[Peace-discuss] Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) is backing bad speech-related legislation as she leaves Congress

[J.B. Nicholson]

Mike Masnick of TechDirt.com has a good article on Rep. Tulsi Gabbard's continuing 
dislike of the 1st Amendment.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20201005/15392845445/reps-gabbard-gosar-introduce-ridiculous-house-companion-to-ridiculous-anti-230-senate-bill-senator-kennedy.shtml

> [Masnick] You may recall that, last year, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard decided to file a
> ridiculously silly lawsuit against Google, claiming that the company had "violated
> her First Amendment rights" because it temporarily shut down her advertising
> account, and also because it filtered some of her campaign emails to spam. In a
> lawsuit that read remarkably similar to the various people arguing that
> "anti-conservative bias" was the basis for a lawsuit, it made a whole bunch of
> silly claims that any good lawyer would recognize as frivolous (hold that
> thought).
> 
> The lawsuit was easily tossed out on 1st Amendment grounds. And when I say "1st 
> Amendment grounds," I mean the court had to explain to Gabbard -- a sitting 
> Congressional Representative -- that the 1st Amendment only applies to the 
> government and Google is not the government. This is really embarrassing:
> 
> [Quoting the decision] Google is not now, nor (to the Court’s knowledge) has it 
> ever been, an arm of the United States government....[end excerpt]
> 
> [Masnick continued] The court jumped straight to the 1st Amendment issue, though
> it could have easily tossed out the case on Section 230 grounds as well, and it
> appears that Tulsi has now joined the "destroy Section 230" crowd, teaming up with
> Rep. Paul Gosar to introduce yet another anti-Section 230 bill in the House.
> [...]
> 
> So these two have now teamed up to introduce the Don't Push My Buttons Act. If 
> that sounds familiar, it's because Senator John Kennedy introduced the same thing 
> in the Senate last week. When that was introduced, we explained just how awful
> the bill was and that analysis stands. It would take Section 230 immunity away
> from sites that do some fairly basic data tracking, or if they use an
> algorithmically generated feed. It makes no sense and seems to serve only one
> purpose: to frustrate social media companies with annoying nuisance regulation.
> 
> The bill seems unlikely to go anywhere, and Gabbard is not running for 
> re-election, so this again seems more for show than anything else, but what a 
> terrible bill to go out on. Gabbard failed in her wacky legal attack on social 
> media, and so as a parting gift she tries to remove their Section 230
> protections. Disgusting.


[ridiculously silly lawsuit against Google] 
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190725/12250442653/presidential-candidate-tulsi-gabbard-sues-google-using-all-same-debunked-legal-theories-others-have-tried.shtml

[easily tossed out] 
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cacd.753634/gov.uscourts.cacd.753634.31.0.pdf

[anti-Section 230 bill] https://gosar.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=4046

[Don't Push My Buttons Act] 
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/7222464/Gosar-275-Xml.pdf

[just how awful the bill was] 
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200930/23050145420/because-congress-apparently-has-nothing-all-important-to-work-it-introduced-two-more-section-230-bills-yesterday.shtml




I saw Gabbard's Google lawsuit as an attempt to get more press (clear as it was from 
the start that she'd lose and lose for good reasons). I also think that it ended up 
contributing to an overall impression that she has problems with freedom of speech.

Now she's backing legislation that aims to disincentivize data collection, data 
collection which is being unfairly identified as the source of a problem with why 
people's political views aren't what the establishment wants them to be.

This data collection distraction is offered up because it reiterates the 
establishment line that undesirable election outcomes stems from voters being 
bamboozled with bad or conflicting information from so many people talking online; if 
all you people would just state establishment-compatible grievances, we wouldn't have 
so many people 'fomenting discord' (as the Democrats put it). So long as this 
distraction keeps people away from demanding something in exchange for their votes 
and working together to demand something of elected officials (Medicare for All, a 
national jobs program, universal basic income, etc.), the distraction is doing its job.