U.S. Senate tech hearing becomes political tussle

The billion+ active users of Twitter & Facebook, for whom these rules seem acceptable & decent.

Following that, it's the people, who can restrict the media based on what they pay attention to.

If the social networks are to be considered publishers, they can properly be held accountable for the information they propagate. That has to remain true whether the information is blatantly untrue political propaganda and climate change denial and anti-vaccination conspiracy theories or child abuse images and calls for violent protest and revenge porn. But the services also have to have full editorial rights to go along with that responsibility, and if the biggest loudspeakers on the planet choose, for example, not to propagate someone's political speech during an election campaign because the operators of those services don't like the politicians, that's their right.

Alternatively, if the services are to be considered common carriers, we go to the other extreme. They aren't responsible for anything transmitted over their network, whether good or bad. They are a mere conduit for information, no different to a phone service or postal mail or the crazy guy shouting in the pub at the end of the night or the Internet itself for that matter. They have to be impartial, including passing on material they don't necessarily like or agree with, without interference or comment. But then the services shouldn't be forever accused of not doing enough to combat whatever this season's political Big Bad is, regardless of the cost or even technical practicality of doing something else about that issue. Censorship is not their responsibility, and enforcing laws against criminal behaviour online is still the responsibility of government through normal law enforcement agencies and judicial processes.

Those are the two classical models for big data shifters within most of our legal systems today, at least in the relatively democratic West. If governments want a third model instead, the politicians need to own the issue for once and actually say what they want so the tech firms can do it (or stop trading, or relocate to a more favourable environment, if what is demanded is too unreasonable or unrealistic). But of course then the frequent contradictions in political comment on these networks would be undermined and they could no longer be turned into the fall guys for everything bad that happens online so politicians who haven't managed to deal with difficult issues can save face.

I am no big fan of any of these social networks, and I do personally think that much stronger regulation of big tech firms is long overdue, for the benefit of all the ordinary people whose lives are affected by them. But I also believe in fairness and transparency, particularly when it comes to who is legally required to do what and who is legally responsible for what. It's really tiresome to see politicians who wouldn't know an encryption algorithm if you handed them a paper with the algorithm's name in inch-high letters on the cover trying to lecture representatives of businesses that, for all their many failings and problems, are at least doing something that some real people find useful.

Cruz is a part of the US government so my statement was about that government but it is of course applicable to all governments.

> Twitter is a monopoly and has an outsized influence on politics and news today, beyond any media force in history, perhaps.

No, Twitter is not a monopoly. Nobody is forced to use Twitter and nobody is prevented from competing with Twitter. The same is not true for the US government which Cruz is a part of.

> They're protected by arbitrary legislation from the 90s that prevents them from being held accountable for false or defamatory statements from getting published and shared on their platform.

Section 230 is no more arbitrary than any other legislation. It doesn't protect Twitter any more than it protects its competitors or anyone else who publishes contend uploaded by other people. Section 230 provides the same type of protection as the first or second amendment, protection from the government.

> The whole impetus from that protection was to promote free speech.

Then it has achieved its objective as it would be much more difficult for anyone (except maybe massive corporations) to publish user generated content without section 230.

> Instead, Twitter has chosen to arbitrarily and selectively mute, shadow ban, lock out, and silence those who they disagree with.

It's their servers. They have no obligation to host anything on them.

> I think if they are benefitting from 230 protection, they should not be allowed to engage in this kind of manipulation. Or they should be forced to federate their service with other platforms.

Force is not an appropriate response. Why don't you delete your Twitter account and setup an account with a competing service? Then you can advocate for other people to do the same thing voluntarily instead of advocating for force and coercion.

> With Twitter, individual contributors can spend a decade building up a following of tens of thousands to millions of users, and then with a click, Twitter can take that away.

You should never have used Twitter in the first place if that was a requirement. Twitter doesn't offer that security but mastodon does so you can use that instead. Other people don't have an obligation to cater to your preferences and it's wrong to force them to do that. Twitter does however allow you to pin a tweet with a link to your mastodon account so I suggest you do that if you still have a Twitter account.

> I mean, I'm old enough to remember when we got the right to keep your phone number passed so that you can keep your number when you switch cell phone carriers. That sort of thing does not exist in social media. If I switch platforms, I lose my ability to communicate with my connections. That's a problem. That should be legislated away.

No, force is not the answer to non-violent problems. Please explore peaceful and voluntary solutions to your problems before imposing your will on others.

Water 1 You must have clean water. 2 You cannot feasibly participate in some other water gathering project in your municipality. 3 Another water company cannot establish itself in your municipality

Social Media 1 You do not need social media, there are many healthy ways to stay connected to friends and family 2 You have many choices of social networks where you can spend your time 3 The longest lived major social networks is like 10 or 15 years old and we really don't have any idea how penetrable the market is long term.

You know there's this big big gigantic thing called the internet and it's so incredibly big you can make your very own website with your own name on it? If you're relevant to public discourse, people will obviously go to your personal website.

If not - maybe you're not so relevant as you thought.

This seems like some potentially dangerous general advise.

As you say, praised by performers. Anecdotally, I have a friend who gives it a glowing review for helping him accept a major award ("I'd like to thank the Academy").

The question is why.

If we are going to let the government declare this a form of illegal censorship the email email trust framework is going to break down. Lee and his ilk are playing with fire.

There is a real problem today with a relatively small number of organisations that host a lot of email accounts being so aggressive with their filtering that it has undermined the basic mechanics and reliability of email as a communications channel.

Stronger obligations on those claiming to provide an email hosting service to actually deliver legitimate mail to their account holders, or to at least provide an effective and standardised recovery mechanism when they make a bad judgement while trying to block junk mail, wouldn't go amiss.

We need less noise and more signal.

I don't have the perspective to evaluate this claim though. I don't know much about the intersection of politics and media in the 80s and 90s. It seems worth considering though. The premise seems straight forward: broadcasting politicians changes how politicians behave.

if people vote with their feet to hang out someplace, it should not face increasing nuetrality regulations, imo. to answer Cruzcs question, every active Twitter user voted for Twitter, & our choice not to go use an alternative is an ongoing continual voting that could change any day.

I also don't agree, don't think Twitter is acting at all biased. I think they have very basic rules & have been very kind about trying to enforce them.

Historically, and this is one of its major problems, "full" censorship is a partisan act by the party defining and implementing the standards. So, when you say this, all I hear is that you prefer a different partisan basis for censorship, and for it to be globally-consistent partisanship rather than variable to reflecting the partisans preferences of individual outlets.

There was little to no liability risk over removing specific material. E.g., if you posted something on my site and I took it down, you had virtually no chance of winning a lawsuit to force me to put it back up or to pay any damages.

Section 230 did not change that, and that's the way it will be if 230 goes away.

What section 230 addressed is the some courts had decided that if I removed some stuff from my site but not other stuff, then I could be liable for that other stuff even if it was posted by my users. So if I removed spam or off topic material, and someone slipped in some libel in another post I could be sued for the libel.

Removing 230 would just go back to that, where I have to chose between letting everything (except stuff that is illegal) on, or being responsible for everything.

No one is going to run a completely unmoderated site for long, which means they are going to opt for heavy moderation.

This implication that platforms have to allow anyone to say whatever they want unless it's a certain pre-set class of illegal speech, lest they become some other service class with additional liabilities for speech, seems facetiously misguided & contrary to all evidence there is for how Section 230 was proposed, discussed, and how it describes itself.