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We don't hold social media companies accountable for things that are posted there because then they will perform a cost/benefit analysis on the risk and liability of comment sections, free speech, posting news and political content, and most of them will engage in the most draconian reduction of free speech online in the internets history.

Why would Facebook let you talk about politics on their platform if you could defame a politician or celebrity and Facebook was on the hook? What's cheaper, banning you and/or algorithmically controlling your speech, or paying major dollars to an employee in a high cost of living who wants deep benefits just to review your speech.

I mean they'd need law staff reviewing every potentially defamatory post.

They'd honestly need lawyers reviewing every post made on social media, or else they could be sued into oblivion.

I can't imagine how any company could run a business allowing people to speak anything remotely close to freely online if that business is financially liable for the truth and veracity of every statement made.

What would happen is social media would turn into a situation where the only people allowed to post would be the Blue Checkmarks -- those who the service verifies as being Goodthinkers who won't create liability, and who may have signed an agreement with the company absolving the company of that liability.

I just can't imagine how free speech could survive online if the big guy could make the newspaper pay for a letter to the editor.

I remember the internet before social media. I don’t think we would be worse of if Facebook prevented people from commenting on posts, I think we would be better of.

What you are describing is the dream scenario for me.

It’s not free speech when it has no consequences, because the consequence of total free speech has proven to make every reasonable voice leave. This is exactly why the comments on political social media posts are so terrible that neither you or I bother to read them.

Because once FB/Twitter/every other large forum limits themselves to only doupleplusgoodposters, there will be a few billion people looking for somewhere else that they can speak, and other services will arise.

And we'll finally see who the blessed of the FB or Twitter or <service> truly are.

Those services will not be able to afford the lawsuits. That's the point. New services will be one of two things:

1) Pirate media in open and flagrant violation of the legal requirement to ensure the legality and veracity of all user content. In which case the government will shut it down or admit non-enforcement of the bogus law.

2) Or they are soon-to-be-former media sued into oblivion because someone lied on their service in a manner which the service is liable for. The service either vets the statements or pays the damages.

This is before we consider the implications of a hostile actor using this mechanism to tank businesses. Write bots to spread misinformation, lies and slander. What are you going to do, sue some unknown operator ten thousand miles away? Good luck. The service will pay damages for it and they'll keep paying until they restrict free speech sufficiently.

>but I simply don’t get why we don’t hold the social media platforms accountable for the content that gets posted to them

I think that's probably too crude a concept, although you can argue that probably 10% of Twitter needs a lawsuit being horrid people and all.

My own guess is that the ability of social media is strong and subtle enough to avoid any rule you might cook up. Their ability to steer enough votes to win an election is obvious and their own bias is clear.

You're not going to get your relatives to leave Facebook, it's too handy for trading baby pictures, so I have no clue what should be done. There'll always be some sort of editorial control.

Seems like you’re saying contradictory things here. On the one hand you’re arguing for massive moderation, and on the other you’re suggesting a few people shouldn’t be able to de-platform a president. You can’t have both.

What’s funny about this is we all act like Facebook/Twitter/YouTube are the only ways that politicians can talk to the public, yet somehow politicians have long campaigned well before the Internet existed, let alone these 3 specific platforms. It’s not like news media has stopped writing about Trump (in fact big news just yesterday about the trump org & taxes). Plus the news media was writing about how Trump is now on some new Gab-alternative, to which Gab is suggesting he’s not on there because they want to allow anti-Semitism and Kushner blocked it. So new platforms easily can come up and acquire various demographics.

It’s also not like Facebook etc is the only source for systemic dissemination of propaganda. Trump used to have extremely frequent calls with Fox News hosts, for example, which commands a very large set of the GOP eyeballs. Probably more than Twitter could ever hope for.

All of this is effectively protected by the first amendment. You could revoke 230 which would quickly lead to mass moderation or complete changes of platform behaviors/features, but you’d be very hard pressed to find a way to force any news org to shape their messaging.

I’m not saying the platforms shouldn’t ban people for breaking their rules, I’m saying that they should be consistent and not just apply their rules when it is convenient for them to do so.

I use Trump as an example because it’s the example everyone knows. I personally think that he should have been banned when he first broke the rules, but since he wasn’t, then he shouldn’t have been banned at all.

I’m calling for more moderation, but for it to be removed from the hands of a few tech billionaires and put into the hand of the public. Is the social media platforms cannot do this, then I fully support the EU route or making them illegal.

I don’t see that as a free speech issue, as long as we democratically agree on it within the EU because the internet is still there and politicians have, as you point out, campaigned without Facebook. What I do see as a free speech issue is when a very select few non-EU billionaires can dictate who says what and when they do it on their platforms. That’s the most anti-democratic threat we face in the EU right now.

I have a lot of sympathy for your Scandinavian viewpoint. But it's noteworthy that this is in the UK, which sets a relatively low bar to proving libel. Some say much too low.

I don't know how it is in Scandinavia, but in the US it would almost certainly be difficult to prosecute this. A lot of harassment is simply legal unless you can prove that deliberately false things were said with the intent to harm people -- which is very hard to prove.

Not that these platforms should hold themselves to a legal standard. Indeed, I've said before that it's long past the time for people to be thinking of moderation as an afterthought. New social networks -- even just discussion boards -- need to think from the beginning what kind of conversation they want. Otherwise, there's a very good chance it will be dominated by those who wish to hurt others, because the others will leave.

FB and Twitter are in a rare position where they own the natural monopoly (or, perhaps natural oligopoly) on general social media. You go there because your friends are there. You may want to leave, but you really can't because no other place can offer you the same connectivity even if they have a vastly improved feature set.

I don't really know what can legally be done to rein these two in. The UK is the lowest bar to set on prosecuting trolls, and this case was expensive and rare. It doesn't put trolls on warning because nobody else will have this person's resources. And it's harder everywhere else.

Even if you and I and all our friends left Twitter and FB for greener pastures, as long as they have that oligopoly, we'll still have to live with people using them to defame us. Everybody will know, even if we're not there.

I'm not actually worried about Trump. He was an exception. Let there be an exception for sitting Presidents; I don't care. He's still just one loud asshole. The problem is that anonymous jerks of all kinds can pursue defamation campaigns. They have to work harder to get traction, but they can also be more focused.

They, I think, are the real problem, and I don't really know what to do. I don't know what laws I'd pass even if I could. The vaunted power of the Internet has made it possible to be mean on a scale never before seen, and nothing I've seen in the past gives me a guide to that.

> I simply don’t get why we don’t hold the social media platforms accountable for the content that gets posted to them

The scale of content being posted on social media is such that this liability makes running a social media platform effectively impossible. All user generated content would have to be manually reviewed before being posted. This would be prohibitively expensive.

As for the Trump ban, freedom of speech also means freedom from compelled speech. The government can't force a store to sell a particular newspaper, or force a newspaper to run a particular story. Same applies to internet websites. If you have a blog with a comments section, the government can't force you to host certain comments.

> The scale of content being posted on social media is such that this liability makes running a social media platform effectively impossible. All user generated content would have to be manually reviewed before being posted. This would be prohibitively expensive.

Since when is "operating responsibly would be too expensive" an excuse that we allow businesses to use to avoid any responsibility for the damage they cause? If your business model can't function at scale without incurring enormous externalities to your society, it doesn't have a right to exist.

It's not just a question if expenses but also responsibility. If I post a post-it note on my schools bulletin board making defamatory statements who is at fault? Me? Or the school, because it was their bulletin board?

The first time, it's your responsibility.

If you kept doing it but the school knew you were doing it and not only left it up, but put copies on bulletin boards across their entire global network, and never asked you to stop, maybe they have to take some responsibility.

Right, the person who authored the defamatory content - not the platform - is responsible. That's how the law works.

The school might not even know whether the content is defamatory. If someone posts an accusation of sexual assault and the accused denies it what happens? Does it have to immediately side with the accused?

> The scale of content being posted on social media is such that this liability makes running a social media platform effectively impossible.

I won’t miss social media, will you?

And I say this as someone who uses Facebook, YouTube and Instagram quite a lot for Blood Bowl hobby purposes, so it’s not that I dislike their platforms as such, but it’s hard to deny that they aren’t healthy for society. At least not if we want to continue valuing experts and science and not popularity and populism.

> As for the Trump ban, freedom of speech also means freedom from compelled speech. The government can't force a store to sell a particular newspaper, or force a newspaper to run a particular story. Same applies to internet websites. If you have a blog with a comments section, the government can't force you to host certain comments.

I personally don’t find this argument particularly compelling when the entity in question is a platform that arguably has more influence over public discourse than most (all?) governments.

There is an enormous difference between someone’s blog and a web site that is used as a communication platform by politicians and world leaders, and which has a user base numbering in the millions or even billions.

>it’s a democratic issue that it is a select few tech-billionaires that can remove someone like Donald Trump from my life

This is largely due to the fact that DT is, frankly, an idiot.

He was still the president on Jan 10. The American President has PLENTY of ways to get their message out... if they want to. Trump refused to adapt to changing circumstances.

I was in the “libertarian” camp on this. But now looking at all the damage caused (including killings in India on false social media rumors) I certainly think “mainstreaming of social media” is warranted.

For one remove anonymity from social media. That in itself should clean up half this mess with existing laws.

This is my issue with the libertarian stance. It’s easy to make arguments in abstract that sounds really good about personal liberty and responsibility, preventing authoritarianism etc. But humans can be really crappy and bad actors will always try to ruin something good (see Internet, environment, poverty programs, insurance, banking, etc), which is then why we end up with regulations.

What I don’t get is this idea that we shouldn’t learn from our mistakes because the #1 thing is to hold onto some kind of immutable ideal. Isn’t that why we continue to have legislation despite constitutions having been already written? That the world changes and thus government should change with it?

> For one remove anonymity from social media. That in itself should clean up half this mess with existing laws.

And it should also enable going after people with unpopular opinions even more.

And preventing people from spreading disinformation doesn't mean that the disinformation will magically go away. It's just that the only people allowed to spread disinformation will be the government and the capitalists. And you will be punished if you call them out on it.

People going after people for unpopular opinions is a society problem. Did that happen in the US or Europe before Twitter? It did not.

I see this touted a lot. But supporting trolls to spread disinformation online isn’t protecting free speech. Free speech protection comes from society and it’s laws. Not anonymity.

He was banned in order for Joe Biden to win. Plain and simple.

Same as why Hunter Biden stories were being blocked on Facebook as untrue, even though they were true. It made one candidate look bad.

It’s important to remember there is a narrative that stories must fit.

The next Republican candidate will be declared mean, dumb, all-phobic to everyone. Everything they say will be “fact checked” and proven false.

Doesn’t matter who it is. Doesn’t matter what they say, or their actual position. They will be canceled.

If they couldn't win an election without a blue bird app, they didn't deserve to win period.

I’m not a Trump supporter, but in the most recent Danish election, the platform that saw the most campaigning funds by all Danish political parties (and we elect quite a few) was Facebook. Most campaigning funds by a lot, mind you. This has been an increasing trend since Obama.

We’ve even got studies that show, that Social Media are easily the platforms where you buy the most influence per money spent.

Of course with no oversight and no public record of what gets shown to whom, unlike all other forms of political campaigning in Denmark, we do kind of put our election results in the hands of a single American billionaire.

It’s no secret that I don’t think our elected officials should get off these platforms, but they are obviously not going to do so when they are so powerful mediums, which means we need to regulate them.

So, not worth arguing the point with you? Already decided that Trump's a victim? Sigh.

What are you talking about? Biden had already won when Trump was banned.

You hit the nail on the head! And I’m from the US, so it’s not too Scandinavian. :)

What I found interesting was the spectacle of Mark Zuckerberg in front of congress. And yet no action whatsoever has come from it.

I think part of the issue is that the very people who could push for legislation (the voters) are also the unwitting products of these companies (sold to their real customers the advertisers).

So the manipulation has gone so deep and been so effective the majority of people aren’t realizing what’s happening.

Being subject to every imaginable form of psychological manipulation has become the norm. Advertising has had a race to the bottom as far as ethics go. News media needs to gaslight its viewership in order to maintain its flimsy position as an authority. The once subtle undertone of propaganda in entertainment is far from subtle. I don't know the reason for why people rarely notice, but I suspect they just want to enjoy their shows. If they were to think too deeply about what their shows have become, it would be hard to enjoy them.

It's difficult to ban a drug enjoyed by the majority of the population, no matter how harmful it is to individuals or society.

This is an excellent point. We know that social media addiction is real, and has real life consequences like increased anxiety and depression. Perhaps we need to start looking at it like a public health emergency.