Daily Archives: March 2, 2024

Elon Musk departs the Phillip Burton Federal Building and United States Court House in San Francisco, on Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2023. Benjamin Fanjoy/AP hide caption

Elon Musk departs the Phillip Burton Federal Building and United States Court House in San Francisco, on Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2023.

A federal judge in San Francisco appears poised to toss a lawsuit brought by Elon's Musk's X against a nonprofit that found the platform allowed hate speech to spread on the site once known as Twitter.

Last year, lawyers for X sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate, claiming the group improperly scraped X to prepare damning reports about the proliferation of hate speech on the site.

But in a hearing over Zoom on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer appeared highly skeptical of the case, devoting the majority of the proceeding to grilling Musk's lawyer over why the lawsuit was brought at all.

Jon Hawk, X's lawyer, said at core the suit is about honoring data security agreements to protect the platform's users.

Breyer was unconvinced.

"You put that in terms of safety, and I've got to tell you, I guess you can use that word, but I can't think of anything basically more antithetical to the First Amendment than this process of silencing people from publicly disseminated information once it's been published," Breyer said.

"You're trying to shoehorn this theory by using these words into a viable breach of contract claim," the judge added.

X contends that the CCDH violated the platform's terms of service by using a third-party tool called Brandwatch to analyze posts on the site to prepare reports critical of X.

The social media company argued that, in the process, CCDH gained unauthorized access to nonpublic data.

Much of Thursday's hearing turned on what exactly constitutes scraping and whether the center did indeed violate X's terms of service by collecting data for its reports.

X is seeking damages from the center, arguing that the platform lost tens of millions of dollars from advertisers fleeing the site in the wake of the nonprofit's findings.

But in order to make this case, X had to show the group knew the financial loss was "foreseeable" when it started its account and began abiding by Twitter's terms of service, in 2019, before Musk acquired the site.

X lawyer Hawk argued that the platform's terms of service state that the rules for the site could change at any time, including that suspended users whom the group says spread hate speech could be reinstated.

And so, Hawk said, if changes to the rules were foreseeable, then the financial loss from its reports on users spreading hate should have also been foreseeable.

This logic confused and frustrated the judge.

"That, of course, reduces foreseeability to one of the most vapid extensions of law I've ever heard," Breyer said.

John Quinn, an attorney for CCDH, said the researchers' use of the third-party search tool never accessed non-public posts

"This idea that this is about data security, this is about user data, there was something to investigate, is implausible," Quinn said.

Among CCDH's reports was one highlighting how X took no action against 99 out of 100 users it flagged for posting hate, including racism, homophobia and Neo-Nazism.

Research into the uptick of hate speech on X has in part fueled an exodus among advertisers on the platform that has so kneecapped the company that Musk himself has repeatedly floated the possibility of bankruptcy.

Late late year, major advertisers like Walmart, Apple, Disney and IBM stopped advertising on X after Musk endorsed an antisemitic post that claimed Jewish communities push hatred of white people.

In response, Musk lashed out. He told companies: "Don't advertise" and used the F-word on the stage of a public event to curse out firms that distanced themselves from the platform.

CCDH, through its spokespeople and staff, has tied its legal battle with Musk to last year's boycott.

The group has portrayed X's lawsuit as Musk's attempt to silence criticism, and in Thursday's hearing, the group cited California's so-called anti-SLAPP laws which protect people and groups from frivolous lawsuits aimed at suppressing free speech.

"Everything in that statute recognizes that very often the litigation itself is the punishment," Quinn told the judge. "We are representing a non-profit organization here being sued by the world's richest man."

Near the end of the hearing, the judge asked why X didn't bring a defamation suit if the company believes its reputation has been harmed by the nonprofit organization.

But one cannot win a defamation suit, he noted, if the statements being challenged are true.

"You could've brought a defamation case, you didn't bring a defamation case," Breyer said. "And that's significant."

See the original post:
Judge skeptical of lawsuit brought by Elon Musk's X over hate speech research - NPR

Israeli philosopher, biblical scholar and political theorist Yoram Hazony delivered a lecture in the Hesburgh Library auditorium Monday on free speech on university campuses in the wake of the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas. Outside the library, students held a vigil for Palestinians who have died in the subsequent war.

Hazony, who serves as president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem and chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, urged universities to be more active in prohibiting speech advocating for violence against Jews.

In his remarks, Hazony offered a scathing critique of elite universities, claiming they have been captured by Neo-Marxist ideologues and have been the driving force behind the return of open anti semitism in America since October 7th.

Hazony described the reaction to the October 7th attack as a rude awakening for Jews who did not think antisemitism was a prevalent problem in the United States. In the wake of the attack, protests against Israel erupted throughout campuses. At the same time, the United States saw a 400% increase in antisemitic incidents, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

University presidents across the country were criticized by many for not forcefully condemning antisemitism on their campuses enough. These criticisms reached their zenith when the presidents of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology refused to definitively say whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their codes of conduct.

Hazony argued the actions of Hamas on October 7th are not morally equivalent to collateral damage inflicted upon the people of Gaza by the Israeli army.

If we're not allowed to say, Look, what's happening over there in that part of the world is radically evil and therefore the university shouldn't be defending it, then I feel like we've lost our humanity, he said.

Hazony argued because many students and faculty at prominent universities began their protests immediately after October 7th, before Israel began its invasion of Gaza, they were motivated primarily by antisemitism. Hazony said antisemitic remarks have been excused on the grounds of free expression and fit into a worldview which designates certain groups as oppressors and justifies any action to overthrow these groups.

Hazony explained one reaction to this phenomenon has been to call for more free speech, including allowing calls for the extermination of any race or group. Hazony described such proposals as naive, arguing that the protestors have jettisoned the old boundaries of legitimate debate.

Free speech cant help where speech is being used in order to destroy free speech, or to eliminate the possibility of an exchange of honors and mutual respect, he said.

Hazony accused these groups of employing threats, aggression, deception and a wide variety of forms of abuse in order to intimidate and silence anyone who descends from their views.

He added that these groups rely on faculty members who do not discipline their actions.

In order to remedy this problem, Hazony called on universities to punish faculty and students who threaten others or call for violence against any ethnic, religious or political groups and to hire more intellectually diverse faculty.

Hazony drew a distinction between restrictions on speech which explicitly calls for violence and restrictions on speech that can simply be interpreted as offensive, which he argued are often used to discriminate against conservatives.

Hazony praised efforts by politicians such as Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida to use state power to combat or change the structure of universities promoting what he views as radical ideas and questioned the wisdom of giving government funding to such institutions.

The idea that these institutions, which with every passing decade become more viciously hostile to America's traditions, to its traditional faith, to its constitutional order, to the traditional family, to God and Scripture, to the basics of what America was until not very long ago need to have tens of billions [of dollars] directed to what's effectively the the peaceful overthrow of the American regime is completely crazy, he said.

Students hold a vigil commemorating Palestinian deaths outside Hazonys lecture on Monday.

While Hazony delivered his lecture inside Hesburgh Library, a group of students gathered in front of the library to hold a vigil commemorating the Palestinians who have been killed since the start of the war.

According to the Gaza health administration, which is run by Hamas, 29,692 Palestinians have been killed, with two-thirds of them being women and children. Israel claims to have killed 10,000 Hamas militants, according toThe Guardian.

The vigil began at 4:30 pm. and lasted until 6:30 p.m. During the event, different people took turns reading names from a list of the children who have been killed in Gaza. Some students held signs urging students to pray for Palestine and organizers passed around flowers.

Francesca Freeman, a graduate student who helped organize the vigil, explained the event was in solidarity against the hatred promoted at the Hazony event. However, she clarified that the main purpose of the event was to mourn the lives of the Palestinians who died and not to protest.

Freeman said the group wanted to express messages of solidarity to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, to express our support for a ceasefire. Freeman described Israels military operation in Gaza against Hamas as a genocide and referred to those Palestinians who have died as martyrs.

Fadwa Kamari, a first-year graduate student who attended the vigil, said it was important to humanize those who have died.

I attended the vigil because its important to remember that the stats we see in the news and on social media are more than just numbers. Every number has a name, and every name meant the world to someone, she said. We shouldnt become desensitized to the loss of life.

Sarah Seto, a graduate student who also helped organize the vigil, described it as "emotionally devastating." After 45 minutes of reading names, she said, the group had only gotten through the names of all the infants and one-year-olds.

Freeman and Kamari urged the University to divest from companies that provide support to Israel and specifically condemned the Universitys association with Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin has sponsored Notre Dame career fairs in the past.

Calling for a ceasefire isnt enough, Kamari said, referring to a recent statement by University President Fr. John Jenkins calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

Freeman said the group did not receive permission from the University to hold the vigil. She said members of the Notre Dame Police Department watched the vigil for most of the two hours, but did not intervene.

Freeman described the vigil as a place of remembrance, mourning, and solidarity, with no space for hate and violence.

See the original post here:
Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony lectures on free speech, antisemitism while students hold vigil - Observer Online

Can Florida and Texas weaponize conservative paranoia over Big Techs alleged liberal bias to destroy social media and free speech as we know it? After nearly four hours of arguments on this question at the Supreme Court on Monday, the answer is disconcertingly unclear. The justices split along unusual lines as they grappled with the two laws at issue. A few seemed genuinely torn over the best approach to the whole mess before them. And while uncertainty is finejudges arent godsthe stakes are too high for the court to mess this up.

What are those stakes? Well, Florida and Texas are seeking to subvert basic First Amendment principles to turn the most popular websites on earth into unusable quagmires of hate and extremism. If SCOTUS allows them to succeed, it would be a grave misfortune for free expression, free enterprise, and democracy itself.

The two laws at issue were inspired by Republican lawmakers conviction that social media platforms discriminate against conservative voices. (They dont, but these lawmakers mistake a few anecdotal instances as irrefutable proof of a trend.) In response to outcry on the right, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed substantially similar legislation that limited platforms ability to moderate content posted by users. The Florida law forbids platforms from moderating any speech about political candidates, deplatforming a political candidate, or disfavoring any journalistic enterprises. It also imposes rigid requirements of consistency for all other content moderation. Texas law goes even further, barring platforms from making any editorial choices at all that are based on the viewpoint of the user.

Both laws require companies to notify users who still end up censored and allows them to appeal. Both let individual users sue and collect damageswhich, in Florida, stretch up to $250,000 per day. Both define content moderation broadly to encompass removing, deprioritizing, or shadow banning posts; deplatforming a user; or affixing commentary on others posts. Both are limited to the largest companies on the internet.

These laws were crafted to sound innocuous. They are anything but. Their radical restrictions on content moderation would require platforms to host all manner of odious, revolting speech (including election subversion). Consider the implications of just one provision, Texas ban on viewpoint discrimination. Under this regime, Facebook could not remove a post spreading dangerous lies about voter fraud. YouTube could not remove a video celebrating white supremacist brutality. Instagram could not remove a photo promoting terrorist propaganda. No company could take down run-of-the-mill bigotryyour racist screeds, your antisemitic memes, the garbage that pollutes everyones experience on the internet. They couldnt even deprioritize this content to shield users from it. Which means users would almost certainly flee by the millions as their daughters wedding pictures were suddenly replaced with KKK recruitment videos.

Thats why, in response to the new laws, the platforms sued in both states, arguing that the First Amendment protects their right to moderate content on their own websites. They beat the Florida law but not the Texas lawthough SCOTUS halted it while they appealed. Their theory is persuasive. Every platform seeks to foster a certain kind of community by removing and deprioritizing certain speech. By exercising this editorial discretion, they are engaging in expression themselves. Choosing which speech to boost, obscure, or remove, the platforms say, is fundamentally expressive activity. In that sense, modern content moderation is indistinguishable from a newspapers right to publish or not publish a specific column. The Supreme Court has long held that publicationsfrom newspapers to corporate newslettershave a right to editorial control and judgment. Citizens United, meanwhile, clarified that the First Amendment grants the exact same rights to corporations as it does to individuals and media outlets. These established free speech principles, the social media companies claim, protect their own right to moderate others speech as they see fit.

Paul Clement, a conservative lawyer working for Big Tech, made these points eloquently on Monday. So did Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, weighing in on the side of the platforms. On the other side, Florida Solicitor General Henry C. Whitaker (bumbling) and Texas Solicitor General Aaron Nielson (obtuse) did a wretched job defending their states laws. This disparity left the justices largely in conversation with themselves, a dialogue that revealed two poles and a mushy middle among the nine.

At one pole, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito defended the laws and disparaged the platforms as totalitarian bullies. Alito suggested that the phrase content moderation succumbed to an Orwellian temptation to recategorize offensive conduct in seemingly bland terms, dismissing it as a euphemism for censors. Thomas derided the platforms for censoring, as far as I can tell, adding, I dont know of any protected speech interests in censoring other speech. (The court has always held that excluding a message is, itself, protected expression.) Thomas also implied that because they are so big, the companies at issue have somehow forfeited their First Amendment rightsa strange argument from the courts proudest defender of corporations right to buy elections. Justice Neil Gorsuch leaned this direction as well.

At the other pole, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh boiled the case down to this: The First Amendment prevents the government from censoring private companies; it does not prevent those companies from censoring their own users. Kavanaugh, despite his recent hard-right turn, has been a consistent champion of corporations right to host any speech they want, which also of course means excluding any speech they want. While serving on the D.C. Circuit, he wrote an opinion opposing net neutrality with broad language that foreshadowed these cases: The government, he asserted, cannot tell Twitter or YouTube what videos to post; or tell Facebook or Google what content to favor. On SCOTUS, he has carefully guarded the distinction between state censorship and private platform moderation. And on Monday, he directly responded to Alitos ridiculous Orwell reference, reminding his colleague: When I think of Orwellian, I think of the state, not the private sector, not private individuals.

Kavanaugh hit this theme about as hard as he could. When the government excludes speech from the public square, that is obviously a violation of the First Amendment, the justice said. When a private individual or private entity makes decisions about what to include and what to exclude, thats protected generally [as] editorial discretion. He also rebutted Thomas suggestion that a company loses its free speech privileges when it reaches a certain size or popularity. Reading from one key precedent, Kavanaugh explained that the concept that the government may restrict the speech of some elements of our society in order to enhance the relative voice of others is wholly foreign to the First Amendment. To ice the point, he noted that previous generations complained that newspapers had unchecked power to shape public opinion, and that that had led to abuses of bias and manipulation. Yet, SCOTUS said that wasnt good enough to let the government force newspapers to carry others speech. His implicit question: Why is the internet any different?

Everybody else sat in the middle. Notably, these ambivalent justices sounded fairly confident that these laws violate the First Amendment when applied to platforms that consist of pure speech, like Facebook and YouTube. They wondered, however, whether they also applied to speech in service of commercethink Etsy or Uberas well as interpersonal communications like Gmail. Justice Elena Kagan asked if the court could hold that the First Amendment protects curated news feeds but not actual services like Venmo and Dropbox and Uber. Those businesses are already forbidden from discriminating on the basis of race or sex, Kagan pointed out. Could a state add viewpoint to the list? (The Big Tech lawyer Clement said no, to the justices consternation.)

Justice Amy Coney Barrett candidly admitted that this is a sprawling statute and it makes me a little bit nervous. She told Prelogar the case contained a bunch of land and worried about its implications for future cases. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson likewise complained about a lot of indeterminacy in this set of facts, noting that were not quite sure who it covers. Jackson sounded deeply skeptical that the Florida law, at least, was unconstitutional in all of its applications, raising the possibility that they might return the case to the trial court for more fact-finding and a narrower judgment. Jackson and Barrett were more receptive to the possibility that Texas law is more blatantly unconstitutional because it applies to only the big speech-oriented platforms.

These concerns about an overly broad or premature decision are understandable. But at the end of the day, Kavanaughs straightforward view of this dispute is clearly correct. Theres a specious appeal to the states argument that they are somehow vindicating free speech principles by forcing platforms to host more speech. But their argument makes no sense, because the First Amendment applies exclusively to the government. The Constitution prohibits the states from censoring speech; it doesnt give them license to tell private companies what speech theyre obligated to host. Florida and Texas want to turn that rule on its head. The result would be bad law and terrible policyand an internet dominated by rotten speech that nobody wants to hear.

Original post:
Big Tech fights Texas and Florida at SCOTUS, and Brett Kavanaugh might be the one saving the internet as we know it. - Slate