FCC to move ahead with 'rulemaking' on Section 230
twitter.com
twitter.com
The media, and those of us who understand what Pai did to net neutrality, need to do a better job of communicating to the general public exactly what Pai is, and what he's there to do.
It would also be nice if people understood that section 230 protections allow the internet as we know it (not just the social media giants) to exist, but I'd settle for just the bit about Pai as a start.
Clearly even here on HN people don’t recognize how important it was to the development of the free and public internet.
We can not sustain a system where a major paper and the U.S. Press Secretary is censored by corporations entrusted with a significant portion of the public square, but that corporation simultaneously has no liability for the things which they, by their non-interference, must be endorsing.
If you're a platform, you're not responsible for what your users say (except directly illegal stuff, eg. child porn), and have no say in what stays on, or gets removed/hidden (except, again, illegal stuff).
If you're a publisher, you have a say what is posted on your site, and you carry full responsibility for all the onsite content.
Walking the line, and not wanting to take responsibility in some cases, but still deletin in other cases should be forbidden
Things that need to be addressed: no advertising to kids, mob control, fake accounts/social manipulation, free speech, transparent and auditable algorithms (screw their IP). Its not an easy task to achieve all of these and other goals but it needs to get done before society literally goes into a civil war.
I doubt YC would hire a full-time staff of moderators to vet every single post. Since we remove things for being off-topic or overly mean, the only possible conclusion is that HN would shut down because they do not want to bear liability for the posts they leave up.
The Internet as we know it would not exist without S230. Please read this[0] for a primer.
[0]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
One could also draw a distinction between burying content vs. completely deleting it. A lot of HN moderation already works by just dropping the content from the frontpage or making comments invisible rather than outright deleting it. I presume the FCC would still consider this
I not sure how this could work for a single-purpose community like HN. Maybe if YC ran a neutral HNaaS then the HN-prime could be operated and moderated by independent staff.
An alternative approach would be exemptions for non-profit sites.
I think it would be possible to operate within these broad rules if the details are crafted right, but even then it would require significant adjustments for many site operators.
Another alternative would be "leave this problem alone, it's working just fine". Site operators can and should have the ability to ban anyone or remove any content, for any reason or no reason, and doing so does not mean they should be liable for everything they might have missed. (In practice, "liable for everything they might have missed" is equivalent to "unable to operate" for anything but the most massive sites that could theoretically afford an army of moderators, and it'd have a chilling effect even there.)
Destroying the concept of moderation does not make the world better. The liability shield is the whole reason Section 230 exists: to make it possible to have enjoyable communities online, without incurring so much liability that you have to shut them all down for fear of getting prosecuted.
If you want unmoderated communities, they exist. Go use them. Stop trying to destroy the concept of moderated communities.(Removing the liability shield would be tantamount to destroying such communities.)
Some people want the audience of moderated communities, but they don't want the standards of those communities. There's a reason unmoderated communities have fewer (and different) users.
If a major fraction of human communication, especially during lockdowns, is facilitated by social networks then they are fulfilling a utility role. So being in the position of dictating what millions of people will talk about is at least questionable.
> for anything but the most massive sites that could theoretically afford an army of moderators
Ok, I have not considered this angle and it is indeed concerning.
> Destroying the concept of moderation does not make the world better.
That may be the goal of the FCC, but I for one did not say that I am in support of destroying moderation. Quite the opposite, I was thinking how it could be made to work while providing more open communication platforms and putting more control in the hands of the users rather than the companies.
Removing the ability of those sites to moderate will not make them better. (Even if it did by some metric, that still wouldn't be acceptable; what constitutes "better" is entirely up to the site owner to determine. But it's even less reasonable given that it wouldn't have the intended effect, unless the intended effect is to cause harm.) Having many users should not suddenly mean you don't own the site, nor should it mean that you cannot moderate the site as you see fit. "We came up with a new algorithm to automatically detect spam" should not need to come with "and several years later we managed to get the government to say we're allowed to use it without incurring liability".
>> for anything but the most massive sites that could theoretically afford an army of moderators
> Ok, I have not considered this angle and it is indeed concerning.
That angle is why Section 230 was created in the first place, and why it should remain intact.
> That may be the goal of the FCC, but I for one did not say that I am in support of destroying moderation.
Removing the liability shield for sites that moderate will destroy either the site or the moderation, and either way the usefulness of the site comes to an end.
> Quite the opposite, I was thinking how it could be made to work while providing more open communication platforms and putting more control in the hands of the users rather than the companies.
Make a new network that puts control in the hands of the users in the way you envision, and test it to see how well it works. Or join one of the existing efforts already working on that. This isn't a legislative problem; it certainly shouldn't have a legislative non-solution masquerading as a solution.
I think most people's experience with moderation puts more weight on any encounters they've had with being moderated, and little to no weight (except perhaps in the abstract) on the volume of what they don't see. Moderation, when done well, is close to invisible; I think as a side effect of that, people underestimate its value in contributing to their good experiences.
You continue to own it, but that does not mean you can do arbitrary things to your users. That's precisely how things work for utilities. You can do whatever with your private road or power generator. But if you're providing essential services to the masses then eventually universal service, non-discrimination and neutrality rules come into play.
If doctors coordinate their covid response over facebook groups, elon musk makes stock-affecting announcement over twitter and the police sends out warnings via twitter than they're taking on the role of a public communication provider.
You could argue that it's a free service and you're not a customer as you're with a utility. But on the other hand you're paying with your data and attention.
> Removing the liability shield for sites that moderate will destroy either the site or the moderation, and either way the usefulness of the site comes to an end.
You're assuming that there is no way to adapt to the new rules. Separation of platform services and moderation would be one. Would it work? Maybe not and you could be right and communities would be destroyed. Or maybe it would result in more Bloggers, Wordpresses and Signals.
> Make a new network that puts control in the hands of the users in the way you envision, and test it to see how well it works.
Regulation is a valid approach though? I'm not saying that the FCC is intending to do good here, just that I can can imagine a hypothetical well-intentioned version of what they're doing.
> That angle is why Section 230 was created in the first place, and why it should remain intact.
Let me rephrase, I find it concerning that it could specifically empower the entrenched players while harming the smaller ones. Requiring an army of moderators when you want to create a global communication platform on the one hand but impose your preferred corporate image (and be it just to remain attractive to advertisiers) on all participants then I am not feeling all that sympathetic. And this isn't just about communication in the narrow sense. The controversy around the apple app store is in a similar vein. On the one hand they pretend that they act as a simple market facilitator, a platform. On the other hand they categorically ban certain categories of legal software because it goes against their corporate interests. Forcing them to choose between platform and publisher could result in either a smaller, carefully curated official apple store + sideloading or larger, more open default app store. Either outcome seems desirable to me.
If you're liable for user-posted content, you either need massive resources to review literally everything your users post (and a sufficient delay for such review to take place, and a massive insurance policy for the inevitable mistake), or you stop allowing user-posted content entirely.
This proposal would make it nearly impossible to simultaneously have user-posted content and moderation. Sites that post read-only content for user consumption would do just fine, but any site that enables the usage of the Internet in a read-write contributory way would be dead. There's no "adapting" to that, nor should there be.
> if you're providing essential services to the masses
Twitter is not in any way an "essential service". The collective set of communication platforms that people use are, in concert, important, but it'd still be a stretch to say even that combination was "essential"; I certainly don't think it's reasonable to consider any one of them "essential" by itself. If any one of those sites went away, people would adapt and use others, and more would arise rapidly to fill the void.
If the power goes out, people die. If Facebook goes down, people probably become on balance happier.
Ignore for a moment that Facebook is publicly traded; imagine it weren't. Do you believe, by way of example, that Facebook should be prohibited from pulling the plug and formatting all the servers one day, just because they decided they were tired of it? I don't.
Twitter is not an "essential service". It's useful. We're not utterly dependent on any one site; we're dependent on some site. If it went away, life would go on, and people would find alternatives. The only critical issue would be if all such sites went away simultaneously, rather than just one. "Widely used" is not "essential".
Yes, I am concerned about the collective of privatized communication mediums. More and more private, personal communication runs over these platforms. Facebook is not just your timeline, it also is whatsapp. Twitter has DMs too. Those get filtered too. This is unlike telephone or face-to-face communication.
Their continued existence is not essential to life, I agree. But they shape communication which is essential to society as a whole. If we can't do anything about the network effect then having a disinterested network should be preferable.
> This proposal would make it nearly impossible to simultaneously have user-posted content and moderation.
I already mentioned this in another post, but let the userbase collectively handle the moderation of what would now be considered "community guidelines", let the platform provider handle moderation of illegal content. This may require much better tooling and different ways content is amplified (or not) than social media platforms currently offer but it doesn't seem as impossible as you say.
I don't want a disinterested communication platform. I want a highly interested communication platform that actually cares and maintains standards. I've tried both, and I find moderated platforms far more enjoyable. I'm not telling other people what kind of platform they should prefer; I'm stating that both such platforms should be available to those who prefer them. Freedom of association is valuable.
> let the userbase collectively handle the moderation
First, it's not at all obvious why user moderation would avoid the liability, and why that wouldn't put either the site or the user at risk under this new draconian liability scheme.
Second, user moderation like that requires some form of meta-moderation ("which users get to moderate"), and then you're back to the same problem.
Third, you're arguing that a site isn't allowed to pay people to moderate, and instead should rely on unpaid labor by volunteers to make the site more useful.
Fourth, you're effectively arguing that people who run websites (as opposed to those who use them) are not allowed to have standards. (And "not allowed without incurring liability" means "not allowed", in practical terms.) No. If I host a chat server, and someone comes on and starts chanting "butts butts butts butts" (saw this one happen) or "you should be gassed" (also saw this one happen) or "good ban all (slur)" (saw that one in a flagged comment on this website today) or "such-and-such group are mentally ill" (I've seen this one too), they're getting banned, whether I own the server or not, the same way they'd get kicked out of a party, or a cafe, or a business. Do you believe that, because I have standards and norms, I should not be allowed to run a server? Because if that causes me to incur liability for user's content, I cannot run such a server. Why is that a problem? Use someone else's server. I do, in fact, have freedom of association, and (modulo protected classes) believe very strongly in "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone".
You have the major internet networks 3 weeks before an election banning speech because if they allowed it it might hurt their preferred political candidate. I mean they can claim otherwise, but they don't apply the criteria they use in this instance to instances where the speech is done by their political party. It is clear what is going on here.
Maybe that is working fine for you, it isn't working fine for me.
The ask of companies under section 230 is that they be allowed to publish libel, publish slander, publish copyright violations, publish content that violates laws against discrimination, publish threats of violence, publish posts by terrorists coordinating their attacks, publish all this with no liability whatsoever.
That is a huge ask. The question is, what do we get back for allowing them that privilege? Increasingly, in my opinion, we get negative value back for that.
It's not working just fine for me, it's time to amend section 230 so that the law advances the policies it advocates or abolish it altogether and let internet content providers live by the same rules that print content providers have lived by.
> The ask of companies under section 230 is that they be allowed to publish
No. "publish" is a distortion promoted by people trying to use the repeal of Section 230 as a weapon. To the extent liability should exist for speech at all, companies should absolutely be liable for what they publish. They should not be liable for what their users publish. Without that distinction, the Internet cannot exist as a medium for any kind of user-generated content. Centralized services providing curated content would fare just fine, but anything that allows users to interact or contribute would die.
> The question is, what do we get back for allowing them that privilege?
A functional Internet. Websites that contains content supplied by others, that aren't "anything goes" cesspools. An Internet that helps people interact in a read-write manner, not just consume content in a read-only manner.
Not true, someone running a small blog can read every single comment that gets submitted. Twitter can't.
>> The world you propose does not have functional real-time public communication, because nobody could risk the liability of allowing the posting of content they haven't checked yet
Not true, even pre-internet the world had functional real-time public communication. We called them telephones. You didn't get cut off if your politics didn't match the phone company's. And if you act as a platform like that on the internet, you could allow the posting of content you haven't checked yet.
Platform or publisher, pick one.
>> The world you propose is one in which nobody could take the risk of running a community online
Not true, there are print communities that publish users' content - people take that risk.
>> "publish" is a distortion promoted by people trying to use the repeal of Section 230 as a weapon
Dictionary definitions of publish: "to make generally known", "to disseminate to the public". No, "publish" is not a distortion, it's a dictionary definition, you just don't like the consequences of that definition.
>> "Without that distinction, the Internet cannot exist as a medium for any kind of user-generated content"
Not true, user generated content exists in print and it should be cheaper on the internet than in print. False claim.
>> A functional Internet
An internet where 3 weeks out from an election, the major providers of information ban information that hurts their political candidate is not a functional internet, it's an Orwellian dystopia.
No. Just no.
But they then have to choose between allowing every racial epithet, porn link and scam, and risking a lawsuit because a commenter says something that’s construed as defamatory.
> Not true, even pre-internet the world had functional real-time public communication. We called them telephones.
Telephones are not public communication.
> An internet where 3 weeks out from an election, the major providers of information ban information that hurts their political candidate is not a functional internet, it's an Orwellian dystopia.
It’s interesting to me that the same people who are up in arms about the response to the NY Post story — the veracity of which has been questioned by several prominent publications — had nothing to say when Twitter announced that they would suspend accounts of users wishing the President would die of COVID. If I had to label one of those an “Orwellian dystopia”, it would not be the suppression of pro–ruling party agitprop.
Yes, that's correct. They have to choose what content to allow. That's called being a publisher.
>> Telephones are not public communication
I'm guessing that you are too young to have heard of party lines.
But yes, telephones were public communication.
Wishing the president would die of COVID would obviously be allowed under a platform scenario, what law do you think it breaks where a content provider wouldn't publish a wish that the president of the US dies of a disease?
Also, I don't think you know what the term agitprop means.
If you're really advocating forcing individuals and small communities to choose between filtering spam and risking lawsuits, we'll have to agree to disagree. Hopefully the chilling effects that would have on speech are self-evident.
> I'm guessing that you are too young to have heard of party lines.
> But yes, telephones were public communication.
Unless I'm misunderstanding what party lines are… no they weren't. How would I listen to a conversation happening between two people outside of my local loop?
> Wishing the president would die of COVID would obviously be allowed under a platform scenario, what law do you think it breaks where a content provider wouldn't publish a wish that the president of the US dies of a disease?
This wasn't a hypothetical; it happened last week. Twitter announced it would suspend the accounts of people wishing the president would die, and the people who would go on to cry foul about the NY Post article were curiously quiet.
> Also, I don't think you know what the term agitprop means.
Yes I do.
Telephone calls are private; not public. There are two parties. It's literally against the law for other parties to attempt to become privy to those communications under most circumstances (wiretapping).
Please explain how something like HN works on the telephone.
>Not true, user generated content exists in print and it should be cheaper on the internet than in print.
User generated content does indeed exist in print, where the cost of printing and shipping that content are incumbent on the party that wishes to make their opinion known. When unsolicited or tiresome, we refer to this as junk mail or chain-letters.
Or it's a sign that Twitter and FB shouldn't be "major providers of information".
Yeah, it really does seem some times like what Section 230 abolitionists really want is better accomplished through antitrust law. Trying to use liability for unrelated torts as a lever to force sites not to moderate is a very indirect and messy way to get back at the major platforms while creating a lot of collateral damage for smaller sites.
On the other hand using communications regulation does sound kind of obvious when you use the telephone or previous net neutrality disputes as reference points. Although it is ironic that the current anti-NN FCC now wants to push for platform services in the name of neutrality.
Should conventional printing press owners be considered utilities because you might want to post a bunch of posters somewhere, and by refusing to print your posters they censor you?
The difference in the printing press analogy is that if a printing company won't print my poster, I can take it elsewhere.
You don't lose those for being too successful.
That isn't true for internet content providers due to section 230.
If internet publishers make active editorial decisions, they are also liable. Consider the new york times online.
I gave an example elsewhere that the owner of a physical bulletin board wouldn't be liable for posters on it, even if they occasionally came by and took down ones that they felt should be removed (for any reason).
Section 230 claims that internet sites are more like a physical bulletin board then a newspaper, in that they are remove-later, not review-first models. Aa such they deserve the same liability as physical remove-later systems: relatively few.
That's called false dichotomy.
And that’s different from present situation because…? We already have Twitter Prime (Twitter), as well as the constellation Twitters — Conservative Twitter (Parler), Nazi Twitter (Gab), [Niche Interest] Twitter (various Mastodon people instances), etc. We haven’t fundamentally changed anything; all we’ve done is move the moderation “problem” around a bit.
I think the actual escape hatch would be enabling users to filter content collaboratively in a way so that there is no entity in the system could be considered a commercial publisher. The platform providers only remove illegal content and the "not a publisher under the law" users do the community-interest moderation rather than corporate-interest moderation.
Of course some could still choose to play under publisher rules and allow user submissions, but that wold probably be much smaller scale if they want to be on the safe side and and pre-check things individually.
> like spam and porn.
I assume (without having checked) that filtering spam would still be allowed even under platform rules.
Sure, but that’s orthogonal. Let’s say for the sake of argument that all those things came true — business models changed, financial interests separated, etc — but from the users’ point of view, everything works exactly as it does today. Success?
> I think the actual escape hatch would be enabling users to filter content collaboratively
This exists today — shared block lists, etc — and it’s insufficient. There’s a reason that when Twitter announced that they would suspend the accounts of people hoping for Donald Trump to die of COVID, the response from people who often receive death threats was “you mean you could have been doing this the whole time?!”
> I assume (without having checked) that filtering spam would still be allowed even under platform rules.
What is spam? “I made $X from my couch”? Repeated links to my blog? Trolling conservative communities with liberal posts?
The problem with carving out exceptions to your ban on moderation is that it moves your complaint from “all censorship is bad” to “censorship of speech I don’t like is bad”.
That is a logically inconsistent outcome so I would expect nasal demons. But yes, it's probably a success because it means the social networks have less of an interest to and a legal reason not to influence content (maximizing engagement, removing content that harms their brand, conforming to the advertisers overton window, etc.).
> This exists today — shared block lists, etc — and it’s insufficient.
I agree that it's insufficient, because it's not first-party tooling that's designed to scale as well as the rest of the network. You can't propagate them in realtime, delegate moderation to trusted peers and so on.
> The problem with carving out exceptions to your ban on moderation is that it moves your complaint from “all censorship is bad” to “censorship of speech I don’t like is bad”.
That smells like a bogus argument to me, akin to complaining that net neutrality will make DoS prevention impossible. Aspects of spam are things being unsolicited and in bulk. But how much you need to do about it in the first place also depends on communication platform is structured in the first place. Do you see any unsolicited content without prompting for it or do there have to be some network edges between you and the spammer? If the latter, sever them, if enough people do that then the tree will fall in the forest and make no sound.
If your position is "never remove anything ever", you circumvent this. But when your position becomes, "actually, you can delete only spam, but nothing else" then you're back in the exact same situation we are currently in - some things are removed by judgement call and not everyone is going to agree on every judgement. It completely removes the very core of the argument - that judgement calls should be unnecessary or not allowed.
If you're suggesting crowd sourcing moderation in a democratic fashion, I would contend this both isn't effective and also that by providing systems that facilitate this, companies would be implicitly affecting the "censorship" of their platform. After all, someone has to decide what the voting algorithm is, what the chance of being a spammer before you are blocked is, etc.
I think that what is being suggested is that there be multiple, user-selectable, opt-in providers of crowd-sourced moderation services that are orthogonal to the unfiltered communication platform.
Something like the 3rd-party spam filtering services for blog comments or email.
I imagine, though, that a 3rd-party "view" of the Twitterverse would also be a Twitter client, have it's own web presence, and basically be a white-label version of Twitter. Twitter itself would be largely relegated to being a backend pipe that the different sites have in common for interoperability.
I can't imagine how these federated Twitter clones would themselves be able to provide a curated experience without running into the same liability problems.
The alternative is that these optional collaborative moderation services are somehow integrated into Twitter itself, which, while not impossible, poses some serious issues of combinatorial complexity, scalability, and sustainability.
Yes, we have federated services now, but the largest and most popular services are non-federated walled gardens.
Looking at your comments it seems like you at least agree that common carriers are subject to some laws.
Great! It seems like you agree with me that there are laws and things that common carriers have to do, and that there is content that they are required to carry some content.
I've specifically clarified that common carriers are subject to certain restrictions on what they can do, and am saying that those restrictions should apply to social media, with a law change.
> the current FCC
My specific claim is that the law should be changed such that they are subject to common carrier laws.
Social media companies are not currently subject to them, but I am saying that the law should be changed so that they are.
If you want to say that the law should be changed so that ISPs are subject to those as well, then go ahead and argue that, but that does not contradict what I am arguing for.
Anyway, I am just glad at this point that you agree that common carriers are subject to certain restrictions, which was my point the whole time. And I am saying that those same restrictions, that you agree exist, should be applied to social media companies, via a law change.
Provably, definitively wrong.
1. HN relies on the "platform" choice to avoid responsibility for 3rd party posts. HN also relies on operators like dang moderating at the server side.
2. The proposed model would prevent operators moderating at the server side, when the "platform" model was selected.
3. Historically, Usenet had workflow, content, and userbase similar to HN - multiuser, near-realtime threaded discussions with text and links, on technical & related subjects.
4. Usenet didn't rely on centralized moderation by the operators; instead the moderation was performed at the client side, by end users. This was entirely sufficient for the purpose. This was done partly in collaborative ways, with sharing of moderation tools & datafiles.
5. Certain groups were centrally moderated through middlemen; participation in those was optional, and content was explicitly submitted to moderation. Those were generally ran in parallel to similar unmoderated groups.
HN, and other fora, would do just fine as "platforms whose operators abstain from interfering in the flow of content", as informed by the historical precedent.
It irks me how quickly we forget the hard wrought lessons from the early internet.
w.r.t. your #5: how does 'participation in some groups is subject to moderation, but participation is optional' fit with the platform/publisher dichotomy?
No different from the present day centrally moderated platforms - whether Facebook, Twitter, or HN. There's significant amount of objectionable and even illegal content on Twitter. The central moderation is a figleaf over it.
>w.r.t. your #5: how does 'participation in some groups is subject to moderation, but participation is optional' fit with the platform/publisher dichotomy?
To re-emphasize: >>Certain groups were centrally moderated through middlemen; (participation in those was optional), and content was explicitly submitted to moderation.
Easily the key distinction is that the moderators weren't part of the platform. It was not the platform doing the moderating. It was pre-arranged users that were designated by the community to have a say who selects the best posts to then forward. It wasn't "this post breaks our ever-shifting rules"; it was "this post is good enough for me to to forward it to the list". The proverbial firewall separating the platform from the users doing the selection is the key distinction.
The closest modern analogy of how the moderated Usenet groups were is "a public-read, private-commit Git repo, with project heads accepting pull requests at their discretion".
Where "entirely sufficient" == put several newsadmins in jail; saw newsgroups collapse under huge amounts of spam; and left newsgroups vulnerable to obvious trolling.
Nah. This is just mendacity on behalf of the right wing of American culture that has changed their mind and decided that, yes, facts have to care about their feelings.
Moderation on the client side is a thing. It already is practiced on networks like Twitter and Mastodon. It was the historical model on Usenet too.
At this point you're just posting excuses for prolonging the monopoly of centralized moderation. The bogeyman of "the right wing of American culture" doesn't help, given how international the discourse of the subject is.
I do wonder.
I'm trying to assume good faith in your reply so let me point something out to you: the people who are wringing their hands about this used to bleat about shared block lists being used to get some semblance of value out of "client-side moderation" (which is not to say that it is successful at dealing with shitty actors, just that it's less unsuccessful, when you use them), just as they're bleating about this. Because the real beef here is not with Twitter Deciding, it's with Anyone Deciding that they are not entitled to the attention of anyone they demand it from.
But they lost re: shared block lists, and this is a retrenchment to attempt to keep relevance when they can, and should, lose this one too and be shown the door. If they want "unmoderated", there are platforms like Parler and Gab where they can have that. Relatedly, those platforms are full of literal-not-figurative fascists. I wonder why.
Are you claiming that the phone system does not work? Or that ISPs do not work?
I think that they work pretty well, even though there really is not much top down moderation.
> If they want "unmoderated"
Why can't we consider the phone network, or ISPs, which are successful examples of the kind of unmoderated approach, that people are asking for?
It’s a fundamentally different problem. If people use my phone company to have racist companies, I don’t have to know or care. Whereas if I had to deal with people saying racist shit every time I went on Twitter, I’d stop using it.
Consider also that most people’s biggest complaint with the phone system is a consequence of them not moderating, i.e. spam calls.
ISPs have to follow common carrier laws.
If social media platforms were subject to these same common carrier laws, then that is good enough for me.
That is what I mean by unmoderated. I mean, that they are following things such as common carrier laws, which have very significant requirements.
Firstly, you're wrong about that. This same FCC voted to remove ISPs from common carrier classification.
Also, what do you think common carrier means? It doesn't mean "completely unmoderated" as you appear to believe. As I already demonstrated, even common carriers perform network-layer moderation, since they provide the network layer. Social media provides the application layer, so why shouldn't they be allowed to perform moderation at the application layer?
Systems such as the phone network are pretty darn unmoderated. It is mostly unmoderated, even if common carriers are allowed to do a small amount, of highly restricted moderation actions.
> as you appear to believe
I have just clarified. It means that there are very strong regulations, that ban many forms of moderation.
> so why shouldn't they be allowed to perform moderation at the application layer?
I am saying that I would be fine if they were banned from doing most moderation actions, as is the case for common carriers.
And I am saying that I would be OK with them engaging in the very small amount of highly regulated moderation, that common carriers are allowed to do.
Common carriers have large restrictions on the amount of moderation that they are allowed to do. I want those same restrictions to apply to other media platforms.
Yeah, I don't think you know what common carrier actually means.[1]
The moderation that telecoms and ISPs perform relates to traffic that can negatively affect other users of those systems. Social media platforms can easily argue that their moderation already follows similar principles. It just happens that they deal with content, not raw bits, so they have to moderate content.
You also didn't address my other point, which is that ISPs aren't common carriers at all and this same FCC voted to make it so. So this seems pretty hypocritical behavior on their part.
Social media platforms are not currently subject to common carrier laws.
And I am saying that the law should be changed so that they are, or whatever needs it be done to make that happen.
Common carriers are absolutely restricted from engaging in certain actions.
Were you not aware that there are regulations that restrict what common carriers do?
Do you disagree that common carriers are subject to certain restrictions?
I am not sure how you could possibly not recognize the fact that we have common carrier laws.
> You're repeating the same things
You are misphrasing the things that I am trying to say, so I have to slightly rephrase it so that you cannot misinterprete my statements.
Re client side moderation, it's possible that users can be educated about effective approaches. Just like they started warming the non-geeks about email with hollywood films (You've Got Mail, 1998), and I'm sure there must have been similar sort of concerted media efforts for older technology. Automobiles, for example. I -bet- we can dig up content (old films) that basically were teaching the American public how to use cars using movies.
Given the inherently democratic aspect of client-side filterings, and serious inherent political concerns with centralized moderation, it seems wrong to give up on the idea simply because the avant garde generation on internet (using mostly antique kludgy UI/UX, btw) had problems with it.
We can fix client side moderation with education. It is a transitory issue, only.
Centralized moderation is inherently problematic for public platforms. (I have no issues with private, members only, platforms opting for centralized moderation.)
If you're being legit with your post, you're falling for a tremendous okeydoke here on the part of people who wish to do civil society harm. Literally all this approach accomplishes, literally and exclusively and without exception all it does, is cede the public square to people who want to export misery or deal with the exporters of misery--a vanishingly small fraction of the decent people out there. We can and must be better and that means that no, we are under no obligation to waste time or resources on people who were never socially potty-trained.
A facade of politeness & shaming, a reality of censorious rules. The encroach was slow, almost imperceptible, but here we are at last. The current state of the Twitter rules is impacting investigative journalism. Internationally recognized journalist Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept explains:
Look carefully at what Twitter is saying to justify censoring the Biden story. If applied consistently, it’d mean that some of history’s most consequential journalism — the Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks’ war logs, Snowden docs, Panama Papers, our Brazil Archive — would be banned. [1]
Ceding the full power to the platforms has failed us.
--
[1] https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1316720230450724864
> you're falling for ..
You seem to think that you know a lot about me. Let me gently suggest that possibly your technical imagination is failing to show you alternatives that solves all these issues.
So, actually, it is not a case of falling for anything, rather waiting since 1996 for someone else to start discussing having social models for networked virtual spaces.
> If you're being legit with your post
And why would I be otherwise? I found that quite offensive, and entirely un-necessary.
It's not a UI/UX problem. It's a "you are offloading moderation to the end user" problem--it is a fundamental failure of the approach. If you are going to put all of the work of moderation on the end user, regardless of whether you dress it up as "shared moderation" or whatever, the end user is going to leave and cede the floor to those who want to dominate the public discourse with sewage and crud and threats because the end user has a life to live and things to do with their day. There is a fundamental human cost to being exposed to the kind of garbage that Twitter et al filter out on the regular. It takes a toll on the psyche. It will drive people away. And that's not a "but muh engagement" for whoever's metrics and KPIs are involved--it is a realization that this is now the public square and ceding it to actively anti-civil movements is bad for liberalized society in general.
If there's a failing of technical imagination on my part, fine. There strongly seems to be a failing of appreciation of how modern supremacist movements operate on yours. This is not a technical problem, this is a human problem. It's a question of whether the psychic damage inflicted upon bystanders by constant and unending exposure (because that is, genuinely, what the end state here is) is worth whatever hypothetical benefit is realized by giving these parties a place from which to abuse others until they definitely, yessir, are blocked by all of them and never, ever seek to get around it to continue their abuse.
> And why would I be otherwise?
Speaking frankly? Because this discussion is dominated by bad-faith types whose axe to grind is really that there's a movement against their favorite flavors of supremacism and they generally use arguments like the one you're putting forth as retrenchment now that the tide has turned against them. If that isn't your bag, I appreciate that; I think you're incorrect, but that's separate from disingenuous.
> There strongly seems to be a failing of appreciation of how modern supremacist movements operate on yours.
Well, the internet gifted to us, with its flat namespace and the inevitable conflation of user identity with device identity, [empowers] bad actors. I alluded to this.
Anyway, your examples are unconvincing. Twitter is primarily moderated by server-side spam and abuse prevention tools. The other two are both far smaller, and don't exactly do a great job at content moderation.
That’s seems bad.
Example: I want to set up a forum where people can discuss a specific topic. Such as the Arch Linux forum, or ones for vehicles (https://www.ninja400riders.com/, https://www.civicx.com/forum/). I am clearly not a publisher; I do produce content and do not want to produce content. So I am a platform.
Am I no longer allowed to decide what is acceptable on my platform? Even if I am running a forum about the Ninja 400 motorcycle, I now have to allow people to post about their Toyota Corolla or about how vaccines cause autism or the earth is flat? What about if I want to moderate the forum to keep discussion on topic and I need to delete trolling or spam, or lock/delete threads that devolve into political fighting among forum members?
You can't have platforms without moderation.
If I'd have to be non-profit (which doesn't mean no ads, by the way), then this kills a lot of business models.
A darkly amusing solution to Eternal September.
The cell phone network is a platform and it has no moderation.
If you want to decide what is acceptable content, you're not a platform, you're a publisher. A stated rationale for protecting internet platform providers was to provide true diversity of political discourse. It wasn't to make it easy to run a forum for Ninja 400 motorcycle fans.
You want to moderate content, fine, you're a publisher and you should be liable for the content you publish. The same way you would be if you published that content as a newspaper or magazine instead of over the internet.
Citation needed.
The most prominent case that led to the passage of section 230 was the decision in Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co. which had nothing to do with politics.
To be clear, it's not fair to classify them as publishers. Newspapers and magazines are not mediums of discussions like forums are, they're compilers of articles that people spend days to write and submit for approval.
To use an offline metaphor, forums are like clubs where people meetup in a room and have informal discussions about the topic of the club. Such clubs often have someone acting as a moderator, since if discussions derail from the club topic then the host of the club will become disinterested, as well as potential newcomers who have an interest in the club topic.
In my opinion, if a club must be classified as either a "platform" or a "publisher", I think the word "platform" fits better. However, you consider platforms as being limited to communication mediums like postal mail and phone networks. If that's the case, then I think clubs classify as neither.
I think they should have to decide on which they one want to be, and I think platforms should have greater protection against liability than publishers.
If you want unmoderated communities, they exist. Go use them. Stop trying to destroy the concept of moderated communities. (Removing the liability shield would be tantamount to destroying such communities.)
Some people want the audience of moderated communities, but they don't want the standards of those communities. There's a reason unmoderated communities have fewer (and different) users.
And what about when the want to block content because they believe in an objective reality?
No they don't, because section 230 does not require them to. It does not even contain the word "platform".
You keep saying that as though it's a fact or a law when it's only an opinion. You should stop doing that.
In pre-section 230 law, even blocking content for vulgarity was enough to get you treated as a publisher, that decision was Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co.
Eugene Volokh has a good summary of this at https://reason.com/2020/05/28/47-u-s-c-%C2%A7-230-and-the-pu.... You might want to read it so you don't make completely uninformed statements on the internet. You should stop doing that.
The key point here is "in pre-section 230 law". Prodigy Services was one the cases that prompted Congress to pass Section 230. Why cite outdated cases to try to prove your point? What's next, Dred Scott v. Sandford?
That’s fine — but it makes you a publisher, not a platform.
Forums are typically about back and forth communication among community members that does not match the business practice of publishing an anthology or how anthologies typical work.
It started with simply getting your platform/publisher license(so they can make you take down illegal content, save the kids), now Turkey dictates your content depending on your internet business.
Just few days ago Spotify was forced to get a license and establish a contact(probably because of the podcasts, will see), recently Netflix was forced to cancel a tv show because of a LGBT character, remove other shows and so on. They are trying to get their grip on Youtube to regulate it like a TV. Booking.com & Paypal are gone since years due to licensing.
As soon as you have your definitions somebody will have to make sure that you are acting accordingly, so rules for the publishers and licensing For the platforms to control the publishers will follow.
With the everything happening, that’s the feature for everyone and let me tell you, it’s not fun.
With the phone company it’s impractical to listen to every conversation and “eliminate the threats”, it is practical with the internet.
EU wants upload filters(stop singing “happy birthday” to your friend, that needs lives), UK want porn and crypto control(no dirty talk on the phone, no secretive talks, must speak load and clear). Turkey wants to control the narrative(An operator jumps in your phone conversation to correct you or stop you talking).
I am sure That US, Canada, Norway , Iran, India etc all have their own agenda too and would loved to control your phone conversations.
As for the liability, it’s already here. A lot of people are serving time or paying damages for the things they did on the internet. The new stuff is to make it controllable at scale.
This is not true. In fact, the document you are thinking of explicitly states that its application shall not lead to any general monitoring obligation.
The goal would be to put significant, very large restictions on their ability to moderate.
> There are already forums with “zero” moderation
How about we look at other examples of communication platforms, that are working perfectly fine.
Just take a look at the phone network, or ISPs.
ISPs and phone networks, have very little "moderation" from the parent company, and yet seem to work pretty well, IMO.
Why can't we treat other communication platforms, the same way that we are treating the large and successful communication platform, which is the phone network?
It’s weird to be having this argument on one of the very forums that benefits from 230. Do you think HN would be a better place if it were forbidden from moderating content? Were you here before dang came along? Can you imagine how much spam gets deleted before we see it and how unusable it would be if it didn’t?
And not for nothing but I wish my phone company would do an better job of moderating the junk calls and spam texts I get.
But set the phone company metaphor aside: I still don’t understand what outcome you want for social media. How do you imagine it will look? Or is this actually intended to put them all out of business? If so, taking down every comment section and discussion board seems like a lot of collateral damage.
Because it is a platform? I don't see a problem with enforcing neutrality on platforms, in the same way that I don't see a problem with enforcing it on my phone company, or my ISP.
> Do you think HN would be a better place
I think the old school reddit model is a reasonable goal to aim for for these types of platforms.
(yes reddit has taken down some communities as of late, but lets assume that this didn't happen, to clarify the example)
IE, delegating moderation to users, but allowing communities in general to be created, with their own sets of rules, feels pretty fair and neutral.
> I still don’t understand what outcome you want for social media. How do you imagine it will look?
The model would be that any form of "moderation" on non-illegal content would be driven entirely by users, or communities of users.
IE, we can still allow people to do things like have shared block lists, or even curated communities within that platform, as long as other users are also able to create their own communities on that platform, that ignore those sets of rules.
Users could still make the choice to have certain rules, or moderation, if that is what they want.
Or, in other words, the reddit model, but without reddit removing non-illegal communities (which, to be fair, doesn't happen that often on reddit anyway. Reddit still mostly tries to be neutral, and they do an ok job with it)
EX: if a user doesn't want to see NSFW stuff, or trolling, or "misinformation", or any other offensive content, then there could be general categories, that describe those things, and the user can have that as a setting to not see that stuff.
Let me go out on a limb here and say that no-one is going onto Facebook looking to find misinformation. They may be looking for stories that appeal to their prejudices and be willing to suspend disbelief for those stories.
But no-one is going to tick the box saying "please show me stuff that is actually definitively false, and potentially dangerous to my person".
So the problem will simply move along to how the "misinformation" tag is being applied and the biases at play there.
Completely disagree. I would absolutely tick that box, as would many other people, specifically because we don't necessarily automatically trust whatever authority is "deciding" what is misinformation or not.
Instead, I would prefer to research an issue, by looking at multiple sides, and make a judgement, as opposed to having some minister of truth controlling what I am or am not allowed to read.
> is being applied and the biases at play there.
But the point is, that if you don't trust a certain group or source's opinion on what "misinformation" is, then you could choose a different authority on that.
IE, the tags for what is or is not "misinformation", would be community controlled, and you could pick which community or group to use as the "source" for this tag.
“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.” - Sam Adams
You want to propose a law that regulates Facebook let’s talk about that directly.
Another analogy: if you are a for-profit business, do not claim Charity status. It is criminal if you do.
Just the opposite. Companies unwillingness to intervene did so. Your opinion may be different, but it's nothing more, and suggesting we deny people their civil liberties based on your hunch is a dangerous line of thinking.
Are you saying that a special immunity from prosecution, granted to particular businesses, is a civil liberty?
Or is this some kind of “freedom from being offended/misinformed” newspeak?
I can’t think of another interpretation where what I am proposing does anything but preserve civil liberties.
I think that moderation is a consequence of the rights to speech and association. The ability to choose what content you host, and whose content you host, is a consequence of those rights.
Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, whomever, cannot violate your civil liberties. Only the government can do that. And when they pass laws that, de facto, restrict the ability of companies to associate and speak freely, they restrict those essential liberties.
Section 230 ensured civil liberties, both Facebook's, and yours, and mine. It means that anyone who wants to can create a website for broadcasting and discussion q-anon conspiracies theories, and they can ban anyone who chooses to disagree. But just the same, I can prevent those people from posting things on my website.
The right to speech does not mean that you are also immune from libel laws. That’s the controversial part, Facebook enjoys both the rights (plus consequences), and a special immunity under Section 230 that does not apply to any other kind of speech.
> And when they pass laws that, de facto, restrict the ability of companies to associate and speak freely, they restrict those essential liberties.
Do you think that being banned from Facebook does not also restrict an individual’s ability to associate and speak freely, in 2020?
> Section 230 ensured civil liberties, both Facebook's, and yours, and mine.
I’m sure lawmakers are hearing this exact line from lobbyists, but it rings hollow. One of those is clearly not like the others, and perhaps the law should favor “yours and mine”.
It does not affect their civil liberties, no.
> One of those is clearly not like the others, and perhaps the law should favor “yours and mine”.
Section 230 does. And repealing it would harm them.
> The right to speech does not mean that you are also immune from libel laws.
Correct. And if we were discussing writing section 230, that would be valid. But we aren't. We're discussing changing established law. And if the reason to change the law is to restrict civil liberties that at protected by the first amendment, you encounter a constitutional problem.
Much as some laws are unconstitutional to enforce, I simply argue that some are unconstitutional to ignore.
If you want to imagine the negative impacts of such a change, a forum on baking could no longer remove content that was not related to baking without being liable for content posted by users.
As far as I know, the owner of a physical bulletin board isn't responsible if I post a libelous poster on it. Why should a virtual bulletin board be any different?
If they are not a neutral platform, they cannot claim shields of section 230.
It is like for a business that hides money in a Organization with a Charity status. We would have that business facing criminal charges in no time.
Why the execs of these platforms demand something different ?
So is a 'for-profit business' is a perfectly fine thing. But having a for-profit business using tax code for a non-profit charity -- would be criminal.
So why does 230 or other shields apply to Twitter or HN or FB?
My point I think more that a social networking company can apply crowdsourced or individual editorialization to political speech. And that application can also be biased, selective and therefore unfair.
It is ok that these companies might do that, but not OK to hide under shields meant for the companies that do not do that (like ISPs)
What shields? What kind of consequences do you imagine these sites should face for biased content moderation?
I get multiple, unsolicited phone calls a day from spoofed phone numbers. I consider the phone network mostly useless.
Why is your content okay, but mine isn't?
(I kid, but I think it gets at the biggest flaw in reasoning of people who think there is an objective distinction between political speech and spam.)
Color me unsurprised that the end game of the nominally pro–free speech crowd is letting the government determine what legal speech should be censored.
1. Even if the courts always get it right, small sites are not going to want to want to hire a lawyer and go to court to defend someone else's speech. They will instead err on the side of caution (as many do now for DMCA violations), causing a chilling effect on speech.
2. In a system where whether a platform is liable for its content is ultimately decided by courts we cede a lot of power over speech to the government.
I really don't think the courts are the path we want to take.
As courts set precedents, the process will become more streamlined. Ultimately becoming codified into law by congress.
Seems like a lot of the people decrying the behavior of the social media sites here are just asking for a censorship regime controlled by them instead of the site itself. Which we already have a mechanism for: go found your own.
So let’s not mess with a law bedrock to the participatory part of the internet. Gutting 230 to get Facebook misunderstands the problem and will have horrible unintended consequences.
It is not designed to do so.
Some politicians have become fixated on Section 230 as a remedy to what they feel is an injustice centered around these massive platforms, when what 230 mostly does is allow hundreds of thousands of small websites to operate without fear of legal liability for every single user comment, whether or not they do basic spam-filtering.
A solution exactly designed to make Facebook and Twitter less profitable would not touch the hundreds of thousands of other websites that gutting 230 would suddenly expose to liability. It would be much more tailored and specific to its purpose.
The solution is very simple. Remove section 230 specifically for recommendations. Which IMO makes sense, people perceive "More like X" or more explicitly "You might also like X" as tacit endorsement.
The algorithms ARE moderation, of sorts.
Better yet, something like Aether, where everybody can moderate for their own feed, and any user can designate any other user or group of users as their moderators to get a curated feed with no effort of their own.
Okay, I'll bite. Should newspapers be liable (that is, able to be sued) for a letter to the editor they publish? How about a comment someone leaves on their website?
Why shouldn't they? If the letter is libelous, then they're responsible for distributing it to a larger audience.
Printing a letter to the editor isn't authoring it, after all. The newspaper is exercising some editorial control in that letters to the editor are not all printed, but it isn't endorsement per-se, just a judgement that there is some public interest in making it available. Any liability for libel should surely lie with the letter's author rather than the newspaper.
I also note that you ignored the latter half of my question.
In case you weren't aware, the answer, currently, to the second half of your question, is that they aren't liable for a website comment, due to section 230.
As for the first half of your question, the newspaper affirmatively chooses to publish the letter. That's where they get the liability. The website does not, it simply fails to censor it.
IIUC they actually aren't responsible for that since they didn't write or publish it.
It is like having a for-profit business hiding under a non-profit tax umbrella.
If HN cannot figure out now to avoid editoralization of polical opinions (either by crowdsource or moderators), then do not allow political content. If HN wants to allow political content, and wants to allow the edtorialization function -- then do not hide behind 'neutral platform'.
That sounds nice and easy until you start thinking about it for any length of time. The biggest problem might be who gets to decide what is illegal. This needs to be figured out in both a theoretical and practical sense.
On the theoretical side does Twitter allow Holocaust denial which is legal in the US but illegal in much of Europe? Does the US get to impose its views of free speech on the world? Does every jurisdiction get a different version of the site?
On the practical side, what happens when the legality of something is up for debate? Maybe an image is revenge porn or maybe it is perfectly legal porn. Maybe a movie clip is a copyright violation and maybe it is fair use. Does Twitter take down that content as soon as there is a complaint? Does it have to wait for some legal action to start or finish? What is the recourse if something is taken down and later found to be legal content?
We have the DMCA to cover this... however it's currently an extremely broken process. While there is a penalty codified for making claim to something you don't own, it is never enforced. That part of it needs to change and the regulation should then act in the manner it was designed to.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
Whats being talked about here is stripping the assumption that twitter is acting in good faith, and therefore removing the protection they get from this section.
Under current law, companies are free to - specifically encouraged to - moderate and delete content as much as they want, while they are also immunized from being treated as the publisher of that content and immunized from any liability for that moderation and deletion of content.
In fact, if you read Section 230 in its entirety, you can see that it is intended to encourage moderation of content based on what the provider considers to be objectionable.
That would eliminate HN, Reddit, basically anywhere with a moderated forum. How do you run a site like Ravelry (knitting/crafting site) with a rule like that?
Under your idea, the reddit would consist of "News Sites" and "4chan". (Actually even 4chan does some moderation).
There's no way that would be acceptable.
What can I do? They’re not saying anything illegal. If I delete the spam or add some sort of filter, I’m now a “publisher” and liable for every comment my readers make. But if I leave them up, my readers will be frustrated that they can’t have a real discussion.
So I don’t have comments. I really want discussions with my readers, but it’s just not worth the risk.
Now imagine this happening to every website. Every community. Hacker News as we know it wouldn’t exist — probably no voting and certainly no moderation. The whole Internet would turn into a cesspool of spam and flame wars. Many apps wouldn’t even exist in the first place.
All because we decided to enforce this entirely arbitrary “publisher vs. platform” dichotomy.
What you are saying about platforms should apply to utilities (ISPs, possible PaaS like AWS), which is where net neutrality comes in. ISPs shouldn't block stuff they or the government doesn't like, slow it down, or otherwise interfere with traffic.
ISPs evolved from “online service providers” which themselves evolved from “bulletin board systems”, and if you consider an ISP to be a utility today, then there was a point where that kind of service became a utility.
It is technically quite trivial to clone the basic functionality of Twitter and run a competing service. This has been done semi-sucessfully with Gab (not endorsing that community, but it is a good example), for example. People choose social media services based on their perceived value, social prestige, etc. There's no equivalent to "I have to use Twitter because they own the lines to the house/they have the only 5G coverage in my area/they are the only company licensed by my city." Twitter is not the only physically possible way to publish short messages to the world (unless the ISPs ruin that now that net neutrality is gone).
Why should we assume that a global content management and delivery network, broadcasting 500 million messages every day, is trivially replaceable? The fact is nothing has even come close to replacing it.
Indeed, it seems that just as there are natural monopolies over physically exclusive infrastructure like roads and cables, there are natural monopolies over network effects and attention/mindshare.
Twitter is popular because people choose to use it, but they have the choice to use other services, or to attempt to create one, and compete with the current popular one, the difficulty of succeeding in the field doesn't change if it is a monopoly (unless of course the service provider can suppress any competitor from entering the market.)
Was MySpace a monopoly? it dominated social media at its peak, and not has been completely surpassed.
Yes Myspace was a monopoly until Facebook opened to tbe public because it was the only way a bunch of people were willing to communicate for a while.
And My Space wasn't a monopoly, there was a parade of social networking sites of various popularity and success starting with bolt in the late 90s and most directly before MySpace was Friendster.
Compare these applications, to say power companies, or ISPs in much of the US. The difference is really clear.
> Firstly Microsoft monopoly got thrown out because of unethical behavior of the judge (which is why there isn't two Microsoft entities today. The whole thing hinged on "Microsoft installed its browser by default which gave it an unfair advantage." To allow the DOJ to save face, Microsoft agreed to make it easier to install other browsers.
Nothing was 'thrown out', rather the penalty was changed after the higher court issued a ruling that actually changed the liability implications for MS, which allowed MS to negotiate a lesser judgement. Findings of fact and the ruling were not overthrown, despite questions about judge Jackson's impartiality.
Beyond that, the US was not the only jurisdiction in which Microsoft was taken to court and found guilty of monopolistic practices. "DOJ" is meaningless in courts outside the US, so your statement doesn't even make logical sense as a component of your argument.
Second - you seem to be standing behind a single dictionary definition for what constitutes a monopoly. That's fine when discussing certain technicalities in abstraction, but completely ignores the fact that the dictionary definition is meaningless in terms of law. A monopoly can absolutely exist even in the presence of competitive options, and that is very clearly laid out in many ways in various laws and legal precedents. The Sherman Act* alone has very clear statements about this, and absolutely contradicts what you are saying. Monopolistic behavior is about controlling the market and/or using market/industry dominance to prevent or stifle competition. It is not about the sheer absence of competition.
* https://www.justice.gov/atr/competition-and-monopoly-single-...
No, it didn't.
The remedy (not the finding of monopoly and abuse of that monopoly) got sent back by a higher court for new proceedings, and then due to a change in Administration to one friendlier to (and, coincidentally, heavily supported by) Microsoft, the government stopped seeking breakup as a remedy while the new proceedings were pending, and a far weaker remedy was mutually negotiated as a settlement.
"The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Judge Jackson's rulings against Microsoft. This was partly because the appellate court had adopted a "drastically altered scope of liability" under which the remedies could be taken, and also partly due to the embargoed interviews Judge Jackson had given to the news media while he was still hearing the case, in violation of the Code of Conduct for US Judges.[24] Judge Jackson did not attend the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals hearing, in which the appeals court judges accused him of unethical conduct and determined he should have recused himself from the case"
Survey a hundred small publishers, and ask them whether their use of Twitter is a choice.
It is absolutely a choice.
> It is technically quite trivial to clone the basic functionality of Twitter and run a competing service. This has been done semi-sucessfully with Gab (not endorsing that community, but it is a good example), for example. People choose social media services based on their perceived value, social prestige, etc.
It is quite simple to create software that mimics Twitter, sure. It is very, very hard to create a platform like Twitter. That further reinforces it as a natural monopoly to me. You can even look at how the companies rise and fall; typically if the incumbent fails, they do so entirely, and the new competitor eats all of their lunch (i.e. MySpace and Facebook, Digg/Slashdot/Reddit, etc). There are very rarely situations where a new competitor comes and splits the market share; they either take it all, or they get none.
> There's no equivalent to "I have to use Twitter because they own the lines to the house/they have the only 5G coverage in my area/they are the only company licensed by my city."
There absolutely is. "I have to use Twitter because that's where everyone I want to talk to is, and they don't allow any interoperation with other social networks." It's fundamentally the same thing, and treating them like a utility would involve forcing them to treat their platform like utility poles. They can charge a fee to the other companies that interoperate to recoup their costs and get some profit, but they have to allow the interoperation.
But that aside (and I think she's using "utility" in a slightly different way), I think it would be a huge mistake to say that our approach is to regulate Twitter (and Facebook, and so forth) as is. That just cements their oligopoly: either your regulation calls out these companies by name (and therefore needs to ensure they retain power to work), or it imposes a regulatory burden which makes it even harder for competitors to replace them. This would be a serious unforced error for people who think that Big Tech is run by their political/ideological opponents. It would also be a practical disaster (imagine government-regulated Twitter spam detection), and IMO it would reflect an abandonment of the ideal of liberty. Rather than providing some structural reason why we need to regulate Twitter, we'd be regulating them baed on their effects - that they did something we don't like, and we don't know how to stop it other than telling them to not do it. It feels like it violates the spirit (though probably not the letter) of the constitutional ban on bills of attainder.
A sibling comment points out the "natural monopoly" argument for regulating ISPs as utilities. That's an argument on structure (there can only be so many ISPs and there's a huge up-front cost to becoming competitive), not effect, and in fact the argument for Net Neutrality was that companies could act in unwanted ways in the future, not that they did.
Our fundamental model for Twitter should be that it's just a company, and it could be replaced by some other company, and if we think that's infeasible, that's the bug in the market that we should fix. We should not resign ourselves to some government-guided-Twitter monstrosity - either you get regulatory capture or you get a private company whose product priorities swing with every election. My personal thesis here is that Twitter is simply too big, and that companies should be barred from growing beyond a certain size (of revenue, employees, or some similar measure). We can break them up like we broke up the trusts of old, and in fact like the trusts of old, they'll probably generate more GDP broken up - without the giant incumbent distorting the market, there's a more meaningful and direct profit motive on each resulting piece as well as more room for innovation by new companies, and therefore more general room for economic growth. That would be regulating the structure of the market in a generic way, and it would specifically regulate it in a way that promotes the ability of the non-government parts of society to have primary responsibility in shaping society.
There is an alternative political model where the government is closely involved in making sure that social media is run in a way that promotes the society the people want (in the government's opinion). WeChat and Weibo run under this model. That model seems to be unpopular in the US (I recall something recently about trying to ban WeChat), and I hope we don't decide that they had it right all along.
This is an interesting subject!
But I think if private individuals (again, including business) don't want to do that, they shouldn't be compelled to! No law makes an email provider use SMTP; they do it because the industry / the market has settled on it.
(Imagine if nobody could use STARTTLS until it got approved by the government!)
Twitter is running a product, which includes broadcast communication as a component, yes, but also includes lots of other components: the idea that the product is structured as short messages with "retweets" and "likes" (distinct from Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, email, etc.), limitations on message size, the idea of "Verified" and the choice of whom to verify, the discovery page and curation, showing "Who to follow" and curation of that, the data model of threading, the whole concept of hashtags, a "Home" view where the timeline goes sideways, images and video and audio and alt text and link previews, encrypting traffic to their site, not encrypting DMs, etc. And part of their product is determining what their rules are about what's on-topic and what's off-topic (whether you count it as spam or as harassment or as whatever else).
Absent a compelling reason otherwise, I don't think the government should be in charge of any of those decisions. I don't agree with all of those, and I certainly don't think it's impossible for them to make better-in-my-opinion decisions. But that's not for me to decide, nor is it for the FCC to decide.
Come to think of it, that's probably the underlying principle behind the US (and many other countries') political philosophy: the default is that choices are in the hands of individuals, including groups of individuals who make a company, and the government overriding that is an exceptional case that requires a strong justification. It's not the only model - monarchies and authoritarian states follow the approach that everything is in the hands of the ruler / the party, and liberty is granted as an exception when there's an argument for it.
In this context it is not at all that “government should be in charge of these decisions”, it is entirely that Twitter’s privileged status should be questioned, given the amount of control they are exercising over the amount of content they distribute.
Put another way: AT&T should not be liable for what I publish on my personal website, but if they were dropping packets from my server because of a “content policy” then I would think differently!
That’s not quite true — Section 230 protects all platforms from liability for content produced by third parties. You enjoy that exact same immunity for comments others post on your personal website. And conversely, Twitter does not enjoy immunity for content that they themselves produce, such as descriptions of trending topics.
Exactly. If the law is not changed, any challenge would hinge on the court defining their curation process as an act of production. It may not be as far-fetched as you think: DJ Shadow can copyright a song made entirely from snippets of other recorded music.
For the record, I think the law should be changed. Twitter is categorically different from a small/personal website. You could argue that it is a natural monopoly.
Any challenge to what? I don’t understand what you’re proposing here. Even if Section 230 were repealed, Twitter would be perfectly free to e.g. censor all conservative content. The issue is that by doing so, they might be liable for unrelated content they allow that ends up being defamatory.
> Twitter is categorically different from a small/personal website. You could argue that it is a natural monopoly.
This would be a hard argument to make. There are hundreds of competing social networking communities, some of which are even bigger!
In general, corporations are artificial entities that are established by society via laws that it enacts. They don't even have a natural right to exist, much less a right to operate without any constraints. This is very different from real persons.
I think that will solve the problem.
Today, HN or Twitter can, selectively, diminish visibility of pro-conservative content and posts, while not applying the same scrutiny to the other side.
They can sit there and claim neutrality, ask for 'evidence' and so on.
But really, they are the ones that should be convincing courts that they were not partial, biased or selective in applying their Terms of Use.
I’m surprised they found a reason to act like this when the conservatives are in power.
Clearly, that's legal. But if I'm running a platform, I should be able to hide/downrank/shadowban/censor it based on what sort of community I'm trying to build. In a kid-oriented venue, it's inappropriate. In a recovering alcoholics group it's harmful/malicious. In a tech forum, it's low value.
If you went to a school, an AA meeting, or a tech conference and talked about beer overbearingly, you'd be asked to leave the venue, and that would be their right.
As onerous as it is to have legitimate, authentic speech banned from a popular platform, the alternative of allowing all speech effectively creates a worthless noise chamber dominated by bad actors.
If I have a platform for selling say automobiles, and people keep trying to sell kitchenware of something equally not off brand. Removing that content doesn't make you a publisher, it makes you a steward of the purpose of a platform.
The idea that moderation or cultivation of a platform, sudden makes you a "publisher" (which is frankly a term that shouldn't even be used in this case as it is too narrow for the web is) makes no sense.
This is, a bullshit threat to try and assert control over platforms that people interact on by the government. It isn't needed, and is likely to be harmful.
Anyway, if you don't want to use Twitter (just to read an image of a real document)... The link to Ajit Pai's comment is https://www.fcc.gov/document/chairman-pai-statement-section-... where you can view it as a DOCX, PDF, or glorious TXT.
If you are upset by Ajit Pai's actions or Twitter's, here's the RSS feed(s) alternative for the FCC: https://www.fcc.gov/news-events/rss-feeds-and-email-updates-...
Genuine question: what would that be exactly?
I agree that government shouldn't only use private sector communication channels as the primary channel.
From a quick Google search: Canada has a National Public Alerting System (NPAS) which provides emergency management organizations across the country with the capability to rapidly warn the public of imminent or unfolding hazards to life. Public alerts are issued through radio, cable and satellite television and on compatible wireless devices
Think of the emergency weather alert radio broadcast channels as a form of primitive public API. We need something like that but over the Internet.
I work on digital displays and I would like to help spread awareness when alerts occur. It is an incredibly complex process, made for big telecommunication companies.
A public API could save lives. You can't even ask them to send you a SMS on Twillio and make an API yourself. They send it through telecommunication networks, not by sending SMS to everybody.
It would be nice to tap into the Amber or Silver (old folks in danger) alert system.
You could easily imagine a flipped situation where people were trying to add regulation to get the same final effect.
I suspect most people think more holistically about regulation than that. Being afraid of being sued and the results of those of those cases being enforced by the government certainly could be interpreted as “bigger government”/more regulation.
In a semantic sense, deregulation is the same thing as removing laws. De = remove, regulation = regulation. But what de-regulation really means is "the reduction or elimination of government power in a particular industry".
In this case, this law is basically an exemption. Putting the merits or validity of that exemption aside, if you remove the law, you're increasing the power the government has rather than reducing it. The courts now have the power over tech companies to enforce laws that make the tech companies responsible for what is posted on their platform.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
EFF's view: https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230
https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/4/13/17172762/fosta-sesta-b...
Women and children were kidnapped, drugged, and raped. Sex with these women and children was offered to paying men via ads in Backpage.
When some of these women escaped they noticed their images were still being used in these ads. They tried to i) get Backpage to stop using these images of them being raped (sometimes of them as children being raped) and ii) get Backpage to take more corporate responsibility about taking adverts from traffickers.
For some reason people seem to think this is about people who chose to sex work. It isn't. It's about people who were forced into it.
Backpage declined to take down the images, and declined to stop taking ads. They then made it easier for people to place those ads; they helped people evade law enforcement; they gave people advice about what language to use when placing those ads.
They got away with it because S230 means they're not responsible for what their users do, even though they're coaching their users about how to evade law enforcement.
I wonder if this is the natural extension of the two political teams talking past one another instead of working together. There's no way such legislation would pass the House right now, so instead they're just playing pretend on their own.
What are the possible results here? Finding sympathetic (ie corrupt) courts that will straight up ignore what the law says and defer to the executive's decrees? Or just directly ordering those federal goon squads to physically take over Twitter et al?
I don't want to deny the possibility that such fascist takeovers could happen. They just seem unlikely, compared to gross ineptitude leading to a lack of any results.
We have a new standard for how much such technicalities as separation of power matter in America, better get used to it. It's not like Democrats will fix all that even if they sweep the election, they'll just sit on their hands as usual.
> This traditional reading of the Commerce Clause was later disavowed by the Court, which after threats from Roosevelt began to read congressional power more expansively in this area, in cases such as NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp.[8] However, more recent cases such as United States v. Lopez[9] perhaps signal a growing inclination in the Court to once again affirm limits on its scope. In a unanimous 2011 decision, Bond v. United States, the Supreme Court cited Schechter as a precedent.[10]
Basically, Congress passes laws that grant powers to the Executive to ... execute .. the law and enforce it. These laws instruct the Executive Branch to write administrative policy which is then enforced -- this is the reason, for instance, that the Department of Education could unilaterally rescind the Obama era "Dear Colleague" letter.
The laws that are passed, including Section 230 and the rest of the DMCA, grant the Administration broad powers to write policy from the law in places where the law is insufficiently defined. This is why the Section II/Section III reclassification (called "Net Neutrality" by its proponents, though the actual "Neutrality" is of course controversial) could be done unilaterally by Pai and it's the same reason that the FCC is open to re-interpret the law as written in order to write administrative policy.
If Congress doesn't like the new policy, they can pass a new law that better defines the Executive's role in enforcing their law.
Section 230 is not such a law. It creates a civil liability shield for interactive computer services and states who that applies to and how it is to be used. There is nothing in it for the Executive to execute. It is only executed when someone raises it as a defense in a court case, and it is the judiciary that decide what it means.
The FCC can interpret it all they want, but that interpretation will be at best persuasive authority in any court case involving the application of 230.
Right, and the limits of that liability shield are not well enough defined in the law so the policy must define the limits until Congress acts to clarify the law. Hence the rulemaking.
Facebook and Twitter's actions yesterday and the controversy over the role of 230 make the lack of clarity apparent.
If Congress doesn't like the new administrative policy, allow them to clarify.
Can you give an example limit you're imagining that would pass muster? To me
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected
doesn't leave much to the imagination, and AFAIK courts have consistently backed that up.
If Congress does not so delegate such authority, interpreting the law is solely the job of the courts. They did not delegate such authority for section 230.
Agencies do not get to just look at any random law that is outside the are they were given power over, decide it is not clear, and make an enforceable rule clarifying it.
If you took the time to lets say read something as large as the Affordable Care Act you would see how little of the rules of implementation were in the bill. I generally look at this as the legislature abdicating its authority. The excuse is that its actually delegation to experts that actually have to enforce the rules.
This is why it is so important to read the Federal Register and push the folks in the Senate and House to specify rules on important bills to give the executive branch as little wiggle room as possible (this advice should apply to all parties).
Which has to be one of the most arrogant things I have ever witnessed.
Wrong. There is nothing in the statute that implies neutrality.
Section 230 was to enable online platforms to engage in good-faith community moderation without fear of taking on undue liability for their users’ posts. Online platforms are within their First Amendment rights to moderate their online platforms however they like, and they’re additionally shielded by Section 230 for many types of liability for their users’ speech. It’s not one or the other. It’s both.
It started off as a discussion between social networks. One that didn't moderate its content and one that did. The one that did got sued into the grown because its attempted moderation. So how is that not an attempt to make them into public squares.
Also saying you just let them moderate doesn't square with how anyone in a government would look at this especially the US government. Why would anyone want them to regulate themselves.
Facebook and Twitter legitimize content. From a social media perspective, they define the vanilla. When people say "I saw it on Facebook", you instinctively intuit it was on their feed between a photo of a kid and advert for Red Robin.
If you want rocky road rather than vanilla, you can go find it on (2^n)chan. It's not hard to find. The presence of FaceTwit doesn't stop those forums existing or censor them.
When the President has a tweet deleted or some covid conspiracy group is removed from Facebook, it's not that there isn't somewhere else that content could go. I mean Trump is literally continuously on TV and has the entire Federal government at his disposal to get his message out. The covid conspiracy nuts can go to some smaller/madder corner of the Internet.
The reason to raise a ruckus is because being kept out of TwitFace means being kept out of the mainstream. I saw the Proud Boys update next to that cute GAP ad. I got the latest @QAnon post after the one from @KimKardashian.
To hell with that. Don't normalize that garbage. Moderate away.
Of course. That's why the people crying about the NY Post article said nothing when Twitter was threatening to suspend accounts for hoping Trump would die of COVID. It's why they're fine when conservative content gets algorithmically boosted but nut when it gets penalized.
I'm happy to have a discussion about what the boundaries of acceptable speech should be. But it always gets cast as a discussion about censorship and freedom of speech, when really the goal is to shift those boundaries to a place they find acceptable.