For the eleventy billionth time, deciding what speech you want to carry and what speech you want to exclude is an *exercise* of the First Amendment—not a violation of it—and “amending Section 230” won’t alter that reality, because the First Amendment itself protects that right.
Their angle is that while Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other behemoths can afford the compliance costs of Section 230 reform, their would-be competitors can’t. Regulating the competition out of business is a tactic as old as time.
Mark Zuckerberg was about 12 years old when Section 230 passed, and the only thing recognizable as “social media” at the time was *maybe* AOL instant messenger, ya dummy.
I should note: The problem here is not retroactivity. The Board of Parole just needs to use its uncontroversial, existing authority to give new hearing dates to anyone who is presumptively entitled to release under this new law, which they refuse to do.
To illustrate by example: There are people who will become presumptively entitled to release in July 2021. Many of those people won't be given a parole hearing until 2022 or beyond, though, which means they won't be released for years. That's a BOP choice.
To begin, while the vast majority of laws are presumed (and are) constitutional, that presumption flips—dramatically—in certain contexts. Generally speaking, compelling people to say things that they don’t want to say is one of those contexts.
It’s that flipped presumption—where the Government has to meet the burden of proving that a law is constitutional—that leads to cases like this: tennessean.com/story/news/201…
It’s my understanding that this is the final text of the new Chancery “super court.” Unless I’m missing something, this is not that big a deal? It’s largely purposeless, sure, but this is a pretty modest change, particularly compared with what was initially proposed.
The folks who pushed this are going to be *shocked* to learn that the problem with their laughably unconstitutional shit was not, in fact, the county where suit is filed.
Relatedly (and I don’t have a great way to verify this), I would be pretty surprised to learn that more than a handful qualifying cases are filed each year. So I guess the 5-10 of us who file these kinds of cases regularly will get our own little special panel thing.