I don’t disagree, but this gets into “why didn’t Twitter ban the elected president from its platform” territory… that’s a real challenge. At least Twitter led the pack on labelling tweets as misleading which was about the only viable choice from my perspective.
Reddit absolutely has a poor track record here, but I’ll gladly take whatever progress is on offer.
This would also erase all small independent platforms. I can tell you right now the BBS would disappear right now if we could suffer legal liability for removing the wrong post.
Worse, removing that wouldn’t accomplish much. An end user who has a post removed incorrectly on say, Facebook, would still have to sue Facebook (at considerable expense) and win, and that’s assuming they didn’t add a forced arbitration clause or some such for such disputes.
Good point. I guess it has to be like the whole free speech maxim or it gets too messy. Even if the litigation fails it would still draw so much of it that it would be a nightmare.
Trump posted a rambling video to Twitter about the current shitstorm at the Capitol. All Twitter does is prevent it from being interacted with in any way other than watching the video, linking to it, or embedding it. Deleting it would be the best of all worlds, but Twitter doesn’t have the fucking spine to do that. Trump incites violence, their disclaimer admits there’s a “risk of violence”, and Twitter does nothing to remove inciteful material that has a URL people can share around. Twitter is failing to use the content moderation power that Section 230 gives them in a responsible manner that benefits its users. Why the fuck do they deserve to be protected by it?
Because the internet is not about twitter and facebook, as much as they might prefer it that way.
Twitter doesn’t give a shit about section 230. If it’s repealed they’ll just engineer a “censor switch” that anyone can pull in the same way folks do today with youtube. They’ll be just fine. Anyone who’s not twitter on the other hand will not be able to afford to employ such measures and will disappear.
Removing section 230 without a replacement will simply make the twitters and facebooks of the world stronger.
I wasn’t calling for a wholesale repeal of 230; I know that Section 230 is important and I submit my prior posts in this thread as evidence to that.
I strongly believe that people should, in specifically targeted cases, be able to press charges and/or file suit to hold sites like Twitter accountable for gross irresponsibility of the kind that they’ve been practicing with regards to Trump and his tweets. Much the same as I argued in my initial post in this thread:
Twitter is enabling domestic terrorism. Companies like Twitter and their execs need to face real justice for that, the likes of which antitrust and strong privacy regulation simply can’t provide on their own. If the clusterfuck today that Twitter enabled Trump to incite and enact had actually been successful, I’m pretty sure that Section 230 as a whole would’ve been dead in a couple weeks.We need to draw a line in the sand somewhere. It should be here.
It’s worth noting that Twitter has generally been leading the way here – they were the first to start labelling tweets with warnings, which is somewhat (thank God) normalized now, though at the time it was basically unprecedented.
If it was up to Facebook, little to nothing would be done. Having physically visited Facebook’s campus and maintained eye contact with Zuck for a minute, I can assure you that Facebook cares about exactly one thing, and one thing only: Facebook.
Looks like Biden is moving forward with this.
“Changes” are one thing. “Repeal” is another.
I don’t think the changes will be in the permissive direction. An improvement over Biden’s statement from a year ago to be sure and yet… her statement about “missinformation hurts people” certainly sounds like she is lining up her shot.
To be clear, I have no problem with that. It’s all about context.
If they require sites over a given size to be transparent about content moderation decisions or to be held accountable to their published policies or things of that ilk, have at it. The primary fear here is implementing a policy that is easy for large players to implement but not smaller sites - but given the enormous loss of goodwill from the larger sites, I would not expect things to trend in that direction.
It’s too early to judge, but I’m certainly not against reform if it’s handled appropriately. History is, however, unkind in that regard.
I’m 100% they will fuck it up.
Public opinion may have turned against big tech, but they have lots of money to spend on lobbying, and politicians will be satisfied to have “done something” even if it’s totally ineffectual at stemming the spread of misinformation and only serves to further entrench Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter.
Look no further than the recent spate of copyright laws which impose new requirements for automated content filtering that only huge established players like Youtube and Facebook will be able to afford to comply with.
This is one of the outcomes I fear. Crony Capitalism is just soft serve Fascism.
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