Executive Orders vs. Silicon Valley

[Cheetah]

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/07/white-house-tech-censorship-1639051

White House drafting executive order to tackle Silicon Valley’s alleged anti-conservative bias

The White House is circulating drafts of a proposed executive order that would address allegations of anti-conservative bias by social media companies, according to a White House official and two other people familiar with the matter — a month after President Donald Trump pledged to explore "all regulatory and legislative solutions" on the issue.

None of the three would describe the contents of the order, which one person cautioned has already taken many different forms and remains in flux. But its existence, and the deliberations surrounding it, are evidence that the administration is taking a serious look at wielding the federal government’s power against Silicon Valley.

[...]

The article looks a lot at what the White House can do, and on what Republicans in FCC and FTC thinks should be possible to do (answer: not much).

Knowing Trump however, and the company he keeps, this could turn interesting.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

A few platforms have been outright caught doing it multiple times (facebook, twitter, google). The main question is "so what?" Going after this derails the typical (alleged) conservative position against government intervention, so it's an egg on face move regardless of what the government tries to "win" in this case. Either they undermine their own purported values or they look bad trying to stop something they can't.

At best, government *might* be able to ding companies for conspiracy, in some cases like the massed simultaneous takedown of Alex Jones or maybe if they can dig up evidence of communication asking payment processors to not fund Gab or something along those lines (some of that would be clear-cut antitrust if they found evidence). There might be some legal grounds as a result, but I don't see how they can pull off telling a search engine what it can/can't filter otherwise.

Twitter can and has straight up lied about its practices publicly. That's grounds for bad reviews, but is it really grounds for anything else?

 

[Peuri]

Good that something is done to the tech giants, although the motivation behind this is wrong. Social media is ripping societies apart to the profit of the advertisers and the tech companies. Manipulating people's behaviour and selling them rage and unachievable images of normal life is their business model. Social media is largely to blame for the increased vitriol in our societies. They need to burn for the sake of all of our sanity and privacy.

 

[innonimatu]

It's always nice to see groups I don't like fighting each other. And I dislike Silicon Valley far more than I do the current american administration, but that may be just because they are far away and want to do things mostly inside their country, while Silicon Valley's tentacles are global.