Reading Amazon's reasoning, tech companies are basically setting a standard that if you want to have user-generated content, you must have professional moderators. This seems like it will be a barrier to innovation.
Professional moderation is an option, but what you are actually obliged to do is ensure that your platform is not a hotbed of violent content. There are a lot of approaches to that, including aggressive bans of nuts before they get a critical mass. Given that Parler is where the nuts go when they get booted off Twitter, that was never in the cards.
Aside: is Moderation as a Service the new shovel to be sold during the gold rush?
I've been wondering about that as well, given the chances that §230 will be revoked
Can someone spin up a competent ML based/human moderator hybrid to moderate comments at Internet scale? (Disqus?) and perhaps offer an insurance plan to webhosts?
Here's a blog post about their ML moderation of hate speech.
Probably won't sell as a SaaS but shows the big value even with 230 in place
https://ai.facebook.com/blog/ai-advances-to-better-detect-ha...
As engineers, we should understand trade-offs. We have more values than just "innovation!"
What happens when congress uses these moves as evidence that Big Tech acknowledges the need to take responsibility for harmful content and then expects the same moves made for much smaller stakes?
There are principles and once those get principles get trampled in the name of expediency, it becomes easier for the next person the trample them further.
And then the US lost the war, went home in disgrace, and the promised cascade of falling dominoes never happened.
Sometimes resistance can make a slope less slippery. With Donald Trump’s election in 2016, I believe the US was on a slippery slope to a very bad place. A lot of stuff were being normalized that should not be (overt racism). However, there was a lot of opposition and resistance which has probably helped stabilize the situation.
So no, just because a lot of resistance keeps you from sliding down the slippery slope, it does not mean the slippery slope is not real.
Which is more likely, congress deciding regulation is needed when Big Tech acts proactively to take care of the worst of it, or congress deciding regulation is needed when they don't do anything?
It's make a reasonable attempt to prevent illegal / violent content and don't purposely create a system meant to fail and flout that's the whole intention of your app (and in Parler's case brag about it to the NYTimes )
Except Google, Apple, AWS, etc. are now actively ridding the Internet of that 'elsewhere'.
Funny how just a few short years ago Google & Co. justified running Stormfront off the internet because of their extreme views. Funny how in just a few steps the justification went from 'extreme views' to 'Alex and Milo' to 'they say things we don't like'. Good luck staying amused with what comes over the next couple years.
This isn't ideology-based. There is good moderation and bad moderation. the /r/conservative and former /r/T_D subreddits swing the ban hammers more liberally than any other subreddits I've seen.
Citation needed.
Amazon declined to comment on the suspension.
> Recently, we’ve seen a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms. It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service. It also seems that Parler is still trying to determine its position on content moderation. You remove some violent content when contacted by us or others, but not always with urgency. Your CEO recently stated publicly that he doesn’t “feel responsible for any of this, and neither should the platform.” This morning, you shared that you have a plan to more proactively moderate violent content, but plan to do so manually with volunteers. It’s our view that this nascent plan to use volunteers to promptly identify and remove dangerous content will not work in light of the rapidly growing number of violent posts. This is further demonstrated by the fact that you still have not taken down much of the content that we’ve sent you. Given the unfortunate events that transpired this past week in Washington, D.C., there is serious risk that this type of content will further incite violence.
I wonder if this is in part due to concerns about revising section 230.
Repealing section 230 would lead to many more proactive measures like this, by all platforms.