> Only the original author may remove content they produce.
This has some pretty bad implications if we think about obvious content problems like child abuse. And sure, algorithms can remove this from people’s feeds, but what about the victims?
Am I the only person who thinks this is a giant, glaring hole in this whole argument?
There are two forces at play here, general public ("everyone else outside the poster") and law enforcement.
- Groups will always be able to flag/hide/shadowban content. Yes this is not not scaleable to millions of people/posts (without masses of slave wage moderators or automation, both which would make ample mistakes). But I also think that communities are not scaleable to millions of people/posts. For all the necessary "common space", it is, and probably should be "the frontier/wild west". Clients might be restricted from accessing it or may have filtering safeguards.
- Law enforcement should have the right to pursue people posting illegal content in real life, and remove it on their behalf with whatever means they have at hand - no matter if in the US, Europe, China or North Korea. But they should be only able to do this via their own (black-hat) methods and not built-in switches served conveniently by the network protocol. Just because the digital world allows complete control, that doesn't mean society should utilise it for its own steering.
In the end my guess is that such debates are kind of needless/theoretical - the world will gravitate to some similar kind of self-balancing anyway, like how it did with digital content piracy.
But there's nothing inherently unjust or malign about law enforcement being able to easily perform its duties (given a legitimate context) or even for companies to give law enforcement the means to police illegal content online, that's their job, nor is the cause of liberty necessarily served by making it arbitrarily difficult.
But if you need a purely technical argument, because requiring law enforcement to use black-hat methods means requiring maintaining a minimal level of unsafety for the protocol.
It's not the 90s cyberpunk era any more. The internet is real life.
I understood the statement relative to the case where someone else centralized ultimately has control of your content, like Twitter. The other extreme is some decentralized equivalent to the case of hard-encrypted files that are only openable to a person with special knowledge. There's lots of grey there, and decentralization opens up lots of questions, like "does any one person really have control over content in a decentralized system?"
I guess the comment seemed too fuzzy to me to be interpreted in much detail, so I was willing to flow with it, at least to some level.
Maybe he assumed that illegal content was an obvious exception. However, illegal content differs between countries. And severe censorship is usually of illegal content.
But if read literally, its pretty abhorrent.