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So while this one-liner comment seems to be drawing ire, I do think it brings up a difficult point.

As more and more of our civic discourse moves online, there are no "public spaces" online where the rule of law and public interest comes first.

There is no town square, no soapbox in the park, no public access TV, or the ability for masses to organize and march or protest (or whatever the online equivalent is), with only the government's laws as written to contend with.

Everything (that has meaningful reach and impact) is private, and all these meeting and communication spaces have a company with shareholders and therefore goals and motivations that override public interest.

I certainly don't have the answer to this problem but this erosion is a problem that will need to be reckoned with at some point.

I think we do, it's called the DNS. Buy a domain and put whatever you like on it. It does get hard/expensive if you get a truly massive audience, but that has always been true. You are not and have never been owed the benefits of someone else's platform, but it's still easier now to have a truly public discussion than ever before.

We have never had a public town square larger than a literal town square, excepting maybe ham radio. Every other space has in some way been moderated or fashioned to purpose. Even public TV, news and radio are groomed to certain standards.

And yet we've had demonstrations and protests that have drawn hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions, into the streets around the world to demand change or rally around causes.

Where does that happen online, with the guarantees afforded by only the rule of law?

Various governments have ways to petition online. Change.org or whatever is reasonably open to things covered by the first amendment, though of course it is privately controlled without real guarantees.

A government-controlled way to protest is not a protest, is it?

Nor is funnelling your voice through a private corporation, regardless of whether it is for profit or not.

Thanks for re-making my point for me I guess?

Yup, we actually need public twitters. Nothing fancy, no recommendations, not even sophisticated antispam, just simple follow list like rss with feedback. People can learn the self-curate

Sure but who owns and runs that? Who is responsible for the infrastructure costs, the operations of it, the uptime, etc..

The government? Which government? The Internet is global, so would you have a public Twitter for every country? How do you geo-restrict this then? Whose laws apply? How is it reported or enforced? Do we need "Twitter cops"?

You can throw out easy answers all you want but it's actually a really complex issue.

The govt, municipalities etc. Public spaces are public and the whole thing can be decentralized so it s not compute and bw heavy. It should be very cheap compared to e.g. roads

You are grossly oversimplifying the technical and governance effort required to do something like this.

In 1955 if I wanted to have a flamebait war with someone across the country, I'd have to write them a letter. We should go back to that.

That might actually be the worst way.

In most of the world yes, but america's laws are unique

Yes, because when the American government controls Twitter, you can be certain all views will be respected and treated impartially...

Without irony, you probably would have less censorship than should a private company own it. Is that a good thing? Not sure. Seems like spam would overtake it quickly.

Sure, until an American president decides to ban another country's account for disrespecting him, or use it for leverage in negotiations, or have the NSA bulk scan their citizens private messages for 'terrorist' communications, or have the algorithm bias other country's newsfeeds in favor of American propaganda.

Twitter is a global platform and much of the world wouldn't trust the US as far as they could throw an American nuke (not withstanding how much they would also trust their own government.) The only reason Twitter works as well as it does now is that its primary concern, as a company, is profit, and not the national interests of one specific country.

That ship long since sailed. Look at Russia, for example. They have basically been cut off from all forms of social media and the president didn’t even need to order them to do it (Even though the president has more or less total power over anything involving international trade). The social media companies did it voluntarily.

I would still prefer it to be the choice of individuals and private platforms, which can be competed with and avoided, than a government. Even if I think blacklisting Russians at every opportunity is a terrible, unproductive and ultimately self-sabotaging move for Americans to make.

> Sure, until an American president decides to ban

Well, that is what the court system, and the supreme court is for.

The court system puts very strong restrictions on what the government is able to do, regarding speech.

Sure, maybe a president would want to do something. And the courts, which have a very established history of protecting speech rights would stop them.

A better solution, though, would be to make a new law that requires twitter to follow similar standards as the government has to follow, in the same way how we put strong restrictions on what telephone companies are allowed to do

(So don't give me any objections about how such laws would be illegal, when we already have them! Use our phone laws as the model, to do something similar, if not exact the same).

Social media companies aren't common carriers. People want them to be so they have to follow the same laws, but they never claimed to be neutral. They have rules, they have distinct cultures and business models. They also exist within an ecosystem of competitors - Twitter being popular doesn't mean they control communications infrastructure. Facebook serving a billion people no more makes it a public good than MacDonald's.

Did you read this part, or are you just going to completely ignore it? "The [modern day] court system puts very strong restrictions on what the government is able to do, regarding speech."

I am not sure how anyone who has read any supreme court opinion in the last 40 years, could come to the conclusion that the government is not strongly prevented from engaging in large speech restrictions.

I read it, I just don't trust it. Not after the Patriot Act, PRISM, Guantanamo Bay and any number of other ways the government has made an end run around its own laws and the courts have let them, or at best not been able to intervene until well after the damage has been done. If the US government really, really wants to break the law, the courts will often look the other way if there's plausible deniability.

Are we really talking about trusting the courts to properly adjudicate a platform with a global userbase and an algorithmically driven feed (designed for psychological control and influence) when the American press is all but universally considered, by Americans, to be controlled by corporate interests and the military industrial complex? We don't even trust CNN to tell us the sun rises in the East and sets in the West but we'll trust the government to have a fair hand at managing Twitter?

I get the argument intellectually, and I'll even concede that it could work in the best circumstance. But I don't believe we live in the world of best circumstance, and i don't trust it to work in practice. Maybe if there were real international controls over the platform. But even then there could be some secret ECHELON BS going on between governments to allow rights abuses on a technicality.

> Are we really talking about trusting the courts to properly adjudicate a platform with a global userbase and an algorithmically driven feed

Ok, well then you are in luck. Because in the context of this thread, it seems like we won't even need the government or the courts to do anything, as Elon is going to be pressuring twitter to do what the open discourse advocates want anyway.

So, just remember, you can't complain about any of this, because it is not the government forcing twitter to have less moderation, instead it is private individuals.

So now everyone wins. You don't have to worry about the government forcing these changes, because private parties are going to force them to have less moderation, and there is very little you can do to stop these moderation changes.

>So, just remember, you can't complain about any of this, because it is not the government forcing twitter to have less moderation, instead it is private individuals.

This is the internet, I will complain about anything I damn well please.

>Because private parties are going to force them to have less moderation, and there is very little you can do to stop these moderation changes.

I can stop using Twitter if I find it objectionable, and if enough people do the same, Twitter will either have to change its policies or a competitor will step in. Because policies aren't laws, and don't require bureaucracy, politics, the intervention of courts or votes to change, private Twitter can change on a dime, whereas public Twitter couldn't.

As hard as it is to stop moderation changes on Twitter, it's easy to avoid Twitter. But if Twitter becomes integrated into the bureaucracy then it becomes as unavoidable as the DMV. The worst Twitter can do about my theoretically objectionable tweets is ban me. The worst the government could do is have me arrested, tortured or killed. I'll take my chances with Elon.

> This is the internet, I will complain about anything I damn well please.

You can complain, but the point is you would be a hypocrite, and none of what you say actually matters.

> I can stop using Twitter if I find it objectionable

Sure you can, and basically nobody else is going to follow, because they are the only major player in that market. So twitter will live on without you, and be perfectly fine.

In fact, it seems that the stock price went up because of the elon news. So the people with the money actually think that it will improve, and you can feel free to waste your time not using the only major platform in twitter's market.

> it's easy to avoid Twitter

Yes, and it is also easy for everyone else to continue to use twitter and not care that you leave. I guess you'll be shouting into the void on platforms that nobody else is using, about how horrible twitter is, and everyone else will continue to not care.

Its a private company and all. They can feel free to choose to have less moderation, and there is nothing you can do about it, but complain in places where nobody will care.

Does American government censor the press? Or mail?

America just had a President who explicitly declared the press to be the enemy of the people.

Ignoring the degree to which the American press voluntarily acts as a propaganda platform[0], the US government absolutely does censor the press, by revoking or controlling press credentials, arresting reporters covering protests, harassment, etc[1].

And the US has historically censored the mail, yes, usually during wartime. But the bigger problem is surveillance - the USPS tracks, photographs and logs all paper mail for government surveillance and law enforcement[2]. The USPS also has a 'covert operations' division that monitors social media posts[3].

You could (correctly) claim that this isn't nearly as bad as the surveillance and censorship regimes elsewhere, but it's difficult to see how making that easier by giving the government direct control over a primary means of global communication makes it less likely.

[0]https://www.thoughtco.com/how-media-censorship-affects-the-n...

[1]https://fair.org/home/us-censorship-is-increasingly-official...

[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-ma...

[3]https://www.salon.com/2021/04/21/is-the-post-office-spying-o...

In living memory, through McCarthyism.

>McCarthyism

Isn’t that “ism” largely discredited? He was right, the government/institutions were full of communists. Today they’ve rebranded as socialists, but to my knowledge everything he fought against came to pass.

Attaching the -ism label is just a thought-terminating cliche.

It maybe wasn't "full of communists" but you are right that project VENONA has shown that McCarthy wasn't totally wrong either. Institutions were deeply inflitrated at all levels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project

I wonder what the overlap between those accused by McCarthy and those who were actually spies.

Communists should have freedom of speech too?

I guess that depends if you consider WikiLeaks part of the press.

During the Trump administration, their vindictive treatment of the press and the selective removal of access to the White House by outlets not toeing the line more or less amounted to quasi-censorship in practice.

Small potatoes compared to the ugliness around the world

Other governments' behavior isn't a relevant comparison. The discussion isn't "Should the US nationalize Twitter or should China?"

Ok then, if comparing censorship by the us govt vs private companies it's clear who wins

Nationalizing in the traditional sense is not the solution, indeed, but rather hold the platform up to the letter of the constitution. This right now is not exactly possible given that "twitter is a private company", therefore arguably if one puts it in the hands of the government, you have the double-edged sword of potentially being abused by the government, and on the other hand the solution i forementioned on holding it accountable given that it would become public under the law. However, just like with any other gov. institution, being held accountable is more often than not up to the people through their civic initiative and probably not something that the government will do out of interest. So in this regard in US it could work given the nature of the constitution, whereas in other countries Twitter would just become a propaganda machine (isn't it one already?).

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas suggested extending common carrier legislation to cover social media platforms. That would essentially prevent them from censoring any content legal in the US.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2021/04/09/justice-t...

Thanks for the link, I remember hearing about Clarence Thomas' take on this subject but I never took the time to study it. My personal opinion (before reading the material above) is that the "core issue" stands on the S230 "loop-hole" (I don't want to use the term 'abuse' given the negative connotation ... so far it[S230] has been a net good since it made the internet grow so much since 2007, but things have started to change with the rise of monopolistic corporations) giving companies both privileges with less responsibility than should necessary. At least in principle a Bill of Rights should exist, especially considering that places like Twitter are considered fairly often under the law (think court cases) 'public spaces'. Therefore in my mind if the public street is a place where i can speak freely, so should one be able to on Twitter/any other such deemed public space.

This seems like a silly post on first reading, but actually thinking about it, that would mean the first amendment actually applies to Twitter right? In which case it would actually mean government can't interfere with it?

It's an interesting mind exercise. What happens with blatant spamming, or bots, is the government allowed to interfere with those? Or does the 1st amendment block that too?

The government already owns a support foundation for publicly-owned broadcasters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_for_Public_Broadca...). Nothing about the 1st Amendment seems to prevent these broadcasters from restricting access to their airwaves. Anyone with a camera or mic can't just walk into a PBS studio and start transmitting whatever message they want. The Public Broadcasting Act of 1972 that created the CPB does stipulate that it has to be objective and balanced when dealing with controversial subjects, but it doesn't say every single person with a voice, no matter what they want to say, needs to be allowed to speak.

I aint no lawyer, of course, but this doesn't seem inconsistent with other arenas of free speech. Even literal public squares don't have infinite space. If some group tried to go occupy a government-owned park with a few thousand people more or less permanently, preventing anyone else from ever getting access, that would be illegal. Rationing and rate-limiting are not censorship, though presumably at least some people subject to it will probably try to say they are.

PBS is a publisher, not a platform, and is legally liable for the content they publish in a way that Twitter is not.

> Rationing and rate-limiting are not censorship, though presumably at least some people subject to it will probably try to say they are.

When rationing and rate-limiting are applied on the basis of the content of the speech, then yes is is absolutely censorship and there are supreme court cases to back that up.

But twitter isn't inherently limited by airtime or bandwidth, it's in principle infinite.

Nuisance on public infrastructure - like loitering and littering, some trolling and all spam could become misdemeanors subject to enforcement. Twitter officers lol. Imagine joining the fbi and ending up manning the Twitter troll patrol.

Absurd idea, but amusing consequences if you ignore the obvious roadblocks.

So many people compare twitter to the national government (even Elon) and make the case that their censorship is akin to a violation of free speech. I would say they need a civics class more than anything.

But in terms of a nationalized social media network, I can't imagine it going well. The lack of innovation in the government would probably mean the site gets overwhelmed and taken down shortly after it was made.

I think that's a solid read.

The social media platforms need some sort of speech regulation enforced on them. Imagine if AT&T cut off your phone call because you started talking about Donald Trump or Hunter Biden's laptop.

Social media companies enjoy immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act[1] but then editorialize their platform to allow only conversations socially acceptable.

Enforcing free speech on the platforms, as its accepted today by the courts[2], with criminal penalties for noncompliance, is the only solution.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 [2] https://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/educational-re...

>This seems like a silly post on first reading, but actually thinking about it, that would mean the first amendment actually applies to Twitter right?

Without Section 230 Twitter would be liable for every evil thing that is said on their platform.

What Section 230 does is create a category in which you are not liable for the content on the platform but they specifically setup limited rules for what can be censored. All censorship must be done in good faith. Lewd, obscene, harassment etc is censorable. But again good faith, you cant just say everything is harassment or obscene so you can censor speech.

So absolutely, twitter is legally obligated to allow free speech. The big controversy is that they are clearly in violation of this but nobody is punishing them. They just get away with it.

>It's an interesting mind exercise. What happens with blatant spamming, or bots, is the government allowed to interfere with those? Or does the 1st amendment block that too?

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

So twitter could ban porn under lewd category but they choose not to do. Same with gore and obscenity in general.

You dont have to censor these things, but you can if you please.

Censoring political speech under any of those categories is going to be virtually impossible to justify that they are doing this in good faith.

You seem slightly confused about what 230 does. What it does is allow companies to do some moderation without legally liable as publishers for all content they host. Without section 230 companies have a choice to either do no moderation or to assume full liability as publishers.

Section 230 was created to encorage online moderation by removing the liability that moderation would bring in an offline context.

>You seem slightly confused about what 230 does. What it does is allow companies to do some moderation without legally liable as publishers for all content they host.

I did copy and paste the law. It's clear to me what is says and the free speech that is required. Censorship must be done in good faith.

>Without section 230 companies have a choice to either do no moderation or to assume full liability as publishers.

Without section 230 they would assume full liability as publisher.

>Section 230 was created to encorage online moderation by removing the liability that moderation would bring in an offline context.

Section 230 was created to allow entities like twitter to exist. Without section 230 twitter stops existing.

Let's be realistic, Elon just put $9 billion down because his poll showed significant problem with censorship. Fixing this will take twitter from $40 billion to much higher.

There was case law before s.230 was passed, which said what parent claimed: if you moderated your content you carried liability as a publisher, if you were careful not to look at what went up on your service then you didn't. s.230 was added to the Communications Decency Act specifically to remove that perverse incentive in order to encourage 'family friendly' moderation. That's it. It doesn't anywhere require good faith. The entire legislative history is on record. And it long predates Twitter.

>There was case law before s.230 was passed,

The CDA was from 1996. What social media predated 1996? Even ICQ does not predate the CDA.

> It doesn't anywhere require good faith.

I literally copy and pasted the law. It literally has the words good faith in it.

>The entire legislative history is on record. And it long predates Twitter.

Section 230 long predated all of the things. It is how they function today.

'Social media' in the web 2.0 sense is post 1996, but there were plenty of websites with comments sections and online forums before that. Cases over intermediary liability for online content have some antiquity; in Cubby v. CompuServe (776 F. Supp. 135; S.D.N.Y. 1991), for example, CompuServe were found non-liable because they had no first-hand knowledge of the defamatory posting. Whereas in Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy (No. 31063/94, 1995 N.Y. Misc. LEXIS 229; N.Y. Sup. Ct. May 24, 1995) Prodigy were found liable as the publisher because they'd set content rules and run a filter over users' contributions. Congress thought that latter result was unhelpful (because it incentivised people to run cesspools rather than to actively moderate them) and legislated.

And sorry, I should have been clearer on good faith. The section preventing providers being liable as a publisher (which is the core of s.230's value to social media platforms) has no good faith requirement. "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." (s.230(c)1) is the whole clause. Platforms don't acquire intermediary liability even if they delete every post praising the Yankees while laughing maniacally and falsely claiming it's a result of profanity use. They simply aren't "treated as the publisher or speaker" full stop.

The good faith language comes from (c)2, which further limits liability (to the speaker) for good faith removals on the grounds that the speech might be offensive. That's not an intermediary liability issue, as such, though.

>The good faith language comes from (c)2, which further limits liability (to the speaker) for good faith removals on the grounds that the speech might be offensive. That's not an intermediary liability issue, as such, though.

We are arguing over a moot point. If section 230 or whatever does not provide for free speech. Then that is what needs to be improved upon. Perhaps make it more clear that free speech is guaranteed.

> If section 230 or whatever does not provide for free speech. Then that is what needs to be improved upon.

The problem is that people have wildly different takes on how to "fix" section 230.

One group wants to eliminate the liability protections, regardless of how much moderating you do. The concern is that this basically makes hosting user generated content at any sort of scale impractical from a business perspective since scaling competent human review to reduce the legal liability below the value per user is impractical for any sort of modern social media.

One group want so eliminate section 230 so only companies that do no moderation have liability protection, forcing social media companies to stop doing any moderation. The concern here is that some level of moderation of abuse / spam seems necessary to keep platforms from degrading into wastelands that no-one wants to use.

The moderate middle ground is reforming section 230 to limit the types of moderation activity that can be performed without losing liability protection.

This last seems politically unlikely as it doesn't provide a political win, despite being good for society.

One group wants to eliminate

> The CDA was from 1996. What social media predated 1996? Even ICQ does not predate the CDA.

Forums existed well before 1996. Both CompuServe and Prodigy were found liable for things people posted on forums on their platforms.

>Forums existed well before 1996. Both CompuServe and Prodigy were found liable for things people posted on forums on their platforms.

Dont take me as opposing the CDA. I think Section 230 is superb and necessary.

What I believe is that we simply enforce the rules. Free speech is guaranteed on twitter.

Your reading of the "good faith" requirement is not in line with how it's been interpreted by the courts.

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...

please tell me you're joking?

Yes, Russia should nationalize it :)

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