In a case being heard Monday at the Supreme Court, 45 Washington lawmakers have argued that government communications with social media sites about possible election interference misinformation are illegal.
Just this week the vast majority of those same lawmakers said the government's interest in removing election interference misinformation from social media justifies banning a site used by 150 million Americans.
On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri, a case that raises the issue of whether the federal government violates the First Amendment by asking social media platforms to remove or negatively moderate user posts or accounts.
In Murthy, the government contends that it can strongly urge social media sites to remove posts without violating the First Amendment, as long as it does not coerce them into doing so under the threat of penalty or other official sanction.
We recognize both the hazards of government involvement in content moderation and the proper role in some situations for the government to share its expertise with the platforms.
In our brief in Murthy, we urge the court to adopt a view of coercion that includes indirectly coercive communications designed and reasonably perceived as efforts to replace the platform's editorial decision-making with the government's.
We argue that close cases should go against the government.
We also urge the court to recognize that the government may and, in some cases, should appropriately inform platforms of problematic user posts.
It's the government's responsibility to make sure that its communications with the platforms are reasonably perceived as being merely informative and not coercive.
In contrast, the Members of Congress signed an amicus brief in Murthy supporting placing strict limitations on the government's interactions with social media companies.
They argued that the government may hardly communicate at all with social media platforms when it detects problematic posts.
Notably, the specific posts they discuss in their brief include, among other things, posts the U.S. government suspects are foreign election interference.
As we argued in our amicus brief, these communications don't add up to the government dictating specific editorial changes it wanted.
Following an injunction in Murthy, the government has ceased sharing intelligence about foreign election interference.
The problem of election misinformation on social media also played a prominent role this past week when the U.S. House of Representatives approved a bill that would bar app stores from distributing TikTok as long as it is owned by its current parent company, ByteDance, which is headquartered in Beijing.
A public report from the Office of the Director for National Intelligence was more specific about the threat, indicating a special concern for information meant to interfere with the November elections and foment societal divisions in the U.S. Over 30 members of the House who signed the amicus brief in Murthy voted for the TikTok ban.
Many of the same people who supported the U.S. government's efforts to rid a social media platform of foreign misinformation, also argued that the government's ability to address the very same content on other social media platforms should be sharply limited.
The government does have greater limits on how it regulates the speech of domestic companies than it does the speech of foreign companies.
If the true purpose of the bill is to get foreign election misinformation off of social media, the inconsistency in the positions is clear.
We believe there is an appropriate role for the government to play, within the bounds of the First Amendment, when it truly believes that there are posts designed to interfere with U.S. elections or undermine U.S. security on any social media platform.
This Cyber News was published on www.eff.org. Publication date: Sat, 16 Mar 2024 02:43:06 +0000