cover image: Thinking Clearly About Speaking Freely – Part 10: Empowering Consumers to Be Content Moderators

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Thinking Clearly About Speaking Freely – Part 10: Empowering Consumers to Be Content Moderators

25 Jul 2022

So, in the meantime, I want to examine another approach to the problem, one that would rely heavily on empowering consumers to decide for themselves the content to which they wish to have access or make available to others. [...] As of now, the effectiveness of both the Texas and Florida laws has been enjoined preliminarily by the courts on the grounds that they likely violate the platforms' First Amendment free speech rights. [...] At issue is a ground-breaking Texas law that addresses the power of dominant social media corporations to shape public discussion of the important issues of the day." According to Justice Alito, "it is not at all obvious how our existing precedents, which predate the age of the internet, should apply to large social media companies." In Part 3 and other parts of this series, I've explained why I'm. [...] Instead, I want to turn to the consumer empowerment approach that puts tools in the hands of platform users to determine the parameters of the content they wish to access. [...] And on the other side of the equation, to the extent that the market doesn't drive platforms voluntarily to make available more consumer empowerment tools, the costs of government mandates requiring the use of middleware may well outweigh the benefits.

Authors

Seth Cooper

Pages
3
Published in
United States of America