Question

PK2A

5. How does the Supreme Court determine whether material is obscene?

6. Why have attempts to censor the Internet failed in the US?

7. Why not just ban spam?

8. Why did Facebook ban Alex Jones and Louis Farrakan?

9. Should websites that show how to 3d print guns be banned?

10. According to the Supreme Court 'anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority'. What does that mean?

Answer 1

5. The Supreme Court determines obscenity of material using Miller test. It originated from the Supreme Court's judgement in Miller vs. California case in 1973. In this case, judge ruled that obscene material are not protected by the First Amendment.
Following are the guidelines of the Miller test:

1. whether the average person applying contemporary community standards would find the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest.
2. whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and
3. whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

A material is considered obscene only if it satisfies all of the three conditions of the Miller test.

6. The government of United States has been trying to censor internet since a long time. Variety of acts like Communications Decency Act, Electronic Communication Transactional Records Act , Child Pornography Prevention Act etc. were enacted to censor internet. After 9/11, PATRIOT act was passed to deter terrorists. But, many of these attempts failed.
Following are the reasons:
1. Many of the acts were repealed by the Supreme Court in the name of the First Amendment.

2. Internet is a vast ocean. It is almost impossible to fully filter contents.

3. With newer encryption standards by companies like Whatsapp (end to end encryption) has put surveillance ineffective.

4. Whistle blowers like Assange and Snowden have caused a lot of pain to US authorities by exposing confidential information.

7. Yes, spam should be banned completely. It results into a lot of scams and a lot of pain to users who get hit by these scams. But, spam cannot be banned completely.

We can ban spam in our private networks or anything on which we have control. But, we cannot do anything to Facebook, Instagram etc. We receive a lot of advertisements in our email box, Facebook and many other places. It is a source of revenue to these companies. So, along with banning spam, we should become more aware of such scams.

8. Alex Jones and Louis Farrakan were banned from Facebook for spreading hate speech through its platform. Alex Jones is a conspiracy theorist and founder of Infowars, while Louis Farrakan has been criticised for his anti-Semitic views.