Originally posted by StyleTime
Yeah. The "muh free speech" crowd also misunderstands this: some misinformation actually is illegal.They have this fantasy that any lie they tell is protected speech, but that is inaccurate. Some misinformation can get you fined, sued, or even thrown in prison. Not all speech is protected speech.
Alex Jones found out the hard way.
In this case, I think the free speech angle is a red herring anyways.
Twitter is in the the FTC's crosshairs due to concerns for the safety and privacy of user data rather than, specifically, the content on the site. I see it as adjacent to the freedom of speech discussion but not directly related. Disinformation creates serious concern for democratic reasons, sure, but it's not hard to see why Markey's alarm about Musk enabling impersonators overlaps with the FTC's ongoing concerns re: whether Twitter is protecting its users.
Which makes sense... because Twitter's whole defense within the freedom of speech debate (beyond the fact that it's a private corporation, as you note) is that: while tweets are a form of expression, they're not *Twitter's* expression. Twitter says that it's not a newspaper with an editorial mandate to avoid lies, it's just a social media platform (whatever that means). So Twitter aggregates data but doesn't curate. That position changed slightly after Jan 6, when Twitter was finally forced to grow a bit of a backbone, but I think it's still generally the industry stance.
Regardless, the FTC says: content of expression aside, you host and aggregate way too much data and metadata to play this fast and loose. And that warning comes with teeth; they fined Twitter $150 million in 2011, and Facebook $5 billion in 2019.
It's all a different debate than, say, in 2018 when the SEC personally fined Musk $20 million for tweeting lies about Tesla that manipulated stock prices.