{"id":65016,"date":"2021-02-19T06:01:02","date_gmt":"2021-02-19T12:01:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=65016"},"modified":"2021-02-19T06:01:02","modified_gmt":"2021-02-19T12:01:02","slug":"65016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=65016","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Social media censorship legislation proposed in Kansas<\/a><\/p>\n

A social media censorship bill, targeting companies like Facebook and Twitter that have been\u00a0censoring<\/strong>\u00a0<\/a>and\u00a0de-platforming<\/strong>\u00a0<\/a>conservative viewpoints, is being considered in Kansas.<\/p>\n

According to Dr. Mark Steffen, the Republican State Senator from Hutchinson who is sponsoring the bill, his measure takes a unique approach to work around the\u00a0Section 230<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0federal protections social media companies enjoy.<\/p>\n

The Social Media Anti-Censorship Bill\u201d SB187<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0targets the terms of service everyone agrees to \u2014 generally without having read them \u2014 when they create an account, under the Kansas Consumer Protection Act.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cWe all know how federal politics goes and getting that liability protection removed isn\u2019t going to happen anytime soon,\u201d Steffen said. \u201cI knew that North Dakota had put out a bill trying to accomplish this.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo I looked at it and studied it and got with the Kansas Revisor\u2019s office and we put our heads together and came up with a different approach.\u201d<\/p>\n

That different approach, in a nutshell, is to make the social media companies put together a user agreement that does not censor political opinion or expression, and which would allow the Kansas Attorney General to sue the offending company for violations, as well as allow private individuals to seek relief.<\/p>\n

The legislation is also careful to carve out\u00a0only\u00a0political speech as protected on the various platforms.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo contract between an interactive computer service and a person that contains the terms of service for use of a social media website operated by such service shall include any provisions that authorize such service to restrict, censor or suppress information that does not pertain to obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable subject matter. For purposes of this section, the terms \u2018harassing\u2019 and \u2018objectionable subject matter\u2019 do not include content that provides political information or expression.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fines could be as high as $10,000 per violation.<\/p>\n

Social media censorship legislation in other states<\/h3>\n

Steffen acknowledges there\u2019s a certain degree of tilting at the federal windmill with this, as this is something of a \u201cgray area,\u201d and that tech companies are unlikely to draft terms of service documents tailored to individual jurisdictions.<\/p>\n

However, he said, he is reaching out to legislators in other states to attempt to spread the idea further.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe know that\u00a0North Dakota<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0is working on it, we know that\u00a0Florida<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>is working on it,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m working to spread this to all states. Right now my target is all states that have a Republican governor and Republican-controlled house and senate. It\u2019s going to take a whole bunch of states pushing back and I would like for them to be doing it via a similar pathway.\u201d<\/p>\n

Steffen said that ultimately he believes social media censorship legislation should be a bipartisan effort.<\/p>\n

\u201cRight now that gun may be pointed at me as a conservative, but someday that gun is going to be pointed at (liberals) and (they\u2019re) not going to like that any better than I do.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo it behooves us to work together and I really do think in Kansas we have the ability to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Social media censorship legislation proposed in Kansas A social media censorship bill, targeting companies like Facebook and Twitter that have been\u00a0censoring\u00a0and\u00a0de-platforming\u00a0conservative viewpoints, is being considered in Kansas. According to Dr. Mark Steffen, the Republican State Senator from Hutchinson who is sponsoring the bill, his measure takes a unique approach to work around the\u00a0Section 230\u00a0federal protections … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law-order","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=65016"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65017,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65016\/revisions\/65017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=65016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=65016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=65016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}