'Who the hell elected you?' U.S. Senate tech hearing becomes political tussle | Hacker News Reader

'Who the hell elected you?' U.S. Senate tech hearing becomes political tussle

uk.reuters.com

55 pointssimonswords82109 comments

For anyone who wants to actually look at Section 230, it's relatively short: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230

It seems like the relevant parts of the discussion are:

(b) Policy (3)to encourage the development of technologies which maximize user control over what information is received by individuals, families, and schools who use the Internet and other interactive computer services;

and then this one:

(c)Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material (1)Treatment of publisher or speaker 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.

(2)Civil liability No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of— (A)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; or (B)any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).[1]

Additionally to this: for anyone who wants to assert that there's some implied requirement of "neutrality," I invite them to read what the authors of the law had to say quite recently.

"The first is that Section 230 does not require political neutrality. Claiming to "interpret" Section 230 to require political neutrality, or to condition its Good Samaritan protections on political neutrality, would erase the law we wrote and substitute a completely different one, with opposite effect. The second is that any governmental attempt to enforce political neutrality on websites would be hopelessly subjective, complicated, burdensome, and unworkable. The third is that any such legislation or regulation intended to override a website's moderation decisions would amount to compelling speech, in violation of the First Amendment" (pg 17)

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7213938-2020-09-17-C...

I'm not a lawyer, but that's what confuses me. Section 230 doesn't need to be changed; twitter violated it quite obviously.

Blocking the NYPost article was not in good faith. It wasn't obscene. It was harassing or violent.

Twitter should by this definition lose their Section 230 protections. Good luck operating Twitter without those protections.

Let users choose their visibility settings and news feed prioritization algorithm (similar to how users can select the search engine used by their browser/phone among various options).

This is a simple solution that should make everyone happy which does not require lawyers or revoking sec 230. It also provides the opportunity for others to publish algorithms that are less polarizing which we very much need right now.

Both Wolfram and Dorsey support this idea.

I also really like this option. But what about the default? I expect there would still be significant disagreement between different factions over what is censored / labeled / prioritized / deprioritized for those users that don't actively switch to the left or right or whatever other custom view.

For this, I wonder if this could be a feature of who you follow / engage with. When someone you engage with flags something, then you don't see it. And vice-versa on prioritization. You are more likely to see things that people you follow engage with.

What if there were no default? You had to go through a setup process to assign the visibility settings you want. That way, there's no possibility of bias because everyone would be required to set their own settings.

Yeah, that would be perfect. It'd be disruptive to force everyone to pick. And, I'm sure there'd be some demagoging about which options there are & how they're presented. But, I haven't heard any other suggestions that don't lead to further conflict.

Ultimately, I hope there can be a solution to this that let's everyone see the content they want and engage in the public square without censorship.

> This is a simple solution that should make everyone happy

It won't, though, because the best feed algorithm for increasing engagement and stoking outrage and making money off ads is not the one that is best for fostering calm discussion and building a community.

Twitter etc. want you to use the engagement one, but in order to actually fix the social problems created by their platform, people have to use something else that will make them less money.

I personally think that's fine, but I doubt Twitter will be happy with that. And I'm not sure how you legislate a requirement that your platform isn't psychologically tuned to bring out the worst in people.

I don't think fostering calm discussion is a necessary goal for large-scale social media platforms. Some percentage of conversations will get heated--both online and offline--but that's natural and is something society is able to deal with.

The danger of social media is that it fosters radicalization by connecting extremists far more efficiently than is possible offline, and that in creating communities of extremists who give themselves psychological permission to act out their beliefs. The consequences of this spill out into the real world in ways that society is not fully able to manage.

People using social media to call each other shitheads for supporting (or not supporting) Joe Biden isn't a problem. No one outside of those involved in the conversation will have any reason to care and the people involved will get over it.

Social media connecting unhinged people, however, and helping them create a parallel reality where burning down 5G towers becomes the right thing to do to protect people from autism, is very much a problem. This kind of activity spills over into the real world and does have direct consequences.

Regulations of social media platforms ought to be far, far more concerned with mitigating the risks of the latter problem than with maintaining civility.

There’s an even easier one. Stop pretending platforms or neutral. Trying to make up a rule after rule to enforce “neutrality“ and avoid the appearance of “bias“ doesn’t work. Both sides are convinced that they’re being shirked.

Just come out and say it. Our new rule is “behave and we will remove what we don’t like“. You don’t like our decision? Go somewhere else.

I don’t know how you could ever apply objective standards to 500,000,000 tweets per day. It’s not feasible. So stop pretending to try.

Platforms can be neutral and once were. Algorithms can be made that are content neutral. Obviously banning users from even mentioning content from a newspaper because you don't like their perfectly legal content flies in the face of that.

That's the deal: you can be a service provider or a publisher. They want to have their cake and eat it too.

Who said that was the deal?

>Platforms can be neutral and once were

Any examples?

> Algorithms can be made that are content neutral

How so?

Where does the law say you can be either a service provider or a publisher?

There are many examples of neutral platforms that put users in the driver's seat: early Twitter and Facebook, USNET, email, RSS, WWW.

The law before Section 230 was such that if you moderated content, you were responsible for it. You can read about CompuServe and Prodigy's different approaches to moderation and liability. Congress decided that internet services should be given immunity from liability for third-party content, but it's clear their intent was not to allow two or three megacorps to act in partisan ways by blocking access to journalism. They are acting as publishers now and I would not be surprised if Section 230 is amended by congress.

WWW, RSS, email are not platforms. They're protocols/services that many platforms are built on. That's a really weird comparison to try to draw between them and Twitter/Facebook.

Let's put it another way. Bookstores are not liable for defamatory books they sell (unless they authored them). That has never been conditioned on the bookstore being "neutral"- a Marxist bookstore is treated the same as Barnes and Noble.

> it's clear their intent was not to allow two or three megacorps to act in partisan ways by blocking access to journalism

Is it clear? Have you read what the authors of Section 230 have had to say recently?

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200921/00260045345/autho...

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7213938-2020-09-17-C...

> ... it's clear their intent was not to allow two or three megacorps to act in partisan ways by blocking access to journalism

From roywiggins' post earlier[1], a direct quote from one of the authors of 230:

"The first is that Section 230 does not require political neutrality."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24923980

> Platforms can be neutral and once were.

Which platform, when, and for how long?

Both of those things do not exist - both the damn propaganda latter day fiction of platform cs publisher distinction - it isn't real and stop pretending it can be and the very concept of neutral platform existing in the past is laughable. Usenet anarchies? Included the sysop free to moderate however the hell they liked and the early net defacto banned commerical activity. Not neutral at all.

That is not the deal. You're trying to change the deal. There is no requirement to be one or the other.

This is why federated platforms are exciting - you can choose the host that is aligned with what you want (aggressive moderation, no moderation, etc) and still be connected to the rest of the fediverse typically.

I don't imagine the monopoly platforms will follow this though, too much risk of losing users once feeds are no longer optimized for "engagement" and revenue. It's easy to realize how boring Facebook and Twitter are once the algorithm is stripped away.

If people were willing to pay for things they used, we could get rid of the damned ads. App.net was an interesting experiment in this, but it did not end up taking off (I don't recall the price anymore).

Cable TV has a subscription fee, but they still show ads. What makes you think ads will just disappear if fees get added?

Would definitely bring down botting on these platforms - if card fraud can be prevented effectively.

The cost of social media is much lower than the cost of television content (licensing and producing shows and movies). Cable TV is more accurately described as subsidized by subscriptions, making up the difference with ads. HBO and others are examples of content providers that (mostly, they still advertise their own content between shows) eschew advertisement in exchange for a higher cost to access.

Social media is cheaper than that, on a per user basis (at least amortized across all users, very active users are a net cost, but also lead many others to participate). I don't know what the price would be, exactly. But let's estimate. Twitter has approximately 300 million users, and brings in around $2.5 billion to $3 billion a year (over the past several years) in revenue. So to get an ad free experience and, assuming they're at least breaking even, cover their costs would be about $10/user.

That isn't to say they'd drop paid content, but they could.

Twitter at least already has this, you can turn the algorithmic home feed off.

Would the idea be that platforms cannot moderate at all? They must allow all legal content? So spam and porn would have to be allowed?

Historically the term platform has meant just that, they have a legal requirement to allow all content. Think something like a phone network.

There are rules about what constitutes spam on a phone network - laws limiting robocalls in some situations for example - but it isn't the phone company making those rules.

platform != common carrier

Here's an article by Eugene Volokh on the difference between publishers, distributors and platforms: https://reason.com/2020/05/28/47-u-s-c-%C2%A7-230-and-the-pu....

"Historically, American law has divided operators of communications systems into three categories", he says, and he describes the third category as:

"Platforms, such as telephone companies, cities on whose sidewalks people might demonstrate, or broadcasters running candidate ads that they are required to carry."

His description of the liability rules for platforms:

"Platforms weren't liable at all. For instance, even if a phone company learned that an answering machine had a libelous outgoing message (see Anderson v. N.Y. Telephone Co. (N.Y. 1974)), and did nothing to cancel the owner's phone service, it couldn't be sued for libel. Likewise, a city couldn't be liable for defamatory material on signs that someone carried on city sidewalks (even though a bar could be liable once it learned of libelous material on its walls), and a broadcaster couldn't be liable for defamatory material in a candidate ad."

If you see a difference between that and "common carrier" that is relevant to whether an entity considered a traditional platform would have to carry spam or porn, what is it?

Then how come Twitter doesn't support it? Who's controlling it?

Or don’t browse to the site where you don’t agree with the results of the algo.

This quote is incredibly awkward from Cruz, who has a family story about fighting nationalization in Cuba, asking a CEO of a sign up required company, with commercial advertisers funding, why he is a private CEO and isn't run by the government.

> Senator Ted Cruz went after Twitter’s Jack Dorsey after the CEO said Twitter has no influence over elections.

> “Who the hell elected you and put you in charge of what the media are allowed to report and what the American people are allowed to hear,” Cruz said ...

I hope Ted Cruz doesn't believe it's the role of an elected official, of all people, to be "in charge of what the media are allowed to report and what the American people are allowed to hear," as his comment seems to imply. If a shitty social media company wants to filter people's access to information that's one thing, if an elected official tries to do it that's something else entirely.

Maybe they should apply this same logic to make mainstream media require neutrality when reporting the news. (all are bad, not saying they aren't, but let's start with Fox News). If Fox news can't be forced to let equal number of progressives on as conservatives, then why should Twitter be forced to modify their algorithm at all?

These conversations seem to make more sense if you think of Facebook and Twitter as bars. They're open to the public but there's some rules for entry (e.g. state/federal laws precluding minors and the establishment's policies around dresscode/behavior).

The staff can ask you to leave or remove you when you're acting up and ban you from reentry if they deem it necessary. Other patrons of the establishment and the staff are welcome to listen to you but are not required to - and they certainly don't owe you a seat at their table just because you're inside.

Open mics don't require "both sides" and typically have the same enforcement mechanisms as above. One can expect to get booed off, muted, and potentially expelled from the place if the crowd doesn't like your singing or the content of your lyrics.

While I very strongly support viewing internet access as a utility - Facebook and Twitter (and similar) aren't essential (much like bars) and might be better off treated as vices to begin with.

These arguments should be focused on how to build protocols that everyone can use for communications instead of platforms. I think that the concepts, expectations, and regulations of the post office and post roads should be extended into the digital world. Of course you'll need to deal with the political vulnerability that was recently exposed when bad actors are put in charge of crucial communications mediums such as the post office.

Section 230 is a remarkably clear and short law which is surprising considering how recently it's been written and the protection it provides but it is probably because it is mostly stating that which is self-evident. Even opening the door to moderate reform of Section 230 is ceding ground to censors and "speech-forcers".

I keep thinking it would be interested to see a digital governance initiative to host citizen's voices. Give each citizen 100kB a day that the government will try to protect, if it is lawfully able to do so, & make accessible, to a certain promised level of scale, for as long as it can.

There’s much that can be said about Twitter’s moderation policies, but entirely orthogonal to that, this quotation should be mighty upsetting to anyone who hews to the basic tenets of American constitutionalism regardless of your political leanings.

“Who the hell elected you?” The implied statement here is that, because you (Jack) aren’t elected, you can’t decide what people read; the corollary being that, because I (Ted) am elected, I can decide what people read. This is entirely backwards! “Congress shall make no law,” says the Constitution. It’s precisely because Ted Cruz is elected that the Constitution says he cannot make laws deciding what people read. That’s the entire point of the exercise!

I agree with the left on so many issues -- and have voted for them consistently for a few decades -- but I'm really disgusted at how they have become the party of censorship and limits on free speech. It's telling that they are now the party that is overly cozy with the largest, most-powerful companies on the planet.

The Democratic Party has been moving away from the original meaning of "liberal" for a long time -- but supporting mega-corps censoring journalism must be the final confirmation that this is no longer a liberal party.

Ted Cruz, known leftist and Democrat...

leftist != liberal

Democrat != liberal

... that's the point. On this issue, Cruz is indeed more liberal than Schatz.

And yet he opposes net neutrality. His position is inconsistent here. He is self-serving, not liberal in any sense.

His position is inconsistent, yes, and so is anyone who supports net neutrality but thinks Twitter should be able to block legal user content on their platform.

On many issues Democrats have the liberal position, but in a growing number of areas, Republicans have the liberal position. Neither is ideologically pure and both are self-serving.

I disagree with your first conclusion. It depends on how you view Twitter. If you view Twitter as a service provider, then net neutrality rules should be applied to them as well. But if you view them as a platform, they're distinct and ought to have greater control. Like a forum, should net neutrality proponents argue against moderators like dang here on HN to be consistent? That's absurd.

But Ted Cruz (and others) are trying to argue that Twitter should be considered closer to a service provider (and thus remain "neutral", whatever that means here) than a platform/publisher (which can control its content more). But Ted Cruz also argues that net neutrality proponents are "snowflakes" and net neutrality is wrong. It would be funnier if the consequences weren't so potentially severe.

Are there any examples of where the issues that fall under network neutrality have resulted in unavoidable censorship (higher charges would not apply, since the option to pay higher fees does exist, regardless of whether it is "fair" or not).

Censorship, not that I know of. But Twitter can't really censor anything, only their platform (same with Facebook). Content they block can be accessed through other means. Net neutrality, however, applies to the operators who can (effectively) bar access short of finding a separate provider.

Examples of things net neutrality would bar would be slowing/blocking Bittorrent connections (traffic shaping), slowing competitors (Netflix), etc. And those things have happened and likely will continue to happen without net neutrality legislation.

> Censorship, not that I know of. But Twitter can't really censor anything, only their platform (same with Facebook).

"Can't really censor anything", except what they can (and do, with a rather heavy lean to one political side) censor: arguably one of the top two "popular information" dissemination platforms on the planet. The same goes for Facebook, and YouTube, if to differing degrees. The same may also be happening within mainstream newspapers and TV news, but due to the nature of those businesses, any censorship that may be occurring is less discoverable (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence).

> Content they block can be accessed through other means.

Can be, in theory - whether it actually is (as compared to the alternate scenario of if it had not been censored on the major platforms), is unknown (due to the discoverability issue, difficulty in finding it (search engine "optimizations", deplatforming), additional effort, etc). It may seem like it isn't unknown (the sense of omniscience that comes with human consciousness), but it actually is unknown.

What I really enjoy about these types of conversations is the somewhat disingenuous ~"can't see the elephant in the room" nature. It is not complicated to realize that if censorship occurs on a platform, then therefore dissemination and consumption of the information will decrease (that's the whole point of it)...yet if one observes conversations on HN, I'd say at least a good third of the comments are written as if the reader genuinely doesn't realize this. That's perfectly fine of course, free speech and all that, but it's really fascinating to consider from a human psychology/neurology perspective. Even more fun is "breaking the 4th wall" of forums by pointing out this meta-pespective, and then observing replies that seem as if they literally hadn't seen that portion of the comment.

Isn't that circular reasoning? You descry "the left" and Democrats on the basis of this story, which is about a right-wing Republican, and when called out you say, yeah, but he's acting like a left-wing Democrat.

Well, no, he's acting like himself, a right-wing Republican, who is upset and trying to exert control over Twitter. This has nothing to do with Democrats.

You're using "Democratic" and "liberal" as synonymous terms when they're not; one is an ideology and one is a party. Just because a Democrat does something doesn't make it liberal -- and in fact, they've been moving away from liberalism for quite some time.

It's funny how in continental Europe, if you tell people you're a liberal they'll think you're a free-market, small-government, pro-civil-liberties type. That's because our definitions in America have changed as the parties have changed. We've entangled ideology (liberalism) with a party (Democratic) to the point where people will call anti-liberal positions liberal simply because the Democratic Party has espoused it. The same is true of "conservatism" and "Republican" of course.

You're on a thread about a United States Senator, a Republican who is consistently measured as very far to the right in the US, and you keep bringing up things like "liberal" and "Democrats" and talking about Europe.

Your insistence on labeling behaviors using terms that don't apply in the context in which those behaviors are taking place seems unhelpful to me.

Again, this is about a Republican US Senator shouting at the CEO of Twitter, a US company. No Democrats were involved at all until you started talking about them.

Let's see, who has been mixing up political positions and parties, shall we?

> I agree with the left on so many issues -- and have voted for them consistently for a few decades -- but I'm really disgusted at how they have become the party of censorship and limits on free speech. It's telling that they are now the party that is overly cozy with the largest, most-powerful companies on the planet.

See that? "the left" has "become the party" of things not actually evident. They are "the party" that is somehow cozy with Twitter, although again, I don't see how a Republican yelling at a company's CEO necessarily means the other party supports that company.

> but I'm really disgusted at how they have become the party of censorship and limits on free speech

In this quote of yours, what does “the party” refer to?

we really gotta disambiguate some terms, here. Bernie is a leftist. Biden is a liberal. Hillary was / is neoliberal (which you could also peg biden as, and which we used to call neoconservative). The democratic party is, on a good day, liberal but actually neoconservative.

That is to say: Leftist : power to the people. pro social programs, pro election reform, held of the belief that unchecked markets lead to unchecked evil. Liberal: pro regulation, socially left. don't-rock-the-boat political and economic mentality. pro middle class, pro tax neoconservative / neoliberal: let the markets run free, deregulate the banks, remove capital gains taxes and push tax burden down the chain to the working class. extremely permissive business laws. heavy focus on socially liberal policies like gun regulation, abortion, and gay rights because it makes for a wonderful distraction while their wall street buddies rob everyone blind and deaf.

please stop clumping leftists in with the rest. we hate that shit. there are barely any leftist politicians, and the democratic party spends most of it's time trying to get them to shut up. we're as mad about it as anyone else.

I totally agree with this (moving more from DSA territory recently to anarchist communism, myself)

I have a feeling that the lincoln project's goal is not just to get Trump out, but actually to instigate a coup within the dem party, give up some on abortion/2a to keep the neoliberal / centrist status quo. Mark my words in ten years, the dems will move more right, I wouldn't be surprised to see Kasich and Romney as democrats.

The left will be regrouping, and the far right, well they'll be hiding from the FBI mostly (at least the terrorist factions).

I mean, think about it. The dems are the epitomy of Reagan republicans. If you wanted to reboot the insanity that is Trumpism, all you'd need to do is get a significant number of fiscal republicans to become democrats, and run as democrats, and maybe embrace a 'few' social programs to 'appear' democrat enough.

...I would argue that this has already happened.

Consider the Green New Deal - absolutely a leftist document. Half the Democratic party immediately jumped down AOC's throat and jumped on the "come on, be reasonable" bandwagon. Not so many years ago, our candidate was Gore. Gore could have written the GND himself.

There is no party for the left. There is center and right and (currently in the white house) extreme right. Which we're now calling alt-right, while there's absolutely nothing 'alt' about it.

It's definitely rich that US Senators are asking "Who the hell elected you?", while they are busy gerrymandering, suppressing voters and actively dismantling democracy.

States establish their own districts, not the federal government. And senators (these days, not originally) are elected by popular vote within their state, districting doesn't matter. Now, the US House of Representatives is the way it is largely due to gerrymandering.

It's hopeless. More than once I've seen claimed that "gerrymandering" affects the Electoral College and got Trump elected. Yet more proof that the word, like "fascism", simply means "anything I don't like".

The electors for the Electoral College in 48 of the 50 states are determined by the states' popular vote, gerrymandering has no effect on this. In Maine and Nebraska, it is partially by congressional district.

Gerrymandering had no impact on Trump's election. He was elected because he got the right states to pull out an Electoral College majority despite losing the national popular election.

Gerrymandering's impact is on the US House of Representatives and state legislatures. Most executive offices are elected by statewide popular vote.

the shame is that gerrymandering is just the tip of an absolutely massive iceberg. if you add up all the ways in which decisions are divorced from popular interest you get a very, very bleak picture of anyone's ability to claim fair representation.

On the other hand, all states no matter how small get 2 senators. That means you can carry a majority in the senate with <12% of the population to support you. Maybe this is why US policy is so far to the right of US public opinion...

Maths:

https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/2jnmbe/i_did_the_...

This article reads like the legislative opinion of ‘encryption’—- strong enough to ensure commerce, but easily back footed by law enforcement.

Legislators don’t do well with incompatible beliefs .

Just going to place this here, before people start talking about "platforms" and "publishers" despite neither of those terms being actually in Section 230

"Hello! You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act"

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...

Here's where I'm confused. As I understand if you repeal Section 230, and these companies become regulated as publishers, they will be required to censor ALL content. So how would repealing Section 230 protect free speech? It seems it would in fact do the exact opposite: result in EXTREME censorship on all these platforms. Furthermore, politicians would have direct control over what these platforms publish in form of laws governing publishers. So now we would have literal government censorship on private platforms. Perhaps this is what they actually want?

Am I missing something?

> As I understand if you repeal Section 230, and these companies become regulated as publishers, they will be required to censor ALL content.

If you just repeal Section 230, then if they don't moderate at all, they will become (at least, based on the legal precedent which motivated 230) distributors, which generally have liability only when they have actual notice of unlawful content. If they actively engaged in preemptive moderation at all, then they will become publishers and fully liable, with no notice requirement, for all content.

So, self-initiated moderation becomes all-or-nothing.

Section 230 was passed to encourage the middle ground.

That's a bit rich coming from the US senate...

Remember, this is the same Ted Cruz who opposes net neutrality. His position is wildly inconsistent between his apparent views on Twitter and his views on the Internet as a whole.

A good answer: "340 million users choose to use Twitter. 4,440,137 voters voted for you, Sen. Cruz."

Is that really a fair characterization though? It may also be that many people feel obligated to use Twitter because it is already one of the "winners" and may not go anywhere due to network effects. So not engaging on it is the same as being silenced/unheard. Similarly, I don't think it would make sense to say "a billion users choose to use Google" and [N] voters voted for [politician].

I don't think it's any less fair than implying that CEOs of companies should have to be elected

You could say the same thing about people living in Texas who didn't vote for Cruz. :-)

The point is that it's not a fair comparison. It's a retort revealing by absurdity the invalidity of the question.

That isn't a fair comparison because people outside of Cruz's district are not able to vote for him. The same is not true for Twitter users and Twitter.

'Who the hell elected you?'

The free market. Consumers who enjoy a curated platform.

There are plenty of alternative platforms, which conservatives are constantly failing to lure anyone to. There is nothing stopping consumers from using the competition other than personal preference for the experience twitter provides.

Weird, because I keep hearing about the alternative platforms getting kicked offline. Krebs has a story about trying to kill 8chan right now. Gab had its payment processing suspended, etc.

Now, right now, it's hard to blame platforms for wanting to get rid of Nazis. Nobody wants a Nazi on their front lawn.

But in the long term, having capitalist oligarchs with control over most of the public's ability to communicate with each other does not seem like a good plan.

The people who lead the companies won't be there forever and in the future, one of the leaders with all the control over what people can and cannot say may be a Nazi or perhaps someone in power will convert to one.

I'd like to believe that's unthinkable, but not thinking about things like this doesn't seem like a very solid plan. Maybe we should limit how much power and control any one media agency can have over public discourse. And yes, the government's power over that should also be limited.

> Weird, because I keep hearing about the alternative platforms getting kicked offline. Krebs has a story about trying to kill 8chan right now. Gab had its payment processing suspended, etc.

8chan hosting is a legitimate liability concern. This is not an apples to apples comparison of businesses operating in good faith with reasonable policies and practices.

I don't see the slippery slope. "If someone is able to shut down our unabashed cesspool, eventually they're going to start coming for sites that aren't cesspools!"

This is not a slippery slope argument, it's "what happens if we permit all this power to rest with a few people and one of them converts to or gets replaced by a Nazi in the future."

This seems to assume that this power is some permanent, unearned thing. The internet is a cruel master - look no further than Tom from MySpace or Jerry Yang from Yahoo!. The power they possess was given to them by their users, and one day those users will find a new platform as they have always done. This isn't some Ma Bell situation where it's illegal to build another phone company.

> This seems to assume that this power is some permanent, unearned thing.

It doesn't have to be permanent to be harmful. Suppose, I dunno, the Koch brothers somehow managed to buy Google (or maybe the Saudis, it doesn't matter really) and simply took over the existing power structure to use it for evil.

Yes, maybe everyone would work to migrate, but it's hard not to think they could do some bad things in the mean time.

> This isn't some Ma Bell situation where it's illegal to build another phone company.

Well, if the alternatives get treated like the examples given up thread, that's quite an uphill battle, because you may not be able to get an ISP, payment processor, IP addresses, domain names, etc.

Having to remake the entire infrastructure again makes some of these things natural monopolies even if it's not exactly illegal to build another one, network effects are still a pain.

> Well, if the alternatives get treated like the examples given up thread, that's quite an uphill battle, because you may not be able to get an ISP, payment processor, IP addresses, domain names, etc.

Calling those particular sites 'alternatives' is ridiculous. There are legit competitors to the big social media sites that aren't cesspools of child porn and hate speech, and those are doing fine. Arguably the biggest up and coming competition, Tiktok, isn't being assailed on free speech grounds but over national security fears.

> 8chan hosting is a legitimate liability concern.

Some plausible excuse can always be found.

> This is not an apples to apples comparison of businesses operating in good faith with reasonable policies and practices.

Humans are incredible capable at "reasoning" (framing, rationalizing) things to any desired perspective or conclusion.

> "If someone is able to shut down our unabashed cesspool, eventually they're going to start coming for sites that aren't cesspools!"

Those are you words, not the words someone else has said in this thread.

You did say this though:

> There are plenty of alternative platforms, which conservatives are constantly failing to lure anyone to.

The person who replied to this assertion noted some examples of such alternative platforms being interfered with - and of course, a "reasonable" reason can typically be manufactured (imagined) within seconds.

And all of this does not take into consideration that visibility of speech largely varies per platform. No, you do not have a "right" to be on a platform, but that is orthogonal to the question of whether the broadcast of certain ideas is being forcefully limited by the employees or executives of large platforms (completely within their current rights).

> The person who replied to this assertion noted some examples of such alternative platforms being interfered with

Those are alternative platforms to twitter in the same way that a strip club is an alternative entertainment venue to your local movie theater.

The alternatives to twitter for people who are not of ill repute are places like Parler and Mastodon, and they're doing just fine and the tyrannical hand of the free market has not crushed them. They're relative failures in the marketplace, but the market doesn't owe them success simply because they have different/lower moderation standards.

> Those are alternative platforms to twitter in the same way that a strip club is an alternative entertainment venue to your local movie theater.

I'm assuming this comparison is supposed to have some rhetorical value to it? Otherwise it just comes off as puritan gatekeeping.

Those are alternative platforms to twitter in the same way that an underground dogfighting ring is an alternative entertainment venue to your local boxing league.

Those are alternative platforms to twitter in the same way that a "massage parlor" (scare quotes intentional) is an alternative entertainment venue to your local strip club.

Better?

No, because you keep comparing nonquestionable to nonquestionable or questionable to questionable.

Your point really isn't coming across well here.

Non-questionable? I would put 'individual is a regular poster on 8chan, a site which regularly has child pornography posted' and 'individual is a regular attendee of underground dogfights' in basically the same category. That's just me, I guess.

Yes, non-questionable. You tried to compare massage parlors with strip clubs when neither are questionable.

On the other hand, both underground dogfights and boxing matches are both questionable.

Your position is all over the place. It's sad, really.

It's coming across fine to me - the "alt" versions are questionable.

What makes boxing matches questionable compared to underground dogfights?

You seem to be missing the entire point.

Questionable alternatives to twitter are "alternatives" only in the sense that questionable alternative to mainstream entertainment options are "alternatives."

The entire point is that boxing matches are not questionable, while underground dogfights are illegal and not really therefore a reasonable alternative.

Yet boxing matches are questionable. Underground dogfights being illegal is a tangential point, based only in legal semantics.

Nothing, boxing matches are an above-board activity, as opposed to dogfighting, that's my point. Above-board web sites with reasonable moderation standards are doing fine, and always have been.

That's just circular reasoning. You claim they're "above board" because they are not questionable, but the only metric by which you deem them not questionable is that they are "above board".

This discussion is going nowhere as long as you don't understand that.

> The alternatives to twitter for people who are not of ill repute are places like Parler and Mastodon, and they're doing just fine and the tyrannical hand of the free market has not crushed them.

It is literally true that:

- alternative platforms do exist

- the free market has not crushed them

I can't help but notice that you didn't address this point:

>> And all of this does not take into consideration that visibility of speech largely varies per platform. No, you do not have a "right" to be on a platform, but that is orthogonal to the question of whether the broadcast of certain ideas is being forcefully limited by the employees or executives of large platforms (completely within their current rights).

Whether they are "doing fine" depends on the definition of that phrase - doing "fine" at what, precisely? At merely existing, in a binary sense? Yes, it is literally true they do continue to exist. Are they "doing fine" (comparable to Twitter, Facebook, etc) at disseminating the speech and ideas of individual members of society? Objectively, no they are not.

> They're relative failures in the marketplace, but the market doesn't owe them success simply because they have different/lower moderation standards.

It's interesting that you point this out despite me already explicitly acknowledging that fact, while simultaneously not addressing an important point where we actually disagree. I always wonder what's going on on the other end of the wire when these scenarios arise...is this selective attention conscious and intentional, or is it more like a kind of intuitive, reflexive behavior. Sadly, it seems Western culture is not yet at a point where such things can be discussed in polite company.

These hearings only serve to show how these senators are complete and total idiots:

Senators: "Who the hell elected you?" The solution is for us to repeal Section 230 so then you'll be liable!!

Big Tech: Umm, you do realize that if you make us liable then our only option is to moderate content more stringently and have stronger controls over what people say, right?

Senators: Monorail!! or something...

While Trump may be saying "Repeal Section 230", his actual proposal makes it bigger: https://www.justice.gov/file/1319331/download

The goal of many senators is to force Twitter to be transparent in being partisan. If Twitter tomorrow says "We're pro-XYZ and we're going to take down content we don't like" then the hearings would be over.

Twitter (and Facebook, et al) don't want that because they would be at risk of losing large parts of their audience. They don't really make money from a bunch of people agreeing with each other and sending nice daily affirmations. They make money when your angry Uncle Billy posts something political and gets a bunch of other people in a big shouting match - views are money.

The senators aren't doing this out of the goodness of their own heart. They believe they will gain better platforms of their own uses (and potentially profit) instead of having to deal with what they perceive as an adversarial platform.

I mean, the real problem is that misinformation and lies are not evenly distributed across the political spectrum. If they were, everyone would complain and there would be no accusations of bias.

It's unfortunate, but it's true.

The Senators are deluded or cynical power grabbers to equate "not bowing in deference to me" as "partisan". The bipartisan and contradictory nature of accusations should really be a hint that they are more full of it than feed lot sewage lagoon.

Everything is political in an election season. In a normal year Congress would delay stuff like court appointments, antitrust investigations, hearings etc. for a couple of months, but our current leaders just can't let an opportunity for free campaign ad footage pass by.

Every other year is a campaign year. The delays or lack of them depends on who is in power. When there is mixed power everyone benifets from delay so you see a lot.

Social media platforms definitely are exerting undue influence over our society and I don't think, after the last couple of weeks, anyone can seriously claim that these companies aren't using their market position to shape public opinion ahead of next week's election.

What to do about it? It's a tough problem. Simply repealing Section 230 would be a ham-fisted solution (like all govt solutions) that would do a lot of harm to smaller players in the industry.

It would be great if people weren't idiots and didn't rely so much on twitter/facebook for their news, but that apparently isn't going to happen...

Doesn’t really seem fair to call people idiots for using social media considering the incredible amount of research and investment that’s gone into making it so addictive. And as for using it as primary source of news, people only have so many hours available to them... if they’re spending it on addictive social media they might not want to go seek out additional news, especially if they feel they’ve gotten enough news from Facebook.

How do you define an "undue" influnce in the first place? Violating the "natural order of things" by not submitting to their "betters"?

The very assertion is deeply wrongheaded in its presumptions of control.

GodFather II:

Senator Pat Geary: I can get you a gaming license. The price is $250,000, plus a monthly payment of five percent of the gross of all four hotels. [sneers] Mr. Corl-ee-own-eh.

Michael Corleone: Now, the price of a gaming license is less than $20,000. Is that right?

Senator Pat Geary: That's right.

Michael Corleone: So why would I ever consider paying more than that?

Senator Pat Geary: Because I intend to squeeze you. I don't like your kind of people. I don't like to see you come out to this clean country with your oily hair, dressed up in those silk suits, passing yourselves off as decent Americans. I'll do business with you, but the fact is that I despise your masquerade, the dishonest way you pose yourself. Yourself and your whole f*ing family.

Michael: Senator. We're both part of the same hypocrisy...but never think it applies to my family.

Senator Pat Geary: [exasperated] Okay. Some people need play little games. You play yours. Let's just say that you'll pay me because it's in your interest to pay me. But I want your answer and the money by noon tomorrow. And one more thing. Don't you contact me again, ever. From now on, you deal with Turnbull.

Michael: Senator? You can have my answer now, if you like. My offer is this: nothing. Not even the fee for the gaming license, which I would appreciate if you would put up personally.

https://youtu.be/sG2-FI5_INA?t=96

What is the point of posting this? What is the point you are trying to make?

That the hearing is little more second-rate theater for public consumption that has been done better in the movies (particularly Godfather II). The feigned indignation of senators, the stoicism of the various CEO's, it's a bit too much.

Well its simple. There is overwhelming evidence they didnt play fair. They are not supposed to editorialize tweets (violation of sec 230 protection). They were free to let Nytimes publish supposed hacked tax returns yet blocked/ censored Nypost and other twitter users from sharing URLs in the same context. They got caught. Now its up to the congress on how they want to proceed to strip them of sec 230 protection and let the trial lawyers sue them into oblivion.

That’s not how section 230 works, as I suspect you know very well.

This is not how section 230 works.

https://popehat.substack.com/p/section-230-is-the-subject-of...

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