Someone made an insightful comment here the other day saying that they (the tech companies) chose to play publisher and opened themselves up to whole lot of legal battles and complaints, when they should have stayed with the carrier option.
How do you mean, exactly? I feel that I understand your point but am trying not to make any assumptions.
Because the distinction is binary. You either censor what information people consume beyond what the law requires you to or you don't. publisher vs. carrier is the legal distinction between the two.
Because I don't think there is one. And I think that's an extremely strained interpretation of Section 230.
>> publisher vs. carrier is the legal distinction between the two
So I'm curious about the law that provides that.
My quotation marks are to summarize the position being made - I use >> for direct quotes.
The person you are responding to is merely pointing out that there is a binary distinction between those that exert editorial control over their content and those that don't and that "publisher" and "common carrier" are the legal terms that cover those two binary categories (which may not be strictly accurate.)
There is nothing about responsibility, so you are putting words in their mouth.
Section 230 was intended to limit this last Case Law decision and extend the protections given to online "common carriers" to online "publishers".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
Oh, right... I won't get a penny. Free speech also means the freedom to tell bald-faced lies, without consequence.
We want publishers to carry some responsibility, for various obvious reasons.
It seems to me that once someone is being held a little bit responsible, they're going to be forced to act as being fully responsible and need the power to block a bit of content, which will then come with the full corresponding responsibility for blocking that piece of content. What do you see as a middle ground? (This is an honest question, not an argument.)
At that point, the publisher vs. carrier crowd goes "well, that racist thing wasn't illegal, so now you have to be responsible for everything someone says." But I don't really care about what most of people say; I just don't want them to be racist.
This isn't a standard we apply to most businesses. If I run a bar, I can generally remove a patron for saying something without the conduct I choose to allow coming under scrutiny.
I agree re: carriers, for the reasons you stated. But to me that's a status mostly reserved for plumbing-type infrastructure, not a choice services have to make when they're deciding what type of content to host.
I hope you're ready to be accused of being a sexist and anti-Semite by many people's definitions. Not to mention that I hope you know that watermelon, dancing, math, and balloons are racist (according to someone with 1000 Tumblr followers, probably), and so have no place on your platform. The point being that determining what is and isn't racist can be a pretty hard problem.
I’ll also note that this doesn’t really answer my question. What is the reason for the platform vs. publisher dichotomy? If I choose not to host content I don’t want to, why does it follow that I should be liable for any content I host?
No, it is not your way or the highway, though. Because you, as the platform, are also subject to the opinions of the public, now.
And if you are subject to the opinions of the public, then you might start to decide to censor more and more things, not because you actually think that they are bad, but instead because some vocal minority is clammering for it to be banned.
I don't want you to be subject to that public opinion. Instead, I want to give platforms an excuse to say "sorry! We can't ban anything at all, because we are required to act neutrally!".
That way nobody can complain and try and pressure the network into expanding their definition of bad things more and more.
And trying to be neutral doesn't even insulate you from those opinions! When I realized my previous webhost's position was to allow e.g. Nazi content as long as it was legal, I switched hosts. What do you think that webhost would do if enough people followed suit?
When was the last time that the phone company was protested because it refused to censor certain people?
The answer is that this basically never happens.
> What do you think that webhost would do if enough people followed suit?
Well, if it was illegal for webhosts to refuse service to groups, then I don't think that these webhosts would be protested, or whatever, for not censoring certain groups.
> trying to be neutral doesn't even insulate you from those opinions
Which is why I want to give networks an excuse, where they can say "Sorry everyone! It is completely out of our hands! We can't censor them even if we wanted to."
> I switched hosts
And if every host is hosting controversial content, then you won't be able to find any that isn't being neutral.
Have you changed your phone provider, because Nazis are using AT&T to make phone calls? I doubt it.
You're assuming that networks are looking for an excuse, but plenty of network operators don't want to serve certain types of content. Making that illegal just means network operators are the ones being censored, rather than their users — except the penalty for disobedience is no longer simply finding another network, but fines and jail time. That does not strike me as an improvement.
This also still doesn't answer my original question: if I as a business owner/network operator don't want to serve certain types of content, why does it then follow that I should be liable for everything I do serve?
I agree that perhaps some degree of regulation could be warranted to adddess their unique sort-of-carrier status, but saying that they should be forbidden by the state from disallowing anything that's legal is a slippery slope in the same way biased censorship is. For example, they may not want any risk of people seeing extreme gore videos, since that could cause people to use their service less, even though such videos are typically not illegal to distribute or view. But with total free reign over a behemoth communication monopoly, politically biased content curation and removal is also a huge problem. I think there needs to be a middle ground approach.
When the arbiter of truth is a profit-oriented, authoritarian regime (ie, any corporation) that's not beholden to anyone - bad things happen.
Just look at Apple's AppStore for an example (at least politics isn't influenced by Apps).
Maybe. https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/18/20921300/rebulicans-demo...
Not to say a company needs to permit all content, no matter how racist or bad, just because it's a monopoly and a sort-of-carrier. But things definitely get trickier. If you're banned from YouTube, you basically can't upload videos anymore, period, at least if you want anyone to look at them. These companies don't fit the classical mode of a carrier, like a telephone provider, because they carry content to be consumed openly by the public. I think Discord is probably the closest thing to a more traditional carrier, though it's still not totally comparable.
There's no good solution here other than debating a reasonable middle ground. These companies probably do need to be more open with what they allow compared to a small business, but they should still also have leeway to make their own decisions.
That's a pretty wishy-washy answer, but I think it's the only alternative to avoid the extremes of either full public utility regulation with government-enforced free speech, or super nitpicky and biased content curation. They can't be treated like either a standard business or a public service. They're in between.
> If you're banned from YouTube, you basically can't upload videos anymore, period, at least if you want anyone to look at them.
There's a pithy statement that applies here: "freedom of speech is not freedom of reach". Because there are plenty of other ways to upload videos — Vimeo and PeerTube and your own server — but none have YouTube's killer feature, which is distribution to a built-in audience.
Let's back up a few decades and say you want to promote Nazism, which is legal. Your options are pretty limited! No major newspaper will publish your article, no major radio station will let you speak and no major TV channel will give you a show. You can distribute your own newsletter, get on public access TV, transmit on unused radio frequencies, or maybe even find a small company that will allow you. But for the most part, you can't distribute to large audiences, and no one has a problem with this.
Enter the Internet. Now anyone can publish things consumable by anyone in the world… but all of a sudden that's not enough, and it's imperative that it's just as easy for Nazis to reach a huge audience as anyone else? What is so fundamentally different about YouTube vs. TV networks that we need to revisit this?
Granted, Nazism is an extreme example; it's more likely that people are concerned about e.g. alleged censorship of conservative views. But it's difficult for me to really care about this, because these are still mainstream views! Even if you don't think you're welcome on Twitter, you can go to Gab or Voat. You can read about it on Breitbart and The Daily Caller. You can get it delivered in the Wall Street Journal. You can watch it on Fox News. For speech that is being "censored", it sure is easy to find.
I'll finish by reiterating my support for breaking up giant companies that effectively control a large part of discourse. Concentrated power is never a good thing. But I think it's a gross violation of free speech to force networks to distribute content they don't want to — especially when there are always options for people to get their speech out.
I definitely don't want them to be classified as public utilities or even broken up. I think very minimal regulation similar to the "equal-time rule" should be used instead, applied only to certain narrow forms of content. I think Steve Huffman of reddit did it right: he's clearly no fan of Trump or his supporters, but he refused all the calls to delete Trump's subreddit. Half the site calls him a Nazi and the other half calls him a libcuck, but I think he made the right move.
I think YouTube should absolutely have a right to remove videos promoting white nationalism or advocating bigotry and such. I just think they shouldn't have absolute free reign to remove anything, due to the fact that they're now kind of more like TV in general, rather than a single TV network.
Scribes, news reporters, telegrams and telephones all throughout history have enjoyed immunity from the content they didnt generate.
Ever hear "Don't kill the messenger?"
A simple example just for clarity. I say "I hate my sister when she doesn't clean up but I love my sister more than anything". If you edit that to "I hate my sister" you've changed the meaning. That edit is your speech and hence your responsibility.
* Claims to know what the heart of the matter is, and that it is power
* Claims those recommending antitrust are "mostly stuck in the industrial age"
* Claims publisher vs carrier dichotomy is a "trap" without explanation
Nonetheless, when he started talking about an API I got pretty excited.
In particular the Naval Ravikant interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qHkcs3kG44&t=3661
Algorithms are a great factor as to why a Facebook got users hooked into its service and drives up ad revenue.