HB 20 And The Regulation Of Social Media

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NOTE - THIS MEETUP IS VIRTUAL AND WILL BE CONDUCTED ONLINE WITH EFF-AUSTIN'S ZOOM ACCOUNT. To join the meetup, RSVP to this event, and then click the link that you will be shown upon RSVPing. The meeting room passcode is 573615. Also, please note that due to the increasing popularity of these virtual meetings increasing the likelihood of Zoom-bombing, we have been forced to institute tighter permissions and security around meeting attendees. Going forward, guests will not be able to share their screen, unmute themselves, or message anyone besides the host(s) in the chat without permission from the meetup organizers. When we are in the Q&A portion of the presentation, guests can raise their hands and will be granted said permissions.

Our speaker this month is EFF Stanton Legal Fellow Mukund Rathi. Mukund is an attorney and Stanton Fellow at EFF, focusing on free speech litigation. He previously worked at the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) on digital privacy rights in criminal cases and securing freedom for incarcerated people during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mukund interned with EFF as a law student. He received his J.D. from UC Berkeley School of Law and B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin. He likes climbing things and making pizza at home.

Although some internet users are understandably frustrated and perplexed by how social media companies curate their users’ speech on their platforms, internet users nevertheless derive the most benefit when the First Amendment protects the platforms’ rights to make those decisions, and 47 U.S.C. § 230 (Section 230) bolsters and supports those rights. These protections ensure that social media companies can create their own curation policies free from governmental mandates, resulting in a diverse array of forums for users, with unique editorial views and community norms. Texas House Bill 20 (HB 20) takes those protections away and forces platforms to host speech inconsistent with their editorial vision. HB 20 prohibits popular online platforms from declining to publish others’ speech, even when that speech violates the platform’s rules, and even though such “content moderation” can be valuable to many internet users when it is carefully implemented. Inconsistent and opaque private content moderation is a problem for users. But it is one best addressed through self-regulation. Join us for a discussion of the thorny legal and ethical issues at the intersection of respecting the rights to free speech AND free association in digital spaces.

From our friends at Make Every Media: Make Every Media's Virtual Media Lounge is opening its digital doors to EFF-Austin for a post-meetup virtual pub happy hour! Decidedly NOT zoom, this spatial video conferencing platform is the closest thing we've found so far to simulating an in-person kind of presence without a VR headset. With the freedom of four glorious directions of movement, you can leave and join conversations at will, grab a private table for two, play an interactive party game, search for old-school 8-bit rpg easter eggs, and more! This lounge is best experienced in a Chrome Browser on your computer. Visit https://MakeEveryMedia.com/MediaLounge the day of the event to get your day-link, and see you after the talk :)