See the link below, James Corbett has been censored for his excellent video on the Federal Reserve.
The White House is circulating drafts
of a proposed executive order that would address allegations of
anti-conservative bias by social media companies, according to a White House
official and two other people familiar with the matter — a month after President
Donald Trump pledged to explore "all regulatory and legislative
solutions" on the issue.
No one would describe the
contents of the order, which one person cautioned has already taken many
different forms and remains in flux. But its existence, and the deliberations
surrounding it, are evidence that the administration is taking a serious look
at wielding the federal government’s power against Silicon Valley.
“If the internet is going to be
presented as this egalitarian platform and most of Twitter is liberal cesspools
of venom, then at least the president wants some fairness in the system,” the
White House official said. “But look, we also think that social media plays a
vital role. They have a vital role and an increasing responsibility to the
culture that has helped make them so profitable and so prominent."
None of the people could say what
penalties, if any, the order would envision for companies deemed to be
censoring political viewpoints. The order, which deals with other topics
besides tech bias, is still in the early drafting stages and is not expected to
be issued imminently.
"The President announced at this
month’s social media summit that we were going to address this and the
administration is exploring all policy solutions," a second White House
official said Wednesday when asked about the draft order.
Accusations of anti-conservative
bias have become a frequent
rallying cry for Trump and his supporters, seizing on incidents
in which tech platforms like
Facebook, Twitter and Google-owned YouTube have banned people like InfoWars founder and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones or faced accusations of
squelching posts by pro-Trump social media personalities Diamond and
Silk.
The companies have
denied the allegations of bias, though they say they have blocked or removed
users who violate community standards policies.
They have also faced complaints from liberal activists that they're too slow to
remove hate speech, a category that some say includes Trump's own
tweets.
The issue took
center stage during a White House
gathering in July in which Trump railed against censorship in front of a roomful of online
conservative activists, and directed his administration to explore all
“regulatory and legislative solutions to protect free speech and the
free-speech rights of all Americans.” Just this week, Trump warned that
he is “watching Google very closely,” citing the case of an engineer who has
claimed the company fired him for his conservative views.
But the White
House effort may be complicated by skepticism in some agencies involved in the
discussions about tech policy. The Republicans at the Federal Communications
Commission and Federal Trade Commission have said publicly that they don’t see
a role for their agencies in policing companies’ online content. The FCC and
FTC have joined the Justice and Commerce departments in discussions about the
potential bias crackdown.
“There’s very
little in terms of direct regulation the federal government can do without
congressional action, and frankly I think that’s a positive thing,” said John
Morris, who handled internet policy issues at the Commerce Department’s
National Telecommunications and Information Administration before leaving in
May. (Yeah, we wouldn’t want to take a position that protects freedom of
speech!)
He added:
"Although the government may be able to support and assist online
platforms’ efforts to reduce hate and violence online, the government should
not try to impose speech regulations on private platforms. As politicians from
both sides of the political spectrum have historically urged, the government
should not be in the business of regulating speech." (We are not talking
about regulating free speech, we are talking about ALLOWING free speech!)
One potential
approach could involve using the government’s leverage over federal
contractors, a tactic the Obama administration used to advance LGBT rights. A 2014
executive order prohibited federal contractors from
discriminating against workers on the basis of sexual orientation or gender
identity.
Trump earlier this
year signed an executive order meant to
promote free speech on college campuses by requiring schools to
agree to promote free inquiry in order to receive federal research funding, something
the schools were already supposed to do.
Concerns about
harmful content online following last weekend's mass shooting in El Paso,
Texas, could become part of the discussion around the draft order on tech bias.
The suspected gunman has been linked to a racist manifesto that, shortly before
the shooting, appeared on 8chan.
Trump said Monday that he wants
the government to work with social media "to develop tools that can detect
mass shooters before they strike,” and the White House has invited internet
and technology companies for a discussion on violent online extremism with
senior administration officials Friday.
The
first White House official said the administration sees no conflict between
demanding that online companies allow free speech while expecting them to
scrutinize people for signs of violence.
“They
have a role, if not a responsibility, to monitor the content on their sites to
ensure that people aren’t threatened with violence or worse, and at the same
time to provide a platform that protects and cherishes freedom and free speech,
but at the same time does not allow it to descend into a platform for hate,”
the first White House official said when asked about the draft executive order.
But
the federal government’s options on combating online bias are limited by the
First Amendment. Another
obstacle is a provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which both
protects online platforms from liability for content their users post and
empowers the companies to remove content without fear of liability. (change
that law.) That provision, Section 230, has increasingly come under
fire from lawmakers of both parties frustrated with tech
companies’ content moderation practices.
The
administration could look to NTIA, the branch of the Commerce Department that
handles communications policy, but that agency lacks regulatory authority and
could simply convene interested parties to explore the issues.
And
while the Justice Department has announced a sweeping
antitrust review of whether tech giants are harming competition
or stifling innovation, antitrust
cases have not traditionally been used as tools to address complaints about
online speech.
The prospects are also bleak at
the independent agencies, the FCC and the FTC.
Section
230 doesn’t give the FCC a regulatory hook to act on, and the Republican
commissioners who lead the agency have already taken a hard line against one
major government effort to regulate broadband providers' conduct, the
commission’s Obama-era net neutrality rules. And when Facebook CEO Mark
Zuckerberg wrote an op-ed proposing
the creation of “third-party bodies to set standards governing the distribution
of harmful content,” Republican FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr derided it as a
plea for the government to police speech.
“Outsourcing
censorship to the government is not just a bad idea, it would violate the First
Amendment,” tweeted Carr,
who is a Trump appointee. “I’m
a no.”
Conservatives
have also spent decades opposing any attempt to revive the FCC's old Fairness
Doctrine, which required broadcasters to be balanced in their programming on
controversial issues. "FCC bureaucrats can neither determine what is
'fair' nor enforce it," the Heritage Foundation said in
1993.
Republicans
at the FTC, which punishes companies for unfair or deceptive acts, also have
said they don’t see a role for the agency in policing allegations of social
media bias. (The bias is denial of freedom of speech. It seems to me the
chickens in D.C. do not want to protect free speech.)
During
an FTC oversight hearing in the Senate last year, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas)
argued that a tech company could be considered “actively deceptive” if it appears to be a neutral public
platform and then engages in censorship. But Republican Commissioner Noah
Phillips said the FTC’s antitrust and consumer protection authorities are “not
authorities to police the First Amendment itself.”
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