Article Image

IPFS News Link • Internet

Section 230 Is the Internet's First Amendment. Now Both Republicans and Democrats...

• https://reason.com

From Josh Hawley to Kamala Harris, online free speech is under attack.

Imagine, for a moment, the following series of online exchanges. This isn't a real conversation. But it's the sort of chaotic, revealing, and messy back and forth that could spread across the internet on any given day in 2019:

A nonprofit immigrant rights group creates and publishes a Facebook invite for an upcoming event: a rally calling on city cops to stop carrying out sex stings at immigrant-owned massage businesses. An LGBTQ activist shares the invite link on Twitter, adding a note about how transgender and undocumented immigrant sex workers both face especially high rates of abuse.

The activist is retweeted by a number of people. Some of them add additional comments, much of them supportive. Someone is spamming their mentions with rude memes, but the activist doesn't see it because that jerk has already been muted. When a friend points out the new replies, this is upgraded to a block.

A parenting and religion blogger using the handle @ChristianMama96 shares a link to a blog post titled "Biblical Views of Sex and Gender," which she wrote and published on her WordPress blog.

In the comments of Christian Momma's blog post—hosted with a Bluehost plan and a URL purchased via GoDaddy—someone who has been banned from Twitter for violating its misgendering policy is holding court about Caitlyn Jenner. A new commenter calls the first an asshole—a comment Christian Mama deletes because it violates her no-profanity policy.

Christian Mama's blog gets some new readers from Twitter, where the guy whose comment she deleted has been tweeting at her as part of an extended riff on the religious right. (She stays quiet and lets her fans push back, but keeps screenshots for next week's newsletter.)

Meanwhile, the sex worker rights rally that was the focus of the initial Facebook invite is well attended and gets picked up by several media outlets, some of whom embed Instagram posts from the event and video that's been uploaded to YouTube. The articles are indexed by search engines and get shared on social media.


midfest.info