I think removing section 230 protections from these companies would be sufficient enough. You can’t have it both ways on being an editor of content (the algorithms) then claim you aren’t a publisher.
It won't. If Youtube had no moderation, it would have no ad revenue. This would effectively kill every single website where users can publish content without having to go through a publishing contract first.
Youtube, Medium, Newsgrounds, every single comments section on news articles, all web forums, Discord, reviews on Amazon, Steam. I'm not even sure websites like buy me a coffee and patreon would be able to survive, because if they can't moderate their posts, that doesn't mean mastercard can't ban them, as mastercard isn't subject to publishing laws.
And when you have sites like Youtube that retain a strict moderation policy, there is going to be absolutely 0 incentive for them to cave to whatever new niche sites crop up that try to play the "we can't enact moderation" card, exactly as happens today.
> ramp up their moderation hard
Not good enough. Every claim about a person in every video posted to youtube would need to be fact checked prior to being visible on youtube. You are underestimating the degree to which this kills youtube qua youtube. This is subtantially more true for facebook, or for comment sections.
>still have liabilities in countries that aren't the US
Already most sites that are required to censor content for a certain locale only block it for IPs from that locale. I doubt this would change.
No it doesn't. Defamation requires some form of mens rea of the statement being made (negligence or actual malice depending on who it's about), so liability for defamation in a no-§230 world largely means "will take it down after someone complains" as there's a pretty solid defense that not verifying the statements before uploading doesn't constitute even negligence, much less actual malice.
The liability rules in a no-§230 world aren't entirely clear since we're basing everything on just two court cases that existed pre-§230, but the social media companies are going to be extremely willing to throw down millions of dollars in legal fees to persuade judges to evolve liability rules that make their moderation policies feasible.
And this comes back to the main point again: no moderation just doesn't scale, not even in channels of merely a hundred people, let alone hundreds of millions. It is naïve to think that companies are going to suddenly decide that "no moderation" is less risk than "tailor both our moderation policies and the law to find some middle ground that is actually feasible."
And an unmoderated site isn't going to be all that fun for users. If there's no curation, you're going to mostly find dreck, which will turn users onto platforms that actually have content worth consuming. If there's curation, well congratulations, content creators still have to pander to the curation rules which is effectively the same moderation environment anyways.
Anyone who has moderated a forum in their lives know how exceedingly stupid this idea is.
I should have clarified and specified that I was only referring to these trillion dollar multi-national corporations that can obviously afford to regulate their platforms themselves.
Regulations can be targeted you know, they don't have to be full-stop.
Also what's nice about the government is that they are compromised of citizens where we can vote in new people to lobby the changes we want. How can I do this at Google or Meta? That's something only the privileged can afford.
They turn the filter to 11. You can't even swear on YouTube anymore.