Implications of the Israel-Palestine Agreement for the Observed Palestine Warfare in the era of a General Relativistic War
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Negotiators are inching closer to a deal for another temporary cease-fire in Gaza to allow for an exchange of Israelis held hostage by Hamas and Palestinians detained in Israel. Representatives of Israel, the U.S., Egypt and Qatar agreed on the “basic contours” of a deal this past week in Paris, according to White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan. The next meeting will be held in the state of Qatar. Despite the U.S. objections, Netanyahu will not call off the planned military offensive in Gaza, where 1 million Palestinians are seeking refuge.
Republicans in Florida and Texas took action, signing sweeping laws that prevent the largest platforms from banning users based on their political viewpoints and require them to provide an individual explanation to users about why their posts have been edited or removed.
Kara: After 30 Years on the Tech Industry: When President Biden and Is He Still Trying to Get What They Don’t: A Conversation with Kara Swisher
Congress is facing a partial government shutdown yet again. Lawmakers are supposed to pass laws to finance the government by September. But they’ve been stuck renewing a 2022 spending plan. Federal funding for several departments, including the Transportation, Agriculture and Veterans Affairs, runs out at the end of the week. President Joe Biden is expected to host the top four Congressional lawmakers tomorrow to negotiate ahead of Friday’s deadline.
Morning Edition aired a portion of our conversation. But a short time didn’t capture the full flavor. There’s also a longer version we have published. Think of it as the full Kara: she details her views on the tech world and her disappointments with it.
Swisher’s memoir tells the story of his 30 years covering the tech industry as a reporter, analyst, columnist, and TV personality. She writes that she went from asking tech leaders what they were thinking to telling them what she thought of their business. She’s not a fan of many of them.
Making the Everest Waste into Art: How the Indian Crafter, Sunita Kumari Chaudhary, and the U.S. Capitol Debate Attack on Social Media Companies will be viewed in the Interest of Freedom of Expression
The Himalayan mountains are plagued by waste left by mountaineering activities over the years. There are a lot of waste on Mt. Everest, according to the Department of Tourism. The government began an initiative in 2019 to clean up the mountains. Some of the material collected from the mountains has found its way to indigenous craftswomen of the Tharu community, who are using their traditional skills to transform the garbage into something entirely new.
Look at photos of how Sunita Kumari Chaudhary and her fellow crafter change waste into art and read about their effort to give back to the community.
“There is nothing more Orwellian than the government trying to dictate what viewpoints are distributed in the name of free expression,” said Matt Schruers, president of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, a trade group for the social media companies that’s involved in the litigation. “That’s the issue in this case.”
The dispute intensified after the violent siege on the U.S. Capitol in 2021, when social media sites booted former President Donald Trump from their platforms, fearing his posts could provoke more unrest.
Texas Republican governor Greg Abbott said that freedom of speech was under attack in the state. “There is a dangerous movement by some social media companies to silence conservative ideas and values. This is wrong and we will not allow it in Texas.”
Guidelines are necessary to make sure that a community isn’t polluted. It goes from posting dog pictures in the cats forum to trying to groom children in a children’s site to everything in between, from vegan barbeques to posting dog pictures in the cats forum.
High Court to hear challenges to Texas, Florida social media laws – a friend-of-the-court comment on the Case of the Rutherford Institute
John Whitehead runs the Rutherford Institute, a conservative-leaning nonprofit group. Whitehead, who filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the cases, said the big social media sites have become the center of people’s lives and they should not be engaging in any censorship.
“It’s out there to make people think,” Whitehead said. You can disagree. If someone puts a comment on a post, people should respond immediately and start a debate. Debating is the key, not eliminating.”
Other allies of Texas and Florida argue the sites are merely hosting content, not making editorial judgments that deserve lots of First Amendment protection.
“Everyone, left right or center, should oppose government control of speech,” Szabo said. If you’re the person in the White House, we know that will not be forever. The First Amendment is important and paramount because of that.
Or, are they more like bookstores and newspapers, places where the information is edited and given the highest level of First Amendment protection?
The Supreme Court case is used by the social media giants. The newspaper in Florida didn’t like the idea of publishing op-eds. The high court was in agreement with the Herald.
Florida is attempting to make the big social media platforms print every single letter to the editor. They said users and advertisers don’t want that.
Social Media and Political Lobbyists: The Impact of Social Media on the American Civil Liberties Union, the Trade Association, and Silicon Valley
The two trade associations — Netchoice and CCIA — are backed by groups across the political spectrum, from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Americans For Prosperity, which is linked to Charles Koch, to the American Civil Liberties Union.
A bipartisan group of national security experts weighed in, too. Rupa Bhattacharyya is a former Justice Department lawyer and special master for the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. She now works at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University Law Center.
On an average day some 95 million photos are uploaded on the photo-sharing platform, followed by 34 million videos on TikTok and hundreds of millions of pounds of social media activity. Some go very far, others don’t. Some percentage of the numbers are not clear but they are taken down for violating the content rules. The rules for social media have become so important because of the large amount of postings and videos that they have become the most important speech regulations on the planet.
Home grown extremists like the Proud Boys have been using social media to lure in new members and broadcast their violence. The Christchurch mosque shooter in New Zealand live-streamed his activities, to try to inspire others, she added.
Bhattacharyya said social media platforms should face common-sense regulations, including consumer protection and anti-fraud laws. And the current content moderation policies of some of the big sites have real flaws.
The court papers said they had threats against the justices. The Moderator said that they deleted those things. But under the state laws, they might face lawsuits for yanking “trolls” who flood their chats with vulgar and racist posts.
It is important to understand what the tech companies are asking for. Even if it’s just displaying search results or quietly gathering your personal data, almost everything TikTok does is about moving and sorting information. The tech giants believe that any conduct of that sort is speech, and any sorting or blocking of that speech is editing. If the justices buy this argument, they would be granting constitutional protection to nearly anything a social media platform does, putting both their actions — and those of tech companies more broadly — beyond the reach of lawmakers who want to constrain them. Doing so would create a kind of immunity verging on sovereignty that it is hard to imagine the framers of the Constitution ever intended.
The laws do not give a description of how exactly their mandates would be enforced. The questions posed by justices proved the court was frustrated at being caught between two polar opposite positions with significant costs and benefits to freedom of speech.