2022.09.28 这是互联网末日的开始吗？

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Is This the Beginning of the End of the Internet?
How a single Texas ruling could change the web forever

By Charlie Warzel
Illustration showing many warning message tabs, like those we get on a computer, radiating from a fire hydrant
Getty; The Atlantic
SEPTEMBER 28, 2022, 5 AM ET
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About the author: Charlie Warzel is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of Galaxy Brain, a newsletter about the internet and big ideas.

Sign up for Charlie’s newsletter, Galaxy Brain, here.

Occasionally, something happens that is so blatantly and obviously misguided that trying to explain it rationally makes you sound ridiculous. Such is the case with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’s recent ruling in NetChoice v. Paxton. Earlier this month, the court upheld a preposterous Texas law stating that online platforms with more than 50 million monthly active users in the United States no longer have First Amendment rights regarding their editorial decisions. Put another way, the law tells big social-media companies that they can’t moderate the content on their platforms. YouTube purging terrorist-recruitment videos? Illegal. Twitter removing a violent cell of neo-Nazis harassing people with death threats? Sorry, that’s censorship, according to Andy Oldham, a judge of the United States Court of Appeals and the former general counsel to Texas Governor Greg Abbott.




A state compelling social-media companies to host all user content without restrictions isn’t merely, as the First Amendment litigation lawyer Ken White put it on Twitter, “the most angrily incoherent First Amendment decision I think I’ve ever read.” It’s also the type of ruling that threatens to blow up the architecture of the internet. To understand why requires some expertise in First Amendment law and content-moderation policy, and a grounding in what makes the internet a truly transformational technology. So I called up some legal and tech-policy experts and asked them to explain the Fifth Circuit ruling—and its consequences—to me as if I were a precocious 5-year-old with a strange interest in jurisprudence.

Evelyn Douek: The year that changed the internet

Techdirt founder Mike Masnick, who has been writing for decades about the intersection of tech policy and civil liberties, told me that the ruling is “fractally wrong”—made up of so many layers of wrongness that, in order to fully comprehend its significance, “you must understand the historical wrongness before the legal wrongness, before you can get to the technical wrongness.” In theory, the ruling means that any state in the Fifth Circuit (such as Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi) could “mandate that news organizations must cover certain politicians or certain other content” and even implies that “the state can now compel any speech it wants on private property.” The law would allow both the Texas attorney general and private citizens who do business in Texas to bring suit against the platforms if they feel their content was removed because of a specific viewpoint. Daphne Keller, the director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, told me that such a law could amount to “a litigation DDoS [Denial of Service] attack, unleashing a wave of potentially frivolous and serious suits against the platforms.”

To give me a sense of just how sweeping and nonsensical the law could be in practice, Masnick suggested that, under the logic of the ruling, it very well could be illegal to update Wikipedia in Texas, because any user attempt to add to a page could be deemed an act of censorship based on the viewpoint of that user (which the law forbids). The same could be true of chat platforms, including iMessage and Reddit, and perhaps also Discord, which is built on tens of thousands of private chat rooms run by private moderators. Enforcement at that scale is nearly impossible. This week, to demonstrate the absurdity of the law and stress test possible Texas enforcement, the subreddit r/PoliticalHumor mandated that every comment in the forum include the phrase “Greg Abbott is a little piss baby” or be deleted. “We realized what a ripe situation this is, so we’re going to flagrantly break this law,” a moderator of the subreddit wrote. “We like this Constitution thing. Seems like it has some good ideas.”

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Everyone I spoke with believes that the very future of how the internet works is at stake. Accordingly, this case is likely to head to the Supreme Court. Part of this fiasco touches on the debate around Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which, despite its political-lightning-rod status, makes it extremely clear that websites have editorial control. “Section 230 tells platforms, ‘You’re not the author of what people on your platform put up, but that doesn’t mean you can’t clean up your own yard and get rid of stuff you don’t like.’ That has served the internet very well,” Dan Novack, a First Amendment attorney, told me. In effect, it allows websites that host third-party content to determine whether they want a family-friendly community or an edgy and chaotic one. This, Masnick argued, is what makes the internet useful, and Section 230 has “set up the ground rules in which all manner of experimentation happens online,” even if it’s also responsible for quite a bit of the internet’s toxicity too.

But the full editorial control that Section 230 protects isn’t just a boon for giants such as Facebook and YouTube. Take spam: Every online community—from large platforms to niche forums—has the freedom to build the environment that makes sense to them, and part of that freedom is deciding how to deal with bad actors (for example, bot accounts that spam you with offers for natural male enhancement). Keller suggested that the law may have a carve-out for spam—which is often filtered because of the way it’s disseminated, not because of its viewpoint (though this gets complicated with spammy political emails). But one way to look at content moderation is as a constant battle for online communities, where bad actors are always a step ahead. The Texas law would kneecap platforms’ abilities to respond to a dynamic threat.


“It says, ‘Hey, the government can decide how you deal with content and how you decide what community you want to build or who gets to be a part of that community and how you can deal with your bad actors,’” Masnick said. “Which sounds fundamentally like a totally different idea of the internet.”

“A lot of people envision the First Amendment in this affirmative way, where it is about your right to say what you want to say,” Novack told me. “But the First Amendment is just as much about protecting your right to be silent. And it’s not just about speech but things adjacent to your speech—like what content you want to be associated or not associated with. This law and the conservative support of it shreds those notions into ribbons.”

The implications are terrifying and made all the worse by the language of Judge Oldham’s ruling. Perhaps the best example of this brazen obtuseness is Oldham’s argument about “the Platforms’ obsession with terrorists and Nazis,” concerns that he suggests are “fanciful” and “hypothetical.” Of course, such concerns are not hypothetical; they’re a central issue for any large-scale platform’s content-moderation team. In 2015, for example, the Brookings Institution issued a 68-page report titled “The ISIS Twitter census,” mapping the network of terrorist supporters flooding the platform. The report found that in 2014, there were at least 46,000 ISIS accounts on Twitter posting graphic violent content and using the platform to recruit and collect intelligence for the Islamic State.


I asked Masnick whether he felt that Oldham’s ruling was rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the internet, or whether it was more malicious—a form of judiciary trolling resulting from former President Donald Trump getting kicked off of Twitter.

He likened the ruling to this past summer’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and took away Americans’ constitutional right to an abortion. “You had 50 years of conservative activists pushing for the overturning of Roe, but this Texas ruling actually goes against almost everything the conservative judicial activists have worked for for decades,” Masnick said. “You have Citizens United, Hobby Lobby, the [Masterpiece Cakeshop] case, which are all complicated, but at the core, they are rooted in how to conceive of First Amendment rights. And in all cases, the conservative justices on the Supreme Court have been all about the right to expand First Amendment rights inside organizations, especially the right to exclude.”

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If the case ends up before the Supreme Court, many of the justices would have to decide against their priors in order to uphold the Texas law. Specifically, Justice Brett Kavanaugh would need to directly contradict his opinion in Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, a case where Kavanaugh clearly argued that private forums have First Amendment rights to editorial discretion.


Keller, of Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, has tried to game out future scenarios, such as social networks having a default non-moderated version that might quickly become unusable, and a separate opt-in version with all the normal checks and balances (terms-of-service agreements and spam filters) that sites have now. But how would a company go about building and running two simultaneous versions of the same platform at once? Would the Chaos Version run only in Texas? Or would companies try to exclude Texas residents from their platforms?

“You have potential situations where companies would have to say, ‘Okay, we’re kicking off this neo-Nazi, but he’s allowed to stay on in Texas,” Masnick said. “But what if the neo-Nazi doesn’t live in Texas?” The same goes for more famous banned users, such as Trump. Do you ban Trump’s tweets in every state except Texas? It seems almost impossible for companies to comply with this law in a way that makes sense. The more likely reality, Masnick suggests, is that companies will be unable to comply and will end up ignoring it, and the Texas attorney general will keep filing suit against them, causing more simmering resentment among conservatives against Big Tech.

What is the endgame of a law that is both onerous to enforce and seemingly impossible to comply with? Keller offered two theories: “I think passing this law was so much fun for these legislators, and I think they might have expected it would get struck down, so the theater was the point.” But she also believes that there is likely some lack of understanding among those responsible for the law about just how extreme the First Amendment is in practice. “Most people don’t realize how much horrible speech is legal,” she said, arguing that historically, the constitutional right has confounded logic on both the political left and right. “These legislators think that they’re opening the door to some stuff that might offend liberals. But I don’t know if they realize they are also opening the door to barely legal child porn or pro-anorexia content and beheading videos. I don’t think they’ve understood how bad the bad is.”


NetChoice v. Paxton is likely an opening salvo in a long, complex, and dangerous legal battle. But Keller offered up a more troubling possibility: This law amounts to a legal speed run that could drastically alter First Amendment law in such a way as to quickly end the battle. “The Supreme Court could strike this down but offer a framework for future litigation that opens the door to new kinds of laws we’ve never seen before,” she said. “Who knows what rule set we’ll be playing with after the Supreme Court weighs in.”

What does seem clear is that this law is an outgrowth of politicians waking up to the raw power of the internet as a communications platform. Lawmakers’ desire to preserve or destroy content moderation is a battle for the soul of the internet, the limits of free expression, and the direction of our politics. We, the users, are caught in the middle.

Charlie Warzel is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of Galaxy Brain, a newsletter about the internet and big ideas.



这是互联网末日的开始吗？
德克萨斯州的一项裁决可能永远改变网络

作者：Charlie Warzel
插图显示了许多警告信息标签，就像我们在电脑上得到的那些，从消火栓上散发出来的。
Getty; The Atlantic
2022年9月28日，美国东部时间上午5点
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关于作者。查理-沃泽尔是《大西洋》杂志的特约撰稿人，也是《银河大脑》的作者，这是一份关于互联网和大思想的通讯。

在这里注册查理的通讯《银河大脑》。

偶尔会发生一些公然的、明显被误导的事情，以至于试图理性地解释它让你听起来很可笑。第五巡回上诉法院最近对NetChoice诉Paxton一案的裁决就是这样的情况。本月早些时候，法院维持了一项荒谬的德克萨斯州法律，规定在美国拥有超过5000万月度活跃用户的在线平台不再拥有关于其编辑决定的第一修正案权利。换句话说，这项法律告诉大型社交媒体公司，他们不能对其平台上的内容进行调节。YouTube清除恐怖分子招募的视频？是非法的。推特删除一个新纳粹分子的暴力小组，用死亡威胁来骚扰人们？对不起，这是审查制度，美国上诉法院法官、德克萨斯州州长格雷格-阿博特的前总顾问安迪-奥尔德姆说。




正如第一修正案诉讼律师肯-怀特（Ken White）在推特上所说的那样，一个州强制社交媒体公司无限制地托管所有用户内容，不仅仅是 "我想我读过的最愤怒的第一修正案决定"。这也是那种有可能炸毁互联网架构的裁决。要了解原因，需要一些第一修正案法律和内容管理政策方面的专业知识，还需要了解是什么让互联网成为真正的变革性技术。因此，我召集了一些法律和技术政策专家，请他们向我解释第五巡回法院的裁决及其后果，就好像我是一个对法理学有着奇怪兴趣的早熟的5岁孩子。

Evelyn Douek。改变互联网的那一年

Techdirt的创始人迈克-马斯尼克（Mike Masnick）几十年来一直在撰写有关科技政策和公民自由的文章，他告诉我，这项裁决是 "零碎的错误"--由许多层次的错误组成，为了充分理解其意义，"你必须在法律错误之前理解历史错误，然后才能进入技术错误。" 从理论上讲，这项裁决意味着第五巡回法院的任何一个州（如得克萨斯州、路易斯安那州和密西西比州）都可以 "强制要求新闻机构必须报道某些政治家或某些其他内容"，甚至暗示 "国家现在可以强制要求在私人财产上发表任何言论"。该法律将允许德克萨斯州总检察长和在德克萨斯州做生意的私人公民对这些平台提起诉讼，如果他们认为他们的内容因特定的观点而被删除。斯坦福大学网络政策中心平台监管项目主任达芙妮-凯勒告诉我，这样的法律可能相当于 "诉讼DDoS[拒绝服务]攻击，释放出一波潜在的针对平台的无聊和严重的诉讼"。

为了让我了解这项法律在实践中会有多么广泛和无意义，马斯尼克建议，根据这项裁决的逻辑，在德克萨斯州更新维基百科很可能是非法的，因为任何用户试图添加到一个页面都可能被视为基于该用户的观点的审查行为（法律禁止）。聊天平台也是如此，包括iMessage和Reddit，也许还有Discord，它是建立在由私人版主管理的数万个私人聊天室上。在这种规模下，执法几乎是不可能的。本周，为了证明法律的荒谬性，并对德克萨斯州可能的执法进行压力测试，subreddit r/PoliticalHumor规定，论坛中的每条评论都要包括 "格雷格-阿博特是个小屁孩 "这句话，否则就删除。"我们意识到这是一个多么成熟的情况，所以我们要公然违反这项法律，"该子网站的一位版主写道。"我们喜欢这个宪法的东西。看起来它有一些好的想法。"

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与我交谈的每个人都认为，互联网运作方式的未来正处于危险之中。因此，这一案件很可能会被提交到最高法院。这场惨败的部分原因是围绕《通信礼仪法》第230条的争论，尽管该条款具有政治上的闪电地位，但它极其明确地规定了网站具有编辑控制权。"第230条告诉平台，'你不是你平台上的人的作者，但这并不意味着你不能清理你自己的院子，摆脱你不喜欢的东西。第一修正案的律师丹-诺瓦克（Dan Novack）告诉我，"这对互联网的发展非常有利。实际上，它允许承载第三方内容的网站决定他们是想要一个家庭友好的社区还是一个前卫混乱的社区。马斯尼克认为，这正是互联网的有用之处，第230条 "制定了基本规则，使各种形式的实验在网上发生"，尽管它也对互联网的毒性负有相当大的责任。

但是，第230条所保护的全面编辑控制并不只是Facebook和YouTube等巨头的福音。以垃圾邮件为例。每个网络社区--从大型平台到小众论坛--都有建立对他们有意义的环境的自由，而这种自由的一部分就是决定如何处理不良行为者（例如，向你发送天然男性增强产品的垃圾邮件的机器人账户）。凯勒建议，法律可能会对垃圾邮件有一个例外--这通常是因为其传播方式而不是因为其观点而被过滤（尽管这在垃圾邮件的政治邮件中变得很复杂）。但是，我们可以把内容控制看成是网络社区的一场持久战，在这里，不良行为者总是领先一步。德克萨斯州的法律将削弱平台应对动态威胁的能力。


"马斯尼克说："它说，'嘿，政府可以决定你如何处理内容，如何决定你想建立什么社区，或者谁可以成为该社区的一部分，以及你如何处理你的不良行为者'。"这听起来从根本上说是对互联网的一种完全不同的想法。"

"很多人以这种肯定的方式设想第一修正案，它是关于你说你想说的话的权利，"诺瓦克告诉我。"但第一修正案同样是关于保护你沉默的权利。而且，它不仅涉及言论，还涉及与你的言论相邻的事物，比如你想与哪些内容相关联或不相关联。这条法律和保守派对它的支持将这些概念撕成了碎片。"

这种影响是可怕的，并且由于奥尔德姆法官的裁决的语言而变得更加糟糕。也许这种厚颜无耻的最好例子是奥尔德姆关于 "平台对恐怖分子和纳粹的迷恋 "的论点，他认为这种担忧是 "虚构的 "和 "假设的"。当然，这种担忧并不是假设的；它们是任何大型平台的内容管理团队的核心问题。例如，在2015年，布鲁金斯学会发布了一份68页的报告，题为 "ISIS推特普查"，描绘了充斥在该平台上的恐怖分子支持者网络。报告发现，2014年，推特上至少有4.6万个ISIS账户发布图形暴力内容，并利用该平台为伊斯兰国招募人员和收集情报。


我问马斯尼克，他是否觉得奥尔德姆的裁决是源于对互联网的根本误解，还是更有恶意--一种因前总统唐纳德-特朗普被踢出推特而导致的司法机关的扯皮行为。

他将这一裁决比作今年夏天的多布斯诉杰克逊妇女健康组织案，该案推翻了罗伊诉韦德案，剥夺了美国人的堕胎宪法权利。马斯尼克说："你有50年的保守派活动家推动推翻罗伊案，但德克萨斯州的这项裁决实际上违背了保守派司法活动家几十年来努力的几乎一切，"。"你有《联合公民》(Citizens United)、《豪比-洛比》(Hobby Lobby)、[杰作蛋糕店]案，这些案件都很复杂，但核心是如何构思第一修正案的权利。而在所有的案件中，最高法院的保守派法官都是为了在组织内部扩大第一修正案的权利，特别是排斥的权利。"

查理-沃泽尔：互联网如何成为一个厄运的循环

如果此案最终提交给最高法院，许多大法官将不得不做出与他们的前科相悖的决定，以维护德克萨斯州的法律。具体来说，布雷特-卡瓦诺法官需要直接反驳他在曼哈顿社区接入公司诉哈勒克一案中的意见，在该案中，卡瓦诺明确主张私人论坛拥有第一修正案规定的编辑自由权。


斯坦福大学网络政策中心的凯勒曾试图对未来的情况进行博弈，比如社交网络有一个可能很快就无法使用的默认非审核版本，还有一个单独的选择版本，拥有网站现在所有的正常检查和平衡（服务条款协议和垃圾邮件过滤器）。但是，一家公司如何同时建立和运行同一平台的两个版本？混沌版是否只在德克萨斯州运行？或者公司会试图将德克萨斯州居民排除在他们的平台之外吗？

"马斯尼克说："你有潜在的情况，公司将不得不说，'好吧，我们踢掉这个新纳粹分子，但他被允许留在德克萨斯州，'。"但如果这个新纳粹分子不住在德克萨斯州呢？" 对于更著名的被禁用户，如特朗普，也是如此。你会在除德克萨斯州外的每个州禁止特朗普的推文吗？公司似乎几乎不可能以一种合理的方式遵守这项法律。马斯尼克认为，更有可能的现实是，公司将无法遵守，并最终无视它，而德克萨斯州总检察长将继续对他们提起诉讼，导致保守派对大科技公司的怨恨更加沸腾。

一部既难执行又似乎无法遵守的法律的最终结局是什么？凯勒提出了两种理论。"我认为通过这项法律对这些立法者来说非常有趣，而且我认为他们可能已经预料到它会被推翻，所以戏剧性才是重点。" 但她也认为，负责这项法律的人可能对第一修正案在实践中有多极端缺乏了解。"大多数人没有意识到有多少可怕的言论是合法的，"她说，认为从历史上看，宪法权利已经迷惑了政治左翼和右翼的逻辑。"这些立法者认为，他们正在为一些可能冒犯自由主义者的东西打开大门。但我不知道他们是否意识到他们也在为勉强合法的儿童色情或支持厌食症的内容和斩首视频打开大门。我不认为他们已经明白坏事有多大。"


NetChoice诉Paxton案很可能是一场漫长、复杂和危险的法律斗争的开场白。但凯勒提出了一个更令人不安的可能性。这部法律相当于一个法律加速器，可以大大改变第一修正案的法律，从而迅速结束这场战斗。"她说："最高法院可能会否决这项法律，但为未来的诉讼提供一个框架，为我们以前从未见过的新型法律打开大门。"谁知道在最高法院权衡之后，我们会用什么样的规则集来玩。"

似乎很清楚的是，这项法律是政客们意识到互联网作为一个通信平台的原始力量的产物。立法者希望保留或破坏内容节制，这是一场关于互联网灵魂、自由表达的限制和我们政治方向的战斗。我们，用户，被夹在了中间。

查理-沃泽尔是《大西洋》杂志的特约撰稿人，也是《银河之脑》的作者，这是一份关于互联网和大思想的通讯。