No, Florida Can’t Regulate Online Speech
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks at an event in 2018. (Gage Skidmore, https://flic.kr/p/2cqMi9Z; CC BY-SA 2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)
Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has promised that Florida will soon enact “the most ambitious reforms yet proposed” for “holding ‘Big Tech’ accountable.” The bill would force large “social media platforms” entities that enable users to access “a computer server, including an Internet platform and/or a social media site” to apply their content moderation standards in a “consistent manner,” to change those standards no more than once a month, and to let users turn off algorithmic promotion or post sorting. It would also block websites from moderating content posted by politicians during an election. “We’re going to take aim at those companies,” DeSantis says, “and pull back the veil and make sure these guys don’t continue to find loopholes and gray a
Following the death of Rush Limbaugh, a number of observers including me noted that Ronald Reagan had paved the way for him and other right-wing talk show hosts by ending enforcement of the fairness doctrine. That rule, part of the FCC’s toolbox for decades, required broadcasters to air opposing views and offer equal time to those who had been attacked.
So why not bring it back? It’s a suggestion I’ve seen a number of times over the past week. But though the idea of enforcing fairness on the airwaves has a certain appeal to it, the fairness doctrine is gone for good, and for some very sound reasons. For one thing, it applies only to broadcast, a shrinking part of the audio and video mediascape. For another, you can’t apply it to new technologies without violating the First Amendment.
First Amendment News 287: Bring back the fairness doctrine? Destroying the internet in order to save it thefire.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thefire.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Toggle open close
This key research from 1993 has been updated in James
Gattuso s new paper Back to Muzak? Congress and the Un-Fairness
Doctrine http://www.heritage.org/Research/regulation/wm1472.cfm
Legislation currently is before Congress that would reinstate a
federal communications policy known as the fairness doctrine. The
legislation, entitled the Fairness in Broadcasting Act of 1993,
is sponsored in the Senate (S. 333) by Ernest Hollings, the South
Carolina Democrat, and in the House (H.R. 1985) by Bill Hefner, the
North Carolina Democrat. It would codify a 1949 Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) regulation that once required
broadcasters to afford reasonable opportunity for the discussion
How Congress can prevent Big Tech from becoming the speech police msn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from msn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.