If platforms are going to start acting like publishers, they should no longer get special treatment when compared to other publishers.
Remember, if the info platform monopolies help the democrats today, they can help the republicans tomorrow.
Remember, if the info platform monopolies help the democrats today, they can help the republicans tomorrow.
> Among the most common lies: Section 230 requires sites to choose between being a “platform” or “publisher”
The idea that Twitter moderating its users' posts means it's acting like a "publisher" is nothing but Republican propaganda[1]:
>Furthermore, a number of senators have prominently criticized Section 230. For example, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) repeatedly (but completely falsely) claims that Section 230 only applies to “neutral public forums."
Threatening Twitter and Facebook with liability for their users' content is authoritarian suppression of free speech. The US government should not be forcing Twitter or any other social media service to carry the president's re-election propaganda - even if the propaganda is factual, let alone if it's full of holes and lies like the NY Post story.
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3306737
> If platforms are going to start acting like publishers, they should no longer get special treatment when compared to other publishers.
The GP doesn't argue that Section 230 says this or that, they're arguing that internet companies who act like news sites should be subject to the same laws as news sites.
1) they don't write the stories or in any way pay the journalists
2) news is a minority of the content
3) moderation is not the same thing as curation
4) hosting a story is not the same thing as publishing it.
If I post an NBC News article to Twitter, NBC is the publisher. If that article contains libel, NBC is the one on the hook in court, not Twitter. (However, if Twitter discovered the article was very likely libelous then it would be both reasonable and responsible to restrict sharing the article).
GP is really making one of two authoritarian arguments:
a) Platforms are not allowed to make broad decisions about what sorts of content they want to host. Presumably GP would then also agree that YouTube's ban on pornography means that YouTube is a "publisher," and that every time Reddit remove a racist subreddit that it is acting like a "publisher."
b) If a platform does not want to host the president's dishonest re-election propaganda, they should expect to face financial and legal consequences.
Of course nobody would really say "b" out loud, hence the word games about "you see, Mastadon is a platform but Twitter is a publisher."
Making a factual correction without any additional commentary. Down the memory hole.
If in the future the Democrats are the lying ones, then those lies deserve to be removed too.
As far as I know, they're not broadly removing "half the information" (which I'm taking to refer to conservative viewpoints), but disinformation related to QAnon, voting, covid, etc.
Disinformation is not something that will help anyone make better judgements.
https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-media-social-media-...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54443878
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/08/11/faceboo...
https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-twitter-block-trump-post-...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-election-exclusi...
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/us-politics/article-fa...
> In late 2017, when Facebook tweaked its newsfeed algorithm to minimize the presence of political news, policy executives were concerned about the outsize impact of the changes on the right, including the Daily Wire, people familiar with the matter said. Engineers redesigned their intended changes so that left-leaning sites like Mother Jones were affected more than previously planned, the people said. Mr. Zuckerberg approved the plans.
That is: Facebook decided to intervene to benefit the right. I don't think this is just because of right-wingers at Facebook: surely a large part of it is bad-faith attacks from people like Ted Cruz.
The idea that Twitter and Facebook are conspiring to suppress legitimate criticism of Biden and thereby defeat Trump is plain ridiculous.
[1] Story is here: https://t.co/sjOYrLQdc3?amp=1 but I got the blurb from this tweet: https://twitter.com/patcaldwell/status/1317140564169625600
The whole point is that the provider of the interactive computer service (ie "the platform") is not to be treated as the publisher of anything anybody says on the platform.
They do?
In the same way, a lot of people would say it would be neutral for media to present arguments that global warming is not man-made, but people who care about scientific fact would claim that even presenting the skeptic argument is non-neutral, sense you are signal boosting an argument with no basis in reality.
For the endless commentary on Trump profiting off the presidency, Trump running an "organized crime family", Trump this Trump that, we have actual hard, concrete evidence that a Vice President's cocaine addicted son was selling access to the office (presumably to fuel his addiction), and on top of that his father lied constantly to the American people about it.
How is this not a scandal?
The dispute is that we don't agree on whether there is concrete evidence that the vice president's son sold access to his office. Hunter certainly capitalized on his name, but to this point there is no hard evidence that this resulted in political access to Biden, that Biden accepted any money, or that Biden gave any favors with regard to Hunter's associates. If you can't prove any of those things, then hammering on it endlessly with no new evidence or any change in the story would be journalistic malpractice.
Facebook has had its thumb on the 'balance' scale in favor of ultra-right-wing sites for half a decade, at least.
- Zuckerberg calling a group of non-profit news sites "not real news" [1]
- Zuckerberg ordering the algorithm of the news feed to be biased toward promoting Breitbart et. al. [2]
[1] https://twitter.com/mathewi/status/1317124357873860609
[2] https://twitter.com/dnvolz/status/1317160066047479809
[3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-mark-zuckerberg-learned-pol...
Furthermore, as for the law, there is a difference between platforms and publishers. Section 230 says that platforms will not be treated as publishers.
"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher..."
FB and Twitter are interactive computer services in this case, and we call them "platforms." The law says they are not to be treated as the publisher of the content that users post on their site. Thus, there is a big difference between a platform and a publisher. That's the whole point of the law.
Downvote all you want, but... that's the law.
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
The law doesn't establish two categories, called "publisher" and "platform." It says, if User writes something on Website, then Website will not be treated as the publisher of whatever User wrote. Instead, User will be treated as the publisher. It defines who is responsible for the content that is served by Website: the User who wrote it, not the Website that served it. At no point does it create a category called "publisher" who is subject to different rules from a category called "platform."
Section 230 does not need to create those categories because they already exist under the law. Historically, content providers have been treated as either publishers, distributors, or platforms, and there are different rules for those categories.
If a law is saying someone isn't going to be treated as a publisher, it is implicitly saying they are going to be treated as a distributor or a platform.
Section 230 says that internet content providers aren't going to be treated as publishers of user content, while the same law also says that internet content providers will have some of the rights of publishers - for example, by moderating content.
Under Section 230, internet content providers are treated as distributors in some cases, for example where upon request they need to remove content that violates copyright, but not liable as long as they do so. They are treated as platforms in other cases, for example defamatory content. Although in some ways they have even more rights than offline platform providers - traditionally platform providers have a legal requirement to accept all traffic.
So 230 gives internet content providers the privileges, but not the obligations, of traditional publishers, along with the privileges, but not the obligations, of traditional platform providers.
The reasons this was done are spelled out in the findings and policies section of the law. Some of the reasons no longer make sense - I don't really think we need government policies at this point to "to promote the continued development of the Internet". And some of the things that the act called out as beneficial about the internet are being harmed by the current actions of internet content providers. We are seeing them act less and less like "a forum for a true diversity of political discourse".
That's why people are talking about modifying Section 230. If you get the benefits of a traditional publisher, maybe you should get the obligations as well. If you get the benefits of a traditional platform, maybe you should get the benefits as well.
And yes that would be a huge change in the way content is provided on the internet.
The whole point of the law is to say that website owners need not worry about being considered a publisher when they let other people post or comment or whatever.
If they don't get special treatment as opposed to publishers, why is explicitly mentioned that they shall not be treated as the publisher? If there's no difference, what's the point in that?
> Really, this is the simplest, most basic understanding of Section 230: it is about placing the liability for content online on whoever created that content, and not on whoever is hosting it. If you understand that one thing, you'll understand most of the most important things about Section 230.
The way I understand it, these big sites aren't simply hosting content, they are themselves creators through editorializing content and so should not enjoy a blanket immunity.