> A court found that the government abused its power and infringes on people’s first amendment rights by using its intimidation power to coerce social media to censor free speech of citizens.
This is not how a preliminary injunction works.
The court has ordered that the governmment stop doing the in-dispute things until the dispute is resolved - in either direction - in court.
The standard for such an injunction is not proof, but "they might prevail in court, and there's potentially enough harm from letting it continue in the meantime".
Also, a WSJ article suggested the point is that discovery needs to occur here before a judgment is made. [1]
Judge Doughty could have dismissed the case without an opportunity for discovery, as another judge did in another NCLA case, Changizi v. HHS, involving the same sort of censorship. Judge Doughty understood, however, that a largely secret censorship system can’t be evaluated under the First Amendment until after discovery.
While I agree here, I want to add a caveat that the linked article is technically a "commentary" pieces, not a news-side piece (aka: it's published on the opinion pages). But even given that, the opinion pages of the WSJ is just as fact-filled as the news side, but just highlights that the person writing it may not be a disinterested party.
The Opinion Pages of the WSJ also tend to lean more conservative, while the news side leans liberal. Though they will happily publish people from the left, such as publishing President Biden: https://www.wsj.com/articles/never-bet-against-the-american-...
> The Opinion Pages of the WSJ also tend to lean more conservative, while the news side leans liberal.
As with most News Corp outlets, the news side of the WSJ leans pretty far to the right (it did so even before it was a News Corp outlet, though not as much), it only seems “liberal” by comparison with its own opinion section.
That said, unlike, say, Fox News, the WSJ news side at least makes an effort to adhere to traditional journalistic norms, its right wing bias is more evident in agenda-setting (story selection, devotion of space, and placement/promotion), and less in commentary and outright fabrications in “news” content.
If you think that's "pretty far to the right," I'd wager you haven't met many people on the right or spent much time reading their thought. There's a whole world of interesting political variety on the left, the right, and elsewhere that will never appear in the newspaper.
When you have a profession that leans one way, most reporting likely follows. So while WSJ news seems conservative, it's positions compared to the general public's views leans slightly left. (Though after reading WSJ for many years now, it highly depends on the reporter).
Very good point...you would think tech folks would be better at identifying relative vs absolute frames of reference, but then the problem space is heavily propagandized and there is only so much time in the day.
What would an absolute frame of reference with regard to political opinion look like? I'm having a hard time conceiving such a thing, since not only does the range of opinion shift over time, but issues move into and out of relevance unpredictably.
It would be something like "select * from [reality]", except there are various problems like physically manifest reality is not the entirety of it, and our records of reality are often technically from the fantasy realm and the truth has been lost to time without our knowledge.
In the case of allsides.com, they're only comparing ~mainstream US media outlets against each other, but there are many cultures that would consider even left leaning US culture to be insanely far right.
In a more serious world, competent philosophers/linguists/historians/anthropologists/etc would deconstruct and expose these organizations for what they really are: propaganda outlets.
That applies both ways - there's no shortage of religious-rightist cultures on the planet that'd treat many sections of the U.S. right as quite left-leaning.
Even comparing to Europe, the memes that the US is to the right or left of Europe is just grossly wrong, often driven by taking one pet issue like public healthcare and using it as the base, when it's just one aspect of policy and there are others where Europe is markedly more moderate or conservative compared to the US.
Oftentimes those sorts of bias-rating sites also report clearly left-leaning outlets as more centrist than they are, and I wouldn't be surprised if outlets like the NYT get far higher ratings for factuality than they deserve.
> So funny, did you miss the columbian journalism review destroying legacy media including the nytimes for partisan reporting?
Ooh, whataboutism.
If we were talking about the NYTimes, I'd have plenty to say about the specific factional bias of that outlet, which, yes, its just as intense as the WSJ’s. If the 1990’s neoliberal consensus (today, pretty much the dominant, though decreasingly so over the last decade, centrist corporate capitalist wing of the Democratic Party) was embodied in a newspaper, it would be the New York Times.
the wsj opinion section has gone wildly off the rails.
love their journalism. can't read half the crap they allow to be published in opeds.
at a minimum, is it too much to not publish outright provable lies?
it actually feels like a similar persecution complex vibe to these lawsuits and congressional hearings to me
that somehow if we aren't forced to listen to them, or that their megaphone isn't as loud as it once was, that they are being persecuted and censored with the most orwellian oppression in the history of our country! (i can think of a lot of truly terrible things our govt has done... literal internment camps and more! but that is besides the point)
no one has silenced them. we continue to hear it constantly.
i hear more anti gay slurs now - on traditional media and online - than i ever remember growing up as a very obviously gay boy ;0
if anything, whenever someone crows about being 'cancelled' their message is spread even farther.
there isn't a right to amplification.
the next door kook was never promised a full page column in the local paper. with a guaranteed readership of thousands or millions.
any truth filter or higher bar for discourse that might have existed in legacy news media has been smashed
news corp is the leader and biggest offender
the democratization of the megaphone (internet gives any random conspiracist opportunity to reach more than cronkite did), has given many the impression that they are owed this power to yell and be guaranteed a listening and receptive audience.
> at a minimum, is it too much to not publish outright provable lies?
I'd love to hear some examples. From what I can tell, they don't lie, but they will leave out details that may provide additional context (much like the NYT and WP opinion pages tend to do).
There is a careful line between opinions and facts. From what I can tell, the editorial board doesn't allow outright facts that can be disputed from being published. But things where there may be a disagreement on a given topic, they will allow it to be published.
this is my all time favorite. which i get is a while ago, but i think the nsa cyber will resonate on hn more than current 'hot topics' (gender. biden policies. the guate piece this week really rubbed me the wrong way. worse it was doing the same thing the author critiqued of u.s. insiders lying to support corrupt interests)
the piece: torture and spying is great and stops terrorists! trust me. because of reasons. damned the research saying this isn't true and lack of any proof i could provide as the ultimate insider. that tan suit wearing barack will kill us all!!!
also having the temerity to publish this during peak bush hate too. balls.
though true that what used to be taken as facts are contested now. and history will never be fully settled timestamped and logged.
it just feels like they are winning with purpose. the christian right has built up an entire infrastructure to churn out 'academic' research, opinion pieces, outright buying news media or creating outlets. all of which is then quoted in judicial opinions by their judges and then taken as the full stop truth; when often most other sources disagree or call it less severe and the source is at a minimum insanely biased
The WSJ Opinion pages generally consist of articles written by The Editorial Board and also those submitted by guest contributors. It would be hard to argue that opinion pieces written by external authors and published by the WSJ have any consistency or standard in factuality or completeness. For example, the column frequently includes content from politicians, business leaders, or former campaign managers like Karl Rove. From what I have seen, the WSJ does not edit external opinion pieces, but can write a short disclaimer.
In particular, they need to find if there was any actual coercion or threat made by the gov't agencies to remove the speech they asked to. For example, when the FBI was asking Twitter to take down videos (of content that violated Twitter's own TOS), Twitter could've told them to go pound sand. But it would be a different story if the FBI indicated that Twitter "ought to" do it or face increased scrutiny, perhaps.
It has been long established in case law that government requests for censorship are tantamount to coercion and threats.
To wit, it matters not if the Giant makes a polite or directly threatening request of Jack. In either case, Jack is right to assume that he has no choice in the matter. And can not be expected to tell the Giant to "pound sand". Conversely, the Giant should not be able to claim that Jack had a choice.
The government has no business asking any entity, which it does not fund, to remove speech in the United States.
I'd argue that the US doesn't have enough of a reputation for disappearing people or putting their business under a heat lamp if they don't willfully comply with police requests that are overbearing. Apple, Google, etc get away with denying a lot of data requests[0]. And despite being put on the stand for 2016 election interference, Jack, Elon, and Mark are doing just fine.
Is that why President Biden called for a federal investigation [0] into Musk's companies shortly after he bought Twitter and told the government censors to "pound sand?"
Keep in mind this was in response to a question from a Bloomberg "journalist" which basically laid out the premise that Musk might be a national security threat. Biden has been known to show up to press conferences with a "cheat sheet" listing which journalists to call for questions, and the verbatim text of the question that each will ask. [1]
Reputation isn't an argument. It would be false in its assumption even if it were.
The case law is established.
There isn't a single case of someone's speech being censored, due to government request, for which the person being censored does not have a Constitutionally airtight First Amendment violation complaint.
I don't see why there needs to be any coercion. The offense here is not against the social networks, it's against the people whose speech was suppressed.
Whether that suppression was done with threats, requests, subtle hints, or an automated system, if the government's intent was to suppress speech, the means employed make no difference.
Edit: imagine an extreme case in which a social network independently created an automated system for government employees to remove posts. Would it be constitutional for the government to use that system?
Well, that’s definitely not true. The government can suppress speech when it sends an emergency action alert to commandeer tv and radio stations during an emergency, for one example.
The fact is that the means employed make every bit of difference when it comes to whether or not the content based speech restriction is tailored as narrowly as possible to achieve a compelling government interest.
On the other hand, maybe it makes not difference to your feelings, which is fair.
Emergency announcements or orders have to be temporary and limited in scope. They also couldn't target specific channels on talk radio just because they have a made up emergency.
Meanwhile the emergency broadcast rules that were created in early tv and radio era definitely don't apply to social media, given that they are discretionary, asynchronous forms of communication, and there's no lack of bandwidth as there was in the early tv and radio era.
I'm obviously not saying the means never make a difference in any case. I'm talking about this case.
I'm saying that using minimal means does not make an unconstitutional action acceptable; you're pointing out that using excessive means can make a constitutional action unacceptable. That's a different situation and not really a reply to my comment or this case.
To make it more relevant, can you point to a single case where a court has ruled that a constitutionally limited action was permitted simply because the means were unintrusive?
A compelling government interest, as you said, could justify the action, but what is the compelling government interest here?
> To make it more relevant, can you point to a single case where a court has ruled that a constitutionally limited action was permitted simply because the means were unintrusive?
I think that's self-contradictory: if the court permitted it, then it did not cross the limits.
If you meant this more broadly, then we should understand that ALL government actions are constitutionally limited and the more an action infringes upon liberty, the more the action should be "narrowly tailored", but actions can still be permitted.
There’s actually a pretty regimented set of rules for the sort of sliding scale you’re talking about. Put succinctly, if the government wants to regulate against your fundamental rights, they have to have a really really good interest and their mechanism must be as narrowly tailored as possible. Less fundamental rights might be regulated against based on an interest that isn’t as strong, or a mechanism that isn’t as narrow, maybe one that is only connected to the interest by a “rational basis”, even if it wasn’t the intent that the legislature had.
Most people other than Rudy Giuliani call these ways of analyzing whether a law is constitutional strict scrutiny and rational basis scrutiny. For intermediate rights, the standard is (wait for it) intermediate scrutiny.
I am only scratching the surface of this subject but you are absolutely right to intuit that the linkage between the means and and the interest.
Ok. I’m glad you’re not saying that; I think it means we are coming at this similarly.
You can choose how compelling the interest is, but my take was that the government has a compelling interest in free and fair elections. Or in making sure a pandemic is handled well.
My hourly rate for research is higher than you probably expect! But your question is super interesting so I will try to answer it this evening. You might have a point about these situations being opposites (contrapositives? I forget) and I have to think about this more.
If there is no coercion then your complain boils down to others not sharing your opinion, both in the way they don't reverberate your personal opinion and in the way they express opinions you don't agree with.
That's kind of the opposite thing you claim you're trying to achieve.
It was not "remove this", it was "this probably violates your TOS", so that could be the difference between asking social media companies to take stuff down for only the Government's interest versus both the Government's and the platform's interests. The FBI isn't going to Klan website hosts and asking them to take down Klan content because those hosts don't forbid hosting that sort of speech.
A bank is acting as a trustee of property, corporate social mediums unfortunately do not.
If you want a legal right to individual freedom of speech on corporate commons, be explicit about it and work for that! Focusing on this small slice of corporate censorship just because it was encouraged by the government is distraction from the fundamental problem.
The standard actually is the plaintiffs are likely to prevail on the merits (not "might"-- it's probable per the judge), and in practice a preliminary injunction hearing in a major case can take the form of a mini-trial. The judge wrote 155 pages that, at first blush, appear to be a very serious and thoughtful effort. The judge summarized on page 154 thus:
"The Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the Government has used its power to silence the opposition. Opposition to COVID-19 vaccines; opposition to COVID-19 masking and lockdowns; opposition to the lab-leak theory of COVID-19; opposition to the validity of the 2020 election; opposition to President Biden’s policies; statements
that the Hunter Biden laptop story was true; and opposition to policies of the government officials in power. All were suppressed. It is quite telling that each example or category of suppressed speech was conservative in nature. This targeted suppression of conservative ideas is a perfect example of viewpoint discrimination of political speech. American citizens have the right to engage in free debate about the significant issues affecting the country." [1] (emphasis mine)
"Likely" means more than "possible" and less than "probable", with a pretty hefty error bar given the trial hasn't happened yet. It's a far cry from the settled state the original headline implied.
An ultimate win must be "likely" to prevail in a PI, and this judge said it was. "Likely" and "probable" are synonyms".[1] Apparently some courts do apply an relaxed standard in First Amendment cases of "reasonably likely"[2], but that's not clearly right and it's also not a quibble over whether "likely" is "probable" (which it is).
This is not how a preliminary injunction works.
The court has ordered that the governmment stop doing the in-dispute things until the dispute is resolved - in either direction - in court.
The standard for such an injunction is not proof, but "they might prevail in court, and there's potentially enough harm from letting it continue in the meantime".