We need a provider that is willing to host content that abides by the laws of the host country. The provider needs to take a stance such that they are willing to host unsavory content assuming it is legal. The 1st Amendment IS important and we need businesses that are willing to say as such.
If the host country is China, and it blocks content critical of the government? What if the host country is Nigeria, and posting gay content gets you shipped to the gulag?
I suspect your opinion is going to change in these cases. And if it doesn't, sorry, but I trust myself to figure out what content I want to read more than any nanny state.
If I go to Walmart and choose to shop in my underwear, they have the authority to make me leave and escalate to authorities if I deny their order. To me, our current laws put us in the same position with speech on Twitter. Our current laws allow private business to make up whatever rules, restrict whatever they want. It's their platform their rules.
I'm suggesting we need a company who makes it their business to allow content and protect their users using the actual law. US law shields content companies from liability because of what their users publish and upload. If someone uploads CP to Reddit then it's not Reddit that's punished (assuming they made good-faith attempts to remove the illegal material).
AFAIK, the users on Parler did not write anything illegal. Maybe they did - idk for sure. The messages on Parler were purely grotesquesand someone didn't like it.
Social media has given humans the once-unthinkable capacity to influence behavior and discourse across the world in real time. Our laws in the US have not yet caught up with this still relatively newfound tool.
Decentralized social networking expects the user to control the user's own social input.
> else it'll end up as a platform for hate speech
A decentralized social networking user is not necessarily an anonymous social networking user. Such a user will still have contacts on computers and phones they own, still leave a connection trail on ISPs, and can still be held accountable. It's more difficult and less convenient for law enforcement--but privacy vs. law enforcement aceess and society's needs/interests thereof is a separate argument/topic.
In the US, hate speech is protected speech. In the UK, hate speech is defined differently than in China. Illegal pornography may include bestiality or drawings in some jurisdictions, not in others. Protection of copyright is enforced differently. There's also the distinction between reading, publishing and hosting potentially illegal material.
This is how the internet works already. It is federated. Established protocols exist for websites and email, but not for social media. Arguably, it's time to change that.
Imagine a social network where you have an identity based on a key pair. The key pair can rotate every month or so. When you meet someone, and you want to "friend" them on your social network, you scan a copy of their public key straight off their phone via a QR code. Now you can author encrypted and signed messages - you know they're only visible to the people you're interested in talking to, because you have their public keys, and they know the messages came from you, because they're signed with your public key.
If your friend Alice introduces you to their from Bob, they might forward you a copy of this Bob's public key, in classic web-of-trust fashion. Alice signs Bob's key, and sends it to you. So long as you trust Alice to not indiscriminately sign keys, you can be pretty sure you're really talking to Bob. You'd easily be able the check the provenance of a key - I have this key that was signed by Alice who claims she got it directly from Bob's phone, and it also signed by Sue, who claims she got it from an email.
When I post a message on my "wall", really I'm posting something encrypted with the public keys of everyone I want to share it with. My phone can reach out directly to those phones to pass on the message. If it can't reach all of them, that's ok, because Alice's phone can forward a copy to Bob's phone on my behalf, or we could have some kind of "dead drop" server online where my phone uploads stuff, and your phone checks for it.
How does this not devolve into your typical Internet cesspool? Precisely because it's not on Facebook.
First, if Bob starts posting crazy ideas about how women should never have gotten the right to vote, I can delete Bob's public key from my phone, and I'll never see anything he ever says, ever again.
Second, and maybe more importantly, this social network we've just imagined has no motivation to "drive engagement". It doesn't promote controversial stories to try to get people to click on more ads. In fact, it can't. There's no "service provider" here to profit from it in the first place, and even if there was, it couldn't read the contents of any of these encrypted communications so it wouldn't know which ones are the controversial ones it should try to drive. Twitter and Facebook need moderation mostly because they spend so much time promoting content from fringe crazy people in the first place.
You could have control at each node, deciding with whom you federate. You can also have a crowded moderation, similar to HN.
Decentralized != immutable != non-heirarchical.
And like sibling, it need not be entirely anonymous either.
The feds would allow it if they had some level of legal access to manipulate it, which would in turn be what most people who want decentralized social networking seem to want: to at least have a somewhat democratically elected body governing it, not an arbitrary private company.
And if it were, is it even desirable?
It seems to me that we're headed for a land where data and ideas, once promulgated, become immutable, but that voluntary moderation regimes laid over those data can be utilized to keep the humans sane.