But what about all the small, independent forums in the internet? For them it would really be impossible to comply with monitoring every post. Often they are hobby projects.
My home kitchen doesn't routinely serve strangers. The forum I host trough a server in my cupboard does.
If you want to make a comparison, it's between a small family restaurant and a giant fast food chain. It may surprise you but food inspectors treat both in roughly the same way.
Face it. Nothing meaningfully separates my forum from giant social media companies apart from scale.
Hence, small forums hosted by hobbyists and volunteers should be shut down.
Most states have cottage food laws, with basic regulations for small-scale commercial production. E.g. you need to take a course on food safety, you need your water tested, and you can only sell up to $X per year, but you aren't subject to random inspections. There is no reason why the web shouldn't be regulated similarly, with different rules based on the size of the audience.
If we have different rules depending on scale, how is it OK for the rules for large scale social media platforms to be impossible to comply with by large scale social media platforms?
In practice though, it's not unreasonable to say that we should expect more from companies that can cause harms at a much larger scale. Perhaps there's some kind of threshold where we can accept some harm being done at a small scale while still not allowing harm at a much larger scale. Seems fair enough.
Before the obvious argument "where do you draw the line?", I may add that only a select and obvious number of social platforms reach the level of Meta's.
Now you want to exempt everyone apart from giant social media companies from that same rule?
This is getting a bit Kafkaesque.
Moderating the News board became too arduous and carried potential legal liability.
So they turned the board off.
It’s really not that hard.
And anyway, just because you can’t fix everything, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and fix something.
All or nothing thinking leads to inaction.
It's invite only Groups on Telegram, FB Messenger, or Apple Messages mostly.
So it has ended well for my social circle ;-)
If hobbyists can't comply, maybe it's about time we prevented small independent forums from existing.