> * I would recommend tuning your language down from suggesting "holding companies accountable for ensuring their products follow the law" is "hideous and cruel". That seems really detached from the discussion.
You've fictitiously made up the link between the first part & the second. I was replying to your absolutely shocking (to me) proposal that we shut down youtube until human moderators can review all incoming content, currently around 720,000 hours/day, and calling the stream of content an "absolutely unhinged problem" (your emphasis). My words might better be expanded into:
> [Your demand to human moderate all content/be afraid of/revile against content/sharing] seems like a hideous & cruel way to take away a basic right to expression that humanity ought enjoy,
Again I feel "misconstrue" is a generous definition of your other fork here:
> Similarly, insinuating that YouTube having to follow US or Australian law about published content is "Full Chinese Authoritarian" moderation is also unnecessarily ridiculous.
Once again, I was discussing your proposal, not the law. Perhaps if we do take Australia seriously (hard to do at present), & regard them a publisher, sites hosting user-content have a higher bar to moderation than what they're doing.
Perhaps just ongoing legal court cases are the check & balance they need & the system is working; they will refine their tools for filtering content to get better, fulfillent to the law perhaps without ever becoming anything humanity would ever have recognized in any way as a publisher before. Personally, I think that would reflect very poorly on the law, would define government as ignorant stupid & incapable of it's base sovereign duty, be unable to make even a simple grasp of reality, but perhaps modern expression can adapt & survive under such merciless ignorant stupidity anyhow. Alas, most likely, it will only be the very very large, existing companies that can navigate & adapt, wade through this legal hell, develop the complex & careful processes & systems to still accept user-content.
I still don't see what you are trying to protect against or how. I don't see great evils about. I don't see these platforms as bad. It's a hard job trying to insure moderation standards are met worldwide. I don't see systematic bad behavior you write about, I see company's trying to do a pretty good job, trying to navigate hard social issues of the say safely (something you propose blowing up by eliminating Section 230 & it's ability to let these company's pick what content to host):
> Scale is not an excuse. It isn't a defense for bad behavior
This crystalizes what I find so terrifying. I've already said I disagree, don't find much of a compelling case for bad behavior. Whether or not scale is an excuse, it misses the obvious truth: the internet has vastly vastly empowered & enabled expression, in ways radically unlike what came before. This planet is vastly more capable. Scale isn't an excuse: it's a fact. One you propose unwinding & turning off. For unspecified spectres of evil & harm, that I think are mostly imagined.
I don't see any recognition of the impossibility of the task you demand companys take, when you describe "accountability." Let's take on of the few truly agreeable awful large scale (more than a couple person sized) incidents, Myanmar (largely lain at Facebook (not Youtubes) feet). First up, yes, Facebook should have done more. They did not deplatform enough people fast enough or aggressively enough. But I have sympathys in abundance, rather than merely axes to grind here. The world is extremely difficult to grasp & understand, the case of what's happening on the ground somewhere is complex & actively developing, & there's so much regional contexts that are hard to acquire. Even if we understand the situation with objective clarity, people's creativity makes the task still further impossible: witness China's ever-expanding sea of banned terms used to talk about Tiananmen Square as prime example, or their expanding list of banned euphemisms that portray their leaders in less than sunny light. To let words or ideas be shared is a risk, always could have some covert or secret message, dogwhistle to the followers, that others might not know. In sum, this idea of accountability strongly implies a knowability, and it would be convenient & simple if reality had such clearly cut lines & shapes for us to govern ourselves well by, to impose order with, but the real factual truth is messiness & overflowingness & saturation & mis-order. It's not even techno-mystical thinking to imagine these companies can order & make safe all expression, that they can be fully accountable: it's the scaries worst branches of utopian thinking that we can legislate & insist upon perfection, that only ideas that have been fully vetted may be released & shared with each other.
To demand of people who have given such great service, enabled so much to begin, because they cannot do it perfectly, is folly. We have to moderate our own expectations & demands to reasonableness. Hosting content must be possible, somehow, and safe harbor makes sense & is the only legal structure we've had to enable us to allow any user-hosted words online. The Anti-Section 230 brigade seems resolutely unable to back off from absolutism, to show nuance or respect or appreciation for these elementary simple facts. Making company's absolutely responsible/accountable for everything that goes through the network is madness, insanity, utterly impractical short of turning it all off & starting again, in something which very likely will end up very near a Chinese model where the State must govern & check all communications. This thirsty crusade against safe harbor is insanity & cruelty, demands impossible perfection of an imperfect world. It's unclear what the charges are: we are in such hyperemotional hyperreal times, and the cries, your pleas of the Anti-Section 230 brigade- to please make things better, please fix the problems- are emotionally highstrung, go for the weakspot of humanity: our willingness to listen to Fear Uncertainty & Doubt & be goaded in. But these claims re short of a real case. Doubt & sensationalistic hype & media frenzy around new online sites abounds, the world is markedly different & we have someone convenient to blame for all the world's ills- the people who have started letting us share with each other. That bad emerges is unsurprising, but I think the case has been vastly vastly overblown against these companys, that the harm they generate is under the rounding point of significance. The ills are not well defined, they are all in all quite rare. It's hard to really assess honestly. But there's no honest assessment when such simple Fear is how this debate is argued:
> less people are slaughtered
The Fear is just to sell something dark. There's no balance to these views, no middle ground. The Anti-Section 230 brigade pushes only harsh, brutal insistence of security & safety, at seemingly all & any cost, & seemingly gladly & readily willing to snuff out human expression as we have come to know it, as it has, unquestionably to me, arisen us from much smaller scale people to much more spanning & expansive & involved scale beings. So many people were not possible before, and can find themselves only because they have been able to use the internet, to find & explore & communicate with others. The Anti-Section 230 brigade has no recognition that bad would find other places & forms, that perhaps the massified giant platforms are doing a better job than the vaster seedier underbelly that would spring up if we dismantled the vast platforms, chopped them down in vengeance & anger.
> In fact, the only thing 720,000 hours of video a day speaks to is an absolutely unhinged problem
This says so much to me. I think this marks well a modern viewpoint, is shared widely by the anti-platform views. I think we need to be very mindful & respectful & appreciative when we consider what 720,000 hours/day of video posted represents. To me, we've made the world alive. The online world is interactable, open for discussion & will accept a diverse range of views, while, ideally, having some moderation guidelines posted to aid in preventing outright harm. Never has the world offered such openness before. Never have we been so able to accept transparency & to communicate so freely & openly, so publicly. The information age is young, it's new, and I still see so much more potential, so much hope that we can keep improving. Please, world, don't let yourself give in to fear.