Eric Goldman & Jess Miers, "Online Account Terminations/Content Removals and the Benefits of Internet Services Enforcing Their House Rules"

Still more from the free speech and social media platforms symposium in the first issue of our Journal of Free Speech Law; you can read the whole article (by Santa Clara law professor Eric Goldman and Jess Miers) here, but here's the abstract:

This article reviews a dataset of U.S. judicial opinions involving Internet services' user account terminations and content removals. The Internet services have prevailed in these lawsuits, which confirms their legal freedom to enforce their private editorial policies ("house rules"). Numerous regulators have proposed changing the legal status quo and restricting that editorial freedom. Instead of promoting free speech, that legal revision would counterproductively reduce the number of voices who get to speak online. As a result, laws imposing "must-carry" requirements on Internet services will exacerbate the problem they purport to solve.

Comments

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

Another Federalist Society author?

If the executive editors of a Stanton-funded publication are Federalist Societeers, and the editor-in-chief (who obviously recruited the others) is a polemical movement conservative, it might have been predicted that the published authors would be so overwhelmingly (and against the odds) taken from the relatively small class of right-wing Federalist Societeers, rather than constituting any legitimate representation of mainstream, modern American legal academia.

Carry on, clingers. So far as a separatist approach can carry those at the fringe, I guess.

[DaivdBehar]

Doxxing, not just for Commies anymore.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/ny-court-officers-dox-chief-judge-to-protest-vaccine-edict/ar-AANNyNC?ocid=msedgntp

[DaivdBehar]

Modest suggestion for Volokh, lawyer dumbass. If you are going to publish articles by blatant, and crass, Silicon Valley clowns and partisan hacks, try a Point-Counterpoint format. It will enhance the credibility of your journal. The authors are employees of Silicone Valley companies. They are fake academics and unethical. Telling the truth or even just both sides of the story may end their ability to make a living. I know this is beyond your ability to understand the real world.

I suggest, at least, the brief disclosure of any conflict of interest of the authors in their biographical descriptions.

[ah....Clem]

Um... the paper was funded in part by the Knight Foundation, not the Federalist Society.

Not sure what the rest of your comment is on about.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

The relevant publication is the Journal Of Free Speech Law, a Volokh-Stanton-Federalist-Heritage-Republican production.

Other than that, though, great comment! Prof. Volokh surely is grateful for your sycophantic (albeit daft) support.

[David Nieporent]

Why are you such a worthless troll?

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

You figure Prof. Volokh's claims that this is a mainstream, non-ideological, academic journal -- rather than a partisan publication arranged, populated, controlled, and funded by right-wingers with a political purpose-- should be protected from challenge?

Perhaps a clinger blind spot is obstructing your view of this issue. That, and a desire to maintain this White, male blog as a "safe space" for disaffected conservatives.

[Greg J]

"Instead of promoting free speech, that legal revision would counterproductively reduce the number of voices who get to speak online."

Bullshit.

And, ah yes, those wonderful "house rules" by which Twitter and Facebook decide that Trump's speech is so dangerous it must be suppressed, but the Taliban is just fine

[BillyG]

Don't forget, the Ayatollah's is just fine too.

[David Nieporent]

Did the Ayatollah violate any of Facebook or Twitter's terms of service?

[Brett Bellmore]

Well, you got us there, the TOS don't say, "Don't commit mass murder!"

Yes, actually he did. As did the Taliban, and many other people still on Twitter.

But the chief rule of Twitter is, "We can ban anybody we want, for any reason, and we don't have to actually follow our published rules." The rules are sufficiently vague that they aren't anything more than a fig leaf.

[David Nieporent]

Well, you got us there, the TOS don’t say, “Don’t commit mass murder!”

Indeed they don't. It's about what one does on the site, not what one does in the rest of one's life.

Your link of course does not say anything about the Ayatollah or Taliban.

[Brett Bellmore]

No, it just links to the rules, and anybody who is the least informed understands that the leaders of terrorist groups and totalitarian states would be routinely violating them, if they're to be taken seriously. I've found people grossly violating them myself, and reported them as a test, and confirmed that they're not actually enforced as written.

My point would be that you can't take the TOS for sites like Twitter or Facebook seriously. They're not the actual basis for decisions, much of the time. Just a fig leaf to hide behind, written in vague enough terms to permit arbitrary decisions.

[David Nieporent]

You still haven't identified any way in which the Ayatollah or Taliban violated the TOS.

[NOYB2]

They're just engaging in motivated reasoning to arrive at the conclusions desired by their friends and paymasters.

[DaivdBehar]

Eugene should be embarrassed by this article. It is a disgrace and unethical. The authors should be fired from their law schools.

[DaivdBehar]

Counting court decisions has no external validity. Court decisions are all garbage by partisan hacks. Polling counts the feelings of a statistical sample of the population. They are now all considered to be fake. Garbage.

[David Nieporent]

Did the Taliban violate any of Facebook or Twitter's terms of service?

[Brett Bellmore]

Yes, of course they did. Have been violating them for at least a decade. But the TOS are elastic enough that they can always justify banning somebody they don't like, or keeping somebody who they don't mind.

The real TOS are just, "We can do anything we want". They've demonstrated that over and over.

[David Nieporent]

The real TOS are just, “We can do anything we want”. They’ve demonstrated that over and over.

Congrats! Maybe you have finally read the TOS, and know that these companies do in fact say that they reserve the right to remove content at will, and therefore they can moderate at will without users having any legal argument about moderation.

[ah....Clem]

Finally, some folks who grasp the policy implications of must-carry laws. From TFA:

"Must-carry rules would cause other dramatic and unwanted changes to the Internet. In particular, must-carry rules would force services to abandon their user-generated content offerings because their business models would become unsustainable. This widespread shift away from user-generated content would remove, not expand, the opportunity for people to speak online. Counter-productively,
must-carry rules would produce the opposite of the rules’ purported objectives—the worst kind of policy reform. "

I really don't understand why so many purported libertarians are so enamored of government restrictions on conduct that will have such a chilling effect on freedom of expression on the internet. Is it simply a tribal Republican thing as explained by Techdirt? (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210816/15580047372/why-is-republican-party-obsessed-with-social-media.shtml)

[DaivdBehar]

These platforms are vast criminal enterprises, with billions of internet crimes on them. They themselves defraud advertisers with inflated viewerships. Half their accounts are not people. Volokh has sided with the criminals. Since the lawyer profession is a cult criminal enterprise, that may be professional courtesy.

Speak to people at the diner 50 miles from the coasts. Everyone knows this well.

[Krayt]

Culling posts and accounts of political opponents because you are threatened with billions in losses from removed legal protections if you don't, is not a free citizenry of business ownerd choosing freely to do this.

Even if they say nobody is threatening them, which everyone says when Goliath is standing over you with his negative $30 billion dollar fist raised.

[DaivdBehar]

Because of the massive criminaliry, billions of internet crimes , millions committed by them, they should be seized in civil forfeiture.

Lawyer dumbass, Volokh, forgot to include an article on their criminality.

[Titus PUllo]

You run a digital bulletin board and offer it as a service to your customer (in fact that is really the only thing you offer) and decide to discriminate against views allowed on your bulletin board. If this discriminates against certain groups protected by the CRA of 64 isnt' this an example of "disparate impact" and hence Google or Twitter or FB is guilty of discrimination? The solution being to allow the types of postings of these groups so these ground are not denied service at any higher % than their % in society?

Ok this is BS but just applying the insane logic used to determine if a company is discriminating since the mid 60's..