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The Case For #SMACA [Social Media Anti-Censorship Act]
Luke Ford Livestreams [YouTube channel] ^ | Aug 19, 2018 | Josh Smith

Posted on 08/20/2018 7:21:11 AM PDT by snarkpup

Attorney Josh Smith discusses his proposal for a legislative fix for the social media censorship problem. An image of his working paper that summarizes the act can be seen here:

https://twitter.com/HalenIndus/status/1027328349176180736

(The text is in a JPEG image. For reasons unknown, FR cannot display it.)

(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Culture/Society; News/Current Events; Technical
KEYWORDS: antitrust; censorship; monopoly
In the first hour, Josh goes through the working paper point by point and fills in a lot of details and rationale. After the first hour, increasingly esoteric details and "what-if"s are discussed with other guests, including Frame Game. Josh mentions that he and Frame Game are among the few people who both 1) understand the details of the problem and 2) know how to word the legalese of an act to fix it and how this legislation will interact with and build upon existing law. [Nearly all of the people posting about social media censorship, here and elsewhere, have no legal knowledge.]

Here are my notes from watching the talk:

The big social media are monopolies, partly because of network effects.

These companies spend tens of millions of $$ on the personnel and software needed to do censorship. (In some cases, this puts them below the level of profitability.) These companies are willing to take these losses in order to be able to engage in Soviet-style speech control. A "free market" can't work if you have a monopoly that doesn't care how much money it loses to maintain their monopoly.

SMACA establishes statutory speech rights.

Spam can also be prohibited. (Spammers are generally not the kind of people who complain if they are censored. They don't want to admit they are responsible.)

Small platforms (like Free Republic) would be exempt.

Big platforms that censor and small platforms that do not makes no sense; but the reverse makes sense. Big platforms (that people depend on for modern life) should be open; small platforms are typically for specialized audiences and should be allowed to moderate discussions.

Companies are already immunized if they err on the side of not censoring.

Companies can currently over-censor because they are protected by a past "legislative gift"—a quirk in the Communications Decency Act. SMACA takes back part of this gift.

Since all the large social media are Leftist-managed and control a huge fraction of modern human communication, the emerging censorship is an existential threat to the Right wing. Social media are the only significant way the Right can communicate. The Left controls everything else (MSM).

There are problems applying antitrust legislation. Litigation takes many, many years and results in only trivial remedies. Meanwhile, we're getting killed while heading into an election. Anything that gets to SCOTUS level would take at least five years, during which time we die. Breaking up big companies who censor us into small companies that also censor us accomplishes nothing; and breaking them up would destroy the network effect economies of scale that benefit the public (e.g., the central public square).

Josh discusses reasons why nationalization would be 1) wrong, 2) impossible and 3) take a decade even to attempt.

Frame Game joins in at the one hour point. He says that if Alex Jones' deplatforming was Pearl Harbor, Trump's tweet was the Awakening of the Sleeping Giant; and Trump's lieutenants are now taking notice.

This current proposal only covers social media—not other platforms like PayPal, banking, etc. Legislation for these other things will come next, and needs different kinds of legislative fixes (e.g., extend the Civil Rights Act to cover political orientation and affiliation as "protected," like race and religion). Social media is the top priority. Doing everything at once would be biting off more than can be chewed and possibly introduce additional controversial things that could sink everything while trying to get this through Congress. SMACA by itself will cripple Far-Left Authoritarians' ability to do the social media censorship that is killing us now. The Left can make heavy use of the Civil Rights Act because many of them are members of affected classes. The Right can't do this now. Making political orientation an affected class would fix this.

Frame Games wants sane people on the Left to support this because they might be affected by censorship as well ("Big Tent Coalition").

1 posted on 08/20/2018 7:21:11 AM PDT by snarkpup
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To: snarkpup

If you want to do this, rename it Net Neutrality,so the Dems will be fooled into passing it.


2 posted on 08/20/2018 8:05:38 AM PDT by sportutegrl (Being offended is a choice.)
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To: sportutegrl

LOL. My thought exactly!


3 posted on 08/20/2018 4:40:14 PM PDT by logi_cal869 (-cynicus-)
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To: snarkpup
Ironically, but not unexpectedly, the Twitter account linked to above with the image of the SMACA summary has been censored by Twitter. The summary can now be found here: https://smaca.us/summary.
4 posted on 11/07/2018 6:32:22 AM PST by snarkpup
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