Obama argues unregulated social media is a threat to democracy
latimes.com
latimes.com
Obama is just changing his tune with the wind.
Where are all the politicians raising the alarm about plutocracy as a threat to democracy? (I know there are a few who do, at least nominally.)
Either they're taking fat stacks of cash and keeping quiet about it or they're being subjected to a relentless character assassination campaign that is largely working as intended.
Too busy astroturfing social media in an effort to drum up popular support for their status as plutocrats to comment publicly on the subject, I'd wager.
The principles of politicians on full display.
Btw, I don't think moderation is hard. If you are saying Trump is guilty of "hate speech" or whatever, and the Taliban isn't...the problem isn't the rules, it is how you apply them (which is a natural consequence of people at these companies not being interested in moderation at all, Dorsey couldn't contain his glee after he removed Trump...it was a personal choice, not moderation). Social media companies make the same mistake that most people make when they consider politics: they believe things they don't agree with are immoral. It was never the task of social media companies to be the religious police, they just appointed themselves.
People are taking social media rules at face value, whereas they should always ask themselves what would happen to them if they said the same things in a bar.
Would they be kicked out? If you behave online as if you would offline then there are very low odds that you'd be banned.
The report button is the equivalent of people going to the bouncer to have you removed, if he's summoned to remove you it means that you said something wrong or to the wrong demographic.
You're talking about the active government of Afghanistan for like...a million years now. Even during US occupation. I think they can control goats.
It probably depends on the user base of the platform, but I believe it could be one of the worst jobs in the world. If you like the community and content, great, but the usual employed moderators on large social media platforms probably need regular therapy to distance themselves from all the crap they have to read every day. There is a huge difference if you have to read it because it is your job and when you do it on your own because you are hungry for something tasteless and when you can just leave a spicy reply.
It depends where you get your definitions from. The European Convention on Human Rights for example only has a couple of 'absolute' rights and free speech is not one. Rights generally need to be balanced against each other (e.g. right to free speech interfering with someone else's right to privacy). Seems sensible. It's a rarity that dealing in absolutes is sensible.
This is really nothing new.
If anything the first amendment is too idealistic sounding since the US has never lived up to what it implies.
Why? I mean it's a common rhetorical move for all kinds of reasons and most of them aren't good, so just by pattern matching sure I guess. But also one of the two political parties in the US is openly contemptuous of the institutions of the state and is blatantly attempting to undermine trust in and power of our elections and legislature. You can't really both-sides that one and it's not hyperbolic to describe it as a threat to democracy.
Your last point I mean yes, certainly. But what do you expect from obama here? He's a millionaire monster war criminal like all american presidents always have been, he's not going to ask us to tear down his own house. That one is on us if we want it to be different, no one with any appreciable power under the circumstances has anything close to a reason to change it.
Some proeminent ones have even quit Twitter altogether with that as a message.
But now that ownership of one network changes hands, it's causing everyone to panic. At least we're dropping the facade about what the political class is really asking for. It's no longer a "private platform, they can do what they want". It's now everyone must follow the same rules mandated down from politicians. Before now the leaders of these networks just happened to enforce the policies the political class wanted. They just have to drag the leaders in front of Congress once in a while to get them back in line. But now that one network is at risk of breaking ranks, everyone panics.
You're starting to see lots of people on Twitter who claim to specialzie in disinformation and monitoring hate speech, it like how all of the Mckinsey types who turned into counter-terrorism consultants around 2004.
Trends in gov contractors, think tanks, and the ex-UN volunteering well connected rich kids are always a good signal of where the slush fund $$$ is going to start flowing. They have a big pull on policy since they have the most to gain.
If you look at a number of developping political scandals, it seems they turned to pandemic consultants two years ago in at least France, Australia, and a couple others.
Giving a single billionaire the power to decide what speech is allowed (and what isn’t) is dangerous. No individual’s incentives align with everyone else’s. And the wealthiest person in the world has especially unique incentives.
If we want to align our social media platforms’ rules with what’s best for society, then we need society to decide the rules.
Do you think people should be free to knowingly spread false information on media platforms?
[0] https://www.thefederalcriminalattorneys.com/convey-false-inf...
This is some pretty impressive Newspeak.
The reason Democracy is “weakening” is because people have been lied to by elected representatives in both parties as well as institutions and traditional media outlets for decades.
Social media has finally given the public a chance to learn about a lot of things that would have simply been covered up or ignored otherwise.
What it sounds like Obama is really pushing for here is government/totalitarian control over what speech should be permitted, the exact opposite of free speech.
A healthy representative Democracy requires information flows that are complete so the public actually knows what their elected representatives are doing. Without this, it creates a situation of mistrust and people do not have the relevant information they need when they go to the polls to vote for their representatives.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant as they say.
This is the real fear that most of these people have when it comes to Musk buying Twitter. They are afraid he will remove censorship controls already in place on the platform.
You make it sound like there is zero nuance to permitted speech as it is today in the US. You can't shout fire in a theater, you can't post spam on Facebook and expect it to stick, and right now, certain kinds of hate or expression are also banned by virtually every common space's TOS.
Social media is an invention of the past 20 years. It's entirely factual that how we communicate and consume information is changing, and it's also factual that our news sources are in danger from two ends: from bias by the platform owners, and from manipulation from outside forces (e.g. foreign propoganda / misinformation).
It's pretty naive to advocate for unfiltered social media. If you want that, there are certainly some venues for it (e.g. 4chan). Facebook and Twitter have huge problems relating to hate speech, misinformation, and misinformation. Doesn't it seem problematic to you that huge swaths of people are bandwagoning onto unscientific / insane conspiracy theories like QAnon? This sort of behavior could not have existed without modern social media, and I find it pretty sad that anyone would say this is desirable.
> The reason Democracy is “weakening” is because people have been lied to by elected representatives in both parties as well as institutions and traditional media outlets for decades.
Democracy is weakening because people like Trump enter office and act like they are above the law -- refusing to cooperate with the other elected bodies, refusing to provide financial transparency, trading on insider information, directly using their positions to enrich themselves and their families, trying to coerce civil servants to abandon their responsibilities in favor of whatever is politically expedient (e.g. declaring voter fraud where there is none, eschewing public health guidance advocated by scientists and public health experts, etc). Democracy is weakening because media outlets are being purchased by billionaires in an environment with increasing wealth disparity. Democracy is weakening because foreign adversaries are leveraging social media to spread misinformation and conspiracy theories are being perpetuated via new memetic and contrarian tendencies.
All of this could be improved with the help of responsible moderation to decrease sockpuppet accounts and misinformation, as well as regulated standards for acceptable behavior in the commons. If you want totally unfettered speech, nobody is stopping you from starting your own private discord server or website. But you can't just say whatever in public commons.
There is one Twitter. Losing access to Twitter, YouTube, etc. looks like losing access to a utility to me.
And it is not easy to start a new Twitter or YouTube in any meaningful sense. One could just as easily say "ISPs are not utilities or monopolies, you can start your own intranet easily with OSS!"
> And it is not easy to start a new Twitter or YouTube in any meaningful sense.
Apparently it is - Trump started his very own, just like that. didn't even take that long.
Not everyone got a free newspaper in the 1800s. The political leaders of the day had various newspapers that were favorable.
The fact and point remains: it's easy to start a social network. Just because it is unpopular/fails doesn't mean it is equivalent to a utility.
But the real defining characteristic that makes an ISP a public utility is that the utility (in the sense of "usefulness") of the internet is strongly bound to its uniqueness, just like the phone system or the road network. Phones and roads and the internet become inherently less useful if there is more than one network. Videos do not become less useful if you have to get some of them from one provider and others from another.
That is not true, though. Self-publishing video on my personal site has effectively no utility compared to publishing it on YouTube. For my job (and the job of, thousands? millions?), it is the only game in town.
An ISP comparison would be hosting my personal site on The Internet vs. a splinternet.
This statement is false. There are plenty of websites that self publish video and receive utility for it.
Just because your unpopular video on your unpopular website doesn't get utility, doesn't mean others don't. On top of that, plenty of videos posted on YouTube also get no utility.
This is a "0.001 is technically greater than 0" argument that could be made for ISPs as well. Do you accept that there are thousands/millions of people who rely on access to YT to support themselves, and have an income dependent on that site that would vanish if they were expelled from it?
> Do you accept that there are thousands/millions of people who rely on access to YT to support themselves, and have an income dependent on that site that would vanish if they were expelled from it?
Do you accept that all of these content creators signed an agreement to use YouTube's platform, which is a private entity? If the agreement is illegal then it is a civil matter and they have remedy - the court system. This isn't a matter of free speech.
Do you accept that users sign an agreement with their ISP, also a private entity? Why should the ISP, a private entity, not be able to censor traffic for which it provides the infrastructure? Because it (like social media) has few competitors?
The usefulness of public utilities is measured relative to consumers, not producers. You have a right to publish. You do not have a right to monetize. You don't even have a right to an audience. All you have a right to is a potential audience. If someone wants to watch your self-published video, they can.
The problem is not the YT is a utility, the problem is that YT is owned by Google and Google has an effective monopoly on on-line advertising.
There are plenty of places to publish videos. Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Vimeo, Daily Motion, Twitch, Instagram, TikTok, etc. So it is obviously not scarce or difficult to do, with that many players. So it fails that definition of a utility, it's not scarce, nor difficult to implement.
Is it necessary? I don't think so. What basic necessities does Twitter provide?
Access to the internet is also not currently a public utility. And yet, some seem to be fine with government censoring speech via one of these non-public-utilities and not okay with it through another.
My point is that there is no reason good reason to treat them differently. There are bad reasons to treat them differently, though, which are covered extensively on this page and mostly due to our conditioning by gov and ISPs alike.
Why is YouTube equivalent to Electricity/Water? The utility argument just doesn't make sense. Perhaps you're thinking more of the "public square" argument.
> My point is that there is no reason good reason to treat them differently. There are bad reasons to treat them differently, though, which are covered extensively on this page and mostly due to our conditioning by gov and ISPs alike.
I see many reasons to treat utilities different than YouTube, and I also see no reason why YouTube should be treated like them.
There are too many private remedies available. On top of that, the government should not be forcing any private entity to moderate a certain way, this sets an extremely dangerous precedent, and will certainly be abused. I should be able to moderate my blog how I choose.
> Why is YouTube equivalent to Electricity/Water?
This is not the comparison I am making. I am comparing YouTube to ISPs and claiming that arguments for or against censorship in the former could also apply to the latter.
America is fully subservient to corporations. Out rights end at their doorways, including freedom of assembly and speech.
To say social media is an exception because it applies rules equally to previously exempt demographics is a joke.
Nope. I just thought the analogy was quite bad.
Similarly, let us imagine that your garden is your own private property and you can ask individuals to leave your BBQ for whatever whimsical reason you choose.
You can open Twitter to the public, just as you can open your BBQ to the public.
Protesting on a front lawn is not a problem because of what is said, it’s a problem because they are trespassing.
Good luck protesting on lawns, try not to get bitten by a dog, arrested, or worse.
So…
—George Carlin (1937-2008)
The problem is that virality in public forums is not driven by "better information," it's driven by verisimilitude, which is the appearance of being true, which is not synonymous with being true. What makes things appear to be true? Consistency with what we already believe to be true for one thing. Another way to put it is that things have verisimilitude if they appeal to our biases.
Another thing that makes things appear to be true is if they're easily digestible. It's easier to convince a layperson that light reflects off a mirror in such a way that the angle of reflection equals the angle of incidence. But it takes an entire book to explain that this is actually a useful simplification, but light's behaviour is much more complex.
The problem of simpler things being more believable is critical to understanding that "better information" doesn't beat misinformation, because misinformation is always simpler than the truth.
To quote another aphorism from H.L. Mencken, "There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong." The neat and plausible attributes of misinformation are very difficult to counter, especially if the problem being discussed has complexities.
Free speech is one of those problems that is complex. There are no simple solutions unless you are a hard-core extreme Libertarian, but you'd never know it listening to all the people who propose simple solutions that are popular because they are simple.
Better information does not dispel misinformation in public forums. I gave reasons why this is the case.
Mind you, better information can dispel misinformation in non-public forums. For example, in a highly moderated community. Or in a community where there is a certain web of trust that discourages cynical actors from deliberately trying to game popularity.
Now onto another problem with your statement: You claimed that better information beats misinformation, and you claimed that if it doesn't, the problem is that the information isn't better.
That's a claim that any idea which becomes popular must be better, because if there was better information, it would have dispelled the poorer ideas. Observing human history, I claim this is demonstrably false.
Billions of people believe things on faith that have no empirical backing, and do so despite access to an unprecedented amount of scientific evidence to the contrary.
Any theory that better information always wins should explain how non-trivial numbers of people can believe things for which there is no evidence or even wildly disseminated evidence to the contrary.
I think the onus is on you to give evidence for your claim, because I personally see evidence to the contrary.
I said no such thing, you did. So AFAIC, you are arguing with yourself, not with me or my words. That, plus the fact that you are making claims without any arguments, examples, or reasoning to back up your claims, suggests that for all your talk of “better information,” you are actually disinterested in better information prevailing.
Your own behaviour is doing a better job of illustrating my point than my words do! I will leave you here to carry on arguing with yourself.
We don't live in a technocracy.
The crux of the matter is you don't get to decide what other people think or believe.
It seems that I called you out on making a claim you didn’t back up, and you are weaving some kind of conspiracy web around my motives and beliefs. That’s an ad hominem appeal to motive, and it’s just as terrible an argument as making a claim you decline to substantiate.
For someone who claims that good information will drive out bad, you appear to have no interest in walking your talk.
This thread has gone from tragedy to farce.
This sounds like a handwavey dismissal of a well understood paradox.
I'm having a hard time understanding this given how fixed the definition of "intolerance of intolerance" is. Can you help me understand how you're receiving it?
For example, Twitter is absolutely staffed and run by people who I believe would wholeheartedly agree with the posted quote. What types of rules regarding intolerance does their platform employ?
One example of something it has banned is The Babylon Bee, for this piece of satire calling Rachel Levine the Man of the Year: https://babylonbee.com/news/the-babylon-bees-man-of-the-year...
Now you tell me, is that intolerance? Is it speech that should be censored? Is removing this type of satire something that you believe is philosophically aligned with the original quote?
Meanwhile, Twitter still allows members of the Taliban to post. Do you think they're more, or less tolerant than the Babylon Bee?
"Intolerance" is such a fuzzy concept. Intolerance of what? You can propose any crazy idea and when people disagree with it, say they're being intolerant.
If I don't want my young children to go to schools that are staffed by ex sex-offenders, on the basis that employing them in that role is a great example of how people can be re-introduced into society and embraced empathetically, am I "intolerant" of something? If I voice that opinion on social media, should it be removed? It's not a real example right now, but that's the direction we're headed in.
Specifically the qualifier where suppression should be used where people adamantly refuse rational argument and attempt to suppress the engagement of rational argument by violent force.
"But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
Sounds kind of familiar
"If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people - maybe there is, I don't know"
If people want to yell "Fake News" on social media, then, they're participating in the debate.
It makes sense that we might need to do a little debugging and refactoring now and then.
Just like the accessibility and exponentially amplified voice provided by the printing press prompted some of the “core principles” of Europe to get reshuffled, it’s pretty reasonable to me that social media could prompt some reshuffling of it’s own.
Dogmatic commitment like you hint at for yourself is an important part of the dialogue of how that reshuffling might look, but I don’t know that your characterization of others is very accurate.
It's pretty reasonable to drill a few small holes in the dam, and to defer maintenance in favor of more urgent priorities.
Dogmatic commitment to the old no-hole-drilling and take-maintenance-seriously dialogues of the past is just a quaint antiquarian tradition.
Masterful work. Real politics. That is how you win.
Please, calling it a coup is a joke. France has larger demonstrations almost monthly (at least during non-Covid times), I've seen larger riots in the aftermath of hockey games.
It was a few rednecks rioting...
Read the article. It wasn't a "few rednecks rioting" -- there were two pipe bombs. Elected representatives were in actual danger; capitol police were struggling to hold back the participants. That the "rednecks rioting" were so poorly organized doesn't make it any less a coup. Our elected officials were being sheltered in windowless rooms.
Funny the guy who encouraged everyone to go to the capital (despite the almost universal disagreement) hasn't testified.
That said, it doesn't really matter that the gilets jaunes were protesting for longer and in larger numbers; directly comparing them is a category error. The gilet jaunes were operating within the norms of how French civil society currently operates. The Capitol protesters/insurgents/whatever were expressly trying to overturn them. Maybe not a coup, maybe not treason, but sedition at the very least.
We can't let the laughable ineptitude of these people distract us; they may not be so freakin' stupid the next time they attempt to overthrow our duly elected representatives.
We definitely can. The whole world laughs at the US when they call it a coup. We've seen plenty of real coups in our lifetime, this ain't it.
Coup attempts are not defined by crowd size.
And when crowds do lead to governments being overthrown, usually it's crowds in the millions encouraging those institutions to overthrow the government. Again which didn't happen.
By any definition it wasn't a coup d'état or even an attempt at anything with a chance of success.
No, a coup doesn't have to be by military and government officials (though they are usually best situated, and in any case were involved in the autocoup attempt of which the attack on the Capitol was a part—but neither the whole, the beginning, or necessarily even the end once it failed.)
And a coup attempt can (this specific subtype is called a self-coup, autocoup, or autogolpe) seek to irregularly extend the powers or the term of the current leadership, not overthrow anyone already in power, and this is what the one involving the 1/6 attack was.
And a coup attempt doesn't always involve taking over anything, in the same way a murder attempt doesn't always produce a dead body.
Really though, that's never been successful and calling it an attempt is being extremely generous. It's like saying writing a Tweet is an attempt at writing a novel.
Well, sure, and if that's really what you wanted to do, that would be a (very badly) attempted coup.
On the other hand, if you had a much larger group of “friends”, including high officials of the federal executive branch, federal legislators, state legislators, and others in and out of government, and instead of going from a pub and breaking a few government windows you coordinated on a scheme to substitute alternative electoral votes for the certified ones from several states relying on an abuse of office by the presiding officer of the joint session counting the electoral votes to effect that, when the regular presiding officer publicly rebuffed the effort gathered a few thousand people including multiple organized armed groups to violently assault the Capitol, erecting a gallows and calling for the hanging of recalcitrant presiding officer, having members and legislative staff escape only moments ahead of the mob (and those moments in part because one breakthrough of barricades was stopped by deadly force), delay deployment of National Guard forces to respond to the attack,...
Well, then you’ve got, while in the actual case still unsuccessful, a lot more credible coup attempt.
Again though, this is exactly my point. I am not from the US. I couldn't really care less. But the problem is that someone's obviously ludicrous subjective interpretation of an event is being stated as an objective fact, and then applied by social media. Do you not see how this can backfire on you? In other words, you have no problem when it is being rigged against people you don't like but how are you going to respond when it is rigged against you?
This is the reason we have courts. This is the reason we have free speech. It is indivisible, applied to everyone equally.
None of his posts violated ToS (there are people on Twitter who are orchestrating genocide), you just don't like them.
Federal code defines seditious conspiracy as two or more people conspiring to overthrow or destroy by force the United States government, or to prevent, hinder or delay the execution of any U.S. law.
> Their main opponent also tried to stage a coup.
But that said it still seems like a real stretch to me to say that the US federal government was so weak that there was ever a serious risk of 10 idiots overthrowing it and installing their guy. It seems like the word "coup" is somewhat meaningless if the same word is used to describe highly organized government takeovers by military leaders, as well as a small group of yokels that didn't even know what to do when they got into the capital building so started walking around taking pictures like tourists. I don't know what word I would use instead, probably "riot" or maybe even "rebellion" (actually, Shay's Rebellion seems way worse than what this was), but "coup" has never felt right to me.
Also worth pointing out I think is that they've been charged with seditious conspiracy (which I agree is a big deal) but none have been convicted (yet). Prosecutorial overreach is a huge problem in our country that needs to change. (to be clear I'm not saying this is a case of prosecutorial overreach, I honestly don't know. But it is certainly possible given how widespread it is in general in the US). Especially hard hit bit it are marginalized groups that can't adequately defend themselves. I've seen cases where the prosecutor didn't think they stood a chance of getting a conviction but they wanted a plea deal so they charged him with as much as possible to scare him into a guilty plea so they didn't have to go to trial.
It also shouldn't be overlooked that there is a massive political incentive for the current people in power to paint this as much as possible as "a coup." Selfishly I do hope they succeed, because I think Trump and many of his people are toxic to our democracy, but I strongly prefer to win "fair and square" rather than hyperbole.
The Oath Keepers and Proud Boys (charged with conspiracy as well in the attack, and in direct coordination with each other) are part of a network that connected to the fairly well documented effort by the Trump inner circle to enact a plan to subvert the vote count and either avoid the counting of or replace the lawful votes from certain states through channels including Roger Stone.
The main mechanism sought to be used was discussed publicly in the media prior to the attack, which sought to forcibly implement it when Mike Pence indicated he wouldn't go along with it voluntarily, by disrupting/delaying the count, removing Pence from the presiding role (“Hang Mike Pence”), and using intimidation to ensure that whatever officer replaced Pence would play ball.
> But that said it still seems like a real stretch to me to say that the US federal government was so weak that there was ever a serious risk of 10 idiots overthrowing it and installing their guy
An autocoup attempt by the sitting President, other high executive branch officials, members of Congress, at least two different organized violent groups, and thousands of followers mobilized by social media for violent attack on the Capital isn't just “10 idiots”.
> as well as a small group of yokels that didn't even know what to do when they got into the capital building so started walking around taking pictures like tourists.
That largely occurred after the evacuation of members, which itself was not complete when people broke into the Capitol; there was a concerted effort to reach the chambers where the joint session was being held, the Speakers office, and other areas where members and other high-value targets were likely to be initially.
I’m not sure if your minimizing misrepresentation is deliberate or just a result of effective propagandization.
Yeah, lots.
> They usually involve armies and mass executions
Military coups are one kind, but even they often involve only a fairly small group of officers, and a few trusted henchmen to execute the coup. Often, key military leaders don't use the military, they just prevent security services from intervening to stop the coup attempt. (Which executive branch officials did for some time during the 1/6 attempt.)
But not all attempted coups are military coups, and the class known as “autocoups”—attempts to extend the domain or time of the current leaders power beyond it's lawful parameters—often look different anyway, since they aren't centered on displacing the existing leader but either disrupting and/or providing an excuse for cancelling a regular change in power or forcibly pressuring some other government body (often by incapacitating or removing key opponents) to acquiesce in a change of terms.
He wasn't cut off easily or lightly. It is not as if he suddenly can't have a website to spread his treason. Oh wait, he could... if he could afford a few developers.
And you believe they were lies, you are saying that you are the ultimate arbiter of truth...I don't support Trump, but I am willing to accept that people have different interpretations of events. I am also willing to accept that courts should be the ultimate arbiter of truth, not social media companies. Welcome to democracy.
Btw, the irony of this is unbearable...Hilary Clinton has contested almost every election she lost. She said 2016 was rigged and challenged that result legally. She said that Obama rigged the Iowa primary. Politicians often think their opponents cheat, it is called motivated reasoning...again, that is why we have courts to decide, not you, not me.
He didn't merely challenge a few items, he loudly proclaimed as fact before the fact that the election was intentionally rigged by a large combination of Democrats and RINO Secretaries of State, and was shot down at every challenge due to a complete lack of evidence. He and his liar sycophants continue to spread these lies not just as supposition, but as fact. It is disingenuous to compare Trump's challenges-cum-lies to any run-of-the-mill challenge of years past.
Back to the main point: He could stand up a blog very quickly and have the ears of all willing listeners on the planet.
The challenges he made were identical. Read what you wrote again, you refer to no laws, you are referring only to the fact that he said something you don't agree with. There is no law against this. He challenged the result legally, he was not successful, he took no other action but to repeat his claim that he believed the election result was fraudulent...which he is within his rights to do.
Great, I suppose that everyone who wants to leave Twitter now will be able to do the same...right? (I don't think you understand that arguing against free speech is not a winnable argument, you are arguing against inalienable rights that founded the USA, I could also posit...if you don't like free speech, you could consider starting your own blog and moving to a country where there is no free speech?).
There is no legal right to post to Twitter. Your last line is so objectionable, I'll target it specifically: anyone can start a blog. Anyone can have the entire internet see their thoughts. Twitter isn't covered by the first amendment. No one in the US is being told they can't have a website.
If I told you you had a right to eat, you would sue me for not feeding you ribeye for every meal.
A lot of information is coming out, and it looks very bad. It certainly is not as simple as "tried to sue".
This comment may age poorly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden...
Gore (D) got 52.1% in 2000, and lost.
GWB (R) got 50.7% in 2004, and won.
Obama (D) got 52.9% in 2008, and won.
Obama (D) got 51.1% in 2012, and won.
Clinton (D) got 53.5% in 2016, and lost.
Biden (D) got 51.3% in 2020, and won.What they did not anticipate was the odd combination of regular media like TV channels reporting breathlessly on (essentially) online trolling for which you'd be banned immediately from any 2008-era phpBB forum.
Obama and the pundits played by the established rules of honesty and fairness and expected the Republicans to do the same... and the Republicans (as well as their associated media, starting with Fox News and ending with OAN/Newsmax) broke with all traditions of democracy and went onto a destruction spree instead. The result is that trust in democracy is fundamentally broken now.
Defending free speech is meaningless if one person's vote is worth more than another's.
There's also tradeoffs to a purely direct democracy that have to be weighed. It's not a clear-cut win for governance
Strategies can change but that doesn't mean the current system does not significantly benefit one party over another.
The very existence of the senate is a blocker to true democratic rule and for good reason. But I don't think changing the election of the president to one person gets one vote would usurp the current system. It's simply more fair. But of course more fair is not what any party truly wants.
Also letting our infrastructure crumble while spending unlimited amounts of money on Middle East wars, restricting housing supply to lock a generation or two out of housing, allowing two generations to be saddled with unprecedented amounts of student loan debt while tuition goes up unchecked, and so on. I could keep going.
Our political class has lost the peoples' trust because they don't deserve it. They've shown nothing but incompetence and corruption for decades. I'm speaking of both major political parties.
That loss of trust has opened the door to a ton of insane garbage, but the blame for that rests on the political class of the past 50 years for dropping the ball in so many ways.
The main reason that Biden isn't fulfilling most of his promises is because the Senate is refusing to pass them. Remove those checks and balances and you'd get a lot more promises fulfilled. But those checks and balances are a feature, not a bug.
First, enforcing strict freedom of speech is regulation too. It goes both ways. Don't like Twitter censoring tweets? Regulate it to force it to publish everything. Or everything but racist stuff. Or whatever you want. Unregulated Twitter can do whatever, it can change your tweets, put words into your mouth etc.
Second, any common good ends up abused if you allow it. Ever been to an unmaintained park where anything is allowed? It's all dog shit and broken glass. It stops being useful as a park, stops being useful to the majority of users, stops being useful to anyone but a small minority who abuse what should be a common resource.
Social media have become common assets (at least the service they provide) so it seems natural to me that they need same protection. I don't mind people writing what I consider crazy or even mildly offensive / racist etc. I mind organised groups abusing such spaces to create impression of popular opinion with malicious intent. We now know beyond reasonable doubt this does happen.
FB and Twitter have no obligation to public health. Their entire profit motive is to burn the fucking country to the ground if their Q3 earnings look good. Put neighbor against neighbor? Why not? Destroy the foundations of democracy to maximize engagement? Sure!
So a politician (flawed as he is and with some withering disappointments as a leader) says "Hey, this shit is unhealthy for democracy!"
It seems so obvious that he is correct, but it seems more important to people here to disagree with the messenger than to consider the message.
I liked that.
Do you really think Trump would ever stop having rallies under any condition?
It's incredibly easy to manufacture 'consensus' among gov experts and feed 'anonymous sources' to news agencies and influencers.
This goes way beyond trying to tip the scales of partisan culture wars.
What's important is to get a bipartisan concensus about it.
The underlying problem is the sheer amount of money and power to be gained by winning in America's 2-party system. So much so, that winning at all costs is the norm.
Winning at all costs, includes (but is not limited to) leveraging bots, PR firms and activists on social media to make one side fear and hate the other.
Media regulation is what dictatorships do, not democracies. The left should focus more on what it claims to support (the plight of the working class) if they want to win elections... People are upset about inflation and wages and the left establishment in most countries is doing fuck all.
They certainly aren't the only issues we face, but calling for platforms to take greater accountability isn't and shouldn't somehow be viewed as political. It doesn't matter whether you're for red, blue, putin, Snoop or the Pope. If the places people go to consume information are allowed to become inundated with blatantly false information, that's a bad thing.
There is absolutely an argument that Twitter, FB, etc. should never have become peoples sources for information but the reality is that this is the world we live in and for better and worse and we need to craft policy based on people's actions not what they should do.
I hope posters here can appreciate how problematic that is, not just from an epistemological standpoint, but also the practical implications.
Anyone that set's out to solve this should go in with a really specific definition (something like verifiable false based on expert consensus), make it enforceable with stiff penalties, and appealable to the courts. It's not perfect, it requires constant monitoring and updating, and lot's of work to make sure it's not like every other regulatory body, and get's subverted or otherwise undermined by political activity. But none of that is impossible. Possibly improbable given current conditions, but regardless something we should be having conversations about.
A ministry of truth with a well defined scope isn't any more unreasonable than a ministry of food cleanliness (FDA).
The same way we regulate what technical exports a company can make when it affects our national security, it is completely reasonable to do the same with the telecommunication companies that can affect equally large impacts on our internal security.
>...but when the counter is the end of democracy then that's not really an option.
I've said it elsewhere in this thread. If you do not trust the discernment of voters, how can you trust them to vote?
How is the state tabooing information not the same as the state manipulating the outcome of an election?
A simple and coherent response might be: Authoritarians do not trust the discernment of voters. They do not trust voters to vote "correctly". Propaganda is necessitated. The force of the state is applied to prohibit contrary information.
Democracy as it is used in this case is nothing more than a window dressing, a catch phrase.
>A ministry of truth with a well defined scope isn't any more unreasonable than a ministry of food cleanliness (FDA).
It is 2022 and we are actually having this conversation. We might observe the mission creep present in all gov. bureaus. Although I'm not sure I can connect here. We appear to have very different premises concerning the role of the state.
>Anyone that set's out to solve this should go in with a really specific definition (something like verifiable false based on expert consensus), make it enforceable with stiff penalties, and appealable to the courts.
Who should select and accredit the "experts"? Who's experts have sufficient expertise to claim an exclusive license on objective truth? From where I stand, I don't see this problem as solvable by fallible men. Omnipotence would be a prerequisite.
Humans have subjective opinions. We have a diversity of views. Yet those who would prohibit that diversity of opinion, a prerequisite to democracy as we understand it, claim to do so in the name of democracy.
That's an interesting analogy, but I'd like to turn a positive spin on it: now that the tower is being built and we can all talk to each other, the old Gods are losing their power and it makes them afraid.
But that's good news for us, the plebs, since the interests of the old Gods aren't aligned with ours:
> Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them.
> But that's good news for us, the plebs, since the interests of the old Gods aren't aligned with ours
And it kind of mirrors how I feel about this whole situation and sentiments like yours: just naïveté and hubris.
Genesis was supposedly written by one of the main promoters of the guy who didn't want the tower built. We should be aware of his biases when it comes to moralizing.
History is written by the victors. Hopefully the next version of Genesis will be written by those who want people to talk to each other freely.
I get the impression from the comments that people think Obama's out for government control of social networks, but that's not what he says in his speech.
https://barackobama.medium.com/my-remarks-on-disinformation-...
He's not wrong about social media being a potential tool of destruction of democracy either by excessive regulation or excessive deregulation, and lists examples.
His question is, can we do better? Is it time to revisit section 230, for example? How do we train ourselves to be resistant to the forces on social media that are actively attempting to manipulate us with clickbait headlines?
The speech is worth a read.
And I empathize and understand people who talk about free speech in its most unadulterated way.
But there are tradeoffs and costs, lots of them have been already detailed so I'll focus on something else: productivity and initiative.
Social media lifted the veil on really how easily manipulated the avg. individual is. There is no turning back from that, no turning back from not knowing that information, it's almost like when you first get the concept of mortality and that one day you are going to die.
And those using social media to manipulate the avg. individual could be left-wing, right-wing, independent, greens, libertarians etc. But as we are seeing these days also billionaires with an agenda , cults, religious movements, corporations, NGOs, Secret Services etc.
For a person trying to make a living in this world, that's really scary, it damages productivity because given all the above people become extremely defensive and think twice before taking any initiative....they could become the target of some cult or political movement with just a simple action such as firing an employee or speaking their mind about something.
And the attack could come from every side or even multiple sides
How come that when yesterday's misinformation becomes today's possibility, no accounts get unbanned? How come tech platforms have routinely banned the same person's accounts all on the same day? Tell me again about Hunter's laptop; I think that would have been extremely relevant about 2 years ago.
If you read his comments carefully, this interpretation isn't far-fetched.
When you can't control the message, people start asking uncomfortable questions like, "Why are you allowing companies to outsource jobs and factories to escape labor and environmental regulations while saving a ton of money?" "Why is healthcare so expensive?" "Why haven't you put any type of caps on pharmaceuticals?" "Why are we spending billions on homelessness and homelessness keeps increasing?" "Why did we spend $300 million a day in Afghanistan for 20 years?"
Why trust individuals to vote, if you cannot trust their discernment?
If you must dictate truth and exclude information you disagree with, then at what point are regulators predetermining the outcome of the democratic process?
There are definite shortcomings to democracy. Tyranny of the majority is a popular critique. Presenting democracy as a virtue to be defended is problematic to be sure. But presenting it as a virtue while attacking the premises of democracy?
I cannot decide which is more absurd, a gov. regulator presuming to have an exclusive license on objective truth as if privy to divine revelation, or suggesting that individuals making their own decisions in regards to the information they consume is dangerous to democracy.
Humanity cannot regulate away "misinformation" anymore than Icarus could touch the sun. Is it hard to accept this as legitimate hubris. Propagandists desiring to regain tighter control over the flow of information seems infinitely more probable.
Does anyone else here remember when we said, "Information wants to be free" ?
That's some pretty incompetent reporting.
Edit: Can we change the URL to the original source instead of driving traffic to bad journalism? https://barackobama.medium.com/my-remarks-on-disinformation-...
>> That's some pretty incompetent reporting.
What's incompetent about that? It seems to be exactly what he did...
This "journalist" doesn't qualify anything and makes a statement of fact that Musk mounted hostile takeover bid.
That is simply bad reporting.
The poison pill was adopted to forestall any hostile attempt if the offer was rejected and try to secure a better bargaining position if they decided to accept the offer.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042215/what-differe...
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/25/twitter-accepts-elon-musks-b...
Zero responsible reporting called this a hostile takeover. The closest you can come is journalists who speculated that a hostile takeover might be attempted if the offer to the board were rejected. There is nothing beyond speculation to show that this was ever a possibility.
So is regulated social media.
Damned if you do...
Social media is not the same as a free press, freedom of speech, etc. Equating the two is quite dangerous, imo.
>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
The problem was that censorship on social media has not been done in good faith and has far exceeded these regulations. Yet nobody ever got around to punishing social media for their violation of these regulations.
Now that Elon has made the effort to get Twitter into compliance and stop violating regulations, now you call them unregulated and want to change the rules?
I hope that Biden and friends try to change the rules so close to midterms. Lets see how that democracy goes after that.
That's a negative regulation, thee only actor that can violate it is government. It is impossible for a social media platform to violate the cited regulation.
It's true that if there is another regulation applicable to platform conduct, there are platform actions that would take the platform out of the immunity provided by the cited regulation (but those hypothetical other regulations would also be constrained by the First Amendment, whether or not the Section 230 immunity applied.)
No, they list out exactly what they may censor like porn. Twitter doesn't do that. It's their choice to do less and that's fine. The problem is that they can't do more. That's a positive regulation.
>It's true that if there is another regulation applicable to platform conduct, there are platform actions that would take the platform out of the immunity provided by the cited regulation (but those hypothetical other regulations would also be constrained by the First Amendment, whether or not the Section 230 immunity applied.)
It's a positive regulation because we regulate media more. We say as a publisher you cant do lots of things that say wikipedia or twitter can do. The caveat is that you can't later regulate more so that you basically are a publisher but without the liability. That would break the system.
Something the article missed is that Obama did explain that anything they do can't conflict with free speech. Therefore it's pointless to go more than section 230.
That is not the way that any court I'm aware of has ever interpreted Section 230, and it's not the way the original author of Section 230 has ever interpreted it either.
Section 230 is not a list that describes the only things you are allowed to censor. It's a regulation on the government that prevents them from treating proactive moderation as liability for other unmoderated content.
Section 230 does not require that a site avoid censoring certain kinds of information.
I'm not a supreme court justice.
>Section 230 is not a list that describes the only things you are allowed to censor. It's a regulation on the government that prevents them from treating proactive moderation as liability for unmoderated content.
So why does section 230 exist?
In a situation like if you are CNN. You publish lies on your platform like Nick Sandman is a white supremacist. You are liable as the publisher.
If someone on twitter says nick sandman is a white supremacist like so many celebrities did. Twitter is not liable, they aren't the publisher.
If section 230 was a negative right. If you were CNN, you would legally become like twitter but censor every subject to the point that people can only say nick sandman is a white supremacist. You aren't liable anymore right? You can say whatever you want right?
Okay, so you have even less authority to dictate what Section 230 actually means.
Are you arguing about what Section 230 actually does, or are you arguing about what you personally would like it to do, because those are two very different conversations to have.
> So why does section 230 exist?
For a lot of reasons, one giant one being that Congress wanted to make it easier for companies to censor in certain situations.
Section 230 was born out of two lawsuits about illegal content against two early Internet companies, one completely unmoderated and one where the company in question had been trying to do some moderation, but some illegal content still slipped past.
The one who was doing no moderation at all successfully got off with the defense that it was not a publisher, the company that had been doing some moderation didn't. From Wikipedia:
> Service providers made their Congresspersons aware of these cases, believing that if followed by other courts across the nation, the cases would stifle the growth of the Internet. United States Representative Christopher Cox (R-CA) had read an article about the two cases and felt the decisions were backwards. "It struck me that if that rule was going to take hold then the internet would become the Wild West and nobody would have any incentive to keep the internet civil," Cox stated.
Section 230 has a number of benefits, including benefits that reduce censorship online by making it safer to operate smaller forums (including HN). But it also allows communities to more easily moderate without that moderation being treated as itself a liability risk.
But don't take my word for it, go read up on the actual people who wrote the bill that are still alive today and who have on multiple occasions commented on their intentions. The bill was never intended to restrict what content platforms could moderate.
> You aren't liable anymore right? You can say whatever you want right?
Section 230 is a protection against speech that your users say. CNN is still liable for its own speech (and so is Twitter for that matter), but it is not liable for the speech that happens in its comments section.
Section 230 is a two-sided safe harbor included as part of the Communications Decency Act (and pretty much the only operative part of that law that wasn't struck down for violating the First Amendment) that exists because:
(1) Online services were starting to be targets of legal action targeting them as publishers of libel, slander, pornography, and otherwise unlawful material, relying on the traditional law wherein having an active role in even minimally controlling the content of a publication rather than acting as a purely hands-off distributor of content made one a publisher with liability for unlawful content whether or not they had actual knowledge of the facts making it unlawful.
(2) Services that were not actively moderated, avoiding that problem, were also quite prominent, being casually stumbled over (including because of aggressive spam, popups, etc.) by internet users, and causing lots of offense with both illegal and legal-but-offensive content.
Section 230’s two-sided safe harbor existed to allow users and providers to use available technology to tailor experiences by enabling and encouraging active private moderation of content, by:
(1) Not making users or providers that take any steps to control content automatically liable without notice for all unlawful content in the set of content impacted by their action,
(2) Immunizing users and providers from liability for actions taken to restrict access to content that the acting user or provider finds objectionable on any grounds.
> If section 230 was a negative right.
Section 230 is a negative law, but it is not a right.
> If you were CNN, you would legally become like twitter but censor every subject to the point that people can only say nick sandman is a white supremacist. You aren't liable anymore right? You can say whatever you want right?
It’d be easier to do what the media has always done to prevent liability here, and find someone else (even if anonymous) to say the thing, and then just print that they said it (emphasizing the message, but mentioning the existence of the source), and be protected by the truth defense (because what you published, that whoever it was said the thing) is absolutely true.
But, no, Section 230’s good faith restriction means that while something like this would not create liability under Section 230, it would likely also not fall under its protection. So libel laws would be available as a remedy. Section 230’s negative nature means when you go outside it's protection, liability requires some other law. Libel law is another existing law providing liability.
The issue is not whether there is a listing, the issue is what the list is for. The part you clipped out before the list is:
“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of”
This is a negative law providing immunity from liability arising under other (federal or state) law, not one imposing liability itself.
EDIT: That having been said, your characterization of the listing itself is also very wrong. It's not a narrow list of things “like porn”, it applies to anything the provider or user taking action “considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected”.
Two important points to note there: first, it is not a set of objective content classes that can be censored, it is entirely based on the subjective consideration of the party acting; second, one of the subjective categories for which restriction by a provider or user is protected under the same harbor is “otherwise objectionable”.
So unless you can find a case of Twitter restricting content that Twitter provably did not in good faith find objectionable on some basis, your claim that their restrictions are outside of Section 230’s protection is equally wrong to your claim that being outside of that protection, with no other regulation, would be a basis for punishment under the law.
> The problem is that they can't do more
Yes, they can, unless there is some other source of liability. 230 is a safe harbor, not a restriction on providers
Democrats love big tech as long as it is beholden to them. When it is not, they start accusing others of the very things they’ve been doing all along.