In His Last Two Weeks, Ajit Pai Finally Finds A Backbone And Refuses To Move Forward With Trump's Ridiculous 230 Attack

from the too-little-too-late dept

On Thursday, a day after his boss helped incite a mob to storm the Capitol, only then did outgoing FCC chair Ajit Pai finally "distance" himself from Trump and say he won't go forward with Trump's plan to have the FCC reinterpret Section 230.

In an interview on C-SPAN's "The Communicators," Pai told Protocol and C-SPAN co-host Peter Slen that he does not intend to move forward with a rule-making on Section 230, which was laid out in Trump's social media executive order. He said he won't "second-guess" the decisions made by Facebook and Twitter to bar Trump from posting. And he said the president bears some responsibility for the riots that engulfed Capitol Hill on Wednesday.

Specifically on 230, this was the exchange:

On Oct. 15, you said that you intend to move forward with a rule-making for clarity on Section 230. What's the status of that?

The status is that I do not intend to move forward with the notice of proposed rule-making at the FCC.

And why is that?

The reason is, in part, because given the results of the election, there's simply not sufficient time to complete the administrative steps necessary in order to resolve the rule-making. Given that reality, I do not believe it's appropriate to move forward.

If you could, what do you think should be done on Section 230?

There's now a bipartisan consensus among elected officials that the law should be changed. Obviously the president believes it should be repealed, President-elect Biden has campaigned repeatedly on its repeal, but within Congress there appears to be a consensus also that it should be revised or reformed in some way. Obviously in terms of changing the law, that's a decision for lawmakers to consider, but I do think there are certain bipartisan consensus areas forming regarding how it should be revised.

It's a very complicated issue, one that I think Congress will have to study and deliberate on very seriously. I personally would think about it more carefully in terms of the immunity provision, for example, but those are the kinds of things that I think the next administration and Congress will think about very carefully.

He's trying to escape this one with his reputation intact, and no one should let him get away with it. He could have spoken up earlier. He could have actually defended the 1st Amendment and the fact that internet websites have the right to moderate as they see fit. That's what his ideologically aligned colleague on the FCC, Mike O'Rielly, did in calling out that social media moderation is not an issue for the government. Pai sat by and said nothing, and watched as his colleague, who had backed up every other nonsense position Pai has taken for years, got fired for it.

Then Pai could have done the correct thing and refused to even bother to take up the issue of CDA 230 after the NTIA, under orders from Trump, sent over a petition. He chickened out and asked for comments, wasting everyone's time. Then, he could have taken those comments -- in which every single substantial comment explained how he had no authority and shouldn't be engaging at all -- and decided not to move forward. But, he spinelessly moved forward with it anyway, pushing out a laughable legal justification that was diametrically opposed to everything he had said about the net neutrality issue.

It's only now -- with two weeks left in the Trump Presidency, after more and more people (including Republicans) have come to realize that maybe Trump is a destructive mess who helped incite a riot at the Capitol -- that Pai pretends to find a backbone and push refuse to move forward on this issue. And he does it in the weakest possible way -- saying that he's run out of time. It's a spineless move from someone who has spent nearly all of his years in public office publicly patting himself on the back for standing by his "keep government out of business" principles.

Obviously, Pai has made a political calculus here, and he's hoping to slide away from this mess and the stench associated with it on the same day that a bunch of other Republicans hoping to revitalize their reputations are doing so as well. But it's not principled to wait until the politically convenient point to do what you should have done months ago. The truth is simple: Pai isn't the principled defender of "free markets" and "light touch regulation" he has positioned himself as over the years. He's just another political hack who took the convenient path.

Filed Under: ajit pai, donald trump, fcc, free speech, michael o'rielly, section 230, social media

Trump's FCC Nominee Asked Fox News To Help Destroy Section 230 To Help Elect More Republicans

from the free-speech? dept

We've written a few times about Nathan Simington, who is currently nominated to take over Michael O'Rielly's seat at the FCC. As you'll recall, O'Rielly's renomination was withdrawn after he dared to give a talk in which he noted, accurately, that the 1st Amendment means that the government cannot regulate how private companies handle content moderation. Simington, in contrast to O'Rielly, has been at the center of various efforts to force social media companies to host speech they do not wish to host (a clear violation of the 1st Amendment, which does not allow for the government to compel speech).

Simington was the guy who apparently wrote the original executive order that kicked off the ridiculous (and still unconstitutional) FCC review process of Section 230. He also works at NTIA, which is run by Adam Candeub, a guy who has spent the last few years attacking (or misrepresenting) Section 230, after he filed a failed lawsuit against Twitter on behalf of a white supremacist. When the lawsuit was filed, Candeub appeared not to understand 230 when I engaged with him in an email exchange. Since then he's spent the intervening years, trying to change 230 to match his false belief of what it should be.

So, perhaps it shouldn't be too surprising that it's now been revealed that Simington and Candeub appeared to spend some time over the summer trying to get Fox News' bloviating talking heads to start attacking Section 230 as well, hoping that this would spur the FCC on towards action (again, which legally it cannot do) against the law.

Simington, a senior adviser in a key Commerce Department tech agency, wrote that the popular Fox News host could help sway the FCC to act on Trump's proposal before Election Day. He also suggested that democracy hinged on the ability of the commission — which has not traditionally regulated social media — to target Silicon Valley companies.

The actual letter to a Fox News staffer, in which Simington notes that this is part of a scheme with Candeub (who is cc'd) is really stunning. Having a government official asking a media personality to assist the government in pushing through an unconstitutional attack on the 1st Amendment is staggering -- and should immediately raise questions as to why either Simington or Candeub are part of the government. Simington flat out admits that he's trying to force the FCC to take action to help support the President and others "down ballot" in the election.

That is not supposed to be how government officials act. Campaigning/electioneering efforts are not supposed to be done by current government staff who are paid by our taxpayer dollars. This is a hugely problematic stance, and should call into question both Simington and Candeub's role in government. It certainly should preclude Simington from being considered for a position on the FCC itself.

As discussed, my boss, Dept. Ass't Sec'y Adam Candeub (CC'd), is strategizing about how best to present the NTIA's petition to the FCC re CDA 230. We hope that FCC rulemaking will uphold press and communication freedoms while restraining social media companies from behavior that, absent certain case law re CDA 230, would be illegal.

As you know, this is a hot issue right now, not merely per the President's major social media executive order, but also (1) Senator Cruz's recent actions re Twitter, coming out of his long-standing concerns about the partiality and bias emerging from social media's de facto content creation via moderation, promotion and demotion, and (2) Senator Hawley's new social media bill.

We therefore hope that there might be some way of engaging with Ms. Ingraham on our piece of this issue. Any additional support we might be able to obtain could help to get the FCC on board more quickly and thereby ensure a freer, fairer social media landscape going into the elections this fall. This is of concern both to the presidency and also down-ballot, and given the emerging role of social media as a replacement for mass media, our democracy will be weakened if we cannot respond to this issue quickly and effectively.

If you have some time tomorrow, I'd love to talk further about this, whether re engaging with Ms. Ingraham or generally for our own planning.

Senator Richard Blumenthal (a long term vocal critic of Section 230) seems to recognize how problematic this is:

“This email shows that Mr. Simington was an active and eager soldier in President Trump’s attempted assault on the First Amendment," Blumenthal said in a statement to POLITICO. "Mr. Simington was willing to bully the very agency he’s been nominated to join in order to do the electoral bidding of the Republican party on the taxpayer dime.

"I am demanding that Mr. Simington explain himself in follow-up questions for the record, and I certainly hope he will be more forthcoming in his written responses than he was during his hearing,"

In any normal administration this would be a massive scandal, abusing the power of government to help a specific party/candidate. Remember all the (mostly exaggerated) fuss about the IRS paying extra attention to conservative non-profits? That was one of the biggest scandals of the Obama era, in part because it was government employees supposedly making decisions based on politics (even though the details showed it wasn't quite that bad). This is worse. Here they are flat out admitting that they are trying to work with Fox News to use the levers of government to unconstitutionally change the law in order to help their preferred political party win in an election.

Filed Under: adam candeub, election, fcc, free speech, laura ingraham, michael o'rielly, nathan simington, ntia, politics, section 230
Companies: fox news

Congress, With Nothing Important On Its Hands, Seeks To Rush Through Nomination Of Anti-230 FCC Commissioner

from the no-other-priorities? dept

You might think that Congress has more important issues on its hands, with a pandemic still going on, issues around disinformation and the election, massive fires still burning in parts of the US, a record number of hurricanes pounding the south... but it appears that Congress thinks the most pressing issue is gutting Section 230. As you'll recall, right after FCC Commissioner Michael O'Rielly made some generally straightforward statements about how the 1st Amendment wouldn't let the government interfere with social media platforms, Trump informed O'Rielly that his nomination to stay at the FCC had been rescinded.

It seems pretty clear that in the world of Trump, all that he wants out of his FCC is to act as his own private speech police. To that effect, he not only put in place the obviously unconstitutional executive order pushing NTIA to petition the FCC to "reinterpret" Section 230 of the Communications Act -- the law that enables social media to exist in its current form -- but has since put pressure on the FCC to move forward with that effort. While some had hoped that maybe Ajit Pai would find a backbone and his long-stated principles in his giant Reese's mug, he has proven he has neither, and moved forward with the process to make the FCC the internet speech police.

Of course, there remains a problem. O'Rielly is still there, and both the Democrats on the FCC have made it clear they disagree with this plan. When the announcement was made that O'Rielly's nomination had been pulled, I heard from multiple FCC experts who told me there was "no way" that a new Commissioner could be nominated, vetted, paraded before the Senate, and voted on before January 20th. However, it appears that a Senate that has decided it can rush through a candidate for an open Supreme Court seat rather than deal with the actual problems of the country can also do the exact same thing for an FCC Commissioner.

Last month, Trump nominated the guy who wrote the unconstitutional executive order, Nathan Simington, to the seat, and again I was told that his nomination was unlikely to be reviewed by the Senate before the new session began next year. Not so, apparently. As Politico reported last week, the Senate Commerce Committee has agreed to rush through his nomination in "near record time" with a hearing set for November 10th.

It's going to be fascinating to watch all those Senators who spent years claiming they were absolutely, 100% against the FCC regulating anything to do with the internet do total 180s and make sure that Simington is ready to become the speech police for the internet.

Filed Under: fcc, free speech, michael o'rielly, nathan simington, nomination, section 230

Apparently The New Litmus Test For Trump's FCC: Do You Promise To Police Speech Online

from the snowflake-central dept

Last month we wrote about how President Trump withdrew the renomination of FCC Commissioner Mike O'Rielly just days after O'Rielly dared to [checks notes] reiterate his support for the 1st Amendment in a way that hinted at the fact that he knew Trump's executive order was blatantly unconstitutional. Some people argued the renomination was pulled for other reasons, but lots of people in DC said it was 100% about his unwillingness to turn the FCC into a speech police for the internet.

While it seems quite unlikely that Trump can get someone new through the nomination process before the election, apparently they're thinking of nominating someone who appears eager to do the exact opposite: Nathan Simington, who wants the FCC to be the internet speech police so bad that he helped draft the obviously unconstitutional executive order in response to the President's freak-out at being fact checked.

Three sources close to the matter say Nathan Simington, a senior advisor at the NTIA within the commerce department, has emerged as a leading candidate to take over Republican Commissioner Mike O’Rielly’s seat at the FCC.

Simington is said to have helped draft the administration’s social media executive order, and his nomination would be a victory for Republicans who want to see the FCC take a larger role in regulating social networks.

You can see the Trumpian logic here: "O'Rielly gently pushed back the tiniest bit on our plan to ignore the 1st Amendment and compel social media companies to host the propaganda and disinformation we spew, so let's replace him with someone who supports that singularly stupid argument. How about the guy who drafted the executive order!"

The idea that "will you support the FCC being the speech police" is now the Republican litmus test for being an FCC Commissioner is a freakish 180 from the history of Republican FCC Commissioners who have spent decades arguing against that on the things they actually have authority over (with the notable exception of obscenity, which GOP Commissioners have, at times, wanted to police). Either way, this seems like yet another example of the Republican party not having any core principles other than punishing the companies and people that Trump doesn't like.

Filed Under: bias, fcc, michael o'rielly, nathan simington, ntia, section 230, social media

FCC Commissioner O'Rielly: Nobody Takes Me Seriously After Voting Down Every Consumer-Friendly FCC Policy This Year

from the obstruction-junction dept

"It takes time and effort to soldier on and make your arguments," he said..."I do the work you'd expect me to do. I read every item. I do my homework. And I make substantive suggestions. But I'm often shot down."

"O'Rielly and his Republican colleague, Ajit Pai, have opposed all the major Democrat-supported issues that have passed, in large part due to philosophical differences they have with their colleagues across the political aisles on these issues. But O'Rielly said what has truly frustrated him is what he sees as an unwillingness by the FCC leadership to find consensus on any issue.

Filed Under: broadband, consumer protection, fcc, michael o'rielly