Facebook curates content, pushes other content, and suggests content to users. That means they publish things, and are a publisher. 230 is perfectly good legislation: Enforce it properly. They're no platform, and do not deserve 230 protections. By their own words, they curate their own business.
Choosing to remove some speech -> be legally responsible for all content under platform?
That would be the same as a business owner who kicked out a drunkard is now legally responsible for any criminal activities performed within his store (or even, using his products.)
They 'choose to remove some speech' in the same way that major record labels 'choose to allow some speech'. They screen literally everything and only permit that which is politically neutral, favourable or profitable to them. They SHOULDN'T be legally responsible for anything which happens on the platform, if they were to treat all the content agnostically like a phone or mail institution would, but when they deliberately foster only certain flavours of speech then it makes sense that they become responsible for that which remains.
If AT&T were in the habit of cutting off your phone calls every time you insulted mohammed, I think it wouldn't be unreasonable that they be investigated further for any jihadattack that was successfully planned through their platform.
When a record company publishes a record, it does so under their name and the record is effectively theirs. Therefor they would be responsible if a record they published encouraged criminal activities for example. I do not see it the same way when a website (or a business) allows posts from the public, then picks and chooses whichever ones they don't like and removes those. It is not the same in scope (record companies typically don't publish many millions of records), and it is not the same as in principle.
As far as I can tell, the only distinction you make is whether or not the publisher puts their stamp on things or not. This does not change the principle. If I make my Funny twerking video about how Drumpf is bad or vaccinations are awesome - and this is republished to millions in a way that it WOULDN'T be, if I twerked just the same about how Drumpf is awesome and vaccinations are bad - exactly how is the platform owner behaving any different to a record label?
I wasn't around when record companies came to be to be having this discussion then, but as for right now I suppose the key difference is ease of distribution. It used to be that in order to release a record it was a big financial matter, requiring distribution and manufacturing process, whereas nowadays its all digital and online and requires pressing 'send' from the user and very little from the companies. Also record companies have more direct control as to the content of the produced work since they are at least in part paying for its creation, therefor they should be responsible legally for the content, just like when you hire a hitman you are legally responsible for the crime.
Well, right, the past tense figures heavily in a lot of how we understood distribution, dissemination, etc to work, back when the online world felt more innocent. I don't think it requires anything remotely near the same level of outlay or opportunity cost that it used to, to amplify 'promising' voices or whatever.
If the main difference is 'ease' I'd say that that difference is long gone.
We've already established that they remove speech because they don't like it. That part we agree on.
How does it follow that they now own what speech remains?
I do think phone companies should have the option to remove customers for any reason. I would also financially support those companies' competitors, because this is a behavior I disagree with. Nevertheless, they should have that right. Just like private business owners should have the right to do or not do business with whomever they wish, hire or not hire anyone they wish, bake or not bake cakes, for any and no reason what so ever.
I do think phone companies should have the option to remove customers for any reason. I would also financially support those companies' competitors, because this is a behavior I disagree with. Nevertheless, they should have that right. Just like private business owners should have the right to do or not do business with whomever they wish, hire or not hire anyone they wish, bake or not bake cakes, for any and no reason what so ever.
Your understanding of the world is out of sync with the reality of the information-saturated reality we reside within. Social media platforms are not analogous to bakeries, they're in the flour already. You can choose to never go to a bakery yet still flourish in society, but it's very difficult to never use social media and do the same. Services seen as public utilities tend to be regulated with this kind of thing in mind. If 'regulation' is a scary word, remember that section 230 is the regulation protecting facebook in this instance.
How does it follow that they now own what speech remains?
Because they created it. If you allow only one kind of discourse through your platform, which in turn is the one major accepted informational exchange in society, and if all these restrictions boil down to CHOICES made by the platform owners, then somebody needs to own these choices at some stage.
I suspect you could live life just fine without using social media, but even if that's not the case there are alternate platforms such as the one we're on right now. Forcing Reddit or Facebook to platform us and our discussion is not justified.
Fundamentally I am against the notion of public utilities for precisely the sort of trouble such as this. If they're public, they must be allocated equally and without discern. Water, electricity, maybe roads, those things rational minds can disagree on. Facebook? I don't see how that case could be made.
As for 230 being a regulation, I don't think we should need a regulation to allow common sense of if Zuckerberg didn't post violent threats himself, then the person who actually posted them is ultimately responsible and not the company. In general the fewer regulation and government running the show we have, the better. I don't want Nancy Pelosi dictating what I can and can not do with my business, and what is or is not appropriate. If I violate somebody's rights, arrest and sue me. Otherwise leave me alone and stay out of my life. Don't like how I run my business? Don't deal with it.
I understood that you're a libertarian from a couple of posts back and I consciously refrained from saying stuff along the lines of 'well what about roads??' etc. As you say, rational minds can disagree on those things but there's a problem to be resolved there.
The challenge of this century will be about access to information, about any individual's control of information regarding themselves, and about the ability of any individual to make themselves visible in an entirely digital sphere. It's naive to continue to address it in the model of street-corner bakeries or imagine that this is somehow not in the same realm of phones, roads, mail, etc.
Disagree with regulation all you want but we live in a reality where a regulated framework is seen as the norm. I share some of the concerns of an overreaching govt, but if your principles only obstruct your political allies and do nothing to your opponents, then there's yet another problem.
Once you engage in editorial oversight, I.e removing content for arbitrary reasons, you become a publisher not a platform. And publishers have legal obligations to police their content and can be punished for not doing a good enough job.
This effectively boils down to 'the law is so and so.' I am not interesting in debating what is currently in the law books, but rather how things ought to be.
No, once you are aware of it you should do what is reasonably possible to remove said illegal activities from your premise and turn them over to the police.
Facebook already runs 100% of user generated content through their algorithms, and uses the analysis of those algorithms to allow the communication to happen or not.
The phone company does not screen your calls to decide whether you are allowed to speak.
It’s moot anyway. Section 230 was amended in 2018 to exclude sex trafficking, so Facebook has zero protection from civil liability for this type of conduct under the law now.
I think we'll arrive at something where channels have a blockchain like model of ownership, and with it the ability to control posting and binaries, and with individual clients subscribing to the thread and simultaneously hosting it collectively.
So, for example, KIA2 would be "hosted" by KIA2's users in a decentralized fashion. So basically discord but based on bittorrent and bitcoin-like blockchain solving.
Darknets like Freenet and GNUnet have been tried, and failed to become fast enough. Today's appstores will ban their apps for hate speech, while FBI & co will flood them with pedo content. The Deep State wants and created Big Tech and other oligopolies that they can control, unlike a million small actors. I'm not so optimistic about a technological solution to a political/criminal problem.
What I'm describing would be based on blockchain so anonymity would be out the window but the ability to moderate by swarm enforcement of key access rules on who can and can't do what with binaries.
So for example, let's say communities.win is a collection of blockchannels. Nothing would obligate KIA2.win's blockchannel owning key to opt into communities.win's ACLs. But if they wanted to subscribe to a collective .win "porn offender / fbi false flag suspects" blockchannel's key restrictions, they could. The obvious retort is they can just spam new keys, to which the obvious reply is that binary adds will probably have to be whitelisted behavior in practice, and ultimately explicit whitelisting for all key activities would probably become the norm.
The functioning of the system would simply hinge on the majority of the swarm of clients being conforming clients that respect the ACLs in updating the blockchannel, and rejecting updates that don't conform.
This idea is sized around relatively small swarms, probably a thousand or less members. I have no fucking idea how badly it would scale but my gut says not well. Horizontally it would scale great (bittorrent) in terms of supporting infinite blockchannels. But vertically it would scale badly for supporting more activity on a given blockchain.
Have you tried having a discussion on Usenet lately? The spam is now completely out of control.
Yeah, we could have something like a private indexer, but then you're introducing gatekeeping and re-introducing central point of failure.
I'm thinking more along the lines of virtually every channel is a blockchain with an owning private key that can set the limits for the channel. It's success or failure would hinge on clients (conforming clients anyway) rejecting updates that don't conform to the blockchain's rules. With each individual user's edits to the blockchain channel being tied to their private key respectively.
By rules, I mean: "Only these keys can delete. Keys not these lists can add. Keys on this list can add binaries. These keys can conditionally delete based on age-out rules. Etc." That sort of thing.
So yes, you would still have channel moderators, but virtually nobody would be able to prevent the creation of more channel chains.
So we're back at the age-old, seemingly-unsolvable issue of internet discussion forums: you need moderation (otherwise bad actors will spam you to oblivion), yet moderators are unreliable (due to the very nature of jannies) and finding good or even decent ones is akin to finding a unicorn.
So at the end of the day, the issue isn't quite technological, but rather a lack of people with a moral backbone, motivation and enough free time.
I'm old enough to remember those days too, y'know.
They never meant that individual resources couldn't be controlled.
If you are disappointed, it is because you misinterpreted their prophecy. They promised you freedom, and you have it. You merely did not grasp that the price is atomization. I have said here before, "facebook is just a url", and people laugh. But that's really all it is. In this place, it is VERY difficult for them to bring what's yours down if you do it right.
People say "but muh parler". PARLER USED AWS. As the saying goes, NOT YOUR KEY, NOT YOUR BITCOIN. If parler had run their own hardware from day one they'd never have been brought down.
So it's still not any worse than the status quo already is? Especially with what's been going on against Patreon the last couple years, stripping these companies of legal protections is a good step forward. Taking the tech giants to court en masse is definitely an effective method.
The only kind of platform that wouldn't be liable in the absence of section 230 is one that simply refuses to censor user content.
Trojan Horse for what? They control 90% of the internet between them all already. They have nothing to gain by rendering themselves liable for criminal content on their websites.
Indeed, we would trade one villain for another. At this point, I'd rather take government control of the Internet over unelected monopolies who basically own the government anyway. With that, we can at least pretend to have a voice.
The best thing to happen, obviously, would be to go back to the 00s Internet: a cyber wild west where nobody is in control. Alas, tis but a memory.
People always get it backwards… corporations aren’t the ones in control, government is. Corporations buy influence from politicians, not the other way around. It’s important to remember government has the ability to shut down anything, for whatever invented reason they can invent. Government has a monopoly on the use of force that corporations simply can’t compete with.
Facebook curates content, pushes other content, and suggests content to users. That means they publish things, and are a publisher. 230 is perfectly good legislation: Enforce it properly. They're no platform, and do not deserve 230 protections. By their own words, they curate their own business.
That's not exactly true, they do do something about it. They make money and punish anyone who tries to tell them to stop.
juicy
What's in it for the Fourth Reich?
How does the logic follow that:
Choosing to remove some speech -> be legally responsible for all content under platform?
That would be the same as a business owner who kicked out a drunkard is now legally responsible for any criminal activities performed within his store (or even, using his products.)
Let's have a discussion.
They 'choose to remove some speech' in the same way that major record labels 'choose to allow some speech'. They screen literally everything and only permit that which is politically neutral, favourable or profitable to them. They SHOULDN'T be legally responsible for anything which happens on the platform, if they were to treat all the content agnostically like a phone or mail institution would, but when they deliberately foster only certain flavours of speech then it makes sense that they become responsible for that which remains.
If AT&T were in the habit of cutting off your phone calls every time you insulted mohammed, I think it wouldn't be unreasonable that they be investigated further for any jihadattack that was successfully planned through their platform.
When a record company publishes a record, it does so under their name and the record is effectively theirs. Therefor they would be responsible if a record they published encouraged criminal activities for example. I do not see it the same way when a website (or a business) allows posts from the public, then picks and chooses whichever ones they don't like and removes those. It is not the same in scope (record companies typically don't publish many millions of records), and it is not the same as in principle.
As far as I can tell, the only distinction you make is whether or not the publisher puts their stamp on things or not. This does not change the principle. If I make my Funny twerking video about how Drumpf is bad or vaccinations are awesome - and this is republished to millions in a way that it WOULDN'T be, if I twerked just the same about how Drumpf is awesome and vaccinations are bad - exactly how is the platform owner behaving any different to a record label?
I wasn't around when record companies came to be to be having this discussion then, but as for right now I suppose the key difference is ease of distribution. It used to be that in order to release a record it was a big financial matter, requiring distribution and manufacturing process, whereas nowadays its all digital and online and requires pressing 'send' from the user and very little from the companies. Also record companies have more direct control as to the content of the produced work since they are at least in part paying for its creation, therefor they should be responsible legally for the content, just like when you hire a hitman you are legally responsible for the crime.
Well, right, the past tense figures heavily in a lot of how we understood distribution, dissemination, etc to work, back when the online world felt more innocent. I don't think it requires anything remotely near the same level of outlay or opportunity cost that it used to, to amplify 'promising' voices or whatever.
If the main difference is 'ease' I'd say that that difference is long gone.
We've already established that they remove speech because they don't like it. That part we agree on.
How does it follow that they now own what speech remains?
I do think phone companies should have the option to remove customers for any reason. I would also financially support those companies' competitors, because this is a behavior I disagree with. Nevertheless, they should have that right. Just like private business owners should have the right to do or not do business with whomever they wish, hire or not hire anyone they wish, bake or not bake cakes, for any and no reason what so ever.
Your understanding of the world is out of sync with the reality of the information-saturated reality we reside within. Social media platforms are not analogous to bakeries, they're in the flour already. You can choose to never go to a bakery yet still flourish in society, but it's very difficult to never use social media and do the same. Services seen as public utilities tend to be regulated with this kind of thing in mind. If 'regulation' is a scary word, remember that section 230 is the regulation protecting facebook in this instance.
Because they created it. If you allow only one kind of discourse through your platform, which in turn is the one major accepted informational exchange in society, and if all these restrictions boil down to CHOICES made by the platform owners, then somebody needs to own these choices at some stage.
I suspect you could live life just fine without using social media, but even if that's not the case there are alternate platforms such as the one we're on right now. Forcing Reddit or Facebook to platform us and our discussion is not justified.
Fundamentally I am against the notion of public utilities for precisely the sort of trouble such as this. If they're public, they must be allocated equally and without discern. Water, electricity, maybe roads, those things rational minds can disagree on. Facebook? I don't see how that case could be made.
As for 230 being a regulation, I don't think we should need a regulation to allow common sense of if Zuckerberg didn't post violent threats himself, then the person who actually posted them is ultimately responsible and not the company. In general the fewer regulation and government running the show we have, the better. I don't want Nancy Pelosi dictating what I can and can not do with my business, and what is or is not appropriate. If I violate somebody's rights, arrest and sue me. Otherwise leave me alone and stay out of my life. Don't like how I run my business? Don't deal with it.
I understood that you're a libertarian from a couple of posts back and I consciously refrained from saying stuff along the lines of 'well what about roads??' etc. As you say, rational minds can disagree on those things but there's a problem to be resolved there.
The challenge of this century will be about access to information, about any individual's control of information regarding themselves, and about the ability of any individual to make themselves visible in an entirely digital sphere. It's naive to continue to address it in the model of street-corner bakeries or imagine that this is somehow not in the same realm of phones, roads, mail, etc.
Disagree with regulation all you want but we live in a reality where a regulated framework is seen as the norm. I share some of the concerns of an overreaching govt, but if your principles only obstruct your political allies and do nothing to your opponents, then there's yet another problem.
Once you engage in editorial oversight, I.e removing content for arbitrary reasons, you become a publisher not a platform. And publishers have legal obligations to police their content and can be punished for not doing a good enough job.
This effectively boils down to 'the law is so and so.' I am not interesting in debating what is currently in the law books, but rather how things ought to be.
No, once you are aware of it you should do what is reasonably possible to remove said illegal activities from your premise and turn them over to the police.
Facebook already runs 100% of user generated content through their algorithms, and uses the analysis of those algorithms to allow the communication to happen or not.
The phone company does not screen your calls to decide whether you are allowed to speak.
"Private companies can do whatever they want without repercussions!" Spoken like a real liberal.
It’s moot anyway. Section 230 was amended in 2018 to exclude sex trafficking, so Facebook has zero protection from civil liability for this type of conduct under the law now.
Yes and?
The more the big platforms shoot themselves in the foot, the more other platforms will eventually be taller than them.
If you think that the next generation of platforms will be susceptible to such vagaries as laws, you haven't been paying attention.
I think we're a couple years out from seeing a PRACTICAL distributed hash social network that NOBODY will be able to bring down or even control.
Imagine usenet but stripped of all control. It will be fucking glorious.
So literally nothing but dick pics?
I do miss the wild west era of the internet so it'd be nice to get back to something like that.
I think we'll arrive at something where channels have a blockchain like model of ownership, and with it the ability to control posting and binaries, and with individual clients subscribing to the thread and simultaneously hosting it collectively.
So, for example, KIA2 would be "hosted" by KIA2's users in a decentralized fashion. So basically discord but based on bittorrent and bitcoin-like blockchain solving.
Darknets like Freenet and GNUnet have been tried, and failed to become fast enough. Today's appstores will ban their apps for hate speech, while FBI & co will flood them with pedo content. The Deep State wants and created Big Tech and other oligopolies that they can control, unlike a million small actors. I'm not so optimistic about a technological solution to a political/criminal problem.
Those were based emphasizing anonymity.
What I'm describing would be based on blockchain so anonymity would be out the window but the ability to moderate by swarm enforcement of key access rules on who can and can't do what with binaries.
Each blockchannel (© Piroko, 2021) would maintain its own ACLs and either a whitelist and/or blacklist, which can either be directly maintained or subscribed to other blacklists / whitelists from other blockchannels. So for example you could have large, community managed "known offender keys" blockchannel (or even multiple competing ones). But the decision to subscribe into them would be on the individual blockchannel owners.
So for example, let's say communities.win is a collection of blockchannels. Nothing would obligate KIA2.win's blockchannel owning key to opt into communities.win's ACLs. But if they wanted to subscribe to a collective .win "porn offender / fbi false flag suspects" blockchannel's key restrictions, they could. The obvious retort is they can just spam new keys, to which the obvious reply is that binary adds will probably have to be whitelisted behavior in practice, and ultimately explicit whitelisting for all key activities would probably become the norm.
The functioning of the system would simply hinge on the majority of the swarm of clients being conforming clients that respect the ACLs in updating the blockchannel, and rejecting updates that don't conform.
This idea is sized around relatively small swarms, probably a thousand or less members. I have no fucking idea how badly it would scale but my gut says not well. Horizontally it would scale great (bittorrent) in terms of supporting infinite blockchannels. But vertically it would scale badly for supporting more activity on a given blockchain.
Have you tried having a discussion on Usenet lately? The spam is now completely out of control. Yeah, we could have something like a private indexer, but then you're introducing gatekeeping and re-introducing central point of failure.
I'm thinking more along the lines of virtually every channel is a blockchain with an owning private key that can set the limits for the channel. It's success or failure would hinge on clients (conforming clients anyway) rejecting updates that don't conform to the blockchain's rules. With each individual user's edits to the blockchain channel being tied to their private key respectively.
By rules, I mean: "Only these keys can delete. Keys not these lists can add. Keys on this list can add binaries. These keys can conditionally delete based on age-out rules. Etc." That sort of thing.
So yes, you would still have channel moderators, but virtually nobody would be able to prevent the creation of more channel chains.
That seems sensible to me.
So we're back at the age-old, seemingly-unsolvable issue of internet discussion forums: you need moderation (otherwise bad actors will spam you to oblivion), yet moderators are unreliable (due to the very nature of jannies) and finding good or even decent ones is akin to finding a unicorn.
So at the end of the day, the issue isn't quite technological, but rather a lack of people with a moral backbone, motivation and enough free time.
20-25 years ago I had professors citing that the same couldn’t happen to the internet. That it would treat censorship as damage and route around it….
We see how that’s worked out…
And they were correct.
I'm old enough to remember those days too, y'know.
They never meant that individual resources couldn't be controlled.
If you are disappointed, it is because you misinterpreted their prophecy. They promised you freedom, and you have it. You merely did not grasp that the price is atomization. I have said here before, "facebook is just a url", and people laugh. But that's really all it is. In this place, it is VERY difficult for them to bring what's yours down if you do it right.
People say "but muh parler". PARLER USED AWS. As the saying goes, NOT YOUR KEY, NOT YOUR BITCOIN. If parler had run their own hardware from day one they'd never have been brought down.
What it would trigger is the death of social media. They'd be held criminally liable for anything done on their platform.
Which means that any platform they could possibly create would be profoundly unattractive to users.
So it's still not any worse than the status quo already is? Especially with what's been going on against Patreon the last couple years, stripping these companies of legal protections is a good step forward. Taking the tech giants to court en masse is definitely an effective method.
The only kind of platform that wouldn't be liable in the absence of section 230 is one that simply refuses to censor user content.
Either way that's a win for us.
Trojan Horse for what? They control 90% of the internet between them all already. They have nothing to gain by rendering themselves liable for criminal content on their websites.
They're evil, not retarded. Risking the effective control of the internet over a small power grab, by putting everything they have in jeopardy.
maybe. banking "censorship" laws were put in place but the big 5 or so banks still clean money for international drug dealers and slavers.
Indeed, we would trade one villain for another. At this point, I'd rather take government control of the Internet over unelected monopolies who basically own the government anyway. With that, we can at least pretend to have a voice.
The best thing to happen, obviously, would be to go back to the 00s Internet: a cyber wild west where nobody is in control. Alas, tis but a memory.
People always get it backwards… corporations aren’t the ones in control, government is. Corporations buy influence from politicians, not the other way around. It’s important to remember government has the ability to shut down anything, for whatever invented reason they can invent. Government has a monopoly on the use of force that corporations simply can’t compete with.
At one point perhaps, but things have been changed. They weren’t able to destroy Trump. They had to rely on corrupt elections to do that.