The US Supreme Court has agreed, in its coming session, to hear an appeal in the case of Gonzalez v. Google. The case deals with one aspect of “the 26 words that created the Internet” — Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

As is usually the case when Section 230 comes up, the pundit-media industrial complex goes into overdrive describing Section 230 as a “liability shield” that provides “immunity” for Big Tech. It isn’t a “liability shield,” nor does it provide “immunity,” except in the sense that you are neither “liable” for, nor need “immunity” from prosecution over, a crime you didn’t commit.

Here are the “26 words” in question:

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

The important thing to understand about those 26 words is that they should have been condensed to 23 words that say the same thing:

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service IS the publisher or speaker of any information published or spoken by someone else.”

Today’s Internet thrives on self-publishing platforms. Social media like Twitter and Facebook. Commenting services like Disqus. Blog platforms like WordPress.

Those platforms are analogous to printing presses, which can be used by anyone to print anything, not to newspapers or magazines where an editor pre-selects what content gets published.

If I sell you a hammer, I’m not the one who beats your spouse to death with it. If I sell you a car, I’m not the one who gets drunk and rams it into a tree. If I give you a printing press, I’m not the one who uses it to publish a Ku Klux Klan tract or a stack of revenge porn flyers.

Gonzalez v. Google takes that obvious fact of reality a little far afield. It’s not about who published what, but about Google subsidiary YouTube’s “recommendation algorithm.” The plaintiffs assert that because YouTube’s algorithm recommended recruitment videos for the Islamic State to viewers, Google is responsible for that organization’s 2015 terror attacks in Paris (in which a relative of the plaintiffs was killed).

But YouTube didn’t publish those videos. They just made a  video “printing press” available to all comers, then used an algorithm to recommend videos particular viewers might be interested in watching.  The makers of the videos made the videos. The people who were interested in the videos watched — and may have acted in response to — the videos.

Yes, YouTube helped make that possible — but only in the same sense that a magazine running an ad for chainsaws helps make it possible for some nitwit to  bring a tree down on your house.

Attempting to unmake reality by repealing or undoing the effect of Section 230 won’t stop terrorism. It won’t keep us safe. It will just make us easier to muzzle.

The lower courts were correct in ruling against the Gonzalez v. Google plaintiffs. The Supreme Court should likewise recognize reality and put this vexatious lawsuit out of its misery.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

As surely as day follows night, a presidential visit follows any major disaster in the United States, so it’s no surprise that US president Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden plan, as reported at Politico, to personally “survey storm damage” from Hurricanes Fiona and Ian, and “meet with officials,”  in Puerto Rico and Florida.

That’s always how it goes, and it’s always a bad idea.

I understand WHY it happens. It doesn’t happen because a president thinks a disaster area is a great place to campaign for re-election or for his party’s candidates. It happens because a president’s opponents will paint him as callous, uncaring, and out of touch if he doesn’t get on a plane and go through the motions of comforting the afflicted.

But presidential visits to disaster areas don’t comfort the afflicted, they afflict the afflicted.

How many planes full of urgently needed cargo and people will be delayed by the security measures around Air Force One’s arrival, presence, and departure?

How many cops and other first responders will spend their time providing motorcade security and so forth when they could have been helping displaced and distressed Puerto Ricans and Floridians get back on their feet? How badly will essential traffic get delayed by the presidential circus?

Whatever you think about federal disaster aid, it’s also worth considering how many destroyed homes could be replaced with the money spent to fly in a political sight-seer and his entourage.

Joe Biden doesn’t need to personally “survey the damage.” Plenty of other people are doing that right now, and producing reports on it for him to read.

If he needs to “meet with officials,” he has numerous telephone/Internet conferencing options at his disposal — options that don’t require those officials to deal with a real emergency AND a presidential visit emergency when they owe their full attention to the real emergency.

Unlike many, I don’t normally associate politicians with words like “leadership” and “courage.” But if Joe Biden wanted to put those qualities on display, he’d issue a statement along these lines:

“I won’t be visiting Puerto Rico and Florida this week. They’re busy.  They’ve got work to do. Anything I could do for them would best be done from the Resolute desk in the Oval Office. I’m going to stay out of their way, wish them well, and help from here. If that’s bad politics, so be it.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

As Russia’s war in Ukraine drags into its eighth month, the European Union scrambles for energy to heat its homes and power its industry in the coming winter, the US and China continue to rattle sabers at each other over Taiwan, and smaller actual and potential conflicts rage around the world, it seems like a good time to take stock of two old, busted, worn-out terms: “American hegemony” and “unipolar world.”

Addressing the United Nations General Assembly last week, the Russian Federation’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov  condemned both: “[A]t some point, having declared victory in the Cold War, Washington elevated itself almost to the position of the messenger of the Lord God on Earth, who has no obligations, but only the ‘sacred’ right to act with impunity.”

Washington, Lavrov declared, is trying to “stop the march of history” against “sovereign states ready to defend their national interests … resulting in the creation of an equal, socially-oriented, multipolar architecture.”

While Lavrov and the government he represents clearly have a hand in the empire business themselves, he’s not wrong in pointing out the US regime’s hubris, which stretches back to well before the end of the Cold War.

In fact, notions of a “unipolar world” and “American hegemony” were always delusional. While the US came out of World War 2 in better shape than other world powers and ruthlessly exploited its advantageous position to extend political and military tentacles toward every corner of the earth. But it never achieved those two goals despite the expenditure of trillions of dollars and the endings of millions of lives in the pursuit.

With the Russian empire trying in vain to stave off final collapse, the US empire clearly in terminal decline, the EU threatening to come apart at the seams, and any near-future Chinese imperial ambitions likely to fail, the future of humanity might best be served by discarding the notion of empire itself. A 200-year-old poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley points in the right direction:

Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains.

That’s how all empires end, though usually only after stealing and wasting untold quantities of  blood and treasure from both their opponents and their subjects.

Governments — especially states with the ambition to expand their rule across mutually agreed turf lines, which all of them become at some point — are the pedestal upon which empires stand and the component parts of which empires are built. They are not our benefactors. We are their victims.

So long as we continue to tolerate political government, we deny ourselves peace and prosperity.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY