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Trump Media in trouble

It's pretty much the same story that Elon Musk discovered when he bought Twitter, and all of us in broadcasting have always known: The advertising environment is important in terms of attracting revenue. Advertisers buy the environment as well as the numbers. So while the numbers may be attractive for various reasons, the environment is toxic. Once again, it's affected Twitter, which was at one time a very profitable operation. Musk had to sue advertisers because they were avoiding him. That lawsuit was dismissed.

What people haven't noticed is that the president has been using his privately owned social media site as an exclusive distribution system for taxpayer funded information. The most recent example was the WHCA dinner shooter on Saturday night. The first and only photo of the shooter, face down in custody, was distributed exclusively on his social media site, not by the FBI. He regularly does the same thing with information about the Iran War. So in fact, the president is using his position in government to compete with the rest of the media. Then he attacks and uses his FCC to attack the rest of the media. The founding fathers never expected a president would continue to use his own private social media company to compete against the rest of the media.

This will be a bigger problem moving forward because the DOJ has announced that this president isn't bound by the previous public property rules that cover information and documents in the white house. They did this to avoid the problems encountered after his first administration, when it was found he had taken a number of classified documents. He claims he determines what is or isn't classified. So he will sometimes post military photographs on his social media site, and they may have been classified information. But since he's president, he can post whatever he wants.
 
TheBigA said:
Musk had to sue advertisers because they were avoiding him.
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Elon really has mastered that "win friends and influence people" thing, ain't he?
TheBigA said:
The founding fathers never expected a president would continue to use his own private social media company to compete against the rest of the media.
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The founding fathers anticipated the possibility of a future venal president, or a future corrupt one, or one that would want to grab power. That's the purposes of the various checks and balances written into the constitution. But I doubt any of them ever envisioned a president who was all of those things and so much more in the realm of greed, grift and grabbiness. Any more than they could have foreseen the damage that a phenomenon like social media could do to the body politic.
 
The other thing we should point out is that the president's social media site is covered by Section 230 of the Communications Act, something that his supporters want to repeal. The problem is it would make the president liable for things he himself posts on his own site, and they know that would become a problem. Of course the president is also covered by the supreme court's immunity for things he does as president. But that would lead to the question: Is posting on the president's private social media site an actual presidential duty? For this one, it seems to be, since he does very little else.
 
TheBigA said:
The other thing we should point out is that the president's social media site is covered by Section 230 of the Communications Act, something that his supporters want to repeal.
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Section 230 protects the business, but not necessarily the author.

Let's say that I posted something libelous about Bob Pittman on here Radio Discussions, and for whatever reason it got picked up by an AI bot, and the iHeart stock tumbles. Lance (or his corporate entity) is not liable for my writings, because he has Section 230 as a defense.

However, I am not immune for my writings. A court could order Lance to reveal any information he has on my identity, and Mr. Pittman (or iHeart) could sue me for damages in civil court. If, instead, I posted a photo of sea shells in a particular arrangement, I could be tried criminally for my post.

For the record, I think 230 needs to be amended. It was originally drafted to protect small businesses and private individuals who happened to run bulletin boards and similar services. It was considered undesirable for the operators of such things to have to personally vouch for everything their participants shared, in the same way that a newspaper publisher can be liable for their employees' writings.

The simple amendment I would propose is that an "algorithmic feed", such as those employed by Facebook, Instagram and most other social media sites, is not protected under Section 230's provisions for "platforms". Only services where everything posted by every user is immediately displayed to anyone looking are defined as "platforms". It has the side benefit of dis-incentivizing those algorithmic feeds, which are a public bad in and of themselves.
 


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