Barr questions Section 230 protections for big tech | Hacker News Reader

Barr questions Section 230 protections for big tech

washingtonpost.com

>Those leveling the charges of censorship, according to the sources, included a participant from the Media Research Center’s TechWatch initiative, which asserts on its web page that “a handful of tech companies can censor both the people and the ideals of the right."

Why do people think stripping Section 230 protections will make companies more likely to allow comments on their sites?

It will make them less likely.

Particularly from the segment of the population who thinks it is funny and appropriate to post "Michelle Obama is a male gorilla" memes.

this is an outrage for free speech and the original idea of what the Internet was supposed to be. But looking at the Internet today -from FAANG to all the crappy ad and data mining surveillance capitalist business models- I don't feel as outraged as I maybe should.

Maybe I'm just too cynical but anything that delivers a death blow to what we have might maybe even be a positive in the long run as it gives momentum for legitimate use-cases of onion routing or p2p based systems.

or maybe not ... but I think Tech won't go away, it'll just shift and adapt to different forms. hard to say if this will be good or not. It'll suck for anyone heavily invested in the status-quo which is pretty cool imo!

to take an analogy of Nassim Taleb any city that has been flattened in war throughout history usually ended up returning stronger and more resilient. This could be an "etcher-sketch start-over push" that may open us up for new ideas (or push legit stuff underground and normalize the darknet model to a wider audience)

Tech built their companies on the idea that they didn't need people-facing people. It shows in lousy customer support, click-away liability, and so on.

In the early days Google had a press conference where one of the founders (Larry, IIRC) was challenged about the availability of all the personal information available in the search results. The reporter apparently made him uncomfortable by bringing up his data. Those details disappeared from the search results the next day.

Fast forward ten years and my friend is falsely accused of violence against one of his students. She was caught with bruises she got from having sex (she was 15 yo or so) and blamed this guy saying they were from a violent outburst. The story is all over the newspapers. They go to court, turns out the girl is lying, he's cleared. Of course during the wait he was let go. So guess what happened whenever he tried to find a job? They "Googled" him of course, all this came up, and he was turned down everywhere he went. Do you think Google would respond to his pleas to get these results dropped? Nope.

I think I'm ok with this. It's certainly going to change things if it gets to the point where Amazon is responsible for slanderous reviews and such. Such speech has never been "free" (as in legal). But today, it's all anonymous and people can say anything. This will turn things back a bit.

It probably won't go that far, though. But it might make those tech co.s rethink things a little. (I also submitted this article but came to yours.)

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