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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

> Paper media abides by this

It's a meaningless comparison.

Traditional media produce and own their content. Online media is user generated.

Paper media also has user generated content. Such content has been the liability of the publisher and things have worked just fine for at least the last two centuries if not more.

Again: There is no reason internet-based media can't act like their paper counterparts. The only plausible reason is because nobody wants liability, but hey: You modify user generated content in any way, /you the publisher/ are now liable for it.

I've worked for a large News Corp paper before.

The amount of user generated content in comments, letters to the editor etc is tiny and was moderated by a single person.

It is simply incomparable to the estimated 500 million tweets a day by Twitter:

https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2020/04/14/twitter-statis...

Why is it my problem that their business model is stupid and doesn't work when treated equally to traditional publishing?

Equality before the law. If your business can't adapt it should die.

Ahh yes, the old "we're too successful to be able to operate responsibly" argument.

Here's a thought: there's nothing that says that Twitter and friends have to exist. There was a time when being able to comply with the law was part of the business model, not a minor obstacle that needed to be worked around.

As a (purely hypothetical) heroin dealer, I can't run a business if I keep getting thrown in jail. What's the solution?

Here's a thought: I am purely hypothetically able to sell some previously unknown and unforeseen (therefore legal) opioid agonist that is just as addictive and dangerous as heroin with no issues of legality. Or maybe it isn't even an opioid agonist and has some novel mechanism of action that is yet unknown.

What's the solution? New legislation that adapts to such a threat to societal welfare. And this is what is effectively happening here with litigation over Section 230 et al. (worth mentioning that it's not even the case that Twitter's business model involves working around the law; Section 230 _is_ the law and it shields Twitter from liability. So there is really no case here like you are describing to begin with.)

The end of society and government is more or less to identify and avoid bad societal outcomes, and an evolving legal system is necessary to keep up with technological and social changes in the world. Maybe you are correct and Twitter shouldn't exist to begin with, alas Twitter exists and other things like Twitter exist. They aren't currently in grave violation of any law to my knowledge, and any law that is to be enacted regarding things like Twitter should be written in light of the current state of the world, which is that Twitter exists and that things like Twitter are easy to create.

Maybe it's fitting that this thread— in its consideration of the balance between freedom and benevolent force— invokes an analogy involving a subject of the war on drugs.

Where I live psychoactive drugs are blacklisted by law. If you want to sell a new one legally you need to apply to get it put on the whitelist.

They did this so that hypothetical you can't dodge the law by tweaking molecules and that new legislation doesn't have to be enacted every time you come up with a new recipe.

I'm not saying that twitter shouldn't exist, I'm just saying that it and platforms like it don't have to exist in their current state. Section 230 _is_ the workaround that didn't have to be created just so that the platforms could operate outside of the regulations that other publishers are bound by

Ok, so Twitter and Facebook go out of business, only to be replaced by offshore businesses outside the legal reach of what replaces section 230.

Honestly what you've done there is present a good case for why dealing heroin should be legal.

> "we're too successful to be able to operate responsibly"

No. I am simply pointing out that comparing print media to online makes no sense.

yes, because print media's business model allows it to operate responsibly

Newspapers are default-deny. The editors decide which letters to the editor to publish.

Social media platforms are default-allow. If they were default-deny, it would take months to get your newsfeed posts approved.

Newspapers were also not designed to be a way for readers to express themselves. Social media platforms exist so that users can express themselves.

I'm not saying that social media companies are doing a good job, or that their moderation practices are good, or that their quest for increasing engagement above all else is good. In fact I wouldn't mind if FB, Twitter, etc. just disappeared tomorrow. But comparing them to newspapers is just not a reasonable thing to do.

With the current state of AI text processing, checking if the contents of a user submitted text would be approved really shouldn't take months but instead seconds.

Sentiment analyzers which take bug reports as toxic but consider beyond the pale statements like "I hope you enjoy eating your family." the opposite of toxic?

> Traditional media produce and own their content.

Phone companies don't. The traditional choices were "have full control of the content, and take full responsibility for that content" (e.g., newspapers) or "don't attempt to control content, and bear no responsibility for that content" (e.g., telephone companies). Newspapers were legally responsible for what they published, phone companies weren't. The phone company (and other so-called "common carriers") weren't held responsible even if someone used the phone to plan a murder. In exchange for that immunity, they were required to give access to anyone with enough money to pay the monthly bill.

> Online media is user generated.

As are phone calls.

With Section 230, tech companies both have a) full censorship powers and b) no responsibility. Absolute power with no responsibility has always been a recipe for abuse.

Paper media does not produce the advertisements, the customers or ad agencies do that. For decades the classifieds section, entirely 'user generated' was of massive import to society, to the degree that sunshine laws still frequently require governments to publish important announcements in the classified section of the local "paper of record."

In other words, traditional media produce and own content, but there has always been a tremendous amount of user-generated media mixed in.

Sure, but my impression is that readers submit classified ads, someone at the paper says it's ok, and it gets published in the classifieds.

A social media platform would not be viable if someone had to approve every post before it went live. (Maybe that means that social media platforms should just not exist, but that's not really the specific point we're arguing here.)

What is the specific point? That ownership of content implies slow production? What if a social media network established a contractor relationship with each user, and paid them for their content at a rate of, say, one cent per million posts, with a maximum of one hundred billable posts per day?

The content would be coming thick and fast, the company would have more standing to enforce its terms of service, and you've dodged whatever moderation rules might apply to user-generated content, since it's all work-for-hire by our vast cadre of contractors.

I'm just not convinced that "traditional media own and produce their content" is indicative of anything particularly important, and just muddies the waters surrounding the actual problems at play.

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