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Clarence Thomas Wants to Rethink Internet Speech. Be Afraid While this week’s dominant Supreme Court drama was the kabuki questioning of nominee Amy Coney Barrett, something of immediate interest came from the actual Supremes. Appended to a denial of cert—that is, the court’s refusal to reconsider an appellate decision—was a 10- page comment from Associate Justice Clarence Thomas. The subject was a controversial provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act known as Section 230. It allows online platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Reddit, and 4Chan to post things from users without any vetting. Under the law, those companies can give voice to billions of people without taking legal responsibility for what those people say. It also gives the platforms the right to moderate content; they can get rid of not just illegal content but also stu that is nasty but legal, such as hate speech or intentional misinformation, without losing their immunity. Though Thomas admitted that his comment had no bearing on the case under consideration, he used the opportunity to volunteer some thoughts on 230. Basically, he feels that lower-court judges have interpreted it too broadly, extending immunity beyond the intent of the lawmakers. He wants to change that. “We need not decide today the correct interpretation of 230,” he wrote. “But in an appropriate case, it behooves us to do so.” In other words, bring it on! Justice Thomas seemingly poses some reasonable reservations. As Judd Legum writes in his newsletter Popular Information, Thomas rightfully points out that while the law protects platforms only when they operate “in good faith,” sometimes the courts have extended 230 to protect them when they continued to promote content that was harmful or even illegal. He cites a case where a judge used 230 to let the dating service Grindr o the hook despite its built-in aws that allowed ill-intentioned users to continually harass victims on the platform. Also bolstering Thomas’ views is the perception that platforms all too often rely on 230 immunity to inadequately police illegal behavior on their platforms. If they were given less slack to enforce the law once alerted to illegality, those platforms would undoubtedly be nimbler in removing such content. But I suspect a dierent line of thinking inspired the Thomas comment. A Supreme Court justice’s public reservations about Section 230 do not come in a vacuum. For months now, politicians have been attacking 230. While both sides of the aisle have complaints (including from former Vice President Biden), the most virulent ones come from the right. So whether he intended it or not, Thomas’ words are a dog whistle to those who want to hobble social media’s ability to lter out lies that poison the culture, endanger our health, and generally make us hate each other. Indeed, it didn’t take long for the justice’s comments to energize conservatives who despise Section 230. Only hours after the Thomas memo was posted, it found its way into the Amy Coney Barrett hearings. Senator Josh Hawley, who wants to strip Section 230 protections from platforms if they moderate misinformation in political speech, cited Thomas’ memo and asked Barrett her views about it. (She gave the same non-answer she had been repeating for days—it’s a hypothetical!) Clearly, Hawley sees Thomas’ words as supporting his views. “It’s quite signicant!” he said of the comment. Then the president himself weighed in. He was unhappy that Twitter and Facebook were correctly withholding distribution of what was possibly a false accusation of Joe Biden’s son. Trump hates it that companies have the right to refuse distribution of destructive propaganda weeks before an election. He tweeted his remedy in upper case, with three bangers: REPEAL SECTION 230!!! FamEmpireEnt | All Rights Reserved | 2020 Clarence Thomas Wants to Rethink Internet Speech. Be Afraid Finally, FCC chair Ajit Pai, again citing the Thomas memo, announced his own intention to reinterpret Section 230. Why him? Well, his general counsel told him it was OK if he took it upon himself to bypass Congress and the courts so that Section 230 will mean what Pai says it means. Pai gave us a hint of his thinking: “Social media companies have a First Amendment right to free speech,” he wrote. “But they do not have a First Amendment right to a special immunity denied to other media outlets, such as newspapers and broadcasters.” Dude! Platforms might not have a First Amendment right to that “special immunity.” But Congress passed a law that specically gave them that immunity, because platforms are not like newspapers or broadcasters. If you don’t understand that, I shudder to think what your unilateral “rulemaking” will be. Hawley, Pai, and Trump are not grappling with Thomas’ relatively nuanced arguments. But they are using his reservations to launch a broader attack on 230. They’re challenging the freedom of companies to interpret toxicity as they best see t—because they want to use the platforms to spread that toxicity. Thomas’s subtly incendiary 10-page comment increases the chances that Section 230, and the right to speak freely on the internet, will soon be legislators, the FCC, or presidential edict. If this happens, the Supreme Court will almost certainly end up determining the outcome. Which is exactly what asking for. Feel better? FamEmpireEnt | All Rights Reserved | 2020 'Virtual' studios could offer a real alternative to green screen special effects For as long as lmmaking has existed, there has been a need to build fantastic worlds in front of cameras. The earliest techniques borrowed from theatre: Painted curtains and wooden, two-dimensional backdrops. Then, we painted worlds onto glass, photographing them onto the lm itself to blend the real and the fake. At the same time, artists worked out how to project previously-shot lm onto a screen behind the actors. These days, we’ve ipped this story, dropping real actors into digital environments that only exist inside computers. But now we’re blending the very old and the very new: Digital backdrops in “virtual” studios could end the blight of green-screened cinema, and its myriad problems. That’s what’s being experimented on in a former newspaper press in Oxfordshire, UK, where the rst “all virtual” lm has just been shot. Jason Kingsley OBE is the presenter of Modern History TV, a YouTube channel with short documentary clips explaining the history of the Middle Ages, which he loves. But that is a side project to his day job, as co-founder and CEO of Rebellion Developments, the British studio behind Sniper Elite. Rebellion doesn’t just make games, however, and owns comics giant 2000AD, the name behind Judge Dredd and Rogue Trooper, as well as publishers Abaddon and Solaris. Now, the company is building its own studio to create TV series and movies based upon its vast library of IP. Percival is a short lm, rst broadcast on Kingsley’s aforementioned YouTube channel, and marks a new chapter in Rebellion’s lmmaking ambitions. The ve-minute clip depicts a battle-scarred knight of the round table played by Kingsley, who is close to death in a forest. King Arthur is dying, the (Holy) grail is missing. The titular knight is left broken and bloodied when some unknown force gets involved. Suddenly, time speeds up, aiding his recovery, and transporting him to the eerie ruins of a church, where he receives a vision that inspires a new quest. Rebellion says that it’s the world’s rst “all virtual” production, with all of the action playing out entirely in front of a halo of large at screen displays. These monitors are connected to PCs running Unreal Engine, where the virtual environments are produced. Essentially, the painted curtains and matte paintings of yesteryear have been replaced with LED TVs showing footage from a game engine. You might have heard of the technique before. The rst high-prole instance of its use was Disney’s The Mandalorian, which shot the majority, but not all, of its scenes in these studios. In that instance, the action was lmed in a 270-degree horseshoe of LED displays 20 feet high. FamEmpireEnt | All Rights Reserved | 2020 Virtual Studios offer alternative to Green Screen Rebellion CEO Jason Kingsley OBE as 'Percival' Star Wars has long been a standard-bearer for titles that push the state of the art of lmmaking. The prequel movies, shot between 1997 and 2003, leaned heavily on shooting actors on green screens, with CGI backgrounds added in afterward. This process, of standing actors in front of blue or green curtains, is known as “Chroma-Key” or “Chroma-Keying.” And after Star Wars, Chroma-Key became ubiquitous for even modestly-budgeted lms with special eects. The mid-noughties saw a trend of lms almost exclusively using the technique, including Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Sin City and 300. These days, green screen is everywhere: the battle of New York from Avengers Assemble, for instance, was mostly shot on a New Mexico green screen studio and then tinkered with for months by an army of CGI artists. Virtual studios have the potential to make a big dierence to lm-making. Because the background and environments were already visible in the shot, there was no need to add them in afterward. It also gives actors a better handle on what they’re doing, since performing in an entirely green void can understandably hamper performances. It’s also a lot easier, and cheaper, to shoot than sending your crew across the globe to real-world jungles and deserts that even a lavishly-budgeted show like The Mandalorian could hardly aord.

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