#it's a personal media grievance when you fake out a death and then kill them after all!

[theliterarywolf]

So, Let’s Talk ‘Love Death and Robots (Episodes 10-18)

Hey guys, I finally decided to finish off my write-up on Netflix's Love Death and Robots, even though I hope that anyone who wanted to give the show a chance has by now. If you need a bit more coaxing, I covered the first 9 episodes here (you can also find my rating system explained there) and I go over the last 9 episodes here.

Oh, also... I know that there's the whole 'Netflix arranges to episode order based on your sexual orientation' thing going on. Even though I think that's kind of bunk because I don't recall Netflix sending me an email to ask 'Hey, so... can we know if you're straight or not?'

I’m going by the episodic order on my first and second viewings.

Let's get started.

Episode 10 – Shape-Shifters

I know people have been making the jokes of 'Lol, who was the closeted gay Republican furry who wrote this short~?” But, God, can... Can we please get more domestic supernatural pieces like this?

Homoerotic subtext or not, watching this story reminded me of one of my grievances whenever I try to wade through the muck and the mire that is the Kindle Store: that being, in regards to MLM writing, you're either a cowboy or a werewolf.

And no one does anything unique with writing gay cowboys or gay werewolves. It's always 'I'm a closeted, homophobic son of a bitch who needs my heart melted by the northern newcomer and their high-falutin' ways' or 'we're werewolves so we have to live by A/B/O-Omegaverse rules, I guess???'

The execution of this story, the melding of fantasy and the real world is something that I like to see in media but, more than often, is shat out into a mess of awkward writing and characters. I'm looking at you, Bright.

Did it Have a Robot – Yes? Or No?

No, this is more of a fantasy, horror, military-drama combo that does wonders.

Could this Stand Its Own as a Feature Film/TV Series?

I mean, with Teen Wolf gone and Supernatural on its way out, I think a fully-developed series leading up to the short that we get here, talking about the main two characters growing up as werewolves and how the world treats them would have a great place in prime-time.

Episode 11 – Helping Hand

127 Hours, eat your fucking heart out! I felt more from this one short about suffering and sacrificing for the sheer essence of surviving the insurmountable than I did with the whole of 127 Hours. Which is kind of bad considering how the latter is based on an actual true story.

Did it Have a Robot – Yes? Or No?

The main reason the main character has to do what she does is because she's doing maintenance on a space-station.

Could this Stand Its Own as a Feature Film/TV Series?

I think this stands better on its own as is.

Episode 12 – Fish Night

(No Gif for this one. Pity...)

Allow me a second.

…

Okay.

If you've ever watched something like Disney's Fantasia or James Cameron's Avatar (Disclaimer – If anyone tries to insinuate that I would ever put Avatar on the same level as any Disney film in terms of quality/re-watchability, I will slap you), you get the sentiments of: 'this exists to be a very, fancy, elegant tech-demo. I know I shouldn't think about story, but I am, and all I see is a very fancy tech-demo'.

That's the notion one gets with Fish Night. Another 2D addition to LDaR, the story of two business men stranded in a desert and the beauty of the natural world of past and present is visually stunning but, as soon as that night falls, you're going to know exactly what is happening for the rest of the story.

But it sure is pretty, though!

Did it Have a Robot – Yes? Or No?

Nope. It was just really pretty.

Could this Stand Its Own as a Feature Film/TV Series?

Nope. It's just really pretty.

Episode 13 – Lucky 13

The second of the stories in LDaR that has a 'last-stand' tilt, even though it doesn't kick in until the end. However, before that, I really enjoy what is another story with a legitimately strong female character, who also happens to be a woman of color, who comes up from the adversity of being a novice pilot and being given an airship with the most unfortunate of reputations to manage.

The relationship between the main character and the ship 'Lucky 13' is really what makes this story stand out.

Which... is ultimately bad for the story that rounds out the collection. But, that will come later.

Did it Have a Robot – Yes? Or No?

The characters are essentially space-marines and they drive around in airships, what more do you need?

Could this Stand Its Own as a Feature Film/TV Series?

Maybe a feature film. But it would have to devote every minute of a film's run-time to developing the universe and personalities of the human characters.

Episode 14 – Zima Blue

Admittedly, this one managed to keep me in suspense until the focus of the story first made himself visible. After that, we're taken on a minute trip through the phenomena of true talent, existentialism, and the concept of joy and self.

And... that's all I will say on that one.

Did it Have a Robot – Yes? Or No?

Ooh, does this one have a robot...

Could this Stand Its Own as a Feature Film/TV Series?

You know, this one is a bit tricky. Maybe not a feature-length film but not pulled out into a TV series either. A thirty-minute short film, perhaps, would let the setting and artwork shine more.

Episode 15 – Blindspot

(No Gif again...)

You know, I keep forgetting that this one exists. It's not even that it was bad, it just...

Okay, so I watch a review channel on YouTube from time to time called “Double Toasted” and, even though I don't agree with about 75% of their stance on LDaR, what they said about this one was pretty spot on.

It's reminiscent of the classic Saturday Morning Cartoons of the 80s... Just with more swearing and death.

Because, yeah, this story follows a team of multi-colored androids driving EXTREME! vehicles while trying to steal a secret computer-chip from a carrier convoy. And all of the androids represent a common character trope seen in those sorts of cartoons: the Cool Dude leader, the brawny idiot, the smart-talking girl, and the green-behind-the-ears junior character.

I actually liked the animation to this one but story-wise it really is just your EXTREME! Saturday Morning cartoon with cursing and violence.

Did it Have a Robot – Yes? Or No?

Yeah, the entire cast.

Could this Stand Its Own as a Feature Film/TV Series?

Maybe a TV series... Ooh, especially if it was done by someone like Christy Karacas (Superjail! and BallMasterz: 9009)

Episode 16 – Ice Age

(I should probably come to the conclusion that no one on this site cared enough about these last few shorts...)

Okay, this one I feel cheated in order to be included in here because it honestly feels so out of place. You get to follow a new, quirky couple moving into their first place together and, whoa-oh! They find an old freezer and decide to look inside to decide whether or not they should keep it!

… And, inside, is a micro-ecosystem that shows the entire past, present, and future of the human-race before blazing out in a fluorescent heat-death in front of their eyes.

All while said quirky couple makes commentary on what they're seeing.

I still don't know what animation was used for a good portion of the freezer-scenes. Was it CG combined with scaled-down camera or what?

Did it Have a Robot – Yes? Or No?

Tech... nically...

Could this Stand Its Own as a Feature Film/TV Series?

Oh, honey, no... A feature-length film of this would be on the same level of all of those ironic romcoms we got in that painful period of the early 2000s and a TV series of this would be canceled after three episodes.

Episode 17 – Alternate Histories

Look, I get where people come from with Alternate Histories: 'this one was goofy', 'it ran a bit too long', 'fake news'. And, honestly, when the title first showed up on my screen, I was cringing because I was sure they were going to spend 8 or 10 minutes of talking about a certain annoying pumpkin man.

However, I actually had fun with this one. Yeah, it seems like the flow and writing seems more like it would be at home on something like Robot Chicken at times, but I still liked it.

Besides, we get to watch a little Cartoon Hitler being killed over and over and over. What's not to like?

Did it Have a Robot – Yes? Or No?

The Alternate History software in of itself is reminiscent to your 'what-if' tropes in science fiction. Just condensed and split apart into a few different scenarios.

Could this Stand Its Own as a Feature Film/TV Series?

I couldn't see a full film or series of this working but maybe, like I said, if an entire episode of something like Robot Chicken was just dedicated to making up a dozen different ways to kill Hitler, that would be pretty interesting to watch.

Episode 18 – The Secret War

This, I feel, is the true casualty of LDaR. Not because it's bad on a technical level, it's actually visually stunning. Not because it's bad on a story-telling level, the writing is actually solid.

No, the main fault of The Secret War... Is that it is the last story in LDaR.

That it's the THIRD 'Last-Stand' story we've seen in an anthology of 18 different stories. I can understand the team behind LDaR wanting to have something like this be its finisher because, as I said, the art direction and writing behind it are really worthy of some fine cinema.

But it would have been better for everyone involved if they had swapped this one's position with something like Zima Blue or Lucky 13. By this point in watching the series, you're kind of reflecting on the darker stories but appreciating the lighter ones as well. So you'd want something with a little bit of hope to finish things off with.

And, trust me: those who know me know that I'm a proponent of 'more dark stories in media/not everything needs a happy ending'. This one just needed to be earlier in the anthology because, oof, I just was not able to get invested in the characters and their struggle. You know that it's not going to end well, you're just watching characters march towards their deaths.

And, again, this would have been fine... Had it been episode 6 or 8. But, no, this is how we decide to end off this cavalcade of high-concept art.

Think back to Night on Bald Mountain from the Original Fantasia. Yes, the initial orgy of horror and fright from Chernabog and his minions is a decadent display but a lot of its weight and impact would have been lost if the film just ended with that. That's why having the brief ending of the Ave Maria segment works: to keep things balanced so that everything in Fantasia can be appreciated in checks and balances.

LDaR unfortunately didn't have that foresight. So, what should have been a feast feels more like a push to get through.

Did it Have a Robot – Yes? Or No?

No, this was one of the fantasy/horror pieces.

Could this Stand Its Own as a Feature Film/TV Series?

Honestly, I'm not sure. Maybe a feature-length film just so that the universe and characters can present themselves on their own, rather than having to bear the weight of being the big finisher to the impact of 17 other stories. But it would still be a risk.

So, those are my thoughts on Love Death and Robots. Personally, I would LOVE for there to be a season 2 of this with more writers involved so we can get an overall more distinct portfolio of writing approaches (as well as maybe serve as a springboard for up-and-coming writers, hm..?)

I do acknowledge the risk of making something like this a yearly thing (many critics of Black Mirror insist that the series' recent low-points are due to the writers having to constantly come back and try to one-up their poignancy), but I think the risks would be dealt with if, again, more writers were allow to join in.

Oh well, feel free to tell me how you felt and what your personal favorites were. Thanks for reading and have a good one!

#Wolf Watches #love death and robots

[theliterateape]

Indefatigable Is a Goal in a Overly Exhausted World

by Don Hall

Then there’s that guy at work who is relentlessly upbeat. He dances in the aisles to the soundtrack of the place as it is comprised of the hits of the 80’s and 90’s. He finds a joke in most interactions. He has a ‘glass half full’ perspective even in the most dire circumstances. He has what seems to be endless energy. You want to kill him or embrace him in equal measure.

I’m that guy.

Despite being him most of the time, I’m getting tired. Sure, I’m half a century old and the natural decay of the body requires more naps but the tired I’m feeling is that of existential fatigue. A weariness of the soul. The pause Sisyphus takes in between pushing the huge boulder up the hill as it rolls back down again and he breathes in a ragged breath, lets out a shoulder shaking sigh and trods back down the hill.

I don’t feel this way often as I am that guy. I am feeling it more often lately.

“Oh. You folks are still doing the mask thing?”

“Yup. Nevada still requires them. Probably a good thing.”

“Most states are tired of it. Most people are tired of it.”

“Numbers don’t lie. Nevada numbers are lower than the current spikes in the Midwest.”

“Of course, numbers lie. The infection rates are all fake. You see, the insurance companies pay out more if the cause of death is COVID so htydchhv jhgkiy llufdsdg j jhhv kukjbkmjh...”

I struggle to find the humor in the moment. My heart gets heavy. Frustration. The fucking boulder rolls down the hill and I wonder if I have the grit to go down and roll it up the hill again.

I read about pandemic fatigue. As if a virus gives a good goddamned how weary we are of it. As if nature gives two shits about our state of mind.

I understand pandemic fatigue.

I also understand

Social Media fatigue Donald Trump fatigue Election fatigue Climate Change fatigue Extreme Left fatigue Extreme Right fatigue Advertising fatigue

I see it in the eyes of people everywhere. In their behavior. 

Amy, the registered nurse with anxiety issues before all this, betting recklessly at the Sportsbook and asking anyone who will listen if they think she should go buy CBD to help. Wayne, a tourist van driver who hasn’t seen a paycheck since March, sitting with his wife playing Keno, each button push a joyless effort. Jackson, my boss, losing his train of thought three times in a twenty minute meeting.

Conspiracy theories are on a full-tilt rise these days. People share them without thought because, while almost droolingly stupid, they explain this. This unexplainable state we’re in is suddenly revealed through some guy on the internet detailing how Canada will lock down a third time and force through universal income and imprison dissenters.

To be truly indefatigable one needs to see beyond the eye’s gaze. To envision a next Thursday when things are no longer assaulting your sense of place, your sense of security, your sense of reality. To resist fatigue, one needs to focus on simple things and create space. To fight it off, the reservoirs of compassion need to be uncorked.

How? I think about this a lot. How to strap on that armor to prevent the decaying planet, the childish society, and the ever-present threat of everything from climate disaster to a possible second Trump term from overwhelming each waking moment with dread?

Stop doomscrolling.

The news is supposed to be news not a parade of despair designed to scare the fuck out of you. Check in with yourself. How do you feel before you open that NYT app or Apple News and start the march of horrors? How do you feel after? You want to be ‘in the know’ but for fuck’s sake, do it less.

Focus on simple accomplishments.

Back in the day I lost eighty pounds and for the past fourteen years I’ve kept it off. 185 is my go to weight but I shot up to 208 in the past year. I’m now working on paring it down and each day I lose another half pound it feels like I have a modicum of control. Working out has the same effect.

My mom gardens. A friend makes YouTube sketch videos. My wife goes out and finds free stuff in alleys and behind stores. Someone knits. Others write their version of the Great American Novel.

Do a few things daily that give you a sense of control of something because everything else out there is well beyond it.

Stop wallowing.

A lovely friend back in Chicago touts the phrase “It’s OK to Not Be OK” and he’s correct. That said, it’s not OK to be not OK and bathe in this fact. Not being OK, recognizing it, avoiding guilt over it, and allowing it to define your every waking moment are not the same. You feel anxious? OK. Do things that relax you but don’t put on a t-shirt and carry a placard that declares how anxious you are. Bragging about how fucked up you feel is a narcissistic wormhole of which there is no escape.

Fucking breathe.

You’re on edge. You feel out of control. Maybe you’re a little desperate. Being a raging asshole is not going to help in any way. Playing up your grievances for the crowd won’t make you feel better.

That barista is a going through the same thing. Fucking breathe and be cool. That woman at Walgreens is living the same COVID nightmare as you. Fucking breathe and be a better person for a moment. That guy who signaled wrong and cut you off is just as uncertain of our political future as you. Fucking breathe and calm the fuck down.

Indefatigable is a state of mind. It is “I’m exhausted but I have just a bit more gas in the tank so why not?”

So. Why not?

#pandemic fatigue #suck it up

[brajeshupadhyay]

You may not have noticed, what with America’s COVID-19 deaths passing the 100,000 mark and cities in an uproar coast-to-coast over police tactics against black residents, but President Trump last week staged a completely fictional attack on Twitter and other online services. The fiction was embodied in an executive order Trump signed on May 28, purportedly aimed at “preventing online censorship.” The order targets Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which dramatically changed the environment for online services hosting user-provided content. Section 230, which has been consistently misunderstood by its critics across the political spectrum, allows online services to host potentially objectionable, even defamatory user-posted content without becoming liable to legal action themselves, while also giving them the discretion to moderate that content as they wish. We have to let go of some Platonic ideal of content moderation…. You’re always going to cheese off somebody. Eric Goldman, Santa Clara University “The section’s most fundamental concept is that we want internet companies to manage user content, and not be liable for whatever they miss,” says Eric Goldman, an expert in the law at Santa Clara University Law School. “The fear was that if they were liable for whatever they missed, they wouldn’t even try.” The tech community has long treated Section 230 as “the most important law on the Internet.” As my colleague Sam Dean reports, the title of a book on the section by Jeff Kosseff, a cyberlaw expert at the U.S. Naval Academy, labels its text “the twenty-six words that created the internet.” But the law also has come under concerted attack by plaintiffs who keep looking for loopholes and judges who open them, all aimed at scrubbing distasteful material from the Web. Trump’s executive order is a typical attack on Section 230, launched by someone acting out a personal grievance. It’s so sloppily drafted that it would accomplish nothing resembling the prevention of “online censorship,” would be almost certainly unconstitutional if it did, and was basically a reflexive reaction to one offense: Twitter’s unprecedented designation of Trump tweets as the embodiment of lies requiring corrections. Twitter tagged the May 27 tweets, which asserted that mail-in ballots would lead to a “rigged election,” with a note directing users to fact-checked information refuting the assertion. Trump issued his executive order the very next day. Twitter went even further a day later, when it placed a blocking message over a Trump tweet implying that participants in protests over the killing of George Floyd, a black man who apparently died in the custody of Minneapolis police, should be shot if they were looting. The message required users to click separately to view the tweet. The executive order bears all the hallmarks of a Trump tantrum, including the lack of a mechanism to turn it into action. It begins with a Frank Costanza-like litany of personal grievances. “Online platforms are engaging in selective censorship that is harming our national discourse,” the order reads, specifically calling out Twitter: “Twitter now selectively decides to place a warning label on certain tweets in a manner that clearly reflects political bias… Twitter seems never to have placed such a label on another politician’s tweet.” (Trump means any politician other than himself.) We added a label to two @realDonaldTrump Tweets about California’s vote-by-mail plans as part of our efforts to enforce our civic integrity policy. We believe those Tweets could confuse voters about what they need to do to receive a ballot and participate in the election process. — Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) May 28, 2020 The order calls on the Federal Communications Commission to “clarify” the scope of 230’s immunity from liability, even though that latitude is quite clear in the language of the law. The text makes it clear that the immunity is very broad indeed. It allows online services to restrict access to content that they consider to be “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable.” The catchall language of “otherwise objectionable,” Goldman says, “makes you wonder exactly what wouldn’t have been included in Congress’s expectations, since they gave such a broad-based mandate to services.” The 230 exemption has been relied on by countless services that allow users to post statements or other content on their sites — newspapers hosting reader comments, merchants posting consumer reviews, expert and amateur forums of every description. Nevertheless, efforts to place limits of the 230 exemption are legion. In one closely followed California case, a San Francisco personal injury lawyer persuaded a state judge to order the consumer review site Yelp to remove an ex-client’s criticism of her performance after the lawyer won a defamation lawsuit against the client. Yelp refused, noting that it hadn’t been named as a defendant in the defamation lawsuit and arguing that it was immune from liability for the client’s posts under Section 230. The California Supreme Court found in Yelp’s favor, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to take up the issue, ending the case against Yelp. (The defamation judgment against the client remained in effect.) Congress tried to carve out an exception to Section 230 protection aimed at online sites that purportedly facilitated sex trafficking. The so-called Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, or FOSTA, which passed overwhelmingly and was signed into law by Trump in 2018, made online services liable for ads ostensibly promoting prostitution, consensual or otherwise. But FOSTA has failed to achieve its goals. Law enforcement officials have said it has made it harder for them to root out sex trafficking, because it drove perpetrators further underground, and interfered with posts aimed at warning consensual sex workers away from dangerous situations or clients. This Tweet violates our policies regarding the glorification of violence based on the historical context of the last line, its connection to violence, and the risk it could inspire similar actions today. https://t.co/sl4wupRfNH — Twitter Comms (@TwitterComms) May 29, 2020 In Congress, attacks on Section 230 or services that rely on its terms are bipartisan. For years, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has been asserting that under Section 230, online services that remove conservative-leaning contents lose their status as “neutral public forums” and therefore their immunity. Those services “should be considered to be a ‘publisher or speaker’ of user content if they pick and choose what gets published or spoken,” Cruz wrote in 2018. (His target then was Facebook, which he complained had been “censoring or suppressing conservative speech for years.”) Cruz’s take was wrong and in any event unenforceable, since any content moderation whatsoever entails picking and choosing what to allow online. Cruz is a graduate of Harvard Law School, so it’s reasonable to assume that he knows he’s wrong, and just as reasonable to conclude that he’s merely preaching to an ideologically conservative choir . But an attack on 230 has also come from Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), who in 2018 proposed a sheaf of regulations on social media aimed at stemming the tide of disinformation, including faked photos and videos, posted online. Warner advocated making online services liable for defamation and other civil torts if they posted “deep fake” or other manipulated audio or visual content. But he acknowledged in his position paper that distinguishing between “true disinformation and legitimate satire.” He also recognized that “reforms to Section 230 are bound to elicit vigorous opposition, including from digital liberties groups and online technology providers.” The best approach to Section 230 is to leave it alone, but manage our expectations of what it can achieve. For the most part, legitimate online services find it in their best interest to combat material widely judged to be socially unacceptable —hate speech, racism and sexism, and trolling. But the debate on the margins is always going to be contentious. “We’re never going to be happy with internet companies’ content moderation efforts,” says Goldman. “You can’t ask whether one company’s doing it right and another’s doing it wrong. They’re all ‘doing it wrong,’ because none of them are doing it the way I personally want them to do it. Your standards may differ from mine, at which point there’s no pleasing everybody.” Online services will always be vulnerable to attacks like Cruz’s or, indeed, Trump’s. The goal of his executive order was to pump up the image of online services into behemoths that have taken over the public debate space for their own purposes, assuming “unchecked power to censor, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alter virtually any form of communication between private citizens and large public audiences,” as he put it in remarks during the executive order signing ceremony. In his mind, that made them legitimate targets for regulation. Trump’s audience, of course, wasn’t ordinary citizens who feel their access to information or right to post their content online was being trampled, but his political base, which imagines that its megaphone is being taken away. The biggest joke during the signing ceremony was Trump’s assertion that “if [Twitter] were able to be legally shut down, I would do it. I think I’d be hurting it very badly if we didn’t use it anymore.” As the prominent internet rights lawyer Mike Godwin observed in response, “Seriously? Who on earth believes that Donald J. Trump could make himself live another week in the White House — much less serve another term — without his daily dose of Twitter psychodrama?” In truth, Trump was just trying to work the referees — hoping that his rhetoric alone will discourage Twitter from further interfering with his tweets. That seems to be working with Facebook, which thus far has announced a hands-off policy on political posting, no matter how noxious or mendacious. Even Facebook executives, as it happens, have been discontented by the hands-off policy adopted by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Arguments that private companies such as Twitter or Facebook are infringing on constitutional free speech rights are misguided, since constitutional protections for free speech apply to official government infringements, not those of private actors. In the private sphere, the diversity of approaches to content moderation may be society’s safety valve. “We have to let go of some Platonic ideal of content moderation, that if internet companies just invested enough time and money, they’d come up with something that would make everyone happy,” Goldman told me. “That outcome does not exist. You’re always going to cheese off somebody.” window.fbAsyncInit = function() { FB.init({ appId : '119932621434123', xfbml : true, version : 'v2.9' }); }; (function(d, s, id){ var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) {return;} js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "https://ift.tt/1sGOfhN"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk')); The post Hiltzik: Trump’s fake attack on Twitter appeared first on Sansaar Times.

http://sansaartimes.blogspot.com/2020/06/hiltzik-trumps-fake-attack-on-twitter.html

#SEO #Local SEO training #daily news paper #daily news india #daily news newspaper #technology news a

[brajeshupadhyay]

Hiltzik: Trump’s fake attack on Twitter

You may not have noticed, what with America’s COVID-19 deaths passing the 100,000 mark and cities in an uproar coast-to-coast over police tactics against black residents, but President Trump last week staged a completely fictional attack on Twitter and other online services.

The fiction was embodied in an executive order Trump signed on May 28, purportedly aimed at “preventing online censorship.” The order targets Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which dramatically changed the environment for online services hosting user-provided content.

Section 230, which has been consistently misunderstood by its critics across the political spectrum, allows online services to host potentially objectionable, even defamatory user-posted content without becoming liable to legal action themselves, while also giving them the discretion to moderate that content as they wish.

We have to let go of some Platonic ideal of content moderation…. You’re always going to cheese off somebody.

Eric Goldman, Santa Clara University

“The section’s most fundamental concept is that we want internet companies to manage user content, and not be liable for whatever they miss,” says Eric Goldman, an expert in the law at Santa Clara University Law School. “The fear was that if they were liable for whatever they missed, they wouldn’t even try.”

The tech community has long treated Section 230 as “the most important law on the Internet.” As my colleague Sam Dean reports, the title of a book on the section by Jeff Kosseff, a cyberlaw expert at the U.S. Naval Academy, labels its text “the twenty-six words that created the internet.”

But the law also has come under concerted attack by plaintiffs who keep looking for loopholes and judges who open them, all aimed at scrubbing distasteful material from the Web.

Trump’s executive order is a typical attack on Section 230, launched by someone acting out a personal grievance.

It’s so sloppily drafted that it would accomplish nothing resembling the prevention of “online censorship,” would be almost certainly unconstitutional if it did, and was basically a reflexive reaction to one offense: Twitter’s unprecedented designation of Trump tweets as the embodiment of lies requiring corrections.

Twitter tagged the May 27 tweets, which asserted that mail-in ballots would lead to a “rigged election,” with a note directing users to fact-checked information refuting the assertion.

Trump issued his executive order the very next day.

Twitter went even further a day later, when it placed a blocking message over a Trump tweet implying that participants in protests over the killing of George Floyd, a black man who apparently died in the custody of Minneapolis police, should be shot if they were looting. The message required users to click separately to view the tweet.

The executive order bears all the hallmarks of a Trump tantrum, including the lack of a mechanism to turn it into action. It begins with a Frank Costanza-like litany of personal grievances.

“Online platforms are engaging in selective censorship that is harming our national discourse,” the order reads, specifically calling out Twitter: “Twitter now selectively decides to place a warning label on certain tweets in a manner that clearly reflects political bias… Twitter seems never to have placed such a label on another politician’s tweet.” (Trump means any politician other than himself.)

We added a label to two @realDonaldTrump Tweets about California’s vote-by-mail plans as part of our efforts to enforce our civic integrity policy. We believe those Tweets could confuse voters about what they need to do to receive a ballot and participate in the election process.

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) May 28, 2020

The order calls on the Federal Communications Commission to “clarify” the scope of 230’s immunity from liability, even though that latitude is quite clear in the language of the law.

The text makes it clear that the immunity is very broad indeed. It allows online services to restrict access to content that they consider to be “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable.”

The catchall language of “otherwise objectionable,” Goldman says, “makes you wonder exactly what wouldn’t have been included in Congress’s expectations, since they gave such a broad-based mandate to services.”

The 230 exemption has been relied on by countless services that allow users to post statements or other content on their sites — newspapers hosting reader comments, merchants posting consumer reviews, expert and amateur forums of every description.

Nevertheless, efforts to place limits of the 230 exemption are legion. In one closely followed California case, a San Francisco personal injury lawyer persuaded a state judge to order the consumer review site Yelp to remove an ex-client’s criticism of her performance after the lawyer won a defamation lawsuit against the client.

Yelp refused, noting that it hadn’t been named as a defendant in the defamation lawsuit and arguing that it was immune from liability for the client’s posts under Section 230. The California Supreme Court found in Yelp’s favor, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to take up the issue, ending the case against Yelp. (The defamation judgment against the client remained in effect.)

Congress tried to carve out an exception to Section 230 protection aimed at online sites that purportedly facilitated sex trafficking. The so-called Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, or FOSTA, which passed overwhelmingly and was signed into law by Trump in 2018, made online services liable for ads ostensibly promoting prostitution, consensual or otherwise.

But FOSTA has failed to achieve its goals. Law enforcement officials have said it has made it harder for them to root out sex trafficking, because it drove perpetrators further underground, and interfered with posts aimed at warning consensual sex workers away from dangerous situations or clients.

This Tweet violates our policies regarding the glorification of violence based on the historical context of the last line, its connection to violence, and the risk it could inspire similar actions today. https://t.co/sl4wupRfNH

— Twitter Comms (@TwitterComms) May 29, 2020

In Congress, attacks on Section 230 or services that rely on its terms are bipartisan. For years, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has been asserting that under Section 230, online services that remove conservative-leaning contents lose their status as “neutral public forums” and therefore their immunity.

Those services “should be considered to be a ‘publisher or speaker’ of user content if they pick and choose what gets published or spoken,” Cruz wrote in 2018. (His target then was Facebook, which he complained had been “censoring or suppressing conservative speech for years.”)

Cruz’s take was wrong and in any event unenforceable, since any content moderation whatsoever entails picking and choosing what to allow online. Cruz is a graduate of Harvard Law School, so it’s reasonable to assume that he knows he’s wrong, and just as reasonable to conclude that he’s merely preaching to an ideologically conservative choir .

But an attack on 230 has also come from Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), who in 2018 proposed a sheaf of regulations on social media aimed at stemming the tide of disinformation, including faked photos and videos, posted online.

Warner advocated making online services liable for defamation and other civil torts if they posted “deep fake” or other manipulated audio or visual content. But he acknowledged in his position paper that distinguishing between “true disinformation and legitimate satire.”

He also recognized that “reforms to Section 230 are bound to elicit vigorous opposition, including from digital liberties groups and online technology providers.”

The best approach to Section 230 is to leave it alone, but manage our expectations of what it can achieve. For the most part, legitimate online services find it in their best interest to combat material widely judged to be socially unacceptable —hate speech, racism and sexism, and trolling. But the debate on the margins is always going to be contentious.

“We’re never going to be happy with internet companies’ content moderation efforts,” says Goldman. “You can’t ask whether one company’s doing it right and another’s doing it wrong. They’re all ‘doing it wrong,’ because none of them are doing it the way I personally want them to do it. Your standards may differ from mine, at which point there’s no pleasing everybody.”

Online services will always be vulnerable to attacks like Cruz’s or, indeed, Trump’s.

The goal of his executive order was to pump up the image of online services into behemoths that have taken over the public debate space for their own purposes, assuming “unchecked power to censor, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alter virtually any form of communication between private citizens and large public audiences,” as he put it in remarks during the executive order signing ceremony. In his mind, that made them legitimate targets for regulation.

Trump’s audience, of course, wasn’t ordinary citizens who feel their access to information or right to post their content online was being trampled, but his political base, which imagines that its megaphone is being taken away. The biggest joke during the signing ceremony was Trump’s assertion that “if [Twitter] were able to be legally shut down, I would do it. I think I’d be hurting it very badly if we didn’t use it anymore.”

As the prominent internet rights lawyer Mike Godwin observed in response, “Seriously? Who on earth believes that Donald J. Trump could make himself live another week in the White House — much less serve another term — without his daily dose of Twitter psychodrama?”

In truth, Trump was just trying to work the referees — hoping that his rhetoric alone will discourage Twitter from further interfering with his tweets.

That seems to be working with Facebook, which thus far has announced a hands-off policy on political posting, no matter how noxious or mendacious. Even Facebook executives, as it happens, have been discontented by the hands-off policy adopted by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Arguments that private companies such as Twitter or Facebook are infringing on constitutional free speech rights are misguided, since constitutional protections for free speech apply to official government infringements, not those of private actors.

In the private sphere, the diversity of approaches to content moderation may be society’s safety valve. “We have to let go of some Platonic ideal of content moderation, that if internet companies just invested enough time and money, they’d come up with something that would make everyone happy,” Goldman told me. “That outcome does not exist. You’re always going to cheese off somebody.”

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