Press protections might safeguard Google’s algorithms, even from Trump By Jared Schroeder SEPTEMBER 6, 2018 PRESIDENT TRUMP INDICATED LAST WEEK that the White House is looking into regulating Google, Facebook, and Twitter because they are, he alleges, privileging voices that criticize him while suppressing his supporters’ ideas. He wrote, in a series of early morning tweets on August 28, that “Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation – will be addressed!” Trump’s suggestion that these companies are privileging certain information while suppressing other content followed similar accusations made by Infowars founder Alex Jones and other right-wing figures of bias against conservatives. How, exactly, would this blanket suggestion to regulate these companies work? When we’re talking about regulating the information that comes up in Google searches or appears in people’s timelines on Facebook or Twitter, we’re really talking about governing algorithms and the decisions they make about which information should be provided and prioritized. Regulating algorithms might seem like entirely new legal territory, since Google and its cousins are only two decades old. But a newspaper case from 1974 has quite a bit to say about whether the government can control, under the First Amendment, companies’ algorithms and how they produce and organize information. In Miami Herald v. Tornillo, the Supreme Court struck down a Florida law that gave political candidates the “right of reply” to criticisms they faced in newspapers. The law required the newspaper to publish a response from the candidate, and to place it, free of charge, in a conspicuous place. [...] il seguito https://www.cjr.org/covering_trump/press-protections-might-safeguard-googles...