Legislation all over the USA is attacking freedom to communicate over the Internet. Some states have enacted age-verification requirements that endanger anonymous speech and limit minors’ access to information they may urgently need. Others are enacting bans on “deceptive” information, leaving open the questions of just what will be deemed deceptive and how people can defend themselves against such claims. An example of the latter is California’s AB 2655, recently signed into law. FIRE and the First Amendment Coalition have issued statements against it, while left-wing media sites have often been sympathetic. I posted earlier about how AP gave Harris’s call for “oversight” and “regulation” of websites as merely wanting “increased accountability.”
MSN, to give a more recent example, ran an ad hominem piece saying that AB 2655 and related legislation “were challenged by a conservative producer whose videos purport to show Vice President Kamala Harris describing herself as ‘the ultimate diversity hire.'” Whatever those videos are, they don’t bear upon the First Amendment issues surrounding those laws. The article gives just one sentence to the grounds for the challenge, citing the attorneys as saying that the laws use “state power to force private social media companies to censor private citizens’ speech.” That’s correct but but superficial reporting. The article characterizes the legislation as “banning deepfake political ads” even though it is far broader than that. The bill is not restricted to either advertising or deepfakes, so the MSN article is deceptive on that point.
Oh, and after scheduling this post to appear, I found out that the video in question was an obvious parody, and thus protected even under AB 2655. See this video discussing it. It isn’t possible for MSN to make that many mistakes innocently in one article. The video I linked to has a serious error of its own; it claims that the Harris video is banned under the new law, even though AB 2655 has an explicit exception for “content that is satire or parody.” I’ve linked to it only because it has a significant part of the video which MSN misrepresented. CAN’T ANYBODY GET A FACT RIGHT?
The majority of takedowns are likely to be ordinary claims, not parody videos. If someone posts on Facebook that “Trump is a Nazi” or “Harris is out to destroy the economy,” are those deceptive claims? Neither is factually true; Trump has never been shown to belong to any Nazi organization, and I doubt that Harris wants a situation that would ruin her re-election chances. A “deceptive information” takedown request would be plausible.
For a long time, Facebook banned all claims that COVID originated in a Chinese lab and accidentally got loose. The claim has never been proven, but there are plausible arguments for suspicion. In retrospect, government pressure may have played a role. Who decides what is deceptive?
Under this legislation, platforms must respond to complaints within 36 hours, determining whether content is “deceptive.” This sounds very similar to the existing takedown requirements under the DMCA. We know what the result of that has been: people hit with spurious takedowns, having to fight an uphill battle to get their supposedly infringing content restored. I’ve been hit by a little of that myself. While there are supposedly penalties for making frivolous takedowns, copyright claimants have rarely experienced consequences.
Things will keep getting worse, I’m afraid.