SCOTUS on the Internet: “It’s Complicated”
Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts
Slate Audio
4.6 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 25 February 2023
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For every person screaming about Section 230 (looking at you, Ted Cruz), there are approximately 0.0000001 Danielle Citrons, i.e. folks who actually understand it, what it does, and how it might be tweaked or interpreted to do better. Luckily, we have a whole Professor Danielle Citron on this week’s show. Professor Citron not only manages to make sense of Section 230 for us, she also takes us through this week's internet cases involving Twitter and Google, and content moderation and liability. She explains how eight out of nine justices apparently failed to read the briefs, instead deciding on an "it's so hard" shruggy head-scratch strategy instead. Danielle Citron’s latest book is The Fight for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age.
In this week’s Amicus Plus segment, Dahlia is joined by Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern to look ahead to next week’s arguments about the Biden administration’s student debt forgiveness program, and to romp through some of the decisions that came down from the Supreme Court this week. Finally, Mark and Dahlia reflect on the results of the primaries in the race to elect a new Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice. Could it be a Mark and Dahlia Amicus plus segment that is not all bad news?
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Dahlia’s book Lady Justice: Women, the Law and the Battle to Save America, is also available as an audiobook, and Amicus listeners can get a 25 percent discount by entering the code “AMICUS” at checkout.
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Transcript
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| 0:30.0 | I mean, we're a court. We really don't know about these things. |
| 0:38.0 | These are not like the nine greatest experts on the internet. |
| 0:44.0 | Hi and welcome back to Amicus. This is Slates podcast on the courts and the law. |
| 0:52.0 | And the Supreme Court. I am Dahlia Lithwick. I covered those things for Slate. |
| 0:57.0 | And this week, the high court decided to take the internet out for a spin. |
| 1:02.0 | And the court came back, um, confused. |
| 1:05.0 | Regulating free speech on the internet turns out to be kind of hard. |
| 1:10.0 | Especially for a court that hasn't really thought very much about this issue ever. |
| 1:16.0 | So joining us today to talk about some cases that could literally strip internet publishing right down to the studs is the wonderful professor Danielle Citron, |
| 1:26.0 | who is going to help us and the justices I hope know what we don't know when it comes to little things like content moderation and search algorithms and theories of causation. |
| 1:39.0 | Happily, Professor Citron has been thinking about these issues for a really long time. |
| 1:46.0 | Later on in the show, Slate Plus members are going to get to hear Mark Joseph Stern as he pops in to discuss some of the first decisions of the term, |
| 1:54.0 | which came down this past week as well as the fate of President Joe Biden's $400 billion student debt relief program, |
| 2:03.0 | which will be heard by the court next week. That conversation with Mark can only be accessed by Slate Plus members. |
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