{"id":12590,"date":"2016-05-13T16:00:39","date_gmt":"2016-05-13T20:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/?p=12590"},"modified":"2016-05-13T16:00:39","modified_gmt":"2016-05-13T20:00:39","slug":"congress-not-facebook-is-the-real-threat-to-free-speech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2016\/05\/13\/congress-not-facebook-is-the-real-threat-to-free-speech\/","title":{"rendered":"Congress, Not Facebook, Is the Real Threat to Free Speech"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Facebook is under fire for allegedly manipulating its \u201cTrending Topics\u201d section to reduce the visibility of conservative topics and stories about the social media platform, according to a story published by Gizmodo<\/a> based on interviews with several former Facebook contractors who were not identified. The company has\u00a0categorically denied<\/a> these allegations, but that hasn\u2019t stopped many commentators from criticizing<\/a>\u00a0Facebook for secretly injecting bias into its users\u2019 feeds.<\/p>\n

I have no idea whether Gizmodo\u2019s scoop is accurate, but I can certainly sympathize with journalists and consumers who don\u2019t want left-leaning curators filtering the stories they learn about. (If the allegations are true, who knows how many stories about former IRS official Lois Lerner I missed out on because Facebook curators \u201cdeep-sixed\u201d the topic?!)<\/p>\n

But what\u2019s more troubling than Gizmodo\u2019s Facebook story is the Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune (R-SD) sending the company a\u00a0letter<\/a> on Congressional letterhead demanding that Facebook explain its curation policy and what, if anything, it\u2019s doing to \u201cinvestigate\u201d allegations that it filtered conservative stories.<\/p>\n

Although Sen. Thune is a longstanding supporter of free markets and limited government involvement<\/a> in the Internet and telecommunications sectors, the decision to turn Facebook\u2019s alleged transgressions into a public policy matter is problematic. Chairing a powerful Senate committee brings with it a bully pulpit that often tempts elected officials to pry into affairs properly left to the marketplace, as I discussed years ago<\/a> when former Sen. Joe Lieberman successfully pressured Amazon to terminate service to Wikileaks \u2014 despite the absence of any judicial determination at the time that the website had violated any laws.<\/p>\n

The letter suggests that Facebook may have \u201cmisl[ed] the public\u201d if its curators prevented right-wing stories from reaching the Trending Topics section. Although Sen. Thune doesn\u2019t point to any law or regulation that Facebook might have violated, the letter seems to imply that the filtering of conservative stories might constitute an \u201cunfair or deceptive act[] or practice [] in or affecting commerce,\u201d contrary to Section 5<\/a> of the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914.<\/p>\n

As far as I can tell, however, Facebook never represented to its users that the Trending Topics section was free from curation. Although a \u201ctrend\u201d can be driven solely by users, favoring certain newsworthy stories (such as the Charlie Hebdo attack) or certain media outlets (such as the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>) is another approach to identifying which stories are \u201ctrending.\u201d<\/p>\n

One could, I suppose, argue that Facebook engaged in deception by omission<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 it didn\u2019t explain that Trending Topics are actively curated \u2014 but do many consumers really believe that \u201ctrending\u201d stories are entirely free from curation, based entirely on their popularity with users? I doubt it.<\/p>\n

More importantly, however, Facebook enjoys the right under the First Amendment to engage in editorial discretion with respect to the content it features on its social network, free from government manipulation \u2014 including political fishing expeditions. As Mercatus Center fellow Brent Skorup has\u00a0explained at length<\/a>, online intermediaries enjoy rights similar to those of newspapers to make editorial decisions about the messages they distribute and highlight. Just as the Supreme Court has held that newspapers<\/a> don\u2019t have to give space to politicians who want to rebut editorials they dislike, Facebook doesn\u2019t have to give conservative news stories equal treatment when it decides which stories to list as Trending Topics.<\/p>\n

Of course, by the same token, conservatives are free to stop using Facebook, or start their own social network \u2014 just as Facebook did when it upended MySpace a decade ago. Nor does it matter that Facebook supposedly curated its Trending Topics without informing its users, because non-commercial speech cannot be \u201cfalse or misleading\u201d by its nature \u2014 instead, it\u2019s held to a more protective standard articulated by the Supreme Court in New York Times v. Sullivan<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Unfortunately, many large Internet companies have been inconsistent in supporting the right of service providers to curate the speech that traverses their platforms. Back in 2012, CEI joined TechFreedom, the Cato Institute, and the Free State Foundation in defending online service providers\u2019 First Amendment rights in an amicus brief<\/a> we filed with the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. However, the Open Internet Coalition \u2014 which included Facebook among its members \u2014 filed a brief on the opposite side<\/a>, dismissing the First Amendment arguments of Internet service providers as bogus.<\/p>\n

Although it may be tempting to see Facebook get a dose of its own medicine, so to speak, elected officials who believe in limited government and free markets should respect the constitutional rights of all <\/em>interactive computer services<\/a> to manage their platforms as they see fit.<\/p>\n

Source: Congress, Not Facebook, Is the Real Threat to Free Speech | Foundation for Economic Education<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Facebook is under fire for allegedly manipulating its \u201cTrending Topics\u201d section to reduce the visibility of conservative topics and stories about the social media platform, according to a story published by Gizmodo based on interviews with several former Facebook contractors who were not identified. The company has\u00a0categorically denied these allegations, but that hasn\u2019t stopped many commentators from criticizing\u00a0Facebook for secretly injecting bias into its users\u2019 feeds. I have no idea whether Gizmodo\u2019s scoop is accurate, but I can certainly sympathize with journalists and consumers who don\u2019t want left-leaning curators filtering the stories they learn about. (If the allegations are true, who knows how many stories about former IRS official Lois Lerner I missed out on because Facebook curators \u201cdeep-sixed\u201d the topic?!) But what\u2019s more troubling than Gizmodo\u2019s Facebook story is the Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune (R-SD) sending the company a\u00a0letter on Congressional letterhead demanding that Facebook explain its curation policy and what, if anything, it\u2019s doing to \u201cinvestigate\u201d allegations that it filtered conservative stories. Although Sen. Thune is a longstanding supporter of free markets and limited government involvement in the Internet and telecommunications sectors, the decision to turn Facebook\u2019s alleged transgressions into a public policy matter is problematic. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[98,675],"class_list":["post-12590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-and-politics","tag-2nd-amendment","tag-facebook"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12590"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12590\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}