Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

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> I'm skeptical of concentrations of power wherever it is: government, Cloudflare, Facebook, etc.

Not to hammer the point to hard, but de-concentrating power is the exact reason why it is better to have moderation decisions across multiple layers of the network stack rather than in level 0 (the government).

Forum messes up on moderation? Not a big deal.

Web host starts making bad decisions? Tons of options.

Clouldflare banning you? Tougher, but there are multiple CDN services, if Cloudflare becomes evil it's not necessarily the end of the world.

ISP banning you? Now we start getting pretty dangerous, there are fewer options available to services and if moderation decisions are made poorly, that can have effects across the entire network for everyone.

The government prosecuting you? This is level 0 of the network stack.

The way that we guard against concentration of power is by de-concentrating it. Cloudflare (and to be fair, other large Internet companies too) are arguing for the opposite of that. In the specific case of Kiwi Farms, maybe this example is so egregious that it does make sense to have some new laws. I kind of agree with that. But no good law will be enough on its own to get rid of Cloudflare's responsibility, the only law responsive enough and fast enough to do that would be one that violated free speech rights.

> Not to hammer the point to hard, but de-concentrating power is the exact reason why it is better to have moderation decisions across multiple layers of the network stack rather than in level 0 (the government).

I'm not disagreeing with your entire argument, just that portion.

Multiple layers of moderation are only safer for free speech to the extent that none of them have too central of a role and there's some degree of visibility as to what is happening.

One of the things that has made social media so toxic to speech is that it has A) gathered so much of the "share" of being a conduit of speech at scale, and B) creates a false feeling of consensus by creating playing fields that are tilted in various ways without the tampering being obvious.

I heavily agree with you that centralization on a single layer is problematic for free speech.

I suspect where I differ from the CEOs of companies like Cloudflare/Facebook, is that I think the solution to that isn't to get rid of moderation, but rather to enforce antitrust and break up their companies. :)

Facebook in particular has this problem; it's constantly asking the government to tell it what to do because it doesn't want to be in charge of speech, and yet it has no problem buying competitors and trying to take over markets. It makes me wonder how concerned about speech these companies actually are, since they had no problem growing their companies to this size and putting themselves into situations where their moderation decisions carry so much weight.

> I suspect where I differ from the CEOs of companies like Cloudflare/Facebook, is that I think the solution to that isn't to get rid of moderation, but rather to enforce antitrust and break up their companies. :)

I'm not sure whether Cloudflare deserves antitrust action. But, yes, Facebook is concerning.

Of course, you've got to acknowledge the flip-side. Sometimes it should be left up to the government. If your internet service is a natural monopoly (perhaps augmented with protections of a franchise agreement from the government), it's especially problematic for them to be making moderation decisions.

All in all, it's hard.

> it's constantly asking the government to tell it what to do because it doesn't want to be in charge of speech

This is a bad thing, according to you? Should Facebook instead make those decisions on its own?

The thing is, no matter what Facebook decides there will be criticism. If they make the decisions on their own, bad. If they ask for government to decide what speech is lawful and what isn’t, bad. If they don’t block fake news, bad. If they block fake news and realise months later it was real, bad.

And your genius solution is to break up the company. But any network, regardless of size will have this issue. The rise of Tiktok makes this very obvious. There’s tonnes of misinformation on Tiktok but it doesn’t get the same coverage because that’s not what aligns with the NYT’s priorities. Tiktok gets around the content moderation problem by simply saying and doing nothing, hoping no one notices.

So what’s your solution to TikTok? Break it up as well? Into what pieces?

The problem with people who come up with simplistic, unrealistic solutions to hard problems is that when the obvious flaws are pointed out in their thinking, they’ll double down.

The weight of any moderation decision is directly proportional to the size of the platform making that decision. This is a generally well understood principle in a lot of free speech circles, I'm surprised that of everything I've written about Kiwi Farms here, this is the thing that is getting the most pushback from people.

The principle behind breaking up platforms is that individual moderation decisions do become harder the more people that they impact. It's also not just a free speech thing, this is the same reason why it's dangerous to have a browser monoculture. If I tell you that having one company in charge of the entire web makes their individual decisions about the web more impactful and more dangerous, that's something you understand, right?

Same deal for moderation.

Of course, see mlyle's other sibling comment -- sometimes we genuinely can't do anything about a natural monopoly and we just need to recognize what they are. But in instances where we can, decentralizing power decreases the overall risk of moderation mistakes for the entire network.

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