SCOTUS and Social Media

Brett Kavanaugh: champion of free speech. Really? Well, he seems to be on the right side this time, and in a perilous time one takes one's help where one can find it.

On August 14, the US Supreme Court rejected an emergency bid from a social media sponsors' industry group, NetChoice. NetChoice had sought a block to enforcement by the state of Mississippi of an age certification law.

So by refusing to hear the matter on an emergency basis, SCOTUS has allowed enforcement to proceed for now. But it has not yet addressed the substantive issue.

The law in question says that social media sites must verify the ages of their users and make efforts to protect young people from being exposed to harmful material. Non-compliance brings civil penalties of up to $10,000 per violation, as well as the possibility of criminal prosecution.

This case seems to me to belong to an enormous set -- the set of all cases in which "think of the children!" is pretext. The real goal is precisely to shut down social media altogether if possible, including of course the exchanges of ideas it promotes among adults, or to allow only a quite truncated (harmless) medium to survive. But it is advantageous to say instead "think of the CHILDREN!!!" and so that is said.

At any rate, Brett Kavanaugh (a Trump appointee and a member in good standing of the dominant bloc-of-six), offered his concurrence to the decision to reject this bid. His concurrence makes the point that the decision is only procedural and holds out hope that when it is time for the substance to be decided Kavanaugh will vote in favor of freedom.

Here's the link:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/25a97_5h25.pdf

Comments

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog