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The Texas legislature passed and Governor Greg Abbott recently signed into law H.B. 20, which he described as “safeguarding the freedom of speech by protecting social-media and email users from being censored based on the user’s expressed viewpoints.”
“No one will really understand politics,” Economist Thomas Sowell once said, “until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems—of which getting elected and reelected are No. 1 and No. 2.” Texas’ latest attempt to regulate content moderation on online platforms, like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, is great example.
The regulations in the bill are unworkable and the premise is unconstitutional, but voter outrage about online “censorship” is real enough for politicians to mine it for contributions, attention, and votes. The law gives the state attorney general and Texas residents banned from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube the ability to sue.
Texas’ bill assumes the platforms are common carriers, despite any official classification of them as such. Traditionally, common carriers are private companies or public utilities, like phone or cable companies, that transport goods with no differentiation and are not allowed to refuse service to anyone willing to pay. But online platforms work very differently from the “dumb pipes” industries conventionally subjected to common carrier status.
Online platforms curate the user experience as a...
Read Full Story: https://cei.org/blog/texas-may-still-be-the-wild-west-but-its-social-media-shouldnt-be/
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