Conservatives Want Common Carriage. They're Not Going to Like It.

from the that's-not-what-common-carrier-means dept

From calls to break up Big Tech to Florida’s latest anti-tech law, one thing is clear—America’s lawmakers and bureaucrats are looking to regulate the online world. Building on the momentum of the Facebook Oversight Board’s recent ruling on President Trump and Justice Thomas’s concurrence in Biden v. Knight Institute, alternative proposals like common carriage are gaining traction among conservative lawmakers looking for new regulatory solutions.

More and more conservatives critique social media by arguing that websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google are effectively the modern public square that shouldn’t have moderation practices built to balance online safety and free speech. So it’s only natural that a proposal like common carriage gained traction in the Trump presidency and has not lost momentum since. Just look at Sen. Hagerty’s 21st Century FREE Speech Act.

Some conservative critics think treating these sites as common carriers ticks many of their boxes—less content moderation, less alleged anti-conservative bias, and more regulation of America’s tech companies. But they’re wrong. Not only is it an unconstitutional solution, its design to work around First Amendment jurisprudence will almost certainly make the internet worse, not better, for conservatives. Common carriage will inch the internet towards an online ecosystem devoid of family-friendly options and teeming with the worst humanity can offer— including the very content conservatives hate like pornography, indecency, and profanity.

An attempt at common carriage regulation is unlikely to succeed in court—social media simply doesn’t fit the criteria necessary for this centuries-old designation. Derived from common law, common carriage was a way for the entire public to receive and transport goods and services deemed essential. When America started its own classification of common carriage in the 1800s, the principle of nondiscrimination was at the forefront of the discussion. American courts identify industries and businesses as common carriers if they do not distinguish between customers or decide what they will and will not carry.

Nondiscrimination is a central feature of traditional common carriers, but it is not a feature of social media. Unlike the railroads and communications companies of the Gilded Age, social media relies on the ability to contextualize and discriminate between different content to provide useful information to users. Content moderation is at the center of that, providing websites the ability to balance free expression and online safety to maximize both and make the internet somewhere we want to spend time. Concerned parents shouldn’t have to wade through expletives, references to violence, and sexual content just to connect with their friends and family as well as protect their kids online.

The ability to moderate is a feature, not a bug, of social media. This is not a matter of transporting goods and services from California to New York—in fact, it's not really a matter of transporting anything. Rather than transporting data like telecommunications businesses, social media hosts content. They offer a space online on which content is posted and established in perpetuity as part of internet history, more like a museum than a railroad. Therefore, ensuring a curated collection of high-quality posts is a key part of their business model, rather than simply serving as a conduit of communication.

This is a matter of private forums and businesses with constitutional protections from government action under the Bill of Rights. Social media sites like any private businesses have First Amendment rights that prevent the government from coming in and forcing them to host speech they disagree with.

Placing social media under common carriage regulations would fall counter to their First Amendment rights and ensure content moderation is effectively impossible as the incentive to maintain online safety disappears. And by taking away websites’ ability to moderate what gets posted online, the internet could easily become rampant with unwanted, offensive, and disgusting content, rendering many services unsafe for use at work or with family. That would only run counter to the founding values and family principles that conservatives seek to protect.

By doing their utmost to ensure websites aren’t allowed to remove lawful but awful content, conservatives may feel like they’re fighting to defend the principles of free speech, but instead they are stifling the free speech rights of media companies and risking exposing the everyday American looking to connect with family, friends, and coworkers to the worst aspects of the internet.

Conservatives, like all Americans, have the right to voice their concerns about the decisions made by social media platforms—and they should do so. But they shouldn’t mistakenly support actions that could put American families and kids in harms’ way online and that would undermine free expression and free enterprise. No matter how it’s sliced or diced, common carriage classification will force social media and the internet writ large to become a cesspool of filth, completely devoid of either conservative or family-friendly values. Treating social media like common carriers could lead to a staggering increase of content that conservatives actively work to mitigate like online harassment, the proliferation of pornography, and other explicit materials that undermine the conservative commitment to family values.

Social media relies on the ability to discriminate between user-generated posts to succeed, actively not treating themselves like neutral transports of information or services like a common carrier would. With their longstanding practice of content moderation and their lack of a natural monopoly, the courts would simply be unlikely to categorize social media as common carriers. And we should be wary of categorizing websites for users of all ages as common carriers lest they become filled with offensive content even adults don’t want to engage with.

By turning to common carriage in their crusade to fight alleged anticonservative bias, conservatives might not like the result—an internet that ignores the best it offers while proliferating the worst.

Kir Nuthi is the Public Affairs Manager at NetChoice and a Contributor at Young Voices.

Filed Under: common carriage, conservatives, content moderation, family values, public square
Companies: facebook, google, twitter

PTC Demands An End To Late-Night Fox Cartoons, Forgets What That 'P' In Their Acronym Means

from the is-it-for-penis? dept

You all remember the Parent's Television Council. They're the conservative family values on television police that seem to think nobody should watch anything they don't like. This has amounted to trying to keep kids from seeing documentaries, to being accused of a focus on fund-raising over actually doing anything, and seeming to have the kind of extreme interest in pornography that would worry most psychologists. Basically, they strive to make everything you see as family-friendly as possible, because they have families and you should too and, if you don't, you don't count. Side note: Billy Ray Cyrus is a board member of the PTC, because a guy married multiple times with children outside of wedlock is super in line with conservative family values.

Well, the PTC is back again to ruin everyone's fun. This time, they have their cross-hairs set on Fox's new late-night cartoon program, which is made up of a bunch of cartoon shorts parodying beloved children's programming for adult audiences. The recently-premiered ADHD programming is supposed to eventually compete with other adult-oriented shows in that time slot, notably Saturday Night Live. The majority of the content is only available online, but that doesn't mean a thing to the PTC, who recently publicly blasted Fox Chairman Kevin Reilly over the show.

"Even if Fox selected only the most benign programs from the 'ADHD' block to spin into a half-hour time slot on Sunday nights, there's no getting around the fact that the online counterpart makes available mind-blowingly explicit parodies of cartoons beloved by millions of children, all without any parental controls or age restrictions whatsoever," PTC President Tim Winter wrote in the letter.

So, by now you're probably wondering what has the PTC so up in arms, right? Well, the answer, of course, is turtle penises, as we learn from this NSFW clip.

If you're a child of the 80's and you didn't laugh, you need severe psychiatric care. It's a hilarious parody of what Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles might be if they were depicted more scientifically accurately. And, yes, there are penises. Scary, terrifying, cartoon penises that just make the PTC have to go poopy with anger.

But here's the thing, this show is a late-night show, competing with other shows geared towards adults and shown in a time slot when all good little boys and girls with parents that aren't chimpanzees should be in bed. Or, at the very least, should have their television habits monitored. You know, by their parents. That, after all, is what the "P" in PTC stands for: parents, who, if they're doing their jobs properly, can save their children from the horrors of seeing a half-shelled mega-wang (turtle-power indeed). But, hey, parenting is hard (totally not an intended pun) and grandstanding for fund-raising is easy, which is how we get the PTC trying to make sure no one has any fun.

Filed Under: cartoons, censorship, family values, ninja turtles, parents television council, tv