If Facebook/twitter/etc hadn’t fucked up and allowed insurrectionists to openly organize on their platform, they could have said “No, we did these specific actions to attempt to prevent it.”
The best twitter can say is that inspite of trump clearly violating TOS nearly every day of his presidency, Twitter did nothing (when they could have) to curb the harm until the last few weeks before insurrection.
My dude, just admit that while you think these large corps might be responsible, that they deserve to be treated as innocent by Congress.
By that same token, your post is disingenuous. They were asked if they were partly responsible, not wholly responsible. The question doesn’t even imply that social media companies are wholly responsible.
They can easily answer that question, and easily answer yes. Yes, they built a service that made it easy for bad actors to spread the lie that the election was stolen. Yes, they built a service that promoted that lie within various engagement groups. Yes, they failed to take steps to limit the spread of that lie, to debunk the lie, or to refute that lie. Yes, they built a service that made it easy for the seditionists to communicate and coordinate their actions. Yes they failed to monitor and block groups that were openly planning the insurrection. Yes they failed to notify law enforcement that there were groups openly plotting an attack on the US Capital. Yes their business model is predicated on stoking outrage in order to increase “engagement” to increase ad sales. No, they did not specifically tell the seditionists to storm the Capital.
Personally, I think Dorsey was the smartest of the three. He sees where this is leading, and wants to get ahead of it. Dorsey is trying to salvage as much of Section 230 as he can for Twitter, by portraying Twitter as acknowledging the fact that social media can result in very negative outcomes, and positioning Twitter as actively trying to address this. Zuck and Pichai are following a short term strategy of denying responsibility in order to prevent some petty lawsuit, while setting themselves up for greater legal liability and regulation in the future. IMHO they are bringing badminton rackets to a rugby scrum.
I don’t know where this will all lead, but my guess is that it will ultimately result in some changes to Section 230 that will put more responsibility on companies for the consequences of their users’ posts. It will probably harm smaller companies who don’t have the resources to hire an army of moderators or build complex algorithms to better catch bad actors, and will be an unworkable shit show of unintended consequences. But instead of trying to get ahead of the disaster by actively trying to be part of the solution, Zuck and Pichai are asking for it to be so much worse than it could otherwise be.
There’s a reason for the discrepancy. Twitter is the smallest of the three. They have the most to lose with a modified 230, as a
Facebook and Google have made themselves too big to fail. They know it. Hammering them too hard means shutting down much of the functional internet for much of the world.
So they laugh at this shit. If the little guys go down? That’s a little less they have to spend buying them out.
I said in another topic that there is huge risk in letting any one industry gain singular power over your economy. Further on that is letting one or two interests gain singular power over that industry.
Honestly? Big Tech makes Big Oil look like pikers.
Google maybe, but Facebook is far from the functional infiltrating octopus that Google is - Social Media is certainly important and it’ll hurt specific business like small businesses, but customers will still need to get those services and they’ll still need to find people to do them, so I don’t buy that it would cripple small businesses or anything.
If Gmail were to like, somehow disappear immediately, it would be devastating to a huge number of consumers in a deep and real way.
Companies are too big to fail… until they’re not. As @falcon2001 notes, FB doesn’t provide core services that would cause world-wide pandemonium. I would also argue that neither does Google. Much of Google’s services would be unaffected by even substantial changes to Section 230: web hosting, email, maps… these could all function without a hiccup if Section 230 were revoked. There would be any number of companies who would be happy to snap up many of Google’s services if they were liquidated, or love to enter the void (such as search) if they were shut down wholesale.
Similarly, there are a host of social media companies that would love to fill a void left by FB, and while I am told that FB offers some convenient services (I wouldn’t know, I haven’t been on FB for 9 years), and small businesses would experience some harm if FB ceased to operate, there are other ways to communicate, coordinate group schedules, and find local businesses. FB’s main advantage is their broad user base, and they know how fickle that is, hence the reason they bought Instagram, WhatsApp, and various other competitors.
FB seems to have the most to lose, which is why their attitude of “it’s not our responsibility to do anything about private groups set up to plan the murder of the Vice President and members of Congress over an election theft lie” seems so puzzling. Their strategy of “let the politicians yell at us then bribe – sorry, campaign contribute – the ever living fuck out of them” will only go so far, especially now that an actual murderous mob descended on various capitals to, ahem, murder those same politicians.
But I’m not a tech billionaire, so take anything I say with a grain of salt.
(I wholeheartedly agree that we shouldn’t allow a few industries to capture any sector of the economy.)
BTW I fully agree with all this; I kind of forgot about the context of Section 230 here, where Google is flatly pretty safe across many of its services.
