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Comment by throwaway13337 | Hacker News Reader

We need to accept that tech companies that control the modern means of communications and commerce are defacto governments. And treat them as such.

Communication on these platforms is public, protected speech just as it was on your street corner. And commerce on these platforms should be protected in the same way as commerce on the street. Government is government and needs to be restrained in all of its forms or it will become a force of authoritarianism that either works on it's own or within the machinations of current government.

The EU is going the right direction with the Digital Markets Act. This act implicitly suggests that these gatekeepers have a special status though it does not outright call them what they are - governments. Speech protection should also be there as it is in all functional, modern governments. As should transparent legal process. Governments should have representation from their constituency.

Big tech is government.

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

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They are not defacto governments. They are holding themselves out as Common Carriers when it suits them, and therefore to obtain the privileges that pertain to that status they should be required to meet certain criteria that one would expect from a Common Carrier, such as Equal Access (in the sense of what was provided by RBOCs to CLECs after the breakup of Ma Bell/AT&T) and true Network Neutrality. You don't get to be a Common Carrier and be a publisher. It's one or the other. Editorializing means you become a publisher and take responsibility for everything that goes on your site just as a newspaper would. Don't like it? Be a Common Carrier.

We don't need any new law... we just need to apply existing legal principles and stop pussyfooting around it. Either they're Common Carriers or they're not. Either they're deserving of Section 230's protections or they're not. Pick one.

I’ve taken strong pushback (on here, and Twitter) for a couple of years for saying these things. People want to get hyper technical about what a “common carrier” is and has been, historically, and how it’s not actually analogous. I get all of that. It’s time to modify and expand the definition. Hopefully, more people are waking up to the truth of this.

It's because most people can't handle hypotheticals very well in general.

Assuming social networks are common carriers means also assuming that laws and law enforcement would need to adapt to the resulting spam filled environment. People would also need to adjust the way they communicate online, you'd need to create something similar to google plus circles to allow free and open discussion that is self moderated. You'd need new forms of trust protocols. You'd need...

Most people just can't fathom how much would need to change to make the internet work. They try to fit in what we have now and just say well that won't work so you're wrong.

I've noticed people also struggle with the big tech censorship argument. The amount of times I've said, censorship laws should extend to social networks and been met with "censorship only applies to government" arguments as if that wasn't the exact premise my argument started with just boggles the mind. Yes, I know, they're private companies, I'm advocating for changing laws so they do apply, not applying laws that don't apply.

There is a quick and obvious retort to "censorship only applies to the government", and that is that Censorship consists of any act of force or fraud that deprives one of the Freedom of Speech, by whatever means otherwise lawfully exercised. By defining it in terms of force and fraud it doesn't matter whether you're dealing with a state actor or a private actor -- any criminal action taken to silence people is Censorship, including tortious interference, conspiracy against rights, etc.

Another obvious retort is that people saying as such are laboring under the delusion that the Freedom of Speech is a right granted under the First Amendment, rather than being a natural right which the first amendment states is outside the purvue of Congress to regulate... which leads us back to the original retort above.

Ultimately, though, people who make such arguments aren't actually interested in an argument. They're simply making up excuses for their class bias so they can go on oppressing the proletariat without having to just openly state that as a self-identified member of the petit bourgeoisie they align with the interest of the bourgeoisie and don't care what happens to you or I... since openly admitting that wouldn't allow them to go on larping as heroes of the revolution (or however they phrase it in the cosmic gag reel running in their head).

> self moderated

This is explicitly where Musk has stated he wants to take Twitter.

For instance, I HATE that people will quote people I've blocked, and I see their comment with a greyed-out quote box. I want blocking to work like Facebook. If you block someone there, you see NOTHING from them. I don't want to even see tweets that REFERENCE something they said. Twitter currently "eggs you on" with this dark pattern.

If we could tailor our own, personal "algorithm," the end result will be something like the proverbial "street corner." Any idiot can carry a sign and shout at people, but YOU can decide if you want to walk up and hear him, duck your head and pass by, or take another street, and NOT have Twitter make that decision FOR you. In my mind, this could be a very different scenario than what we have today.

I'm still annoyed Google plus was left to die. The circles feature was the most useful thing to ever come to social media.

Most people don't seem to understand what the problem is because social media is a circus sideshow for them so they don't see the censorship, while those whose opinions align with those doing the censoring really don't see what the problem is because they can't imagine the tables could ever be turned on them. It isn't until some weird south african guy buys Twitter that suddenly it dawns on people that maybe the rule of law exists for a reason... but only insofar as respecting the rule of law protects them, of course, and not their opposition.

This isn’t really true though, the left has always been concerned that social media censors them, and why wouldn’t you be? Speech is power, and the left is all about promoting their own ideas(not uniquely so, just pointing it out). in fact the left often thinks that even before Musk, social media companies have leaned right. This idea that the left loves social media companies is a right wing narrative. We can talk about whether or not it is true that social media has a left/right wing bias; I’m not necessarily saying that the left doesn’t think social media should do more to fight hate speech (which may disproportionately impact conservatives) but painting the left as loving social media before Musk is just fantasy.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/amp/ncna1245308

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Twitter-censoring-liberals

https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2020/10/26/censorship-cons...

> This isn’t really true though, the left has always been concerned that social media censors them

.... that censors them. Key word.

> This idea that the left loves social media companies is a right wing narrative

You don't have to be right wing to observe leftists embracing censorship of anyone who opposes them.

> They are holding themselves out as Common Carriers when it suits them

When do they do that?

Whenever somebody says something grotesquely stupid or defamatory and someone attempts to sue them over it and they hide behind Section 230.

That's not what a common carrier is. Section 230 doesn't define common carriers or hold common carriers not liable for their users' posts. It has nothing to do with common carriers. Please educate yourself.

Section 230 says to information service providers "We understand your users might say stupid shit from time to time. Since, unlike a newspaper that prints letters from the editor, you can't actually vet their blatherings in real time, you're off the hook for this stuff. As long as you take down anything illegal as soon as you find out. Otherwise you're free to curate these posts in any way your heart desires."

The law actually recognizes that internet platforms aren't like old media and accommodates their unique constraints.

If this shield didn't exist, information service providers would have the following options:

1. Hold all posts in a moderation queue, and publish them only after review.

2. Verify every signed-up user's identity and current address so that libel lawsuits or law enforcement can be referred to them.

3. Some combination of 1 and 2.

So do you wanna give Zuck a copy of your passport? Or wait 20 hours until your food pictures are posted? If neither of those sound appealing to you, Section 230 is a good thing.

Yeah the people who think that repealing 230 would make all social media stop moderating are simply fooling themselves. The result would be absolutely extreme moderation that accepted huge numbers of false positives just to ensure that nothing bad got through, or even just the complete end of user generated content.

Good thing I never suggested that, and much as with the drafting of Section 230, we are perfectly capable of drafting a new law to qualify the protections thereunder. In fact, that was done most recently with FOSTA/SESTA to combat sex trafficking. If they're going to be treated as a special category somewhere between common carriers and publishers, that category requires qualification.

> That's not what a common carrier is. Section 230 doesn't define common carriers or hold common carriers not liable for their users' posts. It has nothing to do with common carriers.

sigh That is literally what they are. Section 230 was enacted specifically to allow internet-adjacent services to avoid being treated as publishers for purposes of user-contributed content despite also engaging in some manner of curation (particularly with respect to removing obscene materials pursuant to the Communications Decency Act). You don't get to pretend they're not operating as a common carrier just because you grepped 47 U.S.C. § 230 and didn't find the words "Common Carrier" in it.

> Please educate yourself.

This is unnecessarily rude. HN is not Reddit. Please don't condescend like that.

> The law actually recognizes that internet platforms aren't like old media and accommodates their unique constraints.

Except, of course, that they are. You're either some specie of Common Carrier (in which case you aren't liable for what flows through your service), or you're a Publisher. If you want some manner of media via between the two then there needs to be some qualification of what you need to do in order to get the best of both worlds, and right now Section 230 simply doesn't provide that. It allows them to pretend to be a Common Carrier when someone says something outrageous and they want to escape liability for it, and pretend to be a Publisher when someone says something they don't like.

> So do you wanna give Zuck a copy of your passport? Or wait 20 hours until your food pictures are posted? If neither of those sound appealing to you, Section 230 is a good thing.

...or we could just write a new law that allows you to be treated as a Common Carrier but only subject to certain express conditions... which oddly enough is exactly what everyone and their brother has been saying for years now. I for one would be perfectly happy attaching a simple requirement that they not engage in viewpoint discrimination ('editorializing'), but merely remove posts that are off-topic, uncivil, or otherwise of low-quality according to clear, specific, and objectively verifiable standards. Is there some reason we shouldn't want that?

> You're either some specie of Common Carrier...or you're a Publisher

Section 230 calls them "information service providers", which makes them neither. You're saying stuff that you wish was in the law. Information service providers are not held liable for their users' content because it would be infeasible to police it properly in real-time. This is common sense. It's emphatically not because they're "claiming common carrier status to avoid liability". By allowing them to moderate and curate content on the platform the law outright says they aren't common carriers, because common carriers have to..."carry". Your phone company can't randomly bleep out your swear words in your conversations.

Internet Service Providers aren't even treated as common carriers. Why the heck should apps that work on top of them be treated as such? Is every 1-800 number a common carrier?

> according to clear, specific, and objectively verifiable standards

Every social platform has a terms of service and usually, community guidelines. Beyond that who defines and decides this? You want the government getting involved in this? How is that better for "free speech"? I'd prefer to let the free market decide, personally. It's weird to see conservatives argue against that.

> You're saying stuff that you wish was in the law.

I'm telling you what the law was before Section 230 was written and why it was written. I'm telling you moreover that Section 230 is a bad law as it carves out a media via between being a common carrier and a publisher but does not lay out any substantive requirements for obtaining this, resulting in providers censoring people arbitrarily.

> Every social platform has a terms of service and usually, community guidelines. Beyond that who defines and decides this?

Social platforms routinely have terms of service that are vague, ambiguous, and which are routinely misinterpreted to flag communications that are otherwise lawful as being "hate speech" or some other such violation so they may be removed, with absolutely no penalty to the service provider for falsely flagging such speech.

> You want the government getting involved in this? How is that better for "free speech"?

Do I want the government getting involved in compelling service providers to honor their terms of service, not fraudulently claim communications violate the same, and avoid editorializing? Yeah, I do.

> I'd prefer to let the free market decide, personally.

The free market does not allow you to break the law with impunity.

> It's weird to see conservatives argue against that.

Good thing I'm not a conservative... but if I were, would that really change anything? It's amazing that arguing in favor of the freedom of speech is suddenly a conservative position these days.

> arguing in favor of the freedom of speech

There's plenty of free speech online. You aren't entitled to free speech on others' property. Fix net neutrality first if you want true free speech.

And I definitely don't want the government to decide if something is "hate speech" or not. That's a slippery slope to actually losing freedom of speech.

> There's plenty of free speech online. You aren't entitled to free speech on others' property.

...neither are others allowed to fraudulently claim speech acts violate their terms of service.

> Fix net neutrality first if you want true free speech.

Por que no los dos?

"fraudulently" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. "Fraud" as a crime has a high bar.

I understand that you want things to be a certain way. But you can't just make stuff up and expect others to accept it.

> Por que no los dos?

Which political party repealed net neutrality? Which political party's supporters also strongly dislike Section 230? We ain't gettin' "los dos" - what's Spanish for "neither"?

> Which political party repealed net neutrality?

Which political party has held the house and the senate and done nothing to reverse it?

Honestly, people who pretend that bourgeoisie issues are somehow the province of just one party are worse than wrestling fans -- they at least know wrestling is fake.

> Which political party has held the house and the senate and done nothing to reverse it?

None.

The Democratic Party has done a lot to undo the effect of that repeal, notably:

(1) Passing net neutrality laws in several states shortly after the FCC repeal, some—like California’s—significantly stronger than the ones that the FCC has passes and then repealed,

(2) Dropping federal opposition in court to those state laws shortly after Biden took office.

I think I agree with your intent - the comparison of Big tech is government didn't gel with my perception.

What I agree with is that Big Tech is forming digital Public Spaces (rather than being a government) and as such there should be parity in rights and protections of being in a digital Public Space.

The distinction for me is that ones rights in a Public Space are different to those in a Commercial Communal Space (such as communal space in a Shopping Mall). I'd like to see a trend to open digital environments being treated as Public Spaces and away from Commercial Communal Space.

Edit: for correcting typos

the comparison of Big tech is government didn't gel with my perception

Because they're not like the big governments with armies, they're like the smaller, local authorities issuing building permits and whatnot.

Less dangerous but more annoying and and should be limited as well.

In what way are they like small governments?

A street corner is not the same as social media. A street corner speech will always have limited impact, unless someone films it and uploads it to YouTube.

This amplification used to be a privilege of the media, and there are upsides and downsides to everyone having a chance at such reach now, and a lot of questionable incentives bound to how such reach can be attained. Instead of one Overton window, we now have multiple, bound to their social media audiences. To properly disseminate all this information is a full-time job for a human brain and most people just seem to stick with what seems proper to them.

When can we have this conversation instead of the tired "social media censorship" debate.

If they're defacto governments, then they should be nationalised. If government is government, that extends to elected leaders or appointments by elected or responsible members of the executive. This of course entails the balkanisation of the internet, but it's the logical conclusion of your position.

What makes it like a government? You didn't offer any explanations except that they control speech, however they only control speech on their service and there are alternative services unlike the government

Lots of government services post on Facebook - often only on Facebook. You can't comment on that or read it elsewhere. There are no alternatives unless the poster picks it for you.

Alternative to what? Protest? Why does it have to be the Facebook post?

That doesn't make Facebook like a government though. If twenty years ago the government chose to advertise a job in the three largest newspapers in a city, and not in the Dah00n Times, that doesn't make the newspapers like a government or incorporate them into the government. It might mean that people should question whether the government is too closely tied to certain private corporations. But that's a different question.

Just having one service ban you will screw up your life, such is the case of one programmer who uploaded a picture of his toddler to let the doctor check for infection - and got permanently banned by the AI, losing access to his Gmail and other Google tools registered to him.

And services rarely act alone, when they do decide to target someone, they usually act in unison to deplatform, whether justified or not.

In some ways big tech is far more powerful than governments.

This is a case for regulation* and for promoting competition and diversity in the marketplace. It's not a case for treating them as governments. If they're governments, who chooses their leadership? Do they have one board, selected by the US president/according to the rules of the US Congress, that is applicable in the US, and another board, selected by the Canadian PM/according to the rules of Canadian law, that is applicable in Canada? How much are we going to pay to their shareholders for confiscating their property?

* Banning moderation is a form of regulation. It falls far short of treating them as governments. It is possible to say "I want to regulate Twitter" without having to make weird statements like "We should treat Twitter as a government".

Nobody said that they are national governments. They are organizations with governance policies.

Even if corporations are not governments, they are far more similar to governments then they are to private individuals.

Moderation is a form of regulation- it is a way of regulating speech. Banning moderation is deregulation.

"More platforms" is not the answer. In a democracy, when people are publicly discussing matters of public or political importance, other citizens have the right to participate in that conversation.

> Nobody said that they are national governments. They are organizations with governance policies.

Under this definition, practically any organization "is a government". My college debate team, Tesla, your local Starbucks. All "governments", because they are organizations have a governance policy (which really just means "leadership").

> Banning moderation is deregulation.

No. The government controlling how corporations can act is, definitionally, regulation. You can argue that is good regulation, but it is regulation. If I am allowed to censor you, that is less regulation than if I am legally prevented from censoring you.

That person was banned because of automatic child pornography detection, you think that should be removed?

Maybe the detection could stay, but the decision making (= acting on gathered intelligence) should absolutely be not outsourced to dumb robots. In this particular case, the context of the e-mails between the father and the doctor would immediately indicate that the photo was legit.

How could a large service have enough people to review material in a timely manner?

CP is, in reality, a fairly infrequent crime. It is also a crime, meaning that someone human should definitely pay attention to it - unless you propose robotization of sentencing as well.

If your automatic detection is tuned well enough not to produce shittons of false positives, you should have enough people to review suspected cases. Real positives ought to be escalated to actual police.

(Also, actual police will not be happy about an automatic mechanism that locks out real CP producers out of their mailboxes, thus alerting them to the fact that there is something going on, and possibly giving them time and opportunity to destroy some incriminating evidence. There is a reason why suspected criminals are staked out carefully, then suddenly raided.)

do we really expect underpaid and overworked jannies who get to spend 12 hours a day checking gore and cp will have a better error rate than bots? customer service & support is dogshit even for the users that these services are ostensibly trying to keep. potential liabilities will never get anything short of kafka.

We are talking about a real black letter crime here, not just a vague Terms&Conditions violation. If actually detected, humans will (or should) be involved way beyond mere suspension of an e-mail account. As in "actually running a criminal investigation".

Which will either clear or implicate the person involved, but either way cannot be done robotically.

And you know what happened after?

Nothing. The programmer tried to open a lawsuit to gain back his rights but he couldn't afford a decade lawsuit against a mega corp.

So the programmer remains banned today, for Google's mistakes.

Google won't admit wrongdoing, because it reveals how flawed their system is and opens them to cases.

Should such an entity with no responsibility be allowed so much power over our lives?

Not sure I agree that big tech is government, but now that the government is an agent of big tech with the use of controlling free speech via their portal (could also argue that big tech is an agent of government), it seems to open the door for a constitutional argument that these tech companies are now under the umbrella of the first amendment.

That is essentially the core legal issue behind the State of Missouri ex rel. Schmitt, et al. v. Joseph R. Biden, Jr., et al. lawsuit. If big tech companies are censoring speech at the request of the federal government then should they be legally treated as an arm of the government? It will be interesting to see how the Supreme Court rules.

https://ago.mo.gov/home/news/2022/09/29/attorney-general-sch...

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has suggested that Congress consider extending common carrier legislation to cover social media platforms. This would essentially prohibit social media companies from removing any legal content (perhaps including some forms of spam), but they would still be able to give users tools for filtering content that they see.

This would be a form of compelled speech, which does raise 1st Amendment concerns. But in principle it's no different from forcing telephone companies to carry all voice traffic without active censorship.

https://www.npr.org/2021/04/05/984440891/justice-clarence-th...

This analogy, like most analogies, confuses more than it clarifies. It sounds plausible but it's disanalogous in ways that make the analogy more of a rhetorical device than something useful. You should just appeal to first principles and make the direct case that social media companies have too much power over speech and can be used by the US government to bypass the First Amendment, and they therefore need to be regulated. Which is a case that I would probably disagree with unless the specifics of what you wanted to do in response were fleshed out. The problem here is with the US government, not with social media companies.

Thank you for explaining it like that. Some refer to these platforms as GACC(Government, AI, Corporate Controlled), but this could be abbreviated to simply government controlled.

These governments are not elected by the people and are primarily driven by profit. Inverted totalitarianism is when economics besets politics.

Governments will always be happy to permit monopolies to large networks in exchange for monitoring & control.

Likewise; large networks will happily grant access to governments in exchange for them staying off their back and keeping completion to a minimum.

You definitely should not treat them as the government. For one thing, that'd mean the government would have the personal info behind everyone's social media accounts. For another, you can't sue the government unless it lets you do it.

There's a reason NCMEC (the agency social media sites are required to report CSAM to) is a private organization and not "the government"; it's to protect your privacy rights via the 4th Amendment.

They do get that info from them already... Didn't you see Snowden's leak 10 years ago?

I actually know how these things work and you don’t need to lecture me with what you thought you understood someone bragging in a PowerPoint to mean.

They get that info through legal processes like subpoenas that Twitter is entitled to fight because they’re private. And they put lots of legally unnecessary effort and their own money into fighting them; other platforms don’t try nearly as hard to stop it. See the DevinCow case.

Of course Elon just fired the exec who did this.

> I actually know how these things work

At least you think you do...

As in I've dealt with all of it professionally and spoken to lawyers on all these topics, yes.

Also, this story seems to be fake anyway.

https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/bullshit-reporting-the-i...

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