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I agree with you. But it is encouraging that there are adults in the room:

> Kate Klonick, a law professor at St. John’s University in New York, urged caution.

> “This is a massive norm-setting period,” she said, with any alterations to one of the internet’s key legal frameworks likely to draw unexpected consequences. “It’s hard to know exactly what the ramifications might be.”

She's absolutely right, but my fear is that room she is in is not the room where it happens.

This is a bizarre line of reasoning

> his perception that there are a set of correct facts and incorrect facts is just so meaingless

Yes, there are facts. In your example, if I say "person X said Y" and have a video of them saying it, I am stating a fact. I am not dealing in beliefs and I don't give a fuck whether or not the person still supports the statements they made or not. I am saying that at some point in time T, person X said Y and this fact is on record.

You are correct, there are literal truths. Some person factually used some set of words in a particular order. The part that people care about is how we interpret those words. It being fact does not make the implication incorrect.

In an extreme example, if someone says "There are extremists in the world, and I am not going to be one of them", I can quote that as "There are extremists in the world, and I am ... one of them", which is factually true, that is a portion of what was said. The interpretation is the polar opposite, but it is factually true.

Likewise, there are facts that are misleading, but true. "The Earth is at the center of our solar system". It's a perfectly valid statement; the rotation of planets can be modeled where the Earth is at a fixed point and the other planets moved around it. It's messy, and the movements look extremely erratic, but it's perfectly valid to be modeled that way.

There are also facts that are true, given a set of circumstances. "I weigh 7 pounds". It's not true on Earth, but in the correct gravitational field, I do weigh 7 pounds. Determining whether that statement is true depends on the implication; was I implying that it is true on Earth or not? That depends on the context of that statement, and on how you interpret the context.

> In an extreme example, if someone says "There are extremists in the world, and I am not going to be one of them", I can quote that as "There are extremists in the world, and I am ... one of them", which is factually true, that is a portion of what was said. The interpretation is the polar opposite, but it is factually true.

Not so extreme considering this kind of editing is basically what led to Count Dankula's court case and conviction.

That's a reach.

Doing explicitly offensive things as satire and being selectively quoted aren't similar.

Why is it wrong to say explicitly offensive things and why should someone be legally punished for it?

Who gets to decide what is and isn't offensive and to what degree?

> Why is it wrong to say explicitly offensive things

Because they are offensive

> and why should someone be legally punished for it

Because that is what legal systems are for. Punishing people who do things we, as a society, find objectionable

> Who gets to decide what is and isn't offensive and to what degree?

That is a rather general question, but generally speaking, the law makers and the legal system decide things like that.

Now, mind you, personally, I support a rather radical version of freedom of expression. I think almost every kind of censorship is ultimately detrimental to society, but I am not naive enough to ask "but who gets to decide" or "but why cannot I"

It wasn't satire; sharing and reporting on it removed the joke context, leading some people to infer satire and others to infer he actually held nazi beliefs.

The original video started with him saying something like "my girlfriend thinks her pug is the cutest thing in the world, so I'm going to turn it into the worst thing I can think of".

On the extreme end, a video can be totally fake. Slightly less extreme, a video might be "fake" in that it's an actor playing a role, and the words they're saying belong to the character and not the actor. More commonly, a video might be taken out of context, so that the apparent meaning of a statement in isolation is the opposite of what it originally meant. (Compare "I hate group X" to "I think people who say 'I hate group X' are jerks.") Modern politics is effectively a distributed indexing system for exactly these most ambiguous cases, coupled with large media apparatuses for broadcasting them.

And these are the problems with the simplest sort of fact, "A said B." That's not even the majority of misinformation out there. We usually have to contend with even worse ambiguities, like whether A "caused" B, or whether A "supported" B, or whether A "criticized" B.

In everyday life of course, these problems are solvable. We find ways to punish people for acting in bad faith, and the incentives mostly line up. But that is very much not how things work in politics or in law. People have large incentives to seek out ambiguous cases. These edge cases become the typical case.

> On the extreme end, a video can be totally fake

Sure. And either you can prove it or not. But that is not what I am arguing against. The way things seem to be working today, is that you say "person X cures cancer" and I say "person X eats babies", neither one of us has any proof whatsoever, but that is OK because nobody ever asks for proof because "hey, there is no such thing as facts anymore"

That's fair. It's definitely possible to go too far with this. I guess what I want to argue is more like this: The problem here is sufficiently hard that, even though we can make definitive judgments about facts and misinformation in some cases, the value of doing so in practice will be low. But of course that's a pretty vague blanket statement that I'm making without any concrete support, and it would probably be better to look at the pros and cons of some specific idea about what the rules should be.

There is still the challenge of the context of "person X said Y" Were they saying it sarcastically? Were they quoting someone else? Does Y include the content said before or after? That can meaningfully change the "fact"

> Yes, there are facts. In your example, if I say "person X said Y" and have a video of them saying it, I am stating a fact.

assuming you actually do this - which i dont believe you do but will accept for argument's sake - it is entirely meaningless. mouth-sounds are not important in and of themselves; you hear the mouth-sounds and interpret them to try and guess how that person will act in the future. you are building a predictive model of that person.

lets say there is a video of a politician (clumsily) saying "i am a rapist hater. i will increase the punishment to try and dissuade these awful crimes and make all our lives safer". You argue it is a true fact that politician is on video saying "i am a rapist". My point is that "true" in this sense is nonsense, and furthermore "true" in any absolute sense is always nonsense.

if your head is a list of quotes people have said that simply don't feed into your impression of them, then you are in a minority so small its effectively 0 on a global scale.

> Yes, there are facts. In your example, if I say "person X said Y" and have a video of them saying it, I am stating a fact. I am not dealing in beliefs and I don't give a fuck whether or not the person still supports the statements they made or not. I am saying that at some point in time T, person X said Y and this fact is on record.

There are clearly facts. But people don't spend a lot of time arguing over whether "person X said Y". Rather, we argue over the meaning of Y and the context in which it was said.

Political discourse has almost nothing to do with facts. That's just an observation, not necessarily a criticism.

You might be saying "they said this", but what your audience reads is "this is true".

To take a recent example:

"A renowned firefighter says that bushfires have mostly been caused by arsonists, exacerbated by conservationists protesting harm reduction burns, resulting in an exceptional fire season this year."

"A renowned firefighter says that climate change has reduced the safe period to perform harm reduction burns, and has contributed to drought conditions, resulting in an exceptional fire season this year."

These are both facts. But which one you report on will give your audience an entirely differently picture of the situation.

> The discussion _requires_ framing, and so does discussing "misinformation and extremist content"

The framing is usually implied instead of spelled out precisely. At the same time, I don't see you arguing against this (probably shitty) implied framing and instead just pretending there is none. This makes it hard for me to take seriously, since it looks so similar to the "there is no perfect security so why even try" line of arguing.

And yes, my alarm bells also went off by AG Barr talking about "misinformation and extremist content", even though I actually do think we should carefully observe whether current online platforms / communication changes our societies and if in a favorable way.

> since it looks so similar to the "there is no perfect security so why even try" line of arguing.

What does "misinformation and extremist content" mean? Because that is the first point. Remember that the GOP called out large companies for "silencing the right" when they enacted policies that reduced misinformation and extremist content in the past. "Misinformation and extremist content" is thus itself an illdefined thing as different people consider different things to fall under it.

The framing usually used is that "if the big companies are liable the content won't be there" which history has shown is only true in so far as "if the big companies are liable user made content won't be there" effectively as huge restrictive filters need to be put in place to avoid the liability.

> even though I actually do think we should carefully observe whether current online platforms / communication changes our societies and if in a favorable way

Feel free to talk about it, you are not trying to enact policy. AG Barr is involved in creating policy and thus should be careful about exactly what he suggests rather than invoking the same liability boogieman that hasn't served us in the past.

> his perception that there are a set of correct facts and incorrect facts is just so meaingless.

While there are large grey areas in the middle where subject opinion, context, and fuzzy word definitions make truth values complicated, there are also some very clear black and white areas for blatantly false concrete claims are being made and spread that have no basis in reality. I think there are ways to regulate and pushing blatant disinformation while leaving the greyer borders up to individual discretion and discernment.

Perhaps. But who gets to decide which side of the line any given statement is on? Imagine, for example, that the person appointed to decide that is an anti-vaxxer. Or that they just left a gig at Monsanto/Bayer, and feel like all claims that Roundup/glyphosate might cause some harm to someone are blatantly false. Or the person appointed was a Democratic activist. Or a Republican activist. Pick your poison. And now this person is given the power to decide which claims are blatantly false, as opposed to grey.

While there are claims that are black and white, and claims that are grey, empowering someone to enforce that clearly-false claims cannot be published is going to bite you, because that person is going to have their own perspectives, biases, and (probably) agenda. It takes something close to a saint to not inflict their own agenda, and saints are in short supply.

> Perhaps. But who gets to decide which side of the line any given statement is on?

Umm... we have an existing legal system already does this. It certainly isn't perfect, but your argument seems to boil down to: we don't have a perfect legal system, so we shouldn't have any laws.

I don't see any reason why we can't have laws that make it illegal to run around and hand out pamphlets that deliberately misinform people about if / when they can vote.

> Roundup/glyphosate might cause some harm to someone

You seem to be using an inherently grey claim to make your point. Of course glyphosate might cause harm to someone, there is almost literally nothing that has no possibility to cause harm to someone. This is exactly the sort of claim whose truth value depends on the context and meaning with which you interpret it.

This is different from a claim like "I have a bachelor's degree from UC Davis" or "You cannot vote without a drivers license"

That is not at all what my argument boils down to. My argument boils down to this: Having some anointed authority that gets to decide such things without having to follow the due process of the court system is a dangerous thing.

The point about glyphosate et al is this: Sure, those are definitely grey. But the authority could claim that they are black and white at his own discretion. If he decides against you, you then have to go to court, with the default decision being against you, in order to be able to be heard.

I am not sure what you are talking about. What authority, other than the courts, could punish you or force you to stop talking?

Are you just saying that moderation should be illegal? In what way would going to court help you if you've been moderated off a platform?

Are you attacking some sort of straw man central censorship authority that would exist outside of the courts?

Several posts upthread, you said: "I think there are ways to regulate and pushing blatant disinformation while leaving the greyer borders up to individual discretion and discernment." So, who gets to regulate? That's your authority that is "other than the courts".

Sure, there's no black or white answer to what is misinformation or extreemist. But regulation and the courts aren't black and white. We regulate the content of broadcast media just fine without hand-wringing about the grey areas.

We do not regulate the content of broadcast media just fine.

Compared to internet UGC, the flow of new content into broadcast media minuscule. According to a random Google search, three hundred hours of new video are added to YouTube each minute. It's unlikely that much new broadcast media is created each hour. And YouTube is just one of many sites. It wouldn't surprise me at all to find that UGC is created at a rate of more than 1000x that of broadcast media. That difference in scale, and the difference in economic value per unit of content, makes a solved problem in one medium an tricky challenge in the other.

Agreed. It is one of those phrases that raises my hair each time right along with lawful intercept and hate speech.

It is disheartening to see it unquestioned and in mainstream.

While I'm sympathetic to your point, sometimes appeals to complexity like this are asinine. There are plenty of complex problems which yield, to at least a degree, to effort.

Historically cultures have modulated themselves in a variety of ways, including censorship of objectionable speech. Even the United States has maintained, in the past, sweeping norms which controlled what kind of rhetoric entered the public sphere. No one would suggest that these norms were always well applied, coherent, good. But its equally challenging to make the case that because of that ambiguity we should simply do nothing at all.

The ability of companies like Youtube or Facebook to shift culture is probably real and thus probably demands a response, imperfect as it may be.

I think the problem of determining whether a company is secure, given a particular attacker, is one that needs to be worked on.

Unfortunately I haven't made any progress in discovering a solution that would accurately determine if a company is secure or not.

Given that an org's security team, or even the world (in case of zero days), may not be aware of vulnerabilities that exist in a company's infrastructure, how do you solve this problem?

If anyone wants to chat about this, I'm at veeralpatel4@gmail.com

It's clearly a complex legal issue, but is there any logical reason why the internet should be treated differently from print and broadcast media in that regard?

The only reasons I've heard are related to how -current- internet content providers' business models work. Those companies' business models are heavily enabled by the CDA itself, so isn't it sort of begging the question?

I agree with you 100% about current Internet content providers. And I wouldn't miss them if they disappeared.

But they aren't the Internet. It was always intended as P2P.

Print and broadcast media exercise editorial control in a way that Facebook and Google do not. That difference matters legally.

Huh? Are you saying Google and Facebook don't exercise editorial control? They definitely do, and the whole point of Section 230 is to give these companies editorial control without the legal liability that goes with it.

If I'm publishing a newspaper, I decide which articles run and which ones don't. I decide on every article. I decide on every editorial. I decide on every letter to the editor. So, I'm responsible for every word.

Is Facebook responsible for every word of every Facebook post? Have they decided whether to publish it or not? No. (Yes, they do have certain filters that try to exclude certain things, but that's all. A newspaper would be different if it published every letter to the editor it received, so long as it didn't contain the words "child porn", for example.)

I should have realized this in my first reply, but your argument is exactly what I mean by begging the question.

Facebook and Google occupy a legal grey area between publisher and common carrier that was literally created by the CDA. So your argument is like saying, "Vaping has to be legal because how else is Juul going to stay in business?", or "Loot boxes have to be legal because they're so important to EA's and Activision's business model." These companies only exist because of a certain legal environment, so how can their existence be used to justify that same environment? Are Google and Facebook now considered inalienable human rights used to derive laws?

Maybe Google and Facebook would be able to survive a change to the CDA, or maybe not. Who cares? The internet ran just fine before the CDA and the technology hasn't really changed much at all. Heck, the two of us are conversing right now without Google and Facebook involved.

Everyone gets so bent out of shape these days about Google and Facebook but no one is willing to even imagine an internet without them. Present company excluded, of course -- at this point I'm just ranting.

> A newspaper would be different if it published every letter to the editor it received, so long as it didn't contain the words "child porn", for example.

This is not true. It has nothing to do with the choices of the editor and everything to do with the medium used. The CDA carves out a specific immunity for internet companies that does not apply to print and broadcast media and that's what Barr is putting on the table here.

I was thinking more about it and the Juul/EA comparisons aren't quite right. A better comparison would be saying in 2006, "of course Glass-Steagall should have been repealed, because how else would these huge banks be possible?" That's another case where the business model was truly enabled by a legislation change like Google's and Facebook's models were enabled by the CDA.