We should either make it illegal to post that kind of information (or rather - try and fail) or enforce fair treatment of people from the big tech companies.
They cannot be both a "mere conduit" and a "censor/publisher" at the same time.
You are saying the equivalent of: if this were 150 years ago, and your crazy uncle thought that the moon was made of cheese, the New York Times would legally be required to put that on the front page of the paper. That's insane.
Under conditions of monopoly, the private companies act much like a government, but unaccountable and undemocratic. It violates the spirit of 1776 to be subjected to the will of an unelected minority and be silenced.
That said, I find the opinions being suppressed despicable, but that doesn't mean I'm going to line up behind government censorship and private monopoly.
Facebook is not a newspaper. Twitter is not a newspaper. In this example Facebok/Twitter ARE PAPER. They are part of the infrastructure of the internet.
The thing is social media have been treated so far more like a Fedex/UPS service than a newspaper. If they do want to open up all messages to place their own inserts, they should become as sueable as a newspaper.
We should only invoke the spirit of a law when it’s a decision of last resort. But we’ve been talking about public vs. private speech for decades now. If Congress had a different spirit in mind, the constitution would’ve been amended or the Supreme Court would’ve issued a definitive decision.
I am strongly in favor of social media companies voluntarily censoring hate speech. But the roundabout way that 1A is being bypassed is concerning.
That is not what twitter or facebook or youtube are about. They are platforms for people to share whatever they want with no preemptive filtering. Because of that open access, they have become the de-facto public square, at least except for adult material and violence/gore. Now the companies want to censor increasing amounts of material that are neither illegal nor fall into the clear adult/violence categories.
Why? They claim advertisers don't like certain content, but that's easily solved by having tags associated with various categories. They could even do it for adult and violent content. Allow advertisers to opt out of advertising on material with any particular tag(s).
Another reason is purely political: they want to shape public politics and discussion, or they are afraid the government will retaliate against their platform for hosting certain kinds of legal but dubious content. This is especially the case for covid-related stuff. They don't crack down on false information on other subjects nearly as hard.
They also probably believe that if they don't outright ban certain content, and create a tagging system instead, the mere presence of that content on their platform will change the audience in ways that are bad for their profitability. That may be true, but the net result is still that they're filtering and manipulating public, person-to-person communication and sentiment in the new public square. Corporations should not have that power.
Note:
I separated out adult and violence because they're obvious "but what about" categories. "You want Facebook, Twitter, Youtube to allow all legal content? What about porn and violence?" I don't know if I have a good answer to that question, but there's plenty of legal history about community standards, and porn and gore are usually outside what most communities consider "public square" speech. There is, however, an argument that they're no longer excludable. If SFO parades are an indication of what's tolerable in the modern public square, what rationale does youtube have for restricting anything equivalent? And terrorist killing videos, while they're obviously gory, have educational value. Personally I'd say unban all of it and have thorough tagging, but I think legally and from a corporate perspective there's a middle ground that has to be found, which is: restrict porn and gore, leave everything else alone (subject to tags). It's worth noting that Twitter takes a different tack on adult content: they allow most porn, it just has to be on an 18+ flagged account. I don't see why all social media companies couldn't do that.
Why are you okay with censorship of the adult and violence categories but not the COVID-19 misinformation category? Fundamentally, the same thing is happening: Twitter is taking a stance on what legal speech it permits on its platform.
I don’t see what’s obvious about the “but what about” categories for sex and violence. You could make the same argument about medical misinformation or hate speech — they’re obviously a separate category that social networks should censor. (You could also make the reverse argument about spam — who is Twitter to prevent Bob’s Viagra Store from promoting his business?)
The point being that it’s all in the eye of the beholder. Everyone has their own line, and if you want to convince others to adopt yours you’re going to have to do more than offer as an axiom that sex and violence are uniquely deserving of censorship.
Incorrect statements about the world (unless they're directed at people and companies, then there's slander and libel law), have never been the subject of legal restrictions that I'm aware of. Social, yes, legal, no.
You can stand on a street corner with a sign protesting science and demanding recognition of flat earth theory. However, try that with a sign depicting gore or porn. Depending on your location, authorities would probably use some generic statute like disturbing the peace or some "harmful to minors" statute. I'd be shocked if any action were taken against anyone advocating Flat Earth Theory. Religious fanatics regularly do much worse protesting abortion clinics.
The issue shows up when certain content is being broadcast in the public square. I think all of these things, from covid misinformation to sex and violence, are so prevalent on the internet that blocking it on the major social media sites is futile. I think it should be handled with a tag system, without blocking or deranking anything other than allowing people to choose which specially tagged content shows up in their feeds.
But as long as they don't have those kinds of tagging systems (twitter allows users to flag their own accounts as 18+, but nothing else and nothing more granular except on their administrative backend), they can hide behind the excuse that their algorithms put arbitrary content into other people's feeds, and therefore the content that has historical precedent for community restrictions (obscene, disruptive, or harmful to minors) can plausibly be restricted on their platforms too.
No, the first amendment of the US constitution means freedom from government intervention. Freedom of speech means exactly what it says - violating it isn't illegal if you're a private company, but that doesn't change what it means.
I believe in marketplace of ideas ; I believe we should let stupid and wrong opinions be voiced rather than simmer in darkness; I dislike censorship in virtually every way and situation; but I'm not aware of what law is being broken. You might persuade me to vote for a new one but I don't know which law prohibits private company on their own private infra to do as they please.
(Please don't say "section 230" without reading it first, that gets tiring, not "controversial". See #1 etc etc ad infinitum ad nauseum)
[1]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
Maybe you can say more about why a business can't be both a publisher and a distributor? A newspaper publishes original content and classifieds, and they certainly have discretion over which classifieds to distribute in their paper, what makes social media any different?
Like it or not, major tech platforms wield the power of small countries now. It's probably helpful that we start thinking of them this way and move toward some kind of equitable regulation.
No, they absolutely do not. Nor do they "control the perception of billions of people." That's just fear-mongering hyperbole. You might have an argument that social media influences the opinions of billions of people, but then you have to take into account the deluge of inputs most people receive from multiple sources online and off, and realize that the total influence any one social media platform has is not that significant. This isn't the world of a few decades ago where many people's worldview was informed by only three tv stations and one newspaper - and not even in that world did the media control people's perception.
When Twitter can levy taxes, field an army and a police force, declare Facebook illegal and bomb their campus into smoldering rubble, and coerce people outside of their platform to obey the laws they pass and enforce through their monopoly on violence then they might have something approaching the power of even a small nation. Being able to ban people from your website (and your website alone) is not equivalent to nation-state status.
>It's probably helpful that we start thinking of them this way and move toward some kind of equitable regulation.
No, it's not helpful, it's propaganda. It's the rhetoric of the modern form of the Red Scare, except now the "communist conspiracy" is running social media instead of Hollywood.
It's also incredibly easy to spread pure garbage with social media. Debunking it takes real work.
I am going to a funeral in a few hours for an unvaccinated friend who died of COVID.
Maybe regulators should force dominant platforms to kick out a section of their user base every so often to keep the ecosystem diversified.
No coffee shop has 1/4 of the human population visit each day.
Twitter is _clearly_ acting as a publisher akin to a newspaper by editorializing and controlling what posts are distributed on its platform which would be OK if they were subject to the same libel laws as a newspaper, but they're not.
It doesn't take a genius or even two eyeballs to see that twitters moderation tilts heavily in one direction and gives a pass to people of a certain political persuasion.
I feel very frustrated by this because to me this is essentially the case of that religious baker refusing to make a gay wedding cake, except here we have a big company refusing to serve some people because it doesn't like what they have to say.
I would not require twitter to server anybody coffee though.
You can argue that Twitter is different because it's bigger, but if there's only one bar in town I don't see a substantial different between these two acts; I just don't see the size of Twitter as especially important to this.
What I'm saying here mostly is- I really don't think you want to add "political belief or opinion" as a protected class. That means not being able to fire someone for expressing racist opinions, that means not being able to ban gang colors from a club, it really has a very far reaching effect.
What you probably want to do is socialize Twitter. Same effect (they are treated as a public entity, and can only punish you for illegal content) but without a bunch of insane restrictions on my own personal Freedom of Association (you remember that part of the Bill of Right, not just the Freedom of Speech parts, right?)
Free speech is the US is freedom from censorship by the govt only, and it isn't unlimited. It only applies to ideological speech.
No consumer wants an unrestricted platform anyway. There are no platforms with zero moderation.
But I disagree that Twitter is an outlier in that regard. Facebook, YouTube, and reddit (mostly) are spaces that technically have groups, but you're still flooded with algorithmically-chosen content made by strangers.
Laws are thought ending semantic games invented by aristocrats to manipulate the masses.
Read James Madison; government exists to protect the opulent minority from the poor majority.
Laws as our society knows them are aristocratic obligations put in people. Our social meme obliges us to kowtow to the owners, just as religion obliged us to kowtow to the masters of the sacred texts.
> Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body.
This quote comes from a statement Madison made at the Federal Convention of 1787 (https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-004...), and is basically pointing out that a Democracy is susceptible to a Tyranny of the Majority (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority), and needs a balancing force (the Senate). The comment you are replying to is from a user named "chmsky00" which gives a hint about how some, in particular Noam Chomsky, have interpreted this quote by Noam Chomsky (https://chomsky.info/commongood02/).
Trade to support biological life is one thing, and is something I feel should be unencumbered by servicing memes like “Jeff Bezos is worth billions of dollars.” An idea my math education informs me is built on abstraction the public cannot understand. It’s little different than conquering indigenous people with language like “My God commands it!”
Bezos isn’t a savior or genius; he had help from our social field theory in the form of rich relatives and friends who gained in a higher tax era, then changes the rules.
Paulo Freire and countless others offer similar metaphors for applying economics to social behavior. We call it behavioral economics now.
IMO the public should be holding out at scale, and only enabling the building of long lived solutions rather than lowest bidder public works, and social agency bent towards consumer waste creation and cleanup, while letting a minority LARP being above the daily work that enables their life.
Simple.
Aristocratic protectionism is built into the American political system.
https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/8793/what-did-j...
If you're paying for the servers that run the conduit, the least you should be able to do is decide who can add to it and what you allow through it.
Use IRC. Use free forum software. Write a blog. Go stand on a soapbox in Times Square and shout it at the top of your lungs. Do whatever you want. But free speech has precisely nothing to do with having free reign to violate a company's terms of service. You have the constitutional right to say whatever you want. You do not have the constitutional right to have your nonsense amplified by billions of dollars worth of privately owned technical infrastructure.
A family who lost a loved one who didn't take the vaccine because they read something on Twitter would have a very good case today to take them to the cleaners. And given the political climate they would probably win.
And because it's merely a veiled threat, there's no basis for a 1st Amendment lawsuit alleging censorship by the government.
If they don't police content, they're covered by Section 230. But if they do police content, and they miss some, then... are they liable for the part that they miss?
Does Section 230 still cover them if they're picking and choosing what they're going to carry?
There's a (mildly sarcastic) article on TechDirt that's pretty comprehensive: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
Holy shit. 230 is LITERALLY ABOUT PROTECTING PICKING AND CHOOSING. That's the entire point!! Carrying everything in common is called a "common carrier". Putting out your own personal speech is publishing. Moderation exists in between and can never be perfect. Section 230 was created so that forums could moderate, imperfectly, however they wish without being liable for stuff that other people wrote. It is what makes the internet as we know it possible, including Hacker News itself.
Seriously, how do these memes get started and gain so much traction!? Why has nobody apparently actually read 230? It's TWENTY-SIX WORDS. That's it. Here:
"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."
Does anyone see the word "neutral" or anything like that in there? Any qualifications on "both sides"? No. Because it doesn't exist. Stop.
Section 230 does not prohibit imperfect moderation. In fact, Section 230 exists for mostly this reason, so that platforms can moderate on a best effort and not be held liable as publishers.