ND House Bill 1144 Seeks To Destroy Facebook As We Know It.

"You can't always get what you want.  But if you try sometime, you find, you get what you need"

For some inexplicable reason the Trump campaign hooked onto that 1968 Rolling Stone classic and used it for their walk-off music at campaign rallies.  I wondered back in June, were there absolutely no other songs available?  I would have taken the B-52's "Love Shack" over a song about loser lament.  The Stones were wondering too, as they threatened legal action to force the campaign to stop playing it.

So when Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Google and others push a sitting president off so many social media platforms, how can a brother get what he needs?

Or for that matter the thousands and thousands of his supporters that those platforms decided to not just show them the door, but drop them out the trapdoor.

Enter North Dakota House Bill 1144.  This mostly symbolic bit of legislation seeks to curtail the control that companies have over their own product.  It would set up substantial financial consequences for any "interactive computer service"  or "social media service" that's tending to it's own business.  A segment of HB 1144 goes a little something like this...

If an interactive computer service provider restricts, censors, or suppresses information that does not pertain to obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable subject matter, the interactive computer service provider is liable in a civil action for damages to the person whose speech is restricted, censored, or suppressed, and to any person who reasonably otherwise would have received the writing, speech, or publication. 

So the damages aren't just for the person who got shut down?  Could I get $ just because I never got to hear what that person wanted to say?

READ HB 1144 BY CLICKING HERE

Social media platforms are private businesses.  To join, you have to agree to their terms of use.  That's a real thing.  Don't follow the terms and they can put you in time-out or banish you to My Space.   Go ahead check that link...it still exists!

Point is...no matter how darn hungry you are, you can't get a chicken sandwich at a Chick-fil-A  on a Sunday.  You can't always get what you want!

Deal with it.