The case brought by tech companies that reached the Supreme Court this week might involve a lot of complicated legalese, but it actually hinges on a simple, unsettled question — one that will define how we treat social media platforms for decades to come.
Media
Opinion | Are social media platforms public utilities like a gas company? – The Washington Post
Have Facebook and X, formerly Twitter, now become the modern equivalent of public utilities, like your phone service or electric company? Or are they media organizations like The Post?
This is the crux of the conundrum facing the justices. The case stems from harebrained laws passed by the Florida and Texas legislatures (try to contain your surprise), which barred social media platforms from kicking conservative firebrands off their sites. Texas holds that the tech companies are 21st-century utilities that have to be regulated to ensure equal access.
Industry groups funded by Big Tech, meanwhile, have sued to invalidate the law, claiming that they have the same First Amendment rights as any other media company — including the right (if not the responsibility) to decide which content is in the public interest and which isn’t.
The debate here has been a long time coming. It remains unresolved, in part, because the tech companies themselves have always tried to have it both ways.
When outraged leftists demand more regulation around content that spreads hatred or misinformation, the companies are quick to assert that they are essentially pipelines for public discourse, rather than content providers. In fact, Congress codified this argument with something called Section 230, a provision that shields social media companies from the same kind of legal jeopardy that a newspaper might face for printing something false.
But when the right tries to impose some version of political neutrality, as it did in Texas, the same companies embrace exactly the opposite conceit — that they are media companies, no different from any news site, and thus can’t be forced to publish content they find offensive.
If they can’t decide which kind of company they really are, it’s now up to the justices to decide for them, I guess.
Writing in the New York Times this week, Tim Wu — a left-leaning law professor at Columbia University and much more of an expert than I am in all of this — argued that the court should uphold the Texas law and treat the tech companies as though they were utilities.
Wu doesn’t like the law itself, but striking it down, he says, would effectively bar any kind of government regulation of social media platforms, under the theory that there’s no difference, constitutionally speaking, between editors at CNN and an algorithm at Instagram.
I have some sympathy for this argument, in part because I’ve worked for two of these companies in my career. (I spent five years as the national political columnist for Yahoo and then published a newsletter on Meta’s now-defunct Bulletin platform.) I can attest to the idea that tech companies behave nothing like traditional journalism outlets. They’re run by engineers who might as well be wiring your house for cable or fixing your water main for all they care about the quality of information you consume online.
And yet, as a nonlawyer, I ultimately come down on the other side of the argument — that social media companies really aren’t utilities at all. They maintain no infrastructures of their own — no pipes or towers. They provide no service that we can’t live without — nothing as basic as drinking water or electric lights. They require no government license to operate. Most important, they enjoy no monopoly, however much it may feel that way in the moment.
Twenty-five years ago, AOL was a behemoth of email and message boards; now it’s as much a relic as dial-up internet. There’s nothing stopping anyone from creating a new social media platform, and there’s every reason to think that Facebook or X — or even Google, in the coming age of artificial intelligence — will be surpassed by some product yet to be invented.
In truth, these tech companies are now content providers who make editorial decisions every day about which posts to promote and which to bury. They are purveyors and aggregators of speech, and it seems to me that they have to be entitled to the same free speech protections as any other kind of media.
But here’s the catch: They ought to be just as accountable for their content, too. Which is why, if the Texas law is in fact unconstitutional, then Section 230 — which was adopted almost 30 years ago now, when the internet was in its infancy — should be thrown out as well, or at least revised. The way to police social media companies is to make them liable for the damage they cause.
That doesn’t mean you should be able to successfully sue a tech company for every dumb post that has harmful or even tragic consequences. It means that social media sites should be held to a minimum standard of care. To use the language of libel law, any company that exhibits “reckless disregard” for the accuracy of its content should be on the hook for the cost of making it right.
Wherever one falls in this debate, however, it’s time for the tech companies to choose a lane — or to have one chosen for them. If you’re a public utility, then you’re answerable to government regulations. If you’re a media company, then you’re answerable to the courts.
What you can’t be is both things at once, and answerable to nothing.
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Bayo Onanuga battles yet another media Punch Newspapers
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Sometimes, you just have to return to the classics.
That’s especially true as Halloween approaches. While you queue up your spooky movie marathon, here are 10 iconic horror movies from the past 70 years for inspiration, and what AP writers had to say about them when they were first released.
We resurrected excerpts from these reviews, edited for clarity, from the dead — did they stand the test of time?
“Rear Window” (1954)
“Rear Window” is a wonderful trick pulled off by Alfred Hitchcock. He breaks his hero’s leg, sets him up at an apartment window where he can observe, among other things, a murder across the court. The panorama of other people’s lives is laid out before you, as seen through the eyes of a Peeping Tom.
James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter and others make it good fun.
— Bob Thomas
“Halloween” (1978)
At 19, Jamie Lee Curtis is starring in a creepy little thriller film called “Halloween.”
Until now, Jamie’s main achievement has been as a regular on the “Operation Petticoat” TV series. Jamie is much prouder of “Halloween,” though it is obviously an exploitation picture aimed at the thrill market.
The idea for “Halloween” sprang from independent producer-distributor Irwin Yablans, who wanted a terror-tale involving a babysitter. John Carpenter and Debra Hill fashioned a script about a madman who kills his sister, escapes from an asylum and returns to his hometown intending to murder his sister’s friends.
— Bob Thomas
“The Silence of the Lambs” (1991)
“The Silence of the Lambs” moves from one nail-biting sequence to another. Jonathan Demme spares the audience nothing, including closeups of skinned corpses. The squeamish had best stay home and watch “The Cosby Show.”
Ted Tally adapted the Thomas Harris novel with great skill, and Demme twists the suspense almost to the breaking point. The climactic confrontation between Clarice Starling and Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) is carried a tad too far, though it is undeniably exciting with well-edited sequences.
Such a tale as “The Silence of the Lambs” requires accomplished actors to pull it off. Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins are highly qualified. She provides steely intelligence, with enough vulnerability to sustain the suspense. He delivers a classic portrayal of pure, brilliant evil.
— Bob Thomas
“Scream” (1996)
In this smart, witty homage to the genre, students at a suburban California high school are being killed in the same gruesome fashion as the victims in the slasher films they know by heart.
If it sounds like the script of every other horror movie to come and go at the local movie theater, it’s not.
By turns terrifying and funny, “Scream” — written by newcomer David Williamson — is as taut as a thriller, intelligent without being self-congratulatory, and generous in its references to Wes Craven’s competitors in gore.
— Ned Kilkelly
“The Blair Witch Project” (1999)
Imaginative, intense and stunning are a few words that come to mind with “The Blair Witch Project.”
“Blair Witch” is the supposed footage found after three student filmmakers disappear in the woods of western Maryland while shooting a documentary about a legendary witch.
The filmmakers want us to believe the footage is real, the story is real, that three young people died and we are witnessing the final days of their lives. It isn’t. It’s all fiction.
But Eduardo Sanchez and Dan Myrick, who co-wrote and co-directed the film, take us to the edge of belief, squirming in our seats the whole way. It’s an ambitious and well-executed concept.
— Christy Lemire
“Saw” (2004)
The fright flick “Saw” is consistent, if nothing else.
This serial-killer tale is inanely plotted, badly written, poorly acted, coarsely directed, hideously photographed and clumsily edited, all these ingredients leading to a yawner of a surprise ending. To top it off, the music’s bad, too.
You could forgive all (well, not all, or even, fractionally, much) of the movie’s flaws if there were any chills or scares to this sordid little horror affair.
But “Saw” director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell, who developed the story together, have come up with nothing more than an exercise in unpleasantry and ugliness.
— David Germain
Germain gave “Saw” one star out of four.
“Paranormal Activity” (2009)
The no-budget ghost story “Paranormal Activity” arrives 10 years after “The Blair Witch Project,” and the two horror movies share more than a clever construct and shaky, handheld camerawork.
The entire film takes place at the couple’s cookie-cutter dwelling, its layout and furnishings indistinguishable from just about any other readymade home constructed in the past 20 years. Its ordinariness makes the eerie, nocturnal activities all the more terrifying, as does the anonymity of the actors adequately playing the leads.
The thinness of the premise is laid bare toward the end, but not enough to erase the horror of those silent, nighttime images seen through Micah’s bedroom camera. “Paranormal Activity” owns a raw, primal potency, proving again that, to the mind, suggestion has as much power as a sledgehammer to the skull.
— Glenn Whipp
Whipp gave “Paranormal Activity” three stars out of four.
“The Conjuring” (2013)
As sympathetic, methodical ghostbusters Lorraine and Ed Warren, Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson make the old-fashioned haunted-house horror film “The Conjuring” something more than your average fright fest.
“The Conjuring,” which boasts incredulously of being their most fearsome, previously unknown case, is built very in the ’70s-style mold of “Amityville” and, if one is kind, “The Exorcist.” The film opens with a majestic, foreboding title card that announces its aspirations to such a lineage.
But as effectively crafted as “The Conjuring” is, it’s lacking the raw, haunting power of the models it falls shy of. “The Exorcist” is a high standard, though; “The Conjuring” is an unusually sturdy piece of haunted-house genre filmmaking.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “The Conjuring” two and half stars out of four.
“Get Out” (2017)
Fifty years after Sidney Poitier upended the latent racial prejudices of his white date’s liberal family in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” writer-director Jordan Peele has crafted a similar confrontation with altogether more combustible results in “Get Out.”
In Peele’s directorial debut, the former “Key and Peele” star has — as he often did on that satirical sketch series — turned inside out even supposedly progressive assumptions about race. But Peele has largely left comedy behind in a more chilling portrait of the racism that lurks beneath smiling white faces and defensive, paper-thin protestations like, “But I voted for Obama!” and “Isn’t Tiger Woods amazing?”
It’s long been a lamentable joke that in horror films — never the most inclusive of genres — the Black dude is always the first to go. In this way, “Get Out” is radical and refreshing in its perspective.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “Get Out” three stars out of four.
“Hereditary” (2018)
In Ari Aster’s intensely nightmarish feature-film debut “Hereditary,” when Annie (Toni Collette), an artist and mother of two teenagers, sneaks out to a grief-support group following the death of her mother, she lies to her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) that she’s “going to the movies.”
A night out with “Hereditary” is many things, but you won’t confuse it for an evening of healing and therapy. It’s more like the opposite.
Aster’s film, relentlessly unsettling and pitilessly gripping, has carried with it an ominous air of danger and dread: a movie so horrifying and good that you have to see it, even if you shouldn’t want to, even if you might never sleep peacefully again.
The hype is mostly justified.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “Hereditary” three stars out of four.
Read the full review here. ___
Researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed from New York.
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