To think that a few months ago, sharing this article would have gotten someone banned from Facebook for sharing "conspiracy theories".
It's all quite sinister.
It also exists on HN. There is a bevvy of topics we are not allowed to discuss here because dang will point to some arbitrary guidelines saying how "that's not allowed here" and ban you. It's the same shit everywhere.
Basically, the moment you step outside of the given narrative and what is and isn't allowed to be questioned, you should have zero (or less than zero, actually) expectation of having a platform where you can voice your concerns, and heaven forbid that your online persona be linked with your personal details, because if it is, you are in so much deep shit it's not even worth it for most people to utter certain words.
There should be nothing so sacred as to be above debate.
The problem with this group of tech companies deciding what is true and what is not, is that even if they're right the vast majority of the time, that few percent where they were wrong and silenced that voice actually matter. Nearly every idea we now hold sacred in science was once heretical. If you silence the heretics, how can you have progress? The Catholic church used to do that, during a period we now call the dark ages. We know how this ends.
Protecting people from misinformation can't be done with censorship, only by presenting them with the truth.
I care a great deal about the benefits of Mastodon! For me, the benefit is that anyone who is obsessive about conspiracy theories, racism, etc have a quarantined social space where they can converse without me having to listen.
If they had a different answer to decentralization than a 2MB/minute block size or a media hosting solution that wasn’t just “allow iframes from YouTube and Vimeo” I would have had more faith, but now that I’ve cashed out I see what the sibling sees, target demographic for a influencer-speculation-exchange is very small.
First we need good tech, like Mastodon.
Then we need to move our own digital "lives" onto those better platforms, and start encouraging our friends to join us.
For my part, I'm working on a new social app where everything is E2E encrypted [1], so you don't have to trust the server. The main use case is to let parents share photos of their kids in a safer way. I'm hoping this will be a big draw for people who have currently checked out of the creepy ad-tracking platforms.
What about all those times internet infrastructure companies shut down the people who built their own website? Do you see the precedent that you're setting?
The justification of 230's existence is that the host shouldn't be liable, because it's not their speech.
That's no longer true if they're picking and choosing what gets heard, what gets buried, and what gets banned.
They may not be typing the post, but they're determining what actually gets said. And that means they no longer deserve 230 protection.
That's how it's written. It provides protection for hosting controversial content posted by users, based on the fact that the host didn't write it, endorse it, or promote it.
If the host has an active hand in doing those things, they are no longer merely hosting. Same goes for surpressing or censoring.
The "another content provider" means the host is not involved in determining the content. But treating posts differently based on that content is not meaningfully different than an editor choosing what to publish.
It isn't merely a grey area. The law was deliberately intended to support editorial selection and even deletion of content offensive to the platform owners sensibilities while explicitly preserving their protection from liability for their users content. This is supported by a plain reading of the text and the words of the men who wrote it.
First the law
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
> (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
>(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).[1]
Now the words of Ron Wyden
>Republican Congressman Chris Cox and I wrote Section 230 in 1996 to give up-and-coming tech companies a sword and a shield, and to foster free speech and innovation online. Essentially, 230 says that users, not the website that hosts their content, are the ones responsible for what they post, whether on Facebook or in the comments section of a news article. That's what I call the shield.
> But it also gave companies a sword so that they can take down offensive content, lies and slime — the stuff that may be protected by the First Amendment but that most people do not want to experience online. And so they are free to take down white supremacist content or flag tweets that glorify violence (as Twitter did with President Trump's recent tweet) without fear of being sued for bias or even of having their site shut down.
Your positions isn't merely incorrect it is directly counterfactual. It's an example of replacing actual known reality with the counterfactual in order to obtain a rhetorical advantage.
It is more advantageous to start from the lie that platform owners have somehow been violating or abusing the law outrageously and something must be done about it compared to the actual reality that the law is working as intended and you wish to change it because there is both a general feeling that existing laws and privileges ought to be enforced and that new laws need be examined before being enacted.
The prevalence of people of a particular political stripe to literally just making up alternative facts in response to inconvenient reality is deeply challenging to productive dialogue because its impossible to start out with a reasonable basis for discussion one must instead rewind to figure out which part of your fellows assumptions are based on purely fabricated reality. I expect you have taken it as a given that the line you were fed was based on reality. You are mistaken. I strongly encourage you to read both the laws and the words of the man who cowrote it.
The intent is clear from this list. It even implicitly allows violence as long as it's not excessive. It does not include anything about truth, or difference of opinion, or statements that aren't "backed by the science".
It also requires a "good faith" interpretation, which would be irrelevant if hosts were allowed to act on any criteria they wish.
Good faith is only relevant to immunity from suits by people whose content was moderated not in terms of liability for other parties communications which is inviolate in all cases.
A finding of bad faith would then pertain exclusively to the particular act or acts of moderation and would not effect the platforms immunity for either other acts of moderation or for other parties speech. There is no act by which a companies 230 protection may be in general dissolved.
Furthermore absent 230 protection for act or acts of moderation those moderated would have little just cause to bring anything but fraudulent frivolous lawsuits because you in truth have little right to be heard on someone else's website. That is to say finding bad faith would only open the door to lawsuits it wouldn't be a cause in and of itself.
Say I banned you from my site because I don't like blond people but lied and said it was for breaking site rules.
I might be acting in bad faith but as you have no particular right to access or post content on my site so the judge would find my bad faith may cost me protection under 230 but nothing else.
This is probably why there wasn't a notable finding of bad faith that helped the blocked party between 1996 and 2019.
In 2019 we finally had Malwarebytes v Enigma wherein Enigma sued Malwarebytes labeling it's software as a possibility unwanted program and advising it's users not to install it. The 9th circuit found it was in bad faith discouraging competition.
If your issue is Facebook and Twitter silencing some viewpoints this is hardly encouraging as there are few parallels.
> That's no longer true if they're picking and choosing what gets heard, what gets buried, and what gets banned.
No, its not. That's approximately the traditional justification for distributors having more limited liability than publishers.
Section 230 was expressly adopted to allow platforms to act like publishers in a limited way without publisher liability, specifically to pick and choose what gets heard, what gets buried, and what gets banned.
The justification you invented is basically the opposite of the explicit purpose of 230.
BS. It covered liability for third party speech. It allowed controversial things to be said without the host being liable for hosting them.
Private censorship of controversial speech is the complete opposite of it's purpose.
>"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider"
If you only allow speakers to be heard that agree with you, you are the speaker.
If you only publish things that you agree with you are a publisher.
The law shields hosts in exchange for providing a place for free speech. If you no longer provide that space, you no longer deserve the protections it affords.
The behavior we see now is exactly the behavior that 230 was meant to prevent: sites being overly protective and aggressively policing what gets posted. 230 was passed so they wouldn't have to do it. It's not an excuse for them to do it anyway.
No one forsaw that the hosts would actually want an excuse to censor users.
That was already allowed, provided they didn't, to use the phrasing being used in this thread, “pick and choose what gets heard, what gets buried, and what gets banned.” Doing that even on a limited basis made them, under pre-230 law, a publisher, subject to liability for all content on the platform.
Section 230 was adopted specifically to allow platforms to moderate user-generated content according the platform owners’ view of objectionable content without incurring publisher liability, because the pre-230 situation was viewed as encouraging a situation i which platforms who didn't feel they could completely moderate were forced to not moderate at all, making online communities persistently polluted with objectionable content.
The Communications Decency Act, of which 230 was the only substantive part to survive, was not about promoting unmoderated internet fora, but the opposite.
If they tell you, "you can't say that, change what you're saying" is it now the cities speech? No.
230 specifically is for the purpose of not being liable, and being able to choose what's on your platform. Specifically so you can moderate your own platform.
No one has some magical right to use your social media business.
Facebook decides to blank ban anything that hasn't been approved by gatekeepers and you approved because you are worried that people might hear on facebook that vaccines cause people to go sterile and not get one?
Which one of these things is actually causing harm? Shutting down all discussion or the worry that someone might post and might think the vaccine causes you to be magnetic?
It's crazy people are falling for this.
Then I worked with the IC and heard what intelligence agents said. Maybe they lied. Maybe they’re crazy. But combined with what happened in the last 18 months, and their statements, there is an acutely centralizer corrupt power which has ever bigger rings of corruption.
Which is normalized as it goes. Everyone does it! Politics as normal. Modern Neoliberalism and government revolving door.
Sometimes people make unfounded guesses based on little/no evidence. Just because it turns out to be correct doesn't mean those people were any more justified-- at that time-- in their unfounded accusations.
Of course a person is now justified, with evidence available, to make these claims. It doesn't mean those who made them baselessly out of suspicion and guesses any less irrational for doing so before there was evidence. Making unfounded accusations doesn't retroactively turn an irrational accusation into a reasonable one just because it turns out to be true.
It's also worth noting that this is still unproven: it doesn't look good for China, but there's nothing definitive yet.
The urge to ban that info in social sites came much later, when politicians got the message and considered that info dangerous(and because the West depended on Chinese supplies).
Most politicians are so dumb from the scientific and technical side that it took a long time for them to understand.
But it gives us and important lesson: If we want to inform ourselves, we should use alternatives to centralized social media.
It simply got politicized just as masks got politicized. The more one side advocates it the more the other side discredits it.
If Trump kept his mouth shut, it may have gone down differently (that is, less politicized).
Bad faith propaganda at the scale we have seen recently is abuse of free speech, and widespread abuse of a freedom often leads to the curtailment of that freedom.
I didn't say they were doing a good job, just that the alternative would have been to let the platform turn into a complete cesspool of bullshit and hate.
This scenario is a curse you get when you are operating a gigantic Internet forum at that kind of scale.
Here's an example of this happening[1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
They're not that far off that to be honest - https://oversightboard.com/
Drop the algorithmic feed, and you solve most of the problem. Unfortunately for Facebook, this would also cut their ad revenue, so they'll never do it.