[doron]

It's well and good to advocate for change within the industry (large and small) but realistically, all of this is missing the forest for trees, or equating symptom with the cause.

The only way out of this long term, is to take money out of politics, repeal citizens united, revolving doors and other methods of lining politicians' pockets.

[ajcp]

While I agree toward the harm it's done, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is a Supreme Court ruling; you can't "repeal" those. It must either be reversed/overturned by the Supreme Court or a constitutional amendment be made by the states. Those are both extremely hard and rare.

[HideousKojima]

>repeal citizens united

So you think it should be illegal to make documentaries critical of Hillary Clinton? Because that's what Citizens United was about, but most people who are against Citizens United don't seem to understand what the case was actually about.

[whimsicalism]

I'm pretty unsure about CU, but the context is the film was created by a political action committee to get standing so they could challenge election law, it's not like they were a bona-fide commercial film-maker (which is why the FEC blocked the film in the first place)

[downrightmike]

You don't even get it.

[BrenBarn]

Well, I think even that may be missing a bit of forest. How about: institute far more redistributive tax policies to prevent individuals or companies from gaining undue market power by becoming extremely wealthy.

[whimsicalism]

It is frankly challenging to reconcile 1st amendment protections and a CU repeal. I'm not sure what the solution is, but think recent events should show that govt can abuse campaign finance law to pick winners and losers in the town square.

[ethbr1]

> It is frankly challenging to reconcile 1st amendment protections and a CU repeal. I'm not sure what the solution is, [...]

Reconciliation: Companies aren't human entities.

Non-human entities aren't entitled to 1st amendment protections.

Campaign finance is equally simple: run your campaign on public funding. Give all candidates who meet a threshold equal amounts of money.

I have yet to hear a convincing argument about what benefit a democracy receives from campaigns having different amounts of funding. That feels like the tail wagging the dog (your supporters fund you, so you can spend that money to buy more supporters).

[whimsicalism]

I'm not so convinced about that reconciliation! Most media in general is not conducted through individual entities.

Even the small film maker or newspaper is usually going to be organized as an LLC, even if it is just a single person trying to submit their film to a festival or something. These should be subject to governmental regulation if they touch on political topics? I think this is significantly thornier than you're making it out to be.

> Campaign finance is equally simple: run your campaign on public funding. Give all candidates who meet a threshold equal amounts of money.

Right, where it gets tricky is with unaffiliated individuals and what counts as a campaign expense versus speech or normal business.

[ethbr1]

That's why they're intrinsically linked.

If you mandate that non-human entities have an 1st amendment right, you cannot have meaningful campaign finance limits.

Ergo, because it's worth having campaign finance limits, in the interest of allowing the best candidate / idea to win, I think it's worth threshing through stripping 1st amendment rights from non-human entities.

Regarding how one weighs what sort of speech would then be allowed and disallowed is a difficult problem, but the above needs to happen before it can even be started on.

Now, we have a frankensystem where reality (unlimited finance) and policy (limited finance) differ, which is never a healthy state.

[whimsicalism]

my point is that stripping non-human entities of 1st amendment is effectively repealing the 1st amendment in the US, if it allows the government to regulate newspapers/printmakers/movies based on political content. so your point is essentially that campaign finance trumps 1A, which might be true but i am not so sure

[ethbr1]

> stripping non-human entities of 1st amendment is effectively repealing the 1st amendment in the US

Human individuals would still have a right to speak whatever they feel.

And arguably, I'd extend that onto platforms above a certain size that can verify human identity (ideally anonymized after verification).

IMHO, newspapers/printmakers/movies do need to be regulated.

They deserve rights, but those rights should look very different than individual 1st amendment right.

Which seems reasonable -- nobody would ever confuse Alphabet-the-company with me-the-individual-person in terms of capability and capital.

[doron]

It's an interesting point. Whether non-human entities are entitled to 1st amendment rights. Since they have the potential longevity that far exceeds humans, and also can't be punished in same manner for potential wrongdoing (i.e. send an entire company or lobby) to prison.

[Matticus_Rex]

> Non-human entities aren't entitled to 1st amendment protections.

The vast majority of speech that needs to remain protected for speech to remain meaningfully free happens through non-human entities. Removing that protection is an absolutely insane step.

[ethbr1]

Happens via, but starts with individuals (or should!).

What we have now is the worst of both worlds:

- Individual speech is censored at whim by non-government platforms that are unavoidable.

- While giant companies are empowered to speak anything they want (speaking as the company).

That doesn't seem ass-backwards?

We should be prioritizing individual speech / power, and disempowering corporate speech.

[Matticus_Rex]

Non-government platforms that are "unavoidable," except that most people successfully avoid them?

[MichaelZuo]

Says who? Even the aspiring indie filmmaker wants limited liability not unlimited liability.

[ethbr1]

That's backwards reasoning though.

If limited liability is a concern... we can just create that for individuals.

I'm not convinced that Meta also needs the right to do whatever it wants, for the sake of aspiring indie filmmakers.

[anon291]

After some research I realized that since 2010 at least (probably true if you go back a bit, but I didn't) EVERY SINGLE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN has been fined for major violations of campaign finance laws (usually related to in-kind contributions, or expenses FEC decides to make election expenses later on).

In other words, it seems impossible to run for president without breaking the law.

This is not okay. One of the issues here is that by making candidates break a law, you basically now have some kind of weird leverage over them. You can make threats to prosecute or fine further and thus have them by the proverbial balls. You also naturally push away people who would be wanting to follow the law, which I argue is sorely needed in Washington DC.

This opens the door to a lot of bad bad bad blackmail opportunities.

If no party and no candidate is able to stage a presidential campaign without being fined, ranging from Trump's chaotic, high energy campaigns to Clinton's 'proper' campaign with lots of decorum to Biden's bring-back-normal campaign, then I think something is seriously the matter with campaign finance laws.

Ideally, fines are a rare occurrence.

Sources:

1. https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/30/politics/clinton-dnc-steele-d...

2. https://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/obama-2008-campaign-f...

3. https://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/07/17/biden.campaign.fine/... (Biden's 2010 campaign... 2020 campaigns seem to be under investigation)

3. Of course, everyone knows about Trump