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Ari Cohn Profile picture
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20 Dec, 4 tweets, 1 min read
S.O. surprised me with a late Hanukkah present that he called "vintage and very vintage"
I have a feeling @ScottGreenfield will approve
I may be less loved than I first imagined
I should never have told him that he's the beneficiary.

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More from @AriCohn

Ari Cohn Profile picture
21 Dec
1/ It would be great if professors of public policy with law degrees would stop spreading misinformation about the law (ironically while complaining about misinformation on social media).

Prof. Reich has two ideas that he thinks don't undermine free speech. He's simply wrong.
2/ First, he proposes "revoking" Section 230. While in and of itself that doesn't necessarily implicate the First Amendment, he is operating on a faulty premise: that somehow without Section 230, legal liability would attach to the speech he finds odious.

Not so.
3/ It's clear what he is referring to. Racist/hateful speech is protected by the First Amendment. One could not successfully sue the speaker of hateful speech due to the First Amendment (see Snyder v. Phelps), so it's curious that he thinks social media platforms would be liable.
Read 13 tweets
Ari Cohn Profile picture
9 Dec
1/ So I watched the Senate Commerce hearing on Instagram today, and while it was far too boring and mundane to live-tweet, there are some observations/takeaways worth sharing.

You can find the whole hearing here (I'll post some select clips): commerce.senate.gov/2021/12/protec…
2/ Blumenthal (D-CT) (of "will you commit to ending finsta" ignominy) is your prototypical "think of the children something must be done may I speak to the manager Karen."

He likes to broadly wave his hands about some purported evil and declare it HIS JOB TO FIX IT.
3/ It's interesting that he brings up that the Surgeon General's report also talks about the impact of "video games and other media."

Those are good comparisons: hysterical moral panics over alleged impending doom to the children!

I said this recently: washingtontimes.com/news/2021/dec/…
Read 30 tweets
Ari Cohn Profile picture
7 Dec
Section 230 is a red herring.

Hate speech is protected by the First Amendment precisely because it is impossible to objectively define. This lawsuit asks the courts to define it, which they will not do. Creative pleading won't get them around the First Amendment's application.
2/ There is no way to resolve this lawsuit without a court assessing the subjective meaning of Facebook's terms of service, and subjectively determining whether or not Facebook has lived up to them.
3/ Like Republican attempts to regulate social media, this runs headfirst into the reality that those judgements are protected by the First Amendment.

Trying to frame it as a "consumer protection" issue is transparent. The courts aren't going to fall for it.
Read 6 tweets
Ari Cohn Profile picture
6 Dec
1/ Whoever at the @bostonherald is responsible for this: toss your stash, you got a bad batch.

Seriously, this is a mishmash nonsense from people who thought "hey, Section 230 is hot, I should write about that even though I know nothing about it."

bostonherald.com/2021/12/05/edi…
2/ So I don't know the age of whoever wrote this, but presumably they are old enough to realize that Section 230 predates Facebook and Twitter by, uh... a long time.

The phrase "public utility" has a meaning, and this aint it. Nor has any social media platform claimed to be one. Image
3/ And this has nothing to do with what Facebook/Twitter think of themselves.

Section 230 merely says that they are not *liable* as a publisher. If they weren't at risk of being deemed publishers, the law would be pointless.

If you knew anything about 230, you'd realize this. Image
Read 12 tweets
Ari Cohn Profile picture
1 Dec
1/ Going to be tweeting through the House Energy & Commerce "Big Tech" hearing here at 10:30 EST. You can watch at energycommerce.house.gov/committee-acti…
2/ Like most of these hearings, this looks to be another Techlash Festivus, with the parties having selected witnesses that largely align with their predetermined grievances against social media compahnies.
3/ Some don't understand how 230/the First Amendment work. Others have never met a civil liberty they wouldn't run over to achieve a desired outcome. Some peddle absurdly flawed theories of how things ought work. Some simply have an agenda and don't care about collateral effects.
Read 270 tweets
Ari Cohn Profile picture
19 Nov
Just gonna get this out of the way:

Without commenting on the acquittal, the fact that a jury acquitted Rittenhouse does not mean it is defamatory to call him a "murderer," and it *especially* does not render any *past* statements defamatory.
2/ An acquital is just that: the government did not meet its burden of proof for a criminal conviction. It does not establish facts for all of time; it establishes whether the jury thought the government proved its case.
3/ Even if it *did* establish fact/truth, it would still be irrelevant to 99.99% of the claims people are yammering about. Why?

Because those statements were all made before the acquittal. Defamation requires fault. In Rittenhouse's case, he'll get public figure treatment
Read 6 tweets

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