Comment by vintermann
5 months ago
Oh, but can you make an argument that the government, pressuring megacorporations with information monopolies to ban things they deem misinformation, is a good thing and makes things better?
Because that's the argument you need to be making here.
You don't even need to make the argument. Go copy paste some top HN comments on this issue from around the time the actions we're discussing youtube reversing happened.
I think those arguments sound especially bad today, actually. They got the suppression they wanted, but it did not give the outcome they wanted.
Not really. You can argue that the government should have the right to request content moderation from private platforms and that private platforms should have the right to decline those requests. There are countless good reasons for both sides of that.
In fact, this is the reality we have always had, even under Biden. This stuff went to court. They found no evidence of threats against the platforms, the platforms didn't claim they were threatened, and no platform said anything other than they maintained independent discretion for their decisions. Even Twitter's lawyers testified under oath that the government never coerced action from them.
Even in the actual letter from YouTube, they affirm again that they made their decisions independently: "While the Company continued to develop and enforce its policies independently, Biden Administration officials continued to press the company to remove non-violative user-generated content."
So where does "to press" land on the spectrum between requesting action and coercion? Well, one key variable would be the presence of some type of threat. Not a single platform has argued they were threatened either implicitly or explicitly. Courts haven't found evidence of threats. Many requests were declined and none produced any sort of retaliation.
Here's a threat the government might use to coerce a platform's behavior: a constant stream of subpoenas! Well, wouldn't you know it, that's exactly what produced the memo FTA.[1]
Why hasn't Jim Jordan just released the evidence of Google being coerced into these decisions? He has dozens if not hundreds of hours of filmed testimony from decision-makers at these companies he refuses to release. Presumably because, like in every other case that has actually gone to court, the evidence doesn't exist!
[1] https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/03/06/congress/ji...
The key problem with the government "requesting" a company do something is that the government has nigh infinite unrelated decisions that can be used to apply pressure to that company.
It's unreasonable to expect some portion of the executive branch to reliably act counter to the President's stated goals, even if they would otherwise have.
And that opportunity for perversion of good governance (read: making decisions objectively) is exactly why the government shouldn't request companies censor or speak in certain ways, ever.
If there are extenuating circumstances (e.g. a public health crisis), then there need to be EXTREMELY high firewalls built between the part of the government "requesting" and everyone else (and the President should stay out of it).
The government has a well-established right to request companies to do things, and there are good reasons to keep it.
For example, the government has immense resources to detect fraud, CSAM, foreign intelligence attacks, and so on.
It is good, actually, that the government can notify employers that one of their employees is a suspected foreign asset and request they do not work on sensitive technologies.
It is good, actually, that the government can notify a social media platform that there are terrorist cells spreading graphic beheading videos and request they get taken down.
It's also good that in the vast majority cases, the platforms are literally allowed to reply with "go fuck yourself!"
The high firewall is already present, it's called the First Amendment and the platforms' unquestioned right to say "nope," as they do literally hundreds of times per day.
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