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Julian Sanchez Profile picture
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16 Jul, 4 tweets, 1 min read
(1) Quite apart from the merits, the White House should stop presuming to tell private companies how to moderate user speech. (2) On the merits, that’s an incredibly dumb idea on multiple levels.
Specifically: It assumes real identities are tied to accounts and/or massive sharing of personal user data between platforms. And it assumes it’s desirable for every online community to have the same standards of conduct, which apart from some very basic stuff, it is not.
Trump: “Twitter and Facebook are state actors! They violated my rights! Waaaah!”

Every competent lawyer: LOL.

White House: “No, hang on, we can make this plausible…”
Government officials getting this involved in moderation decisions, apart from being inherently undesirable, really could backfire spectacularly. At some point that currently-stupid “state actor” argument becomes credible. And there’s no 1st Amendment “misinformation exception.”

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More from @normative

Julian Sanchez Profile picture
16 Jul
There is literally a Supreme Court on precisely the question of whether the First Amendment protects the right to use the word “fuck” in a publicly visible political slogan. They said it does. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohen_v._…
Cohen v. California was actually a closer call, because it involved wearing a “Fuck the Draft” jacket into a public courthouse, where the government has some extra latitude to set rules of decorum. The sign in this case was on the woman’s own property.
* “literally a Supreme Court CASE…”
Read 7 tweets
Julian Sanchez Profile picture
11 Jul
“Nobody serious thinks this, but a bunch of readers are hungry to believe it, so can we find someone shameless enough to make a case that will sound superficially respectable to people who don’t know any better?” Click goldmine.
Call me quaint, but on topics where a normal reader can’t easily evaluate the seriousness of an argument, I think running pieces like this is an abrogation of editorial duty. It’s like running flat-eartherism or “sovereign citizen” nonsense.
You’re signalling, “this is one among several credible positions, where there’s reasonable disagreement among specialists.” Which is a lie. You’re running it because it will get clicks, and MORE clicks because other respectable outlets are unwilling to lie to their readers.
Read 4 tweets
Julian Sanchez Profile picture
6 Jul
This got about a thousand times creepier when I hit the bio and realized the author was a college professor.
This is an inadvertently perfect reductio ad absurdum of demands for “political neutrality” (whether from social media platforms or other institutions). Because obviously there are tons of odious political views nearly everyone thinks OUGHT to be romantic dealbreaker.
I assume that if the students also said they weren’t interested in dating ISIS fighters, anti-Semites, or admirers of Joseph Stalin, the author wouldn’t think that was “discriminatory” (let alone “authoritarian”)—he’d be worried if those things WEREN’T dealbreakers.
Read 5 tweets
Julian Sanchez Profile picture
1 Jul
Cosign: Excellent piece. The key point is that the disturbing rise of bonkers conspiracy movements has to be understood more as a failure of trust than of rationality.
We might say “I’m a rational person; I form views based on science…” But usually you didn’t DO the science. You trust the social credentialing systems that validate the people who assure us they did the science.
Yeah, one reason this flourishes is that given the sheer quantity of news and scientific pronouncements, it’s trivial to come up with lots of examples of Approved Sources getting things wrong (or even just seemingly wrong).
Read 5 tweets
Julian Sanchez Profile picture
1 Jul
It’s been clear for a long while that a big part of why our conversations around race are so broken is that folks on left & right have very different ideas of what “racism” means. yahoo.com/news/poll-the-…
We still see versions of this exchange constantly:

“Racism is embedded in American culture and institutions.”

“Why are you calling me, personally, a racist?"
Mostly the problem here is that many on the right stridently refuse to think in any terms other than individual hatred. Though I also wish folks on the left would stop insisting on pushing claims that defy ordinary usage in ways that end up sounding ridiculous.
Read 4 tweets
Julian Sanchez Profile picture
25 Jun
I find myself increasingly frustrated with all sides of this conversation. The right wing media has made a crude caricature of a varied body of academic work their flavor-of-the-week boogieman, while the pushback is veering toward “CRT? Never heard of it. Does it even exist?"
Simultaneously true:
(A) The CRT backlash is badly confused about what CRT is, and often in bad faith.
(B) There really does exist a line of CRT, influential in some ed departments & teacher trainings, that views pedagogy as a locus of activism for racial equity.
That second part, however distorted the noise machine’s picture of it, is not a conspiracy theory or made up. There are books and conferences and everything. Pre-backlash nobody would have seriously denied this part.
Read 12 tweets

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