This story breaks that mold in that it involves social media censoring private conversations via DM. If you think that's OK for Twitter on its platform, is it also OK for AT&T on its phone network? For Google on Gmail?
Twitter is a closed-system and not a utility, and I guess that makes all the difference.
From my understanding, the current status quo is:
1. A platform can not moderate its content beyond removing illegal content that is brought to their attention;
2. A publisher can moderate and selectively cull what ever user content they like, but is held liable for any infringing content that breaks its ToS or the law.
This is a matter I strongly believe requires an update to relevant legislation and a clear / strong precedent that can be pointed to. It feels like social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) is trying to be both a platform and publisher when it suits them.
EDIT: Made the language a bit more neutral and closer alined to the current than the "should be". A child reply linked an article that is worth reading [1], however take it with a grain of salt, seeing as it's more opinion and interpretation of intent than a reading on application of the law as it is written. This issue has been simmering away long before 2016. It's only started to come to the foreground as the social media giants started moving closer to "publisher" than "platform". It would have been unthinkable to see Twitter, Facebook and Youtube "fact checking" and adding content below posts ten years ago.
I see this less as a partisan issue and more of a civil rights issue. I don't want to imagine a future where we have untouchable arbitrers of truth.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/21/18700605/section-230-inte...
https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/21/18700605/section-230-inte...
I believe modern application of a law should matter more than what the writers of the law were potentially thinking at the time.
>Then we get to these early internet services like CompuServe and Prodigy in the early ‘90s. CompuServe is like the Wild West. It basically says, “We’re not going to moderate anything.” Prodigy says, “We’re going to have moderators, and we’re going to prohibit bad stuff from being online.” They’re both, not surprisingly, sued for defamation based on third-party content.
>CompuServe’s lawsuit is dismissed because what the judge says is, yeah, CompuServe is the electronic equivalent of a newsstand or bookstore. The court rules that Prodigy doesn’t get the same immunity because Prodigy actually did moderate content, so Prodigy is more like a newspaper’s letter to the editor page. So you get this really weird rule where these online platforms can reduce their liability by not moderating content.
Section 230 has never been applied this way. Some people want to change it, but they haven't yet. There is no legal precedent that those people have to stand behind.
You're asking the courts to change the law based on executive preference. That's dangerous for a wide variety of reasons (ex-post-facto-ness, separation of powers, etc.)
In case you didn't understand the parent, section 230 was written to fix the issue that prodigy had. All section 230 does is protect people who moderate content from civil liability. That's it. The law itself doesn't distinguish platforms or publishers. It distinguishes first-party and third-party content (and gives you protection for third party content, even if you publish first party content and moderate the third party content). That's all.
Nothing about platforms or publishers, and nothing about categorizing a company as one or the other. Only protection around certain kinds of content.
>Then we get to these early internet services like CompuServe and Prodigy in the early ‘90s. CompuServe is like the Wild West. It basically says, “We’re not going to moderate anything.” Prodigy says, “We’re going to have moderators, and we’re going to prohibit bad stuff from being online.” They’re both, not surprisingly, sued for defamation based on third-party content.
>CompuServe’s lawsuit is dismissed because what the judge says is, yeah, CompuServe is the electronic equivalent of a newsstand or bookstore. The court rules that Prodigy doesn’t get the same immunity because Prodigy actually did moderate content, so Prodigy is more like a newspaper’s letter to the editor page. So you get this really weird rule where these online platforms can reduce their liability by not moderating content.
There is precedent, but you are right in that the whole space has been allowed to act unchalleneged for so long. This is something that needs to change and we need a modern precedent to point at.
The cases you're citing predate the law, so they aren't precedent on how the law should be handled.
If you want actual precendent, here's some:
- https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/batzel-v-smith
- https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/universal-communicat...
- https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/perfect-10-inc-v-ccb...
- https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/parker-v-google-inc
- https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/ma-v-village-voice-m...
- https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/jurin-v-google-inc
That basically all says that the provider can't be held liable even if they moderate things, due to 230, the most recent in that list is from 2011, but there are more recent rulings that exist.
Here's matching precedent from 2018/19: https://www.lawfareblog.com/herrick-v-grindr-why-section-230...
It is technically a "matter of interpretation" in that one major political party is reading things into the law that don't exist and so it's a very common interpretation, but ... they don't exist.
The key part that stands out to me and after refreshing my memory of the particulars, should be interpreting where "good faith" ends with respect to censoring topics and people, and what the bounds of "objectionable content" is.
Deciding that some news articles cannont be shared or talked about (even privately via the platform) while allowing others in similar circumstances to be distributed, is surely far from ideal.
The current status quo, as I understand it, is:
1. Everybody (newspapers, social media) can be held liable for their OWN content (e.g. the NYT for their articles). 2. Nobody can be held liable for disseminating OTHER people's content (letters to the editor, tweets), whether or not they decide to filter some of that content out of their own volition. 3. (This is where my understanding gets murky) Once the disseminating entity has been made aware that something they disseminate is illegal (copyright violation, illegal pornography, etc), they bear some responsibility for stopping the further dissemination.
But these problems will still be here post-Trump, or even if he wins re-election. We need to have reasoned debate on how to deal with our new world with social media.
This isn't a new behaviour.
I've experienced it personally: Back in 2011, when I published the big archive of paywalled but copyright expired Jstor documents with attached manifesto facebook silently vanished any message containing a link to it or the title of it, even in private messages.
One reason you haven't heard more about this behaviour is because the fact of the matter is that its extremely effective.
I also think that not only is it legally permissible for Gmail to censor links, they do so already. Try reliably delivering a newsletter from a brand-new domain name (I have). Censorship isn't any better when it's the emergent effects of unknowable spam filtering and abuse algorithms than a decision by a human. (I'd say it's worse, because at least you can ask the human what they were thinking.) But the solution there is for consumers to stop using products that don't do what they want, not for big government to tell companies how to implement technical systems.
AT&T is not in the business of content.
That's a very material distinction.
That says nothing about how/who/what Twitter should or should not be doing in this case, other than to say the moment you dip your toe into content management, it's going to get very complicated, as we now see on a daily basis in the news.
T-mobile already classifies these calls as 'Scam likely' and they've never seemed to misclassify any, so obviously it can be done.
They do, my local politician robo-calls all his constituents with info, and T-Mobile always flags his calls as spam.
I guess in a way it's spam since it's unsolicited? But it's real info, and relevant to the local people he's calling, and keeping people informed is part of his job.
> robo-calls
Yeah that sounds like spam. If info needs to get sent out, try email. Robo-calls are intrusive, and generally the wrong medium for transmitting information.
Edit: Obtrusive -> intrusive. Although I guess both are technically correct.
Granted that feels different than a phone call, but the intent may be the same.
Also, usually, you can unsubscribe to email lists/sender. While you can't do that for phone calls. You might block a specific number, but those robo-calls might use many different numbers
That's the way pretty much every spammer justifies their existence and somehow manages to sleep at night.
The only reason robocalling by politicians is not illegal is because it's them who get to make the laws. They should all get in the sea, alongside all the other spammers.
That’s a feature, not a bug.
Took a long time to clear up in California.
I got one (Verizon) just as I started reading the comments for this post. :(
There are solutions[1], but you'll need to wait until next July[0],at least in the US. It's not a complete solution, but it should take care of the vast majority of scam calls.
[0] https://www.fcc.gov/call-authentication
[1] https://transnexus.com/whitepapers/stir-and-shaken-overview/
Google recently unveiled plans for its "verified calls" feature, so that might help if you're on an Android 11 device.
I personally do not answer any calls from numbers not on my contact list. If a call was urgent, I'd normally recieve a text message (if informal) or an email (if formal, like the bank, for example) from the caller eventually.
That was 5 years ago. Maybe they've changed?
I do. Then take the time to get an actual human on the phone. Then I verbally abuse them until they hang up.
It's not effective in stopping them, but while I'm spewing vulgar stuff at them, they're not trying to rip anyone else off.
Once the subject is switched, we can comfortably speak in generalities about the abstract value of speech. It reminds me of what Keats said about a certain way of thinking about economics: "Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again."
We're dealing with something that most reasonable people agree is a genuine crisis of democracy, and it's sheltered by a naiive conception of speech that doesn't have anything specific to say directly about Qanon, Covid, the 2020 election. It's a view from 10,000 feet generality that works when the ocean is flat again.
Twitter (and every single commercial social media space) is not the above, and can do what it wants on its service. It's not a public utility.
In the past few years, we've seen these big tech companies operate in a manner that seems collusive. They follow each other's cues. One company is the first to censor, and then the other companies follow very quickly with the exact same censorship. (The quick collective action tends to dilute the criticism against any single one of those companies.) It's not just one company doing what it wants, it's all the major players doing the same form of censorship.
I'd be more concerned if I bought server hosting from AWS, stood up a WordPress blog about my thoughts on capitalism, socialism, sports, and dogs, and Amazon decides to suspend my account due to my writings.
Why use social media?
>You should have done that
In a way, the New York Post can do exactly this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24781812
These media corporations really should be paying attention to the changing landscape of open web standards. Their entanglement with corporate social platforms for eyeballs will be their own undoing.
In our current world, they haven't, and you're responding here on a corporate social platform. Because that's where the people are.
What if it were your ox being gored?
Your political leaders and journalists are tuned in.
Thus your life is still affected.
The audience will follow. Trust me, I know audiences move around. They've moved around so many times in recent history and since the conception of the Internet.
Many pols actually prefer single points of, ah, influence, so they're going to fight you.
(National Review|Atlantic|NYT|Reason|New Yorker|...)
Thus your life is still affected. Ergo, we should .... ???
As you note, there's even less of a monopoly today than there was 50-60 years ago. So why should Twitter (or Facebook or any other similar medium) require any special attention?
More than the examples the other comment noted, though, I prefer the depressing/amusing history of Gab as they stepped on just about every single centralized service rake and had it hit them in the face for things some of its user base typed. Going through its wiki history page, I'm even seeing some I missed. Here's a list: Apple (iOS app store), Google (play store), Twitter (API), Asia Registry (domain name), Microsoft (Azure), Stripe, PayPal, GoDaddy, Medium, Joyent (hosting), Backblaze, Coinbase, Square, most Mastodon instances (federation won't necessarily save you) and popular Mastodon mobile apps, Mozilla (Firefox addon), Google again (Chrome addon), Visa.
At the end of the day, yes, anyone can spin up Tor or I2P or Freenet or whatever to talk unhindered, they can participate in commerce with decentralized crypto-coins. And despite the struggles one can still find Gab/4chan/the others on the clearnet and participate in the subset of things that got them in trouble for hosting. It only takes a very moderate amount of active will, and you'll have all you want. That it's not exposed passively to people on other platforms is probably no great loss. Still I think it's worth caring a bit about these things as indicators of changes in culture and, following culture, law, even if you like me don't particularly care much if you're reduced to keeping a private journal because no one will host any of your thoughts because of a subset of your thoughts at some point in time.
The leaked emails from Hunter Biden's computer were not classified. (Well, at least they weren't marked as classified by a USG entity.) The computer was not "hacked" to obtain the emails either. It was left unclaimed in a computer service shop.
Or they are using similar criteria to decide what is allowed, and so independently arrive at the same decision when the same thing is posted to them all.
The Holocaust happened 75 years ago. Twitter's decision came 2 days after Facebook's.
Q.E.D.
If airline A decides to offer free checked bags, and then a couple days later airline B does the same thing, would you think they're colluding?
If airline A decides to offer free checked bags, and then a couple days later airline B does the same thing, I would not think they arrived independently at the same decision. Whether they're "colluding" is of course controversial, but there should be no controversy that B did it because A did it.
Is there a "market for censorship"? Perhaps there is. That would be an interesting discussion. But it's not interesting to entertain the idea that Facebook and Twitter independently and totally coincidentally decided to ban Holocaust deniers within days of each other.
There is absolutely a "market for censorship," because there's a market for everything a company does! That's the whole idea of the free market - every decision a publicly-traded company makes is a participation in the market, and they take the whole state of the world into account as best as they can. When a corporation says "Happy Pride" or "Merry Christmas" or whatever, sure, part of that is the genuine belief of some of their employees, but there is absolutely a decision that doing so is better for the business than not. (Some of this decision is based on whether it's better for the business to make those employees happy. Most of it is based on whether they'll make potential customers angry by doing so or not doing so.)
If social media companies are getting heat in the public discourse for not doing X, then yes, it's a market-based calculation to say to themselves, "If we keep not doing X, our public image will suffer, which is bad for the business, so let's do it." And since the public discourse changes, the market conditions that lead to certain decisions change with it, too. If on December 1 the media gets mad about people not saying "Merry Christmas," on December 2 the market value of deciding to say it has gone up, and nobody would be surprised to see multiple companies react or expect them to have talked to each other before reacting. If last week the media gets mad about Holocaust-denial content, this week the market value of banning it has gone up.
... And there's a more visible form of this which I left out because I thought it was implied by "responded to market conditions": both companies wanted to make an unpopular decision because they think it will be long-term good for their business, but whoever moves first will suffer a short-term loss. As soon as one company does it, though, that gives cover for any other company. You see this in pretty self-explanatory free markets like competing gas stations across the street: if station A raises their prices, station B is free to raise their prices to match without losing any business relative to status quo ante. So they both end up waiting until they're pretty confident the other wants to raise prices too (which - again - they can judge from the state of the world and not from talking to each other), and then someone updates their signboard, and then the other gas station follows.
It's not collusion when two gas stations raise their prices to the same price. It's how the market works. You can dismiss the fact that the free market is fundamentally an engine of communication as "not interesting" if you like, but that doesn't change how the free market works. It's not coincidental at all - they participate in the same market. But it's also how the market is supposed to work.
That was exactly my point! "The quick collective action tends to dilute the criticism against any single one of those companies."
The problem in this case is that Facebook and Twitter are not simply local gas stations. They are two of the biggest social networks in the world, with billions of users. They effectively control a gigantic chunk of the entire market, in a way that is nowhere even remotely analogous to local gas stations. Even if 2 gas stations explicitly colluded, they couldn't hope to control the market, because there are just too many gas stations. You can't drive a mile down the road and find another Facebook. There's only 1 Facebook in the world.
You haven't actually showed that there's a market for censorship, because it's not obvious that censorship is actually financially beneficial to those companies. This is a controversial decision at best, and not really analogous to the price of gas, where the financial implications are clear. I'm not saying it's false (after all, I'm the one who suggested the idea), but it requires more elaboration than "there's a market for everything".
EDIT: Reportedly the US Senate will subpoena Jack Dorsey, so there's already severe backlash.
I agree that this is a problem, and I think we need to break up Facebook and Twitter and Google and Amazon and all other large companies, because by their sheer size they distort the free market. But it's worth being precise about what the problem is, lest we make it worse. The problem is not that these particular companies did something unique, and if we let other companies grow in their place they'll do better. The problem is that any market that has companies of this size is distorted and does not function as we want it to function. Today it's this problem. Tomorrow it's something else. Are you going to subpoena Jack Dorsey every time the oligopoly makes an individual business decision that the ruling party doesn't like?
There's nothing functionally distinct between what Facebook and Twitter did and what two gas stations do all the time - the problem is scope. If we start looking for evidence of "collusion," and it turns out (which I hope you admit is at least possible) that there was none because they did the same thing at the same time because of standard market mechanisms, what do we do at that point?
One of the common proposals - making Twitter and Facebook obligated to carry certain content - not only is a practical mess because it cements their oligopoly role and puts the government in charge of determining each new abuse, it also really ought to be a philosophical mess, abandoning any pretense of valuing the free market and valuing liberty.
(Another way of putting this might be, a "free" market without aggressive regulation to prevent anyone from "winning" too strongly will quickly cease to be free, and the "free" market as a tool works well in cases where the barrier to entry is low and the barrier to becoming a giant is high, like gas stations, and less well in cases where the barrier to entry is high and gaining control of the market makes it easier to lock others out ... like Standard Oil. It would be far more liberty-minded to say, once you grow to a certain size, that you must split the companies into smaller independent companies than to say that the government tells you how to run yourself.)
Alternatively, if every company in a free market seems to believe that X is objectionable, then X is considered objectionable by all of society, and it's not the place of the government to override that. If Facebook bans 419 scams, and Twitter bans 419 scams, and Reddit bans 419 scams, and Craigslist bans 419 scams, a fake Nigerian prince shouldn't be able to lobby Congress for a Constitutional right to force these private companies to host his content. They're allowed to be "collusive" in establishing shared, society-wide norms - that's how society works.
(Or we could conclude that we cannot make the free market so fair as to fairly represent all of society, but as far as the Overton window in the US is concerned, that's an absurdum, and so one of our propositions must be wrong.)
How would you feel if they had banned all talk of russian conspiracies the last few years? Would you be making the property rights argument still?
Yes. Because otherwise the Russians (or anyone else) could do so on my property and I would have no recourse.
The appropriate way to handle this is to vote with your feet/wallet.
Besides, Twitter and Facebook's revenue model is so incredibly evil and exploitative, folks should leave there even if they weren't blocking whatever it is that you think is important.
I did nearly seven years ago and I'm much happier for it.
Not exactly. The public has the right to have all laws applied fairly. The social media platforms have enjoyed the rights of a neutral forum without the liabilities that come with being a publisher. Yet the platforms act like a publisher, deciding what is seen or not seen, and the public directly or indirectly suffers as a result. This is a pretty clear case of actual rights being violated, despite the distracting narrative of "muh private company".
Every forum online has rules about what you can and cannot post; there is no law stating they have to leave whatever you post up.
Phone companies are natural monopolies on account of the cost of building out a physical network and network effects. Social media has similar dynamics. The only difference is there is no requisite physical layer.
Is there a network effect? Sure. Did MySpace, Friendster, AOL, CompuServe etc have those first mover advantages as well? Where are they now?
They had the same first-mover advantages. They never achieved Facebook's scale and network advantage. In the early days, Ma Bell also faced competition.