[natechols]

Or maybe we think that giving the government the power to tell private companies which speech they must allow is more authoritarian than letting the companies decide for themselves. Whenever there are tricky balancing questions like this, I always err on the side of the party that doesn't have a monopoly on violence.

[username90]

Extending free speech laws to cover companies which acts as public forums is not the same as the government telling companies what they are allowed to say and do. If you think that free speech laws are fine for governments then you should also think it is fine for certain companies which grew too powerful and influential.

[natechols]

How do you think those laws will be enforced, if not the government telling companies "you must allow this defamatory and/or untrue content on your servers"? Facebook and Twitter can't censor me, because I am not a customer of either company, and neither has a law enforcement wing. The government, on the other hand, has unlimited firepower and I have no choice whether to "do business" with it. So yes, I will absolutely apply different standards to each.

[tekknik]

Why is it up to the company to decide what is defamatory or untrue? If you read the rebuttal twitter posted on his tweet you’ll see it boils down to “no evidence”. This doesn’t mean his claims are not true, it means there’s no evidence they are. These are very different concepts. So now twitter is running around saying it’s untrue when legally it hasn’t been proven untrue. They should instead take a hands off approach and let people think, read and decide for themselves.

[natechols]

I personally feel much freer to think for myself if government officials can't force private companies to carry their personal content. Of course it's highly unlikely that Twitter fact-checking the president will make any difference - everyone who's been paying attention made up their minds about the guy years ago - but if Trump is really so triggered by it, he is of course free to post his thoughts elsewhere. It's awfully telling that he immediately decided to involve federal regulators, although I suspect this will be just as effective as the fact-checking.

[tekknik]

Trumps EO today did not and will not force companies to carry government content. Instead it removes protections for them if the limit access to things not specifically protected in the Communications Decency Act.

The rest of it you’re welcome to your opinions and interpretation of events. There is, however, quite a bit of people that agree with him.

[natechols]

This is just disingenuous. The message here is unambiguously "carry our content unedited or you become legally liable for everything posted on your site." Don't pretend that the decision of whose content is "protected" isn't going to be 100% subjective and partisan depending on who appointed the federal regulators. Or do you really think Trump's FCC or FTC (or whichever agency he imagines will enforce his new EO) is going to leap to the defense of, say, an Ilhan Omar tweet?