None
EN
Broadcast indecency may offer a path forward for social media regulation
['John Villasenor', 'Cameron F. Kerry', 'Mark Maccarthy', 'Stephanie K. Pell', 'Richard Salgado', 'Chiraag Bains', 'Alex Chohlas-Wood', 'Katie Kinsey']
News RSS Feed
What is potentially relevant though—and perhaps worth considering—is the underlying notion that one or more distinctive categories of speech could be carved out exclusively for the social media context, in the same way that indecency is a regulatable category of speech exclusively within the broadcast context. In the broadcast context, the two rationales that have been most relevant in relation to indecency are: 1) that broadcasters utilize a scarce public resource (the broadcast spectrum), and as public trustees of this resource, are thus entitled to lower levels of First Amendment protection; and 2) that broadcasting is “uniquely pervasive,” and this pervasiveness provides a rationale for treating broadcasting differently than other media.