Platforms Are Not Publishers
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
> The internet connects more than 3 billion people
> and enables a grand diversity among them to speak,
> if not yet to be heard. “Republics,” said the late
> Columbia University professor James Carey, “require
> conversation, often cacophonous conversation, for
> they should be noisy places.” That sound you hear,
> which sometimes grates, is the racket of society
> negotiating its norms and standards, its future.
> It is the messy sound of democracy.
Any site today that doesn't have iron-clad moderation (like this one!) devolves into an inhumane freak show.
charlesism, you are blatantly promoting an agenda of censorship. One should not behave well due to the threat of punishment but by virtue of virtue.
You appear to stand against everything of value in the West. There are corporations and special interest groups trying to influence the narrative in reddit and even here in order to further reduce online freedoms and to establish the official list of forbidden thoughts.
Furthermore, The Atlantic has a long number of articles promoting globalism and the destruction of nation-states. A true free market of ideas requires anonymity. Who is going to help you when rampant corruption emerges in organizations such as the United Nations (a known harbor for individuals involved in child traffic scandals)? Remember the gamergate fiasco?
People all over the world are angry, and it is not their fault entirely - overpopulation and resource depletion need to be dealt with. But why doesn't anyone seem care about raising the bar on education, not just in terms of skill sets but also morality and long-term thinking?
> you are blatantly promoting an agenda of censorship.
> You appear to stand against everything of value in the West
> The Atlantic has a long number of articles promoting globalism
> and the destruction of nation-states.
> People all over the world are angry, and it is not their fault entirely
And by the way, are you familiar with the writings of Richard Coudenhove Kalergi, Practical Idealism ?
http://balder.org/judea/Richard-Coudenhove-Kalergi-Practical...
EDIT: care to explain the downvotes?
The greatest feature of the United States of America is that it was never a nation state.
This cuts both ways. See what happens in states where the border does not respect these local realities, for example where you have sunni led by shia or the other way around. Or look at Africa where Western powers drew lines on maps without respecting ethnicity.
Nation state is one form of decentralization, letting people govern themselves how they want.
Though experiment: imagine that there was a single global state, with one set of laws and institutions. How do you think that would work out?
An overreaching organization without a face for accountability is prone to disaster, as recent decades have shown. As a curiosity, the United Nations have had a former Nazi at its head. This situation was only rectified thanks to the United States.
https://unbrigandage.wordpress.com/2013/12/16/nazi-at-the-un...
Our problems aren't created by uneducated people, they're created by educated people who are taking advantage of uneducated people. Removing that step from the equation makes their job easier, not harder.
One problem wit the United States is that the technical professions have let themselves be so marginalized. The Deep Water Horizon disaster would not have happened if the engineers had as much power as the managers.
This is my point, the technical class in the United States doesn't realize it should have more political power. Scientists get kicked around too much.
Any new country should see what happened in the United States and give more power to its technical class. This would be more of a meritocracy.
The internet and Usenet did OK without moderation until Eternal September and the invention of SPAM, when internet culture started to die. RIP. Before that a new arrival was expected to figure out netiquette, and everyone else would behave accordingly.
Ever since then there has been an fairly steady slide. The arrival of astroturfing corporate and special interest groups, trolls, and platforms that assist the amplification of effect by actively seeking to avoid any moderation has just intensified things. Those places without moderation deviate to lowest common denominator with astounding speed. We've seen it time and time again, and as a result many sites have closed down their discussion areas entirely. See reddit subs with and without active heavy moderation. Moderating does not rule out anonymity, nor should it.
Without moderation commercial interests, political groups and trolls will ultimately ruin all locations that attempt to allow reasonable discussion as it is not in those group's interests to see a virtue in being virtuous.
The few places left where you can have reasonable discussions, including on controversial topics, are those that moderate hard. They don't censor.
Moderation is keeping people on topic of the forum, killing spam, trolls and sockpuppets, removing abuse and so forth, and trying to keep things on the rails and civil. Including banning trouble makers. Rather like dang does around here. That's not censorship, it's attempting to avoid anarchy. Neither is limiting the range of topics the forum or platform wants. Standards and extent will vary depending on the aims of the site.
Censorship is suppressing a view, even if it follows the standards and allowed topics of the forum. Legal censorship is a little more complex as standards vary between countries.
Having a post removed because it's spam, abusive or is off-topic is not censorship, which was the point the GP was erroneously trying to make.
Soft-censorship and derailing is done on purpose to censor certain topics which go against the establishment status quo. Reddit is fertile with such examples. If someone is making a comment which does not bode well to those in power, it is common for the thread to be sunken with low-class behavior and baits in order to shut down valid discussion by forcing an emergence of rule-breaking content.
That is a far more greater threat.
How do you propose to mitigate that?
That's exactly what censors say
It seems having a relatively small user base with specialized knowledge on selective topics on a site designed for balanced discussion (i.e. not twitter) is far more important to quality of discussion than moderators.
Trying to discuss important things over Twitter and Youtube comments seems like trying to have a logical conversation in a riot/mob -- there's too much noise, too many people, and it was never designed for that in the first place.
If you don't want democracy, your options are monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy or tyranny. There are two sides to every coin.
He did accurately described dynamic on youtube and some forums I used to read too. As in, that is literally how it played out.
Just because someone 2500 years ago said something that could be framed as something sort of similar does not make his argument false. Besides, ancient societies did a lot of social controll too.
This is false... There is tons of high quality content on YouTube. PBS digital studios, for example, has several fantastic channels. The comments on those videos are generally pretty good as well.
That's not too say that much of YouTube isn't just utter crap or even sometimes harmful. But there is good content if you look in the right places and get the algorithms churning down the right paths.
Maybe one distinguishing feature of a platform vs a publisher is curation. Verizon does not choose which phone calls I get--it routes them all. My DNS provider does not choose which requests to resolve; it resolves them all. Heck, the interstate highway carries any vehicle that meets standard specs for safety. Those are platforms.
If Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc simply and directly routed content without curation, they would have a stronger claim on being a platform. Instead, they use filtered timelines and "suggested content" to make decisions about what people see. That's more akin to what the Washington Post does, than Verizon.
Social media platforms will claim they use algorithms instead of human judgment to route content, so it's unbiased. Does anybody still buy that?? The many ways in which "smart" algorithms can be biased have been well covered. If nothing else, they are biased in favor of content that generates the fiercest emotions, in the name of "engagement."
And why do they do that?
I would suggest another distinguishing feature of a platform vs a publisher is the business model. Platforms are fee-for-service. You pay your ISP a fee, and it delivers the service. You pay a gas tax, and the government provides your roads.
Publishers have an advertising business model. This creates an incentive for them to manipulate you in ways that increase advertising. Your ISP does not care if you use their service... in fact, they get better profit margins if you don't! But Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube do care, and they take active steps (see: curation) to manipulate you into doing so.
Let's roll with the physical-digital analogy for a second here: When I go to the convenience store to buy a muffin in the morning, right next to the register the clerk usually has the daily paper sitting on the countertop and I can buy a copy if I think the headline it's worth reading. Or perhaps I can hear the news playing overhead on some TV in a store as I walk around looking for items. Social media currently works like if my muffin was sitting between a copy of the Times and a coupon catalog when I went to the store to go look for it. I am able to look at what I want in pieces when I go to the store, and the cluttered mess of content in the timeline is a conscious choice to keep people looking at ads and reading sensational headlines.
But here's where I keep doubting myself from playing the defense of absolute free speech in this situation: I read an article here on HN recently and commented that these situations always seem to play out through media orgs. Infowars, CNN, even The Atlantic are all companies vying to get some of that sweet sweet user interaction through gaming the platforms. They are frequently condensing their content into auto-playing videos on user timelines, publishing sensational titles in the post text linking to their articles, etc. I can hardly name instances where this was about a user with no media presence. It's almost like media orgs leverage their huge presence to push their own survival.
That's the truth about all online services; they change what they class themselves as whenever the alternative is too 'inconvenient' for them.
That's why you can be one or the other, but not both.
Platforms can also use their own products (ISPs themselves use internet or Amazon also uses AWS).
Platforms are shielded by CDA exactly because they do not care about the content that goes through it. The moment you demonstrate that you have the capability and intent to filter, you will get responsible for doing so.
So no, they still are not both. By editorializing others' content, the CDA protections are void.
No, publishers don't, as an essential feature, produce (in an original sense) content, they distribute it (which involves reproducing it, but that's different than producing it.) Some publishers do also control content creation, though many primarily it entirely acquire content from third-party creators.
The entire article and it's rejection of the idea that internet platforms are publishers rests on this bizarre error (it's not bizarre as a misunderstanding in the public, but it is bizarre how it can get published in a professionally edited media outlet, where presumably before publication at least one person basically aware of what publishers are had to have read and signed off on it.)