The platforms have acted, raising hard questions about technology and democracy

Weirdly, Fox News recently exited primetime news. Their 7 PM news hour is being replaced with another opinion show.[1] This was before the riot; it was a decision based on ratings. It's a concern in that it disconnects a sizable fraction of the US population from any source of information about real-world events. Fox will still have a hard news show, but at 3 PM.

[1] https://keyt.com/news/money-and-business/2021/01/11/fox-news...

It depends which type of Republicans, right now it looks like the party is de facto split in two. Even though today's vote showed that they still think the Trump side will win out in the medium to long term, otherwise I can't explain why they chose to face the media storm directly and voted against impeachment.

You packed a lot into this one sentence.

Please share your evidence.

It’s especially problematic if these de facto monopolies take sides in elections.

And so on.

This is not about disappearing people. Or businesses. This is about disappearing politicians.

The real game here is that the mainstream media - especially on the far right - have suddenly discovered they're no longer owners of the narrative space, and their game tokens can be removed without notice.

Of course they're unhappy about this.

So if we're going to talk about concentrated media influence, we should be questioning the international reach and centralised narrative control of the Fox network (and others) at least as much Twitter or Amazon's ability to ban someone who was literally planning an insurrection in the US.

There is no free speech issue here, because the kind of "free" political speech we're talking about is very, very expensive, and only available to a tiny selection of headline operators.

Everything else in the social media space is noise farmed for engagement, and is unlikely to unduly trouble anyone who matters.

But now the companies that make printing presses won't sell to you. The machine shops that make the parts to build printing presses also won't work with you. Maybe you're supposed to mine your own ore and refine your own metal to build your own printing press?

In the long run, we're going to have to find a better way to deal with odious speech that by simply cutting people off and shutting them completely out of the public sphere. For one thing, this requires us to trust that the gatekeepers who control access are always going to be fair and just and only shut out genuinely bad actors. There's needs to be a process where anyone who wants to can still see and inspect the banned speech to audit whether it was really worth banning or not.

I see it as more like the telephone: customers that want to receive calls (i.e. TCP connections) sign up for the service and receive a number (i.e. an IP address) that others can then use to contact them. And some of these customers choose to have their number published in a public directory of subscribers (i.e. DNS) to make it more convenient for others to find them.

At the most fundamental level, the Internet is nothing more than a vast and automated network for establishing point-to-point (i.e. private) calls between two parties.

What erosion of civil discourse are you talking about? 10 years ago half or more Americans were against gay marriage, today 30% of the US is against that, except nowadays they are also called neonazis and are being deplatformed from major platforms. Do you think 50 years ago there could be civil discourse on legalizing rape or celebrating Holocaust? No, these people would get the same treatment. Or, as a non-imaginary example, just remember McCarthyism.

What changed is the level of discrepancy of Overton windows between rural and urban America. That’s all.

> platforms being used to organize illegal activities

Hah, but when they are used to organize illegal activities in countries like Egypt or Belarus it was not an issue.

> proliferation of misinformation (during a pandemic)

If you think that an average citizen is too stupid to think for themselves, we might as well just abolish voting rights. And surely there is a better way to combat misinformation than giving censorship powers to private technocrats.

But the free browsers will be gone.

Greenwald might be a disillusioned Leftist (not liberal), but then, so the original neoconservatives were disillusioned Trotskyites.

Disillusionment is what spawns radical conversion and radical converts are often the least-open-minded, most most fact-averse, ideological crusaders.

> if we’re going to, in the secret little court in each of our minds, “hold Parler liable for its moderation decisions” despite the fact that Section 230 won’t allow that in a real court,

Other than civil liability of the types which are specifically dependent on status as a “publisher or speaker”, Section 230 doesn’t prevent them from being held liable.

Criminal liability, or civil liability not dependent on status as a publisher (though some courts have, controversially, extended Section 230 to liability as a “distributor”) is generally outside of the scope of Section 230 protection.

I think that what should be sought is another "Section 231" that makes banning users from platforms must go through the justice system, just like if you wanted to ban someone from the town square.

This gives platforms a scapegoat, "the government won't let me", but still allows the platform to do things like not list "bad" people in the "discover" feed and make better mute/ignore features

Unilateral and permanent banning just creates more problems

If I had to pick though, yes I would say I'm more worried about people who think the state of affairs this article is discussing is completely fine, as opposed to idiots acting out after being cooped up at home for a year. The latter is a concerning problem but one much more easily dealt with, if for no other reason than that a large majority of people agree that it is actually a problem.

If you say something on the Internet that angers a mob, you are no more directly harming your ISP than you are directly harming your electric company. Why should one of them be able to cut you off on a whim, and the other cannot? If it is because one of them is more indirectly harmed, such as by the mob attacking them, then why do tolerate such attacks on one but not the other?

Fundamentally, I think that a service provider, of any service, should be expected to provide their service to anyone willing to pay for it, as long as that customer does not actively and directly harm the service provider. Mob actions against the provider are a separate matter, and should be opposed, whether they are calling for all ISPs to disconnect the offender or for all grocers to stop selling them food.

Further, I think that even at the platform level, permabans should not be allowed (unless perhaps with a court judgement after multiple offenses). Temporary suspension for TOS violations? Sure! But there should always be a clear and accessible process for appeal, and for the offender to redeem themselves. Considering what a large and important part of society communication platforms have become, a lifetime ban without trial or recourse is unacceptable and unconscionable.

Don't get me wrong, I do want to be defended from violence! But not at all costs. I don't want people to be tortured in the name of defending me, and I don't want every conversation on the internet to be monitored and censored in the name of defending me. That's too much.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/18/faceboo...

A handful of companies control the vast majority of discourse in the world - and there's no competition in their moderation styles. It's either time to split them up or to regulate them.