However, where it gets scary is when it starts dipping into “examining existing Federal laws, regulations, and policies.”Īnd, look, at this very moment, there’s a half decent chance that in 30 months we’ll have a President DeSantis in office. ![]() Increasing access to survivor-centered services, information, and support for victims, and increasing training and technical assistance for Federal, State, local, Tribal, and territorial governments as well as for global organizations and entities in the fields of criminal justice, health and mental health services, education, and victim services There are some good things a task force like this could obviously do - some of which appears to be part of its mission. There is a very, very, very narrow sliver of threatening speech - that focused on inciting imminent lawless action - that is not protected, but almost none of the actual abuse and harassment that occurs online goes anywhere near that level. Even though this official says that “banning threatening speech is not protected” it sounds like they mean “threatening speech is not protected by the 1st Amendment, and therefore okay to ban.” But… that’s just fundamentally wrong in nearly all cases. So while we are going to carefully navigate those issues, we are also going to remain laser-focused on the non-speech aspects.” “But banning threatening speech is not protected by the First Amendment. “We are very mindful of the First Amendment issues,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss the White House’s plans. An unnamed White House official brushed off free speech concerns that were raised by a Washington Post reporter: There are also other concerns about the task force. It is difficult to take the White House seriously in trying to “stop” online harassment when it would platform a harasser like that. Hell, one of the “experts” at last week’s panel once openly harassed a supporter of Section 230 for merely reporting, neutrally, on a Supreme Court decision, suggesting that people should set up fake profiles on sites and send people to rape the supporter. And, of course, part of this is because while abuse and harassment are very real, there is no clear definition of what constitutes abusive speech. ![]() We’ve seen such systems get regularly abused to silence perfectly legitimate speech. That’s not an approach that is (1) constitutional or (2) workable. Unfortunately, there are already many reasons to be concerned about this new task force - mainly in that many of the participants come from the world that believes in questionable approaches to dealing with this - such as by removing Section 230 and making companies somehow “liable” for speech, even when it’s legal. And, there are many lessons to be learned, including some really unique and creative approaches to dealing with the challenges related to such speech. Harassment and abuse is a real issue on the internet. So, once again, as we said with the previous disinformation board, if the goal is really to better understand the flow of information online, and how to counter it without running afoul of the 1st Amendment, that could be interesting.
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