Attacking the First Amendment certainly seems counter productive for a *checks notes* member of the press.
WTF?
WTF?
Boycott the New York Times
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Cool “checks notes” little tidbit. Did you come up with that on your own? Or did botox boy tell you to do that?
How can NYT's get away with saying these things? What right do they think they have? They only way to save free speech is to take away NYT's free speech.
“Opinion” and “Guest Essay” mean nothing to Elon?
They have every right to say it. I have every right to disagree with their position that they want to take away everyone’s right to free speech. See how that works?
Dumb take by Elon, criticizing a guest essay that The Times publishes because it believes in giving people a voice, he should delete that tweet
I guess he’s saying platform owners should be held responsible for everything published on their platforms. Hmmm…
The NY Times is part of government? Who knew? and is that asshole even an American citizen?
Not listening to someone's message doesn't mean they're losing their freedom of speech. Your name is awfully accurate based on your takes.
Elon knows he can tweet anything he wants and the idiots that follow him will just repeat what he says.
LOL. Just because he's become a billionaire using real American's(like me) taxpayer dollars only makes it seem, to braindead fascists like you, that he's an American. I asked whether he was a citizen and as usual, you have to prove you didn't understand a simple question.
He became a naturalized citizen in 2002.
"The United States is literally a distillation of the human spirit of exploration. This is a land of adventurers." - Elon Musk
"America is the land of opportunity more than any other place, for sure." - Elon Musk
"I’m nauseatingly pro-American. I would have come here from any country. The U.S. is where great things are possible." - Elon Musk
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Are you going to eventually kill him like the Selena stalker? Seems like you’re on that track.
By Tim Wu
Mr. Wu is a law professor at Columbia who writes often about Big Tech. He served on the National Economic Council as a special assistant to the president for competition and tech policy from 2021 to 2023.
The First Amendment was written in the 18th century with the noble and vitally important goal of ensuring robust political debate and a free press. For much of American history, First Amendment cases involving speech typically concerned political dissenters, religious outcasts, intrepid journalists and others whose ability to express their views was threatened by a powerful and sometimes overbearing state. The First Amendment was a tool that helped the underdog.
But sometime in this century the judiciary lost the plot. Judges have transmuted a constitutional provision meant to protect unpopular opinion into an all-purpose tool of legislative nullification that now mostly protects corporate interests. Nearly any law that has to do with the movement of information can be attacked in the name of the First Amendment.
Monday’s Supreme Court decision in the two NetChoice cases greatly adds to the problem. The cases concern two state laws, one in Florida and one in Texas, that limit the ability of social media platforms to remove or moderate content. (Both laws were enacted in response to the perceived censorship of political conservatives.) While the Supreme Court remanded both cases to lower courts for further factual development, the court nonetheless went out of its way to state that the millions of algorithmic decisions made every day by social media platforms are protected by the First Amendment. It did so by blithely assuming that those algorithmic decisions are equivalent to the expressive decisions made by human editors at newspapers.
Even if one has concerns about the wisdom and questionable constitutionality of the Florida and Texas laws (as I do), the breadth of the court’s reasoning should serve as a wake-up call. The judiciary needs to realize that the First Amendment is spinning out of control. It is beginning to threaten many of the essential jobs of the state, such as protecting national security and the safety and privacy of its citizens.
How did we get here? The reach of the First Amendment started to expand in the 1960s and ’70s, when the Supreme Court issued a series of rulings that held that the First Amendment concerned not just political and religious speech but also other forms of expression (such as sexual content) and commercial communication (such as advertisements). These initial changes to the scope of the First Amendment were reasonable.
Over the past decade or two, however, liberal as well as conservative judges and justices have extended the First Amendment to protect nearly anything that can be called “speech,” regardless of its value or whether the speaker is a human or a corporation. It has come to protect corporate donations to political campaigns (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010), the buying and tracking of data (Sorrell v. IMS Health in 2011), even outright lies (United States v. Alvarez in 2012). As a result, it has become harder for the government to protect its citizens.
Consider national security. Among the most important areas of statecraft is defending against foreign espionage and the waging of informational warfare. For this reason, the United States has long barred other nations (and indeed foreign citizens) from controlling American broadcasters or news organizations. Yet First Amendment advocates have argued that by forcing TikTok to find a non-Chinese owner, as legislation signed by President Biden in April does, the federal government is violating the Constitution. Indeed, TikTok sued the government in May on just those grounds. If TikTok wins, it will be a victory for any foreign nation that seeks to manipulate and surveil U.S. citizens in the name of a tech company’s right to free speech.
Likewise, in the name of protecting free speech, courts have also made it difficult for lawmakers to protect people’s privacy and repeatedly struck down efforts to protect children. For example, Vermont passed a law to prevent pharmacies from selling prescriber data in 2007, but the Supreme Court struck it down in 2011, presuming that the sale of data is a form of speech. And last summer, after California passed a law to prevent social media companies from tracking and extracting data from children, a federal court blocked it, arguing, in effect, that the surveillance of children is also a form of speech protected by the First Amendment.
The reasoning in the decision in the NetChoice cases marks a new threat to a core function of the state. By presuming that free speech protections apply to a tech company’s “curation” of content, even when that curation involves no human judgment, the Supreme Court weakens the ability of the government to regulate so-called common carriers like railroads and airlines — a traditional state function since medieval times.
Governments have long insisted that certain economic actors serve as common carriers and thus cannot discriminate in the traffic they carry. In the information age that has led to internet regulation, including the Florida and Texas laws at issue in the NetChoice decision. Such regulation is not always perfect, to be sure, but it represents a legitimate tool with which democratic governments can stand up to private power.
The next phase in this struggle will presumably concern the regulation of artificial intelligence. I fear that the First Amendment will be extended to protect machine speech — at considerable human cost.
In our era, the power of private actors has grown to rival that of nation-states. Most powerful are the Big Tech platforms, which in their cocoon-like encompassing of humanity have grown to control commerce and speech in ways that would make totalitarian states jealous. In a democracy, the people ought to have the right to react to and control such private power, as long as it does not trample on the rights of individuals.
But thanks to the Supreme Court, the First Amendment has become a barrier to the government’s ability to do that. Free speech rights have been hijacked to suppress the sovereignty of humans in favor of the power of companies and machines. As Justice Robert Jackson put it in 1949, “if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”
Tim Wu (@superwuster) is a law professor at Columbia and the author of “The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age.” He served on the National Economic Council as a special assistant to the president for competition and tech policy from 2021 to 2023.
Mr. Wu is a law professor at Columbia who writes often about Big Tech. He served on the National Economic Council as a special assistant to the president for competition and tech policy from 2021 to 2023.
The First Amendment was written in the 18th century with the noble and vitally important goal of ensuring robust political debate and a free press. For much of American history, First Amendment cases involving speech typically concerned political dissenters, religious outcasts, intrepid journalists and others whose ability to express their views was threatened by a powerful and sometimes overbearing state. The First Amendment was a tool that helped the underdog.
But sometime in this century the judiciary lost the plot. Judges have transmuted a constitutional provision meant to protect unpopular opinion into an all-purpose tool of legislative nullification that now mostly protects corporate interests. Nearly any law that has to do with the movement of information can be attacked in the name of the First Amendment.
Monday’s Supreme Court decision in the two NetChoice cases greatly adds to the problem. The cases concern two state laws, one in Florida and one in Texas, that limit the ability of social media platforms to remove or moderate content. (Both laws were enacted in response to the perceived censorship of political conservatives.) While the Supreme Court remanded both cases to lower courts for further factual development, the court nonetheless went out of its way to state that the millions of algorithmic decisions made every day by social media platforms are protected by the First Amendment. It did so by blithely assuming that those algorithmic decisions are equivalent to the expressive decisions made by human editors at newspapers.
Even if one has concerns about the wisdom and questionable constitutionality of the Florida and Texas laws (as I do), the breadth of the court’s reasoning should serve as a wake-up call. The judiciary needs to realize that the First Amendment is spinning out of control. It is beginning to threaten many of the essential jobs of the state, such as protecting national security and the safety and privacy of its citizens.
How did we get here? The reach of the First Amendment started to expand in the 1960s and ’70s, when the Supreme Court issued a series of rulings that held that the First Amendment concerned not just political and religious speech but also other forms of expression (such as sexual content) and commercial communication (such as advertisements). These initial changes to the scope of the First Amendment were reasonable.
Over the past decade or two, however, liberal as well as conservative judges and justices have extended the First Amendment to protect nearly anything that can be called “speech,” regardless of its value or whether the speaker is a human or a corporation. It has come to protect corporate donations to political campaigns (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010), the buying and tracking of data (Sorrell v. IMS Health in 2011), even outright lies (United States v. Alvarez in 2012). As a result, it has become harder for the government to protect its citizens.
Consider national security. Among the most important areas of statecraft is defending against foreign espionage and the waging of informational warfare. For this reason, the United States has long barred other nations (and indeed foreign citizens) from controlling American broadcasters or news organizations. Yet First Amendment advocates have argued that by forcing TikTok to find a non-Chinese owner, as legislation signed by President Biden in April does, the federal government is violating the Constitution. Indeed, TikTok sued the government in May on just those grounds. If TikTok wins, it will be a victory for any foreign nation that seeks to manipulate and surveil U.S. citizens in the name of a tech company’s right to free speech.
Likewise, in the name of protecting free speech, courts have also made it difficult for lawmakers to protect people’s privacy and repeatedly struck down efforts to protect children. For example, Vermont passed a law to prevent pharmacies from selling prescriber data in 2007, but the Supreme Court struck it down in 2011, presuming that the sale of data is a form of speech. And last summer, after California passed a law to prevent social media companies from tracking and extracting data from children, a federal court blocked it, arguing, in effect, that the surveillance of children is also a form of speech protected by the First Amendment.
The reasoning in the decision in the NetChoice cases marks a new threat to a core function of the state. By presuming that free speech protections apply to a tech company’s “curation” of content, even when that curation involves no human judgment, the Supreme Court weakens the ability of the government to regulate so-called common carriers like railroads and airlines — a traditional state function since medieval times.
Governments have long insisted that certain economic actors serve as common carriers and thus cannot discriminate in the traffic they carry. In the information age that has led to internet regulation, including the Florida and Texas laws at issue in the NetChoice decision. Such regulation is not always perfect, to be sure, but it represents a legitimate tool with which democratic governments can stand up to private power.
The next phase in this struggle will presumably concern the regulation of artificial intelligence. I fear that the First Amendment will be extended to protect machine speech — at considerable human cost.
In our era, the power of private actors has grown to rival that of nation-states. Most powerful are the Big Tech platforms, which in their cocoon-like encompassing of humanity have grown to control commerce and speech in ways that would make totalitarian states jealous. In a democracy, the people ought to have the right to react to and control such private power, as long as it does not trample on the rights of individuals.
But thanks to the Supreme Court, the First Amendment has become a barrier to the government’s ability to do that. Free speech rights have been hijacked to suppress the sovereignty of humans in favor of the power of companies and machines. As Justice Robert Jackson put it in 1949, “if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”
Tim Wu (@superwuster) is a law professor at Columbia and the author of “The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age.” He served on the National Economic Council as a special assistant to the president for competition and tech policy from 2021 to 2023.
the Supreme Court weakens the ability of the government to regulate so-called common carriers like railroads and airlines — a traditional state function since medieval times.
Can someone help me come up with some medieval corollaries to railroads and airlines that were regulated by the government?
Can someone help me come up with some medieval corollaries to railroads and airlines that were regulated by the government?
You might be the best troll ever or just the most delusional person ever....I just can't tell sometimes
From copilot:
In medieval England, common carriers were subject to certain regulations, although the nature of these regulations differed from modern standards. Here are some key points:
In medieval England, common carriers were subject to certain regulations, although the nature of these regulations differed from modern standards. Here are some key points:
- Definition of Common Carriers:
- A common carrier was an entity that held itself out as ready to transport goods for the public at large, for hire or reward.
- Common carriers had specific characteristics:
- Duty to Serve All: They were required to serve anyone who sought their services.
- High Standard of Care: They had to exercise care for the goods entrusted to them.
- Limited Liability: Their liability for damages resulting from the goods carried was limited.
- Historical Origins:
- The concept of common carriage traces back to Roman times, where shipowners, innkeepers, and stable keepers had legal obligations.
- In England, early common law applied to various “public callings,” including bakers, brewers, cab drivers, innkeepers, and carriers.
- By the 1700s, common callings were limited to infrastructure services like transportation and communications.
- Regulation:
- Common carriers were regulated based on their role and privileges:
- Responsibility for Goods: The critical question was whether a carrier held itself out as a general carrier for specific goods.
- Government Control: Regulation also considered carriers’ ability to control traffic due to special privileges or monopoly power.
- Common carriers were regulated based on their role and privileges:
- Legal Duties:
- Common carriers were legally bound to serve upon reasonable demand.
- They were held to a high standard of care for the goods they transported.
- Incidental damages were the limit for breach of duty.
Wait, this is still a paper? Damn thanks for the flashback thought the acid from the 90s was kicking in again
Would this part be good too? I seem to recall you are a ban TikTok guy.
Yet First Amendment advocates have argued that by forcing TikTok to find a non-Chinese owner, as legislation signed by President Biden in April does, the federal government is violating the Constitution. Indeed, TikTok sued the government in May on just those grounds. If TikTok wins, it will be a victory for any foreign nation that seeks to manipulate and surveil U.S. citizens in the name of a tech company’s right to free speech.
National security issue. The CCP doesn’t have first amendment rights.
TikTok might, we'll find out. Would that be good or would that be the first amendment out of control?
First amendment doesn’t apply to a CCP owned company IMO.
"The common carrier was an indispensable figure in the life of early modern England, providing for the carriage of small items from place to place and an alternative to the posts for letters.1 Early modern letters frequently refer to sending goods or packets by ‘the carrier’, and the definite article signifies that a particular carrier was meant who plied a regular route. In 1637 London was the terminus of more than two hundred public carrier services each week.2 There were carriers in most parts of England. By the nineteenth century the carrier’s name was always painted on his cart, and the network of regular long-distance carriers was only put out of business by the combination of railways and a cheap postal service."
So if TikTok prevails in its lawsuit on first amendment grounds, would that be good or would that be the first amendment out of control?
Wait, SNL is still on the air? Wait, Jordan Bohannon is still in college? Wait, wait, wait!
A misapplication of the first amendment. “Out of control” wouldn’t be the phrase I’d use.
But not good at least. To sum it up, first amendment being out of control is good, unless it's a misapplication. Crystal clear.
Sadly, “critics of liberal media” do not understand what an editorial is…….after all, these folks rely on editorials and “alternate facts” as main sources for their news.
