It isn't often that I see a case which really could change the internet. Particularly eye-opening was https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-277/292540/2023... - an amicus brief from the moderators of the subreddits r/law and r/SCOTUS. It brought home how different a world with laws like this could be. And I had to laugh at pages 15-22. "We aren't going to argue the law. We're just going to show you the content that we are moderating." Followed by screenshots of attacks, many of them death threats, aimed at the Supreme Court. That's one way to get a judge's attention!
Wow, that's a great find! You don't even have to read beyond the table of contents:-
> TABLE OF CONTENTS [...]
> ARGUMENT ............... 6
> Amici Censor Irrelevant and Inappropriate Speech to Cultivate Healthy Online Communities Built on Common Interests. This Includes Removing Death Threats Aimed at Members of This Court. ........... 9
> Amici Could Be Sued for Censoring Internet Trolls Who Are Calling for the Execution of Supreme Court Justices. ........ 19
> Those Who Are “Censored” by Amici Can Speak Elsewhere. ........... 22
> These laws are not about protecting speech. They’re about politicians ensuring that a favored constituency has access to someone else’s megaphone to spread a message
I was a high school teacher for a long time. When explaining to students how I facilitated discussion in the classroom, I talked with them about the idea of the loudest voice. If you don't moderate a discussion thoughtfully, it will be taken over by the few people with the loudest voices.
We see this same dynamic all the time in online communities. Moderators quiet the loudest voices so everyone else can have a meaningful conversation. These laws are aimed at letting the loudest people shout everyone else down, so the people trying to hold onto power can't be challenged.
> They’re about politicians ensuring that a favored constituency has access to someone else’s megaphone to spread a message
I think this is an inaccurate characterization. Over the past 20 years content creators were encouraged to use and invest in building an audience on these platforms based on the tacit understanding that they would behave like content neutral common carriers. If the platform's willingness to abuse this power had been apparent from the start they would never have become so powerful.
People created their own "megaphones" over many years only for the platform to start dictating to them how they can communicate with the audiences they've built, often based on naked political animus. It was a bait and switch - a fraud.
That said, having listened to most of the oral arguments I think SCOTUS will strike down these laws.
The fundamental problem is that the Internet centralizes power in a small number of corporations which then become ripe for capture by powerful interests, whether political, ideological, or commercial.
IMO the ultimate solution is a decentralized Internet like https://freenet.org/ that doesn't require creators to hand over control of their voices to powerful third parties.
>Over the past 20 years content creators were encouraged to use and invest in building an audience on these platforms based on the tacit understanding that they would behave like content neutral common carriers.
That's a strong assertion. Do you have any evidence to back that up?
AIUI, the law governing this (at least in the US -- which is relevant since we're discussing US state laws being challenged in the courts) is the Communications Decency Act of 1996[0], with section 230[1] of that law being the pointy end of the stick WRT these particulars. I would also point out that the above serves as a front-end (in that it allows the courts to reject lawsuits misdirected at platforms, when they should be directed at the source of the speech) to the First Amendment[2].
Please detail where, exactly, any of the above supports the claim that "content creators were encouraged to use and invest in building an audience on these platforms based on the tacit understanding that they would behave like content neutral common carriers."
Perhaps I'm missing something important (which is certainly possible) and I'd appreciate being enlightened. As such, I look forward to your response.
Additional Edit:
I'm responding to [3] below as I am apparently rate limited and wanted to make sure I was clear in what I'm trying to say as I am pretty passionate about it:
That's as may be, and I remember it fondly too.
However, it wasn't by government or the law that "content creators were encouraged to use and invest in building an audience on these platforms..."
Rather it was those platforms themselves. It would be easy for me to just say "sucker! you've been rooked!" and leave it at that.
However, I'll (attempt to) respond substantively by saying that the surveillance capitalism[4] business model was still nascent and there were many more options for interpersonal interaction back then.
It was inevitable that after the consolidation of "social" media that advertiser influence (since they're actually the customers -- not you) would be paramount to these platforms.
And that's what drives the moderation/censorship folks are complaining about -- because advertisers don't want to be associated with anything controversial, they just want you to buy their products/services and (the advertisers and the platforms as well as various middlemen) collect (ala [4]) as much information about you as they can to aid in that process.
I think to most people on the internet in the early 2000s, it was unthinkable that content on the major platforms would be censored based on political content. I don’t think there is any evidence for that, it’s more of a general feeling, and the fact that political censorship took off in the next decade.
If these platforms had started out censoring particular political content, they would not have had the same mass adoption, or there may have been more free-speech competitors.
I'd potentially reverse this: 'overt' political censorship didn't start until certain creators started to market their otherwise objectionable content as "political" as a way to bypass existing moderation policies.
Advertisers are also considerably more picky about the content they're willing to be associated with, and considerably more influential with regard to the content most people see online than they were 20 years ago. Advertiser demands have produced rapid policy changes from the likes of Youtube and Reddit where other forms of pressure have had little effect.
I agree with the person you're responding to, that the assertions you're making here don't seem to be supported by the evidence:
As one of those people in question, it was never unthinkable. Even during the 2000's, it was common to ban people from MSN chatrooms. Before that, it was common to ban people from IRC channels, individual IRC servers, or even entire IRC networks. Did the GNAA have a right to "be platformed" indefinitely wherever they wanted?
Also, the "censorship" in question more often deals with things like insults and other incivility, spamming, death threats, etc. Not mere "political" speech. I doubt many folks were banned from /r/SCOTUS for politely saying "I politically disagree with this ruling". We see via screenshots in the amicus the sort of stuff that was actually moderated.
Indeed, the "censorship" which spawned these laws was the banning of a dude actively calling for violent insurrection against the government, and receiving it, and continuing to encourage it during the violent insurrection. That's the "political speech" the bill authors had in mind when drafting it. It's possible that the "censorship" in question is all that stopped the putsch from succeeding. One can see why fans of said dude and his insurrection were so upset by that.
I think you’re right that people have been banned from things as long as the internet has been around. However more tools exist today to censor, things like AI generating and reading subtitles for YT demonetization and algorithm deranking.
If someone makes a threat on a person or groups life online, or doing something illegal, then I agree it shouldn’t be allowed. But censorship today goes far beyond that.
The purpose of the platform matters. MSN chats (group chats?) and sub-reddits are smaller places presumably set up by another user for a specific purpose. I have no problem with people being banned/censored for whatever reason from these smaller forums.
I have an issue with censorship when the platform is generic, not dedicated to a particular topic or group, like Twitter, YouTube, or Reddit as a whole. When one or more dominant third party platforms censor the same people, it has an effect similar to that of government censorship.
I also think the censorship will backfire, because by being shut down, it gives power to the ideas being censored. “There must be a reason they are shutting down discussion. They have no real answer to it!”
I agree that online harassment is ugly, but I still believe in absolute free speech on these generic platforms. The best solution to all of this would be to have block lists that people could opt-in or out of. Don’t want to see something? Subscribe to the block list.
> more tools exist today to censor, things like AI generating and reading subtitles for YT demonetization and algorithm deranking
I don't see how that justifies the government compelling you or I or IRC chanops or subreddit moderators or Twitter admins to say what the government wants us to say. None of those were used to ban the former president when he was engaging in the "political speech" of inciting a violent insurrection and encouraging it while it was happening.
> If someone makes a threat on a person or groups life online, or doing something illegal, then I agree it shouldn’t be allowed. But censorship today goes far beyond that.
And yet, the speech the government is trying to compel here includes, but is not limited to: insults; slurs; obscenity; spam; inciting violence; inciting insurrection; death threats; and more.
> The purpose of the platform matters
Does it, though? That seems like an arbitrary line drawn to avoid logical inconsistencies. Who defines what the purpose is? Who defines how it matters?
> The best solution to all of this would be to have block lists that people could opt-in or out of. Don’t want to see something? Subscribe to the block list.
Is it, though? This part of the post you replied to, bears repeating:
> Indeed, the "censorship" which spawned these laws was the banning of a dude actively calling for violent insurrection against the government, and receiving it, and continuing to encourage it during. That's the "political speech" the bill authors had in mind when drafting it. It's possible that the "censorship" in question is all that stopped the putsch from succeeding.
Blocklists wouldn't have prevented it. If you or I or Twitter don't want to aid and abet violence and insurrection, the government should not be able to compel us to do so.
>>Over the past 20 years content creators were encouraged to use and invest in building an audience on these platforms based on the tacit understanding that they would behave like content neutral common carriers.
> That's a strong assertion. Do you have any evidence to back that up?
I was there, I remember it. I co-founded a pioneering but ultimately unsuccessful online video company around 2006 called Revver that had to deal with moderation issues quite early on, YouTube, Vimeo, Google Video were our competitors. The idea that we would use this power in a politically biased way never occurred to us, it was obvious that it would be unacceptable, it was unconscionable.
And we weren't the exception, we were the norm that included companies like YouTube and Reddit. I think anyone working on a user-generated content startup at that time would tell you the same thing.
> I co-founded a pioneering but ultimately unsuccessful consumer-facing video company around 2006 called Revver that had to deal with moderation issues quite early on. The idea that we would use this power in a politically biased way never occurred to us, it was obvious that it would be unacceptable, it was unconscionable.
In 2006, the internet was probably dominated by western audiences. Now, the user base of any large social media site includes much more of the world, including groups like Hamas, ISIS, etc. and they would absolutely claim their content is political.
> In 2006, the internet was probably dominated by western audiences. Now, the user base of any large social media site includes much more of the world, including groups like Hamas, ISIS, etc. and they would absolutely claim their content is political.
After 9/11 radicalization on the Internet was a serious concern - but most people seemed to understand that freedom of speech meant tolerating speech you didn't like.
For example, just a year after 9/11 the New York Times published a letter by Osama bin Laden explaining his views and motivations. That's almost impossible to imagine today (when apparently the NYT will fire a writer for admitting they like Chick-fil-A).
> After 9/11 radicalization on the Internet was a serious concern - but most people seemed to understand that freedom of speech meant tolerating speech you didn't like.
Maybe in the filter bubble of a comp sci student lounge.
You've forgotten how everyone else lost their mind in 2001, and rallied behind a folksy strongman, and his cabal of stooges, useful idiots, and bad Boyars.
Most people at the time seemed to believe that finding and exterminating every terrorist (Alleged or otherwise) the government could get its hands on would be the only way we could remain free. They hate us for our freedom, and all that. Things like the PATRIOT act have support outside the nerd-sphere, and the NSA revelations were a nothingburger to most people, and torturing people in Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, well, they are all guilty anyways.
The only reason those views and motivations get any airtime is so they can be attacked (without opportunity for debate or rebuttal). Had his values and goals had been less comically antithetical to ours, or if he wasn't condemned by his own actions as an irredeemable monster (which further damns anything he has to say), you wouldn't have seen a whiff of them. We only hit those we can beat.
> Maybe in the filter bubble of a comp sci student lounge.
My example of the NYT publishing Osama bin Laden had nothing to do with comp sci student lounges, can you imagine they NYT publishing something like that today? The equivalent might be an op-ed by Vladimir Putin, it wouldn't happen. The views of the legacy media have shifted dramatically on free speech over the past two decades, particularly over the past 8 years.
By the time the United States Senate held its "Jihad 2.0" hearing in 2015 [1], social media companies were already working to prevent ISIS and other terrorist groups from spreading their messages or media. If there was any pressure from government and the general public, it was to the effect that social media companies weren't censorious enough regarding this sort of content.
I personally fall on the "maximal free speech" side of preferences. If an ISIS video isn't calling for imminent lawless action [2], then I don't want YouTube deleting it. But I don't think that YouTube should be legally required to keep hosting an ISIS video that is technically legal under the First Amendment, and I also understand that my preference is unpopular. I'd be surprised if more than 10% of Americans agreed with me when I say that an ISIS member should be able to publish repugnant, bigoted, propagandistic, even violent videos so long as those videos are legal under First Amendment standards.
I personally want minimal filtering on this sort of content because:
1) I'm in no danger of actually being recruited to a terrorist cause.
2) Primary sources, like combat videos from the Syrian civil war (including propaganda videos that compile such clips) can provide more information about ongoing conflicts, combatants, and world events than general purpose news outlets can provide.
I think that most people are against dissemination of this sort of content because point 2 is irrelevant to them (they're not news junkies closely following armed conflicts) and, stochastically speaking, a few people who see terrorist propaganda videos will be persuaded to take up terror. Or maybe it's even less calculating: the reasoning could be as simple as "ISIS has a disgusting ideology, and disgusting ideologies shouldn't get free speech considerations."
The extreme breadth of speech protected under the First Amendment is more than what the median American wants protected, and spans more than what social media companies want to provide hosting for. High minded commitments to free speech like news outlets publishing a letter by Osama bin Laden in 2002 [3] are more notable for their rarity than for exemplifying a general standard of the time.
> I personally fall on the "maximal free speech" side of preferences. If an ISIS video isn't calling for imminent lawless action [2], then I don't want YouTube deleting it.
An online video is almost by definition incapable of being incitement to imminent lawless action. The threshold for this magic phrase is roughly along the lines of leading a mob and saying "there is <member of outgroup>, lynch them." Pretty much anything short of that is constitutionally-protected free speech under the First Amendment, and it's virtually impossible for an internet video to be sufficiently imminent for the purposes of incitement to imminent lawless action.
Interesting, I didn't realize that the "imminent" component disqualified recordings. I would have thought that an exhortation to do something lawless as soon as you hear the message would count. Something like "Here's the home address of a Senator who called for military action against the Islamic State -- go burn his house down now!"
> I would have thought that an exhortation to do something lawless as soon as you hear the message would count.
That is almost literally the opposite of what Brandenburg v Ohio held! (Many people tend to do this: they assume that the phraseology is meant to limit speech along the lines of Schenck v US or Whitney v California, what is now known as the "clear and present danger" standard, which is what Brandenburg v Ohio was explicitly overturning.)
Brandenburg v Ohio held that advocating violent overthrow of the government is free speech, but you need the very direct link between the speech and the illegal actions for the speech to become illegal. The emphasis in "incitement to imminent lawless action" of Brandenburg is meant to be "imminent", and later court cases have generally held that "imminent" is meant to be read in very short timespans.
Where I lived, another organized movement included people burning down a police station, a gas station, a historic liquor store, vandalizing too many businesses to count, and shutting down roads, highways, and interstates but that's inconvenient or insensitive to talk about, especially in the ways those Jan 6th people are regularly described.
If I were to guess at the political motivation for allowing one group to be criticized in any imaginable way, while there were attendants that did not participate, while the summer of love can only be described without mentioning the participants involved in general mayhem: I'd suggest it's because the point is to create division among the masses and thwart any attempt at changing the status quo.
The source of both is the violation of the social contract by those in a position to do so and the victims are roughly every participant in both events, whether they committed a crime or not, and nearly every other US citizen.
The "authorities" only interest is to redirect blame and avoid responsibility or disenfranchisement from control of society. Thinking they have any particular interest in one group or another, except for themselves , is delusional.
That's the real issue I see with more censorship, more control, more surveillance, more integrated intelligence services, more focus on "culture". All the things that matter to them will be protected by whatever means necessary while any material concern, or hope, for the rest is just a wheel to turn to keep the ship on course. Nothing personal at the top, I'm sure, just business as usual. Sorry, not sorry.
Where I live, there was an insurrection on January 6th a few years back, incited to action and violence by the sort of "political speech" the governments of Florida and Texas are trying to force us Americans to speak, publish, or otherwise carry.
Sounds a bit conspiratorial, so not worth clicking, but in any case, there's enough "both sides!!1"-style equivocating on the net, and I'm not really interested in engaging with that sort of low-effort distraction on HN. Have a good one!
As conspiratorial as an article published on the Microsoft Network by "Russell A. Berman (born May 14, 1950) ... an American academic and professor specializing in German studies and Comparative literature."[0] can be?
Have a good one either way! Certainly, no reason to quarrel when, orientation ignored, we're overwhelmingly in similar circumstances.
Your post was the part conspiratorial and vague ("the game is fixed"), so not worth clicking the link. What good would it do? The post seems unrelated to the topic, which is republican government efforts to compel speech in order to make sure the next insurrection is successful. Based on the 1 cryptic sentence you provided before linking out, I'm guessing the link is similarly unrelated. Hence: not worth the click.
In any case, there's enough "both sides!!1"-style equivocating on the net, and I'm not really interested in engaging with that sort of low-effort distraction on HN. Have a good one!
> Your post was the part conspiratorial and vague ("the game is fixed"), so not worth clicking the link.
Apologies for not documenting the link, and I don't mind if you check it or not. I think it's unfair to say "the game is fixed" is conspiratorial, that is a fair criticism of the system we have when the DNC, and I'm sure the Republicans would be willing, to propose that, as Newsweek reported:
> The most recent court hearing on the case was held on April 25, during which the DNC reportedly argued that the organization's neutrality among Democratic campaigns during the primaries was merely a "political promise," and therefore it had no legal obligations to remain impartial throughout the process.[0]
and Salon:
> The DNC is advancing the argument that any claims to be neutral and fair to all candidates were nothing but “political promises” and are unenforceable by law. They claim that there was no expectation that they would actually be evenhanded in their treatment of Sanders and Clinton. They have made this case despite the fact that many in DNC leadership made claims of fairness when Sanders supporters clamored for accountability during and after the primary.[1]
---
> Based on the 1 cryptic sentence you provided before linking out, I'm guessing the link is similarly unrelated.
Well its an article about how the Democrats may form their own certification interruption if Trump wins and my assumption, which is not a judgement, is that given what I know, you would be more supportive of that than the event you mentioned. I think they're both childish but that doesn't mean you can't appreciate the possibility.
The relation between my comments and the article is that the summer of love, Jan. 6th, and the pandemic brought about previously unseen levels of censorship and propaganda on the internet. The powers that brought these about are apparently above the letter of the law because section 230 protections depend on acting as a common carrier, while the level of interference and integration of former natsec officers into media companies suggests the government is acting unconstitutionally through private companies.
> which is republican government efforts to compel speech in order to make sure the next insurrection is successful.
You say that as if corporations are people and that people cannot be trusted to be the judge of information and decide their own politics, which is a possible political position but not a statement of fact. Certainly corporations can editorialize and manage their content but can they do that and _still_ be protected by Section 230 or are they only protected otherwise?
Now this was a somewhat higher-effort distraction and I hope you have a good one too.
This post also seems mostly-unrelated to the topic, which is republican government efforts to compel speech in order to make sure the next insurrection is successful. Only the last part is relevant, so Ill respond to that:
> You say that as if corporations are people
The discussion here is whether republican government officials can compel me to speak because I own or operate a company (corporation or not), or because I volunteer to moderate a subreddit, or because I am an operator of an IRC channel, or otherwise operate some sort of online service on which people can post to each other. Which is what they're trying to do now.
Honestly, I challenge you to stay on topic without mentioning the Democratic party. They aren't the ones who passed this law. Republicans are. False equivalencies like this:
> Democrats may form their own certification interruption
...aren't relevant, especially when we're discussing the violent, deadly insurrection perpetrated by republicans, not a "certification interruption", which seems to be a term coined just now.
Sorry, you had spent some ink saying I was being conspiratorial rather than brief.
Here again, you say:
> The discussion here is whether republican government officials can compel me to speak because I own or operate a company (corporation or not), or because I volunteer to moderate a subreddit, or because I am an operator of an IRC channel, or otherwise operate some sort of online service on which people can post to each other.
But the 5th circuit points out, correctly in my opinion, that circumstantially conveying the message of a user in an open platform with privileges regarding liability is not compelled speech:
> The Fifth Circuit noted in its decision that the First Amendment protects the “‘right to refrain from speaking,’” and publishers cannot be compelled to publish specific articles or viewpoints. Yet the Fifth Circuit did not recognize “editorial discretion”—the right of private organizations to control the dissemination of third-party content—as an independent right. Instead, the Fifth Circuit explained that such discretion arises only where a law compels or restricts the speech of the private party itself—whereas the Texas law concerns not platforms’ own speech, but how platforms treat users' speech.
These platforms benefit from section 230, they can abandon that, accept responsibility as publishers, and do whatever they want outside some other asinine law controlling free expression.
...
I'm struck by how your stance seems to perfectly reflect a belief in guilt by association or representation since you're suggesting that it is as if the message was your own were you to moderate the forum, etc. and disagreeable content was outside your power to prevent.
I think it's a shame that there are so many angry and easily influenced people out there but the root causes aren't the mean words on the internets from other actual humans, as sad as that may also be.
I appreciated their latest reply, especially mentioning case law. I don't feel they've been flame warring with me. If they feel I have with them, I apologize to them, but I didn't get that vibe from them, either. Is it possible you're interpreting both of our incisiveness as flame warring?
I know I didn't flag them, but I dont know if they flagged me. I'd be surprised though, given their respectful replying.
> Over the past 20 years content creators were encouraged to use and invest in building an audience on these platforms based on the tacit understanding that they would behave like content neutral common carriers.
Beyond what the other (excellent) comment had to say about this, why does what content creators may have believed mean fuck-all in terms of what these cases are arguing? Nobody would have used Facebook if they thought Facebook would "censor" them?
And besides that, your assertion that it's a bait and switch implies that all these creators would've been able to foster the exact same followings using, what, their own websites? Accounts on different social networks? Dubious at best. A lot of the aforementioned creators benefited strongly from the network effects of those platforms and the algorithms bringing their content to new followers. It's likely if they didn't grow up on whichever platform they picked, they wouldn't have grown at all.
> why does what content creators may have believed mean fuck-all in terms of what these cases are arguing?
I didn't say it did, I acknowledged that SCOTUS would probably rule against the TX and FL laws. I'm talking about the broader context.
> Nobody would have used Facebook if they thought Facebook would "censor" them?
I think if people knew then what they know now about how these platforms would behave starting around 2015 they would have had a much more difficult time achieving their dominant positions, there would have been far more skepticism.
Of course it's hard to prove a counterfactual but that's my view having been a small part of it.
> I think if people knew then what they know now about how these platforms would behave starting around 2015 they would have had a much more difficult time achieving their dominant positions, there would have been far more skepticism.
Maybe. The polarization of the country has increased significantly since the covid era.
Plus most of this censorship discourse really only occurs at the edges. 99% of my meatspace social network cares about seeing puppy vidoes or whatever Taylor Swift has to say. Exactly zero of them have any expectation that their posts will ever be censored because they don't post anything oppositional.
I think that, even with censorship, void a real alternative competitor, the networks would have grown all the same. The only difference is maybe TruthSocial or Rumble would have spun off a few years earlier.
I'd support Freenet if it wasn't for their massive CSAM problem. I absolutely hate that I know what "PTHC" stands for.
Maybe it's changed. I haven't touched Freenet since...I think 2010? I just remember seeing index pages with links to tons of sites on Freenet, and a considerable number of them were links to CSAM.
Nope. Deleted that. Ain't gonna be a part of that.
I find that surprising, even in 2010 it was difficult to find illegal content on Freenet unless you were looking for it - and certainly in recent years it's virtually impossible, the default indexes are carefully vetted.
In any case, the original Freenet was never going to be a general-purpose replacement for today's centralized services as it can only handle static content. For the past few years we've been working on a sequel to Freenet that is much more general-purpose, you can learn about it at https://freenet.org/. While the original Freenet was analagous to a decentralized hard drive, the new Freenet is like a decentralized computer.
As part of it we're building a decentralized reputation system (based on a "web of trust") to address illegal/offensive/objectionable content.
The half of HN without proper impeccable impulse control are probably on a list now. You could have said "hate that I learnt lingo used by abusers, just by being on Freenet".
For those wondering, the initialism relates to extreme child abuse. And now I too get to wish I hadn't looked.
FWIW, I am relatively certain a good chunk of HN users are marked as "mostly harmless" already. In other words, we are all on the list. We just have different tags:D
edit: Or at least, if I was responsible for running IC, we would all be on the list with appropriate tags. Thankfully, I am not.
In short, the problem is that there is no universally agreed-upon definition of "problematic" content. No matter what definition you think is reasonable for moderation, there will both be people who complain that it is too permissive and people who complain that it is too restrictive. At a large enough scale, people on both extremes of the spectrum will be complaining about your moderation policies--and at very large scales, there will be politicians to listen to them!
There's definitely a slippery slope when you start with centralized moderation, which seems to be the article's central argument.
With the new Freenet, we're using a decentralized moderation system that lets users control what they see or don't see, based on sensible defaults. This builds on a concept from the original Freenet called web-of-trust[1]. I believe this method, combined with the fact that centralized censorship is impossible in the new Freenet due to its lack of centralized control, offers a strong alternative.
In essence, you can either curate all content yourself, or you can upvote other people's curation for a given community. The curators who are voted for by the majority of a community effectively become the default moderators for it, but any member can explicitly opt out of curation by any given moderator.
> In short, the problem is that there is no universally agreed-upon definition of "problematic" content.
I got banned from my city's subreddit for making a mild criticism about crime once. Now I'm shut off from events, networking, etc.
I'm from the southeast, which is a conservative area of the country. The internet I grew up on had thicker skin, wasn't trigger happy with banning, and because of that I was exposed to ideas and perspectives that I wouldn't have ordinarily been in contact with. People didn't have a disgruntled disposition that immediately banned opposing views on sight, so I was able to soak in so much information.
Expressly because of this, I was able to change my shape from a conservative kid into a well-rounded moderate. I don't think I could replicate this experience easily on today's internet. People are divided into factions and are quick to mute and ban those they disagree with. (The rage-centric algorithms also heighten confrontational language and showdowns, but that's another issue.)
Censorship almost always leads to imbalanced power dynamics and gatekeeping. It's become a tit-for-tat tool of retaliation and playing "gotcha". People enjoy digitally flicking each other off by banning them. It's super fucked.
Filtering is important, but we should have protocols for that where individuals have complete control and discretion. I don't know how that's supposed to work on platforms that are wholly controlled by profit-seeking corporations, but maybe legislation can craft a way forward.
I really hope we don't dive deeper into the censorship rabbit hole. It genuinely terrifies me more than any other issue facing humanity.
I totally understand what you mean by growing up on a different internet.
The mistake I made as a kid was in believing people wanted things like intellectual freedom and to contemplate things they don't agree as to potentially grow and learn something new.
People don't want that at all. I think we can see that largely, people want to be told what to think and then demonize those that think differently for entertainment. That is basically what defines our culture in 2024.
This is just the start of this new culture too. There is so much room left to run when you still have people who remember what things were like at the start of the internet.
What is gen alpha going to save the culture? I think that will be a really comical thought in 15-20 years.
We are still pretty close to the surface. Maybe I won't because of old age but as a society we are going way deeper.
> In short, the problem is that there is no universally agreed-upon definition of "problematic" content. No matter what definition you think is reasonable for moderation, there will both be people who complain that it is too permissive and people who complain that it is too restrictive.
But this is rather the point. What you need is a wall between hosting and discovery.
Alice has some rather controversial things to say, Bob wants to hear about them and Caren doesn't. So Bob and Caren should be using different filtering systems that they can choose for themselves. What shouldn't happen is that Alice gets banned from the internet or shadow banned on a dominant platform with a network effect just because Caren doesn't like her, because Caren should only be deciding for Caren and not Bob.
This doesn't mean Caren has to design her own filtering system. She can use someone else's. But she should have a choice in which one to use, independent of the underlying platform, and so should Bob.
Right now we tie the filtering system to the thing with the network effect and then have Zuckerberg or Musk deciding for everybody when it should be everybody deciding for themselves.
The problem is that it's an awful lot of work for everyone to decide for themselves, and I don't think the average user is going to care enough to build their own moderation algorithm. They'll just complain and move on
> This doesn't mean Caren has to design her own filtering system. She can use someone else's.
There can be one filter that only blocks spam and scams, another that blocks conservatives, another that blocks spam, scams and celebrity gossip, another that only shows technical content etc. You open the config options and pick one, like you choose an ad blocker or a radio station. If you don't like it you pick a different one. It shouldn't be that hard.
> Who is in charge of tagging every bit of content so your filter works?
Whoever makes it? The entire premise is that anybody could make one, however they want, and people could choose the one that works best for them. Go create one that operates by manual curation if you want to.
But here's an answer to this one:
> And if the answer is "AI", then who trains it and with what data?
You do. On a network where votes/ratings are public, make a filter that looks at how you vote, compares it to other users to find the users with the most similar tastes, and then shows you the things that they liked. Occasionally it shows you something generally popular or vaguely controversial at random to see if you like it and if you do it shows you more.
This isn't even modern "AI", it's old school machine learning and statistics. And it works pretty well until bots figure out how to game it, and then you have to come up with a way to detect the bots, and it becomes a cat and mouse game.
Which is why we need the evolutionary pressure on the other side. Have lots of different filter algorithms made by different people so the bots have to hit multiple targets at once, and users can pick the ones that are most effective at excluding them and don't get stuck with a crappy one they can't change because it's tied to the network itself.
We already have that. One is called 4chan, the other Reddit, the other truth social. And let’s not forget the actual public square. I don’t know why these being different platforms is a relevant detail, the users still have a vibrant level of choice.
The users have no meaningful ability to move other users to a different platform:
> Bob wants to open up his feed and see all the content he likes from Alice and Dave and Erin and Frank. If Alice goes somewhere else, Bob can follow her, but then Dave and Erin and Frank are still on the old site, and maybe Bob doesn't want to give that up, but the others don't even know that Alice exists and have no incentive to move.
Why is it objectionable to you for Bob to have the ability to sort his feed differently than you?
We see exactly this in real life. The more heavily moderated a forum is, the more popular it becomes. Open it as a free-for-all and let the abuse run wild, and all the normies head for the exits.
> The more heavily moderated a forum is, the more popular it becomes.
This is objectively false. The forums run by a tinpot dictator who excludes too many things that people want to see have zero users, not the most users. Many of the most popular forums became popular before they had any kind of strong moderation and only adopted it after they already had a lot of users. HN is one of the rare examples where the moderation was present from the beginning, a major reason it works is that it's a specialized site that doesn't target general audiences, and it's "popular" but not half as popular as 4chan.
As a general rule people don't like spam, but if the place where their friends are has some spam, they're going to stay there while complaining about the spam. And, of course, they hate it when somebody excludes something that they want. But that might not get them to leave either, because network effects are powerful, even when they hate it. Twitter users have been calling it "the hellsite" for many years while continuing to be Twitter users.
Which is why large general-purpose platforms need different algorithms for different people -- because different people want different things.
The other way is Alice choosing a different avenue where Caren isn't, and Bob goes where Alice is.
Filtering content is a needed, but ultimately losing proposition (time and resource is one thing, accuracy is another).
Having the source choose which megaphone they'll use and have communities surrounding those probably works better for everyone. It's only an issue when Caren's goal is to have Alice silenced in the first place.
> The other way is Alice choosing a different avenue where Caren isn't, and Bob goes where Alice is.
Which is where the network effect becomes an issue.
Bob wants to open up his feed and see all the content he likes from Alice and Dave and Erin and Frank. If Alice goes somewhere else, Bob can follow her, but then Dave and Erin and Frank are still on the old site, and maybe Bob doesn't want to give that up, but the others don't even know that Alice exists and have no incentive to move.
> It's only an issue when Caren's goal is to have Alice silenced in the first place.
That can be a problem, but what if it's just that Carol doesn't want Alice in her feed? If everyone can choose their own algorithm then she can choose one that doesn't show Alice and Bob chooses one that does. If everyone on the same site gets the same algorithm then Carol starts agitating for one that doesn't show Alice and now there's problems.
What you say is true only in an idealized fantasy world. We might sometimes get close to that ideal in small communities such as a classroom. But in the real world, moderators on large online platforms constantly abuse their power to push preferred narratives and suppress dissent rather than facilitating meaningful conversations.
But this doesn't fundamentally change the situation. It just effectively makes the moderator the loudest voice. This is not necessarily a bad thing, e.g in your classroom example with a teacher moderating a bunch of kids works very. When it is the executives of a few large corporations moderating everybody, I'm not so sure.
I think there is a big difference between "I am using Twitter and thereby I expect random people to get my tweets promoted by their algorithm" and "I am using Twitter and expect that the people who actively went out of their way to follow me will get to see my content" or even "I am using Twitter and expect that the data I gave them in trust to store won't arbitrarily be deleted without first attempting to return it to me" (along with a minimum retention period and potentially some requirement to hand over the data to the state rather than destroy it... note that these are the kinds of requirements we legally place on rental storage agreements). Most of the functionality of these social media platforms are NOT similar to a forum, and if I chose to follow someone it makes no sense for me to whine about the things they say: I can and should just unfollow them.
In person two people cannot talk at the same time hence one person can monopolize the discussion unless moderated.
The same thing does not necessarily happen on social media, at least not in the same way. Two people can talk and post at the same time without preventing each other from communicating to their audience. And you can filter obnoxious users should you wish to do so.
But if the platform bans people or deletes posts because they discuss things they disagree with politically, you prevent the audience from accessing content they might find interesting. In this case the moderation is trying to shutdown the debate not really facilitating it.
You need moderation, but the big platform have clearly shown that they have trouble resisting the temptation of abusing it.
"They're about politicians ensuring that a favored constituency has access to someone else's megaphone."
Except it's not a megaphone because, as another commenter reminded HN in a recent thread about "federation" protocols, the internet is not a broadcast medium. (It's still point-to-point that's being used to spread the message.)
You know, nobody ever just openly advocates for silencing and suppressing opposing viewpoints. No, there's always a story they hide behind, a moral they put out to justify their actions, they always find a way to do it while portraying themselves as the good guys, that there's a good reason for what they're doing, and it's not bad.
Yeah, you're not for censoring people, you're just for "moderating the loudest people". It definitely isn't censorship that you want to remove the voices of people you disagree with, definitely not censorship, you just want "the loudest voices moderated". Keep telling yourself that.
Somewhat ironic considering the mods of those subs have deliberately banned anyone who disagrees with their political slant and stickied a post at the top of one of them stating words to the effect of "this is not the place to be wrong and belligerent about it."
But I guess a bunch of people that full of themselves are full enough of themselves to think that SCOTUS is going to care about an amicus written by a bunch of anonymous Internet people. Sure, they moderate death threats, but they also moderate away anything they might have to disagree with. And then pull stunts on the order of "I'll reinstate your account if you write a 500-word essay on why you're wrong."
> Amici moderate the social media platforms r/law
and r/SCOTUS on the website reddit.com. Through
content curation and careful moderation, they have
built and maintained a significant audience
interested in viewing and constructively contributing
to these internet forums.
I would argue that the reason these subreddits are successful, has little to do with the moderation, most successful subreddits are simply successful because they have good real estate. They were simply the first to snatch up the common nouns "law" and "SCOTUS".
> Under the challenged laws, removal of such a scintillating contribution to legal discourse would require amici to provide HateSpeechLuvr with an individualized explanation for the removal, and expose amici to the risk of legal action by the state, or, more dangerously, private actors (like Mr. Luvr).
Do the challenged laws actually apply to Reddit moderators, as opposed to Reddit the corporation? I don't think on a plain reading they actually do. Both the Florida and Texas laws apply to actions by "social media platforms". Reddit itself is a "social media platform", but I don't think an individual volunteer Reddit moderator is – so I don't think this law would apply directly to them. In any event, were SCOTUS to uphold these laws, they could make clear the scope of their application in upholding them, such that private individuals such as volunteer Reddit moderators were clearly excluded from it.
And the "scintillating contribution" it is talking about is a single sentence with no meaningful content, just an extremely defamatory insult which includes the n-word. Even if SCOTUS upholds these laws, I doubt any attempt to challenge the moderation of that specific contribution is going to succeed in the courts.
> The argument if I understand correctly is that they are becoming a public forum with the ability to censor public speech.
Based on what bar? Because they're popular services?
But why should that matter? There absolutely are a bunch of competitors available. And there's no "is a popular forum" exception in the first amendment that I've seen, people just seem to be making up this idea out of whole cloth.
And the government could start its own online public forum if it wanted. If Texas and Florida feel this way, why don't they make their own truly public message board or social networking site that's free of censorship?
Because they're using 47 U.S. Code § 230 (c)(1) to avoid responsibility for what's said on their platforms.
That section says: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."
We're in this weird place where social media platforms want to claim that it's their speech in some cases, and not their speech in other cases, and that just seems unfair.
This has been resolved in the past by phone companies and similar platforms being declared common carriers - and that's true even if there are a bunch of competitors available. Why shouldn't that be true of social media platforms?
They're taking the only rational position available.
* Absolutely censoring nothing is an insane position to take. Even just spammers would flood such a site, let alone super extreme people like outright Nazis or KKK members. The typical person would have no interest in sharing a website with people like that, and they would flee. Very few people want to be posting on 4chan (and IIRC even 4chan has some moderation these days, underscoring the point).
* On the other hand, you can't realistically expect a company to take full responsibility for every piece of user generated content immediately. There's no way to do this well at scale, other than to use algorithms to get rid of what seems like the worst stuff, and deal with the grey areas when users submit reports of bad behavior. It's not feasible for a site that lets users upload random things, resulting in millions of pieces of new content daily, to manually approve every single one.
Not just popular, ubiquitous. The competitors you mention are promptly bought out by the big players, or they are massive companies themselves whos policies are indistinguishable from their competition. It's unfortunate but the network effect means everyone will coalesce to where everyone else already is, forming what is in my opinion a de-facto 'public square'. Public discourse in general becomes shaped by corporate editorial policy, to such a degree that these policies could decide the outcome of elections. On paper its a private company exercising their prerogative, in practice its corporate power being used to shape public opinion and control narratives on a scale never before seen, and its effect on our general discourse has been chilling to say the least
As for the government starting its own public forum, it would meet the same fate as every other big tech competitor. I wouldn't be surprised if they got bought out.
> forming what is in my opinion a de-facto 'public square'
There is nothing in the Constitution about a "de facto public square". The first amendment concerns how the government can manage speech, and Facebook isn't the government, no matter how popular they are.
If you want to make a legal argument, it needs to be grounded in reality, not something you just made up.
Now if you want to argue that the current situation is fucked up and unhealthy for a society, sure, I'd probably agree. But that's not the same topic. The topic is whether these laws are Constitutional, and they very clearly are not.
The concept of a public square or public forum is what we're trying to articulate here, most of us are aware it's not provided for in constitutional language. It's only somewhat recently that it's become relevant, the amount of speech that happens on privately controlled platforms is not something that was predicted or prepared for, it's a massive paradigm shift in human relations. While the proposed laws may be unconstitutional, the grievances that motivated them are legitimate and should be addressed. I just don't think it's helpful to shut down every conversation on the topic on the grounds of constitutionality, particularly in a case like this where the 'spirit' of the constitution is IMO clearly being violated even if the literal words of it are not.
I don't think the spirit of the Constitution is being violated here at all. As you say, the Constitution didn't account for private speech making it so easy to reach a wide audience, so it doesn't really have anything to say here, one way or the other.
Personally, I think having a government Twitter as a "digital public square of last resort" is fine as a solution, as long as it has no curation abilities whatsoever: no recommended pages, no default feed or algorithmic timeline, not even a search function. Any pages you get to come via external links, or internal links placed manually by whichever page you're looking at.
This way, you avoid any issue of bias, and while there may be Nazi pages somewhere there, you wouldn't be able to get to them except by getting linked elsewhere to Nazis, it wouldn't be the platform actually recommending Nazis to you (because it wouldn't recommend anything).
They've been interfering with what people type for a long ducking time now. :)
But there's a lot of keyboard manufacturers out there, I think many people would buy a different keyboard if the one they had did not serve the purpose they intended it for.
I don't think anything is really a common carrier unless they are or have been granted a monopoly or oligopoly over limited public resources.
Haha so hacker news. You know the vast majority of humanity now uses virtual keyboards embedded in the OS right. And your hardware keyboard would do nothing to stop OS level censorship.
There are many virtual keyboards built into OSes, and many OSes, even in use by the general public.
There is a very extreme difference between the ability to choose an iPhone, and being able to choose which wires are on the pole in front of your house.
Common carriers are required to provide service under a special set of terms, in exchange for special and preferential treatment, like having exclusive access to public resources. That's not the case with a mobile phone, virtual keyboard, or OS. If you want to make one, go make one.
> Apple starts censoring your sentences at the keyboard level. How would you feel then?
Vindicated by my choice of operating system.
But seriously, "what if <company> did monumentally stupid thing for their business?" can be asked about many sorts of things. What if Apple decides to only support Dvorak keyboards? What if Apple gets rid of all of their game-specific graphics APIs? What if Apple triples their prices overnight? Which of these should the government categorically ban businesses from doing?
Correct: the government should not be micromanaging generically bad business practices unless it amounts to actual abuse of consumers/workers/the envinronment/etc. Just doing really dumb bad shit that'll result in a failing business isn't that.
If Apple wants to stupidly censor people at the keyboard level and thus incite everyone to switch to Windows or Linux (or Android), well that's dumb, but doing dumb things shouldn't be generally illegal.
>Or are you referring to a common interpretation, typically of language that is absent from the Constitution?
Not GP, but there is text that says this -- no interpretation required:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."[0]
And
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. "[1][2]
> Private companies can't violate an individual's First Amendment rights. Only governments can.
Which part of the quoted text supports this claim? Answer: none of it. Interpretation: since it doesn't mention private companies in this context, private companies and the first amendment are not connected, and the former cannot violate someone's rights under the latter. Not an unreasonable interpretation, but not found in the text.
"Congress shall make no law..." And that extended to the states by the 14th Amendment.
Passing a law forcing someone (or a group of "someones", which is what a corporation is) to host/amplify speech they don't wish to host/amplify is "abridging free speech" and is explicitly forbidden by the First Amendment.
The original claim here was a corporation cannot infringe first amendment rights.
That was followed by the claim that this is actually in the Constitution.
But the constitution does not say this. It says (if you go with the corporations-are-people-with-first-amendment-rights interpretation) that the government may not abridge the first amendment rights of corporations (and, usually the accompanying implicit coda, nor the rights of individuals using technology provided by corporations).
> The original claim here was a corporation cannot infringe first amendment rights.
Yes, because the first amendment is explicitly about rights protecting you from the government.
If a law says "the government can't do X to you", then nothing individuals or corporations do can violate that law. Obviously. I'm not sure why this is difficult to grasp.
"Precedent" would imply that this is merely the interpretation of earlier courts, but no, the first amendment is quite explicit about what the rights therein are protecting you from, and it's not private groups.
> If a law says "the government can't do X to you", then nothing individuals or corporations do can violate that law.
Other individuals and corporations have many rights with respect to other individuals and corporations that are not shared with the government.
In this particular aspect, the government cannot abridge your right to free speech, but this is widely understood as referring only to free speech essentially controlled by government (i.e. public contexts). I am (relatively) free to limit your "free speech" in my magazine or blog or youtube channel.
Part of the question before the court is the extent to which social media is closer to a government controlled space or context or a private publication.
> Other individuals and corporations have many rights with respect to other individuals and corporations that are not shared with the government.
Agreed, and those are written in things other than the First Amendment.
What were we discussing, again?
> Part of the question before the court is the extent to which social media is closer to a government controlled space or context or a private publication.
Which is patently absurd. There are some grey areas for the First Amendment, but "is a private corporation actually the government?" isn't one of them. That's extremely black and white. Republicans arguing otherwise just don't like that some corporations have at least attempted to moderate hateful speech and misinformation.
Now, maybe if tech platforms had been granted a monopoly by the government, like some utilities, then sure, but that's not the case here.
It's explicitly how the First Amendment is written (Congress shall make no law). If they want to change the constitution, they need to modify the amendment to explicitly state that private corporations shall not infringe on speech.
While that appears to be true, and while it might seem like this case appears to be about first amendment rights ("free speech"), a quick glance at some of the links here appears to show that the first amendment does NOT in fact appear to be the (main) issue in this case.
I am not a lawyer and not well versed in this case. But my 2 cents:
- This case does NOT necessarily appear to be about whether individuals' FIRST AMENDMENT rights were violated, or about whether individuals have a FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHT to express themselves on the social media platforms of private companies.
- Instead, this case DOES seem to be about in what capacity a STATE is allowed to REGULATE private companies operating WITHIN THAT STATE.
It might seem somewhat paradoxical, and my guess is that is because the issue is nuanced but not overly so. The STATES are introducing MORE REGULATION of companies, in order to help ensure MORE FREEDOM of individuals. This can be painted as "more onerous" or "less free", but that view may depend on who you are (e.g., if you hardline siding with corporations, or if you hardline side with less regulation, even if that particular regulation in fact requires less regulation by companies of individual flesh and blood humans). (This might also be painted as "more free", in terms of the STATE'S RIGHT to regulate.)
In theory, some states could "regulate and enforce" that companies must follow certain rules. In general, the states have broad latitude in making rules that are left up to them, and that are not really the main concern of the federal government.
If the courts were to consider or decide whether there are in fact more FIRST AMENDMENT FREEDOMS FOR INDIVIDUALS (NOT COMPANIES) in relation to social media, that would be huge but I think pretty unlikely at this time at least. But hey, big changes can always happen seemingly out of nowhere or too fast for some.
> In their briefs responding to Texas and Florida, the platforms argued that both laws infringe on their First Amendment rights by preventing them from exercising editorial discretion—which they view as protected expressive conduct—in deciding when and how to disseminate speech. The platforms asserted that the laws would prevent them from removing problematic content, such as terrorist propaganda.
Interesting take. So the platforms, as entities, want them some first amendment speech rights. And of course, it's all been about the terrorists. Thank you Google, Facebook and others, for keep us safe from those villains.
If they want editorial discretion, then they are publishers...no section 230. If they want to be common carriers then they should not be making editorial decisions.
Ironically, if they had not taken steps as egregious and suspending the account of the current president of the US these laws would never have been considered by FL or TX.
Imagine if you time-travelled back to 2002, before Reddit and Facebook, when the internet had thousands of unconnected phpBB forums.
I happen to think the Porsche Cayenne is an ugly midlife-crisis-mobile driven by assholes. Should the Porsche Owners Club phpBB forum be permitted to censor my speech, when I want to share my opinion that Cayenne owners can suck a fat one?
In 2002 the answer would be obvious - it's no problem if they censor me, there's like 1000 other forums I can go to.
It shouldn't matter even if there truly is nowhere else for you to go. There were zero forums in 1860 and yet we still figured out how to call each other race traitors in pamphlets. The first amendment right is to not have the government police your speech (often nowadays extended beyond speech to influence), it does not give you a positive right to force anyone else to spread your speech.
More than that, forcing someone else to spread your speech when they don't want to is a DIRECT violation of their first amendment right, of the "government forcing you to say things" kind.
You cannot make "free speech is an ideal" without breaking someone else's free speech.
Yes, hugely different. No-one joins the Porsche Owners Club because they want to hear what the US President says about national policy. If the Porsche Owners' Club kicks you out, it doesn't really affect your life - official/important announcements aren't posted there, you're not going to get asked about your membership in a job interview. These huge platforms explicitly aspired to be the town square of the internet, not a private members' club; they need to accept the responsibility that comes with that.
These companies want their cake and they want to eat it, too. They want to be treated as a publisher when it comes to making editorial decisions, but they also want to be treated as a dumb pipe when it comes to liability for the content that they publish. They're Schrödinger's Forums: Both publishers and non-publishers, depending on which one helps them.
The point of 230 was to eliminate the "publisher" distinction.
Otherwise, you can't eliminate spam withouth accepting liability for whatever psycho comments.
If anyone wants to delete spam or kick people off their own servers, why should they be denied?
>If they want editorial discretion, then they are publishers...no section 230. If they want to be common carriers then they should not be making editorial decisions.
If any post in this discussion called for it, this one does[0][1].
My concern, ultimately, is what's going to happen when these laws are introduced and a republican congress continues to pursue a rejection of Section 230?
So social media platforms are no longer able to censor any content posted to their sites (outside of specific cases), but are also liable for what users post to their platform?
If I was a conspiracy theorist I'd say these actions are specifically to make social media itself inhospitable in a legal sense. What company wants to take the risk of not being able to moderate user-generated content but are also legally responsible for that same content?
Do you think this would stop at the big boys like Facebook and Twitter?
What about Reddit? If I post a story in r/AITAH that the other person discovers, this opens Reddit up to a possible libel lawsuit if the other person thinks I'm not being truthful. Do you think that's a risk that Reddit's legal department will let them take? I highly doubt it. Do you think unpaid volunteer mods want to be legally liable if they remove a post for violating guidelines?
Let's go another level deeper, your neighborhood's Nextdoor forum. If Susan from down the road starts saying I slept with her husband to bad mouth me on the app, I could not just sue Susan for libel, but I can also include Nextdoor in the lawsuit. Do you think Nextdoor's legal team will allow that? Again, nope. But Nextdoor wouldn't be able to remove Susan's post because it would be "silencing her freedom of speech". So instead, Nextdoor takes the logical legal decision to completely remove any user-generated posts, effectively killing their product.
And another level deeper, some random classic car forum with maybe 100 users per month. What do they do? I think you get the hint.
This isn't just going to affect social media platforms. This will affect all platforms that allow users to post in any capacity, text, photos, videos, links, etc.
Your presence here is your answer. Why are you here if social media doesn't provide any value?
You'd have to be braindead to not understand the immense value social media has added to society. But like all things, social media has it's negative aspects. But just because social media isn't perfect, doesn't mean it has no value. As I said, your presence here is proof of that.
Their presence here does not indicate they value their time here in a net-positive way. It offers no proof whatsoever.
They could be addicted. FOMO could drive them to compulsively check the site. It might be their only social interaction at all during the workday. This might be the only group of people on the internet with similar interests.
None of those things would necessarily make it a net-good thing, if it also has negative repercussions that outweight the benefits. Many drugs, legal and illegal, are fairly harmful. Sometimes the benefits are worth the negatives. Sometimes they are very firmly not. Much of the anti-social-media position is about social media being addicting and net-harmful.
I personally don't see the immense value that you see. I've seen some value for some specific sites for some short, specific times. My grandma could interact with some of her grandkids for a short while on Facebook, for instance. Of course, she (or we) used to just pick up the phone, which is what happens now too.
I've seen some cool projects on HN I'd otherwise likely never have seen.
Otherwise I'm drawing a blank.
> None of those things would necessarily make it a net-good thing
Who is talking 'net' here? The commenter simply questioned whether social media added any value to society. To deny social media has provided any value to society is as braindead as denying that fossil fuels added value to society. Now whether the negatives outweight the positives ( aka net value ) is an entirely different question.
> My grandma could interact with some of her grandkids for a short while on Facebook, for instance. Of course, she (or we) used to just pick up the phone, which is what happens now too. I've seen some cool projects on HN I'd otherwise likely never have seen.
Oh so it does provide value. So you are agreeing with me then?
> Otherwise I'm drawing a blank.
You aren't braindead. You are disingenuous. So you never asked for or search for information on reddit, hn, stackoverflow, etc. You never found solutions to problems on tiktok, youtube, etc? You don't know anyone who found a job via hn, linkedin, etc? Bought or sold stuff on facebook, etc?
If you believe that the negatives of social media outweigh the positives of social media, then fine. That's your opinion. But to cavalierly dismiss or deny that social media provides value to society is being disingenuous at best or braindead at worst. Or more likely agenda driven nonsense.
Your comment reminds me of this excellent monty python clip: What have the romans done for us?
This is why we can't have nice things. The social media platforms took things too far. Most republicans would be in favor of the platforms not being liable for content if they don't censor. Most and both political sides would probably also agree that they should be taking steps to protect minors from child predators etc., and that was the intent behind 230 protections. The social media platforms took 230 beyond what is was initially intended for as a premise to weaponize it against people who's politics they don't agree with. Obviously with that kinds of a loophole 230 was not well thought out from that regard and would need a re-write.
>The social media platforms took 230 beyond what is was initially intended for as a premise to weaponize it against people who's politics they don't agree with.
So what? And I mean that quite seriously.
To clarify, I despise the big social media platforms and refuse to use them even if that inconveniences me (and occasionally it does). At the same time, those platforms have the same free speech rights that I do, and curtailment of their free speech (and property) rights (in this case, the right not to publish/amplify the speech of others) also curtails my free speech (and property) rights.
And since I want to protect my own rights, I support the right of those rapacious scumbags to moderate/censor on their own private property.
You're right, these companies do have the right to censor speech that they disagree with. However, if they do that, then they are responsible for any speech that they do not censor. So for instance, if someone posts a libelous statement on Reddit, and Reddit doesn't remove that statement, then victim of libel should be allowed to sue Reddit directly, instead of just suing whoever made that post.
I think I'd agree if the circumstances are the same, and on request a libel was not taken down for you when it was for other people. The same circumstances including being on the same subreddit, being caught by the same auto-filter, being notified in the same way, at least.
So, for example if libel against you wasn't caught by a particular filter then that's not bias against you, and so they are not party to the libel (unless you can show the filter was specifically designed to fail to catch libels against you).
> The social media platforms took 230 beyond what is was initially intended for as a premise to weaponize it against people who's politics they don't agree with.
So what? You're taking it as a given that "if a website moderates content in a way I don't like, the government must step in and force them to do moderation in a different way I do like"; I don't accept that premise at all, it's quite totalitarian in both concept and real-world execution.
So it turns out, inconveniently, "Children need protection from predators" and "People need protection from bigots" are two sides of the same coin.
It's all politics and it always was. Claiming one is "common sense" and one is "political" misses what "political" means.
I think S230 set a pretty good tone in biasing in favor of the right of the service owner to set the tone over-and-above within the constraints of the law (for a simple practical reason: if you don't give them that right, they'll just stop providing the service). But that does mean that when your provider decides that, say, debating the humanity of trans folks is no longer acceptable, we toe the line there or we start our own service.
Thanks for your input on this, especially for S230. I never understood the concept that a private business has to entertain or host content that they do not want on their site.
If a friend invited me to their house I can start calling their wife a fat cow and tell them how ugly I think their children are. It doesn't mean they have to put up with it or accept that sort of speech on their private property. That doesn't mean he censored me or inhibited my freedom of speech.
Well, did your friend invite you there saying his house was a place for you to share your mind?
For me, it's an issue of scale. Your friend is a single person (or family). Twitter is a gigantic, faceless corporation (okay, Elon Musk makes it less faceless, but you know what I mean) that tries to cater to everyone—in effect, it tries to be a commons. Can we consider it one? Should we? Should we make a law that says once a social media company gets to a certain size, it can't censor anything anymore if that content is legal?
I'm generally against additional regulation. I don't think, for instance, a small pro-life forum should be forced to allow pro-choice people to spew vitriol, nor vice versa. I'm hesitant to say the same for a giant company like Twitter or Facebook. There, I think it might be more appropriate to have comprehensive filtering and self-moderation tools vs. shutting people out completely (assuming their behavior is legal).
A lot of these issues stem from the fact that, until recently, society has never had to grasp these issues. Our laws are not equipped to handle these sorts of questions. Especially when that question ultimately is "When does a private company become a public service and, therefore, must abide by the laws and regulations applicable to all public services?"
My statements, while I myself do not necessarily agree with them, are what I view as possible when operating within the current legal framework our government has built for these private companies.
To me, if the government wants to hold a private company to the standard of a public service, then that private company must fully, legally, and entirely become (somewhat) a public service. I view that as becoming a service similar to the United States Post Office.
It's allowed to continue to operate as a company but has to comply with government regulations (whatever those may be). That also means that its goal is not profit generation. It can still charge users for certain services if it wishes but is no longer able to sell user data, and it must remain revenue-neutral.
This is a fair analogy but I think it could go further: your friend shouldn't be required to take what you say, print it out, and hand copies to everyone else that comes in to their house. They can say no, you can't do this here and I won't repeat it.
And I think this is perfectly acceptable when the service in question is one out of many. The reason why it is so contentious today is that a few megacorps have effectively come to define what "the Internet" is for the majority of people, though, and their ability to exclude content translates to extreme amount of political power in practice - so much so that it should not be tolerated in a free society.
But the solution to this problem is not to force those private service providers to be hands-off, but to make sure that none of them are big enough that it matters. Which the political forces that are pushing for these laws won't do, because their political economy boils down to "capitalism good, anti-monopoly bad", and that inevitably leads to the present state of affairs in practice.
Most Republicans want to censor just different things, just look at all the book bannings across the country. There are tons of things that lefty people complain about being censored on social media but we don't here about it because left-wing media is nowhere near as powerful as right-wing media. (The main lie in a lot of these discussions is that corporate media is lefty.)
Speaking as another leftie, corporate media is very much culturally left. But there is a big disconnect between cultural left and economic left now, to the point where the rhetoric of the former is used to distract from the latter.
CDA 230 exists because the Wolf of Wall Street was trying to censor evidence of his crimes. He got one ruling against Prodigy saying moderation makes you liable for defamation; and another from Compuserve saying no moderation means no liability.
Let me be very clear about how the law would work sans CDA 230: any time someone does not like what you are saying, they can sue the platform you host it on to get you censored. The only platforms resistant to this would be ones full to bursting with spam. This is already really bad. If you want a partial repeal, i.e. one where platforms are still allowed to "protect minors from child predators", I'm not sure that'll pass muster at SCOTUS. Selectively removing speech protections based on content is a no-go.
Furthermore, platforms being able to take down political speech they disagree with is not a "loophole". That's just what moderation is. The whole point of a moderator is to silence the loudest voices, so that others may speak.
Section 230 was written without limitation on the kind of censorship allowed because it was an end-run around Constitutional prohibition of government content favoritism that had destroyed previous censorship laws and waa (correctly) suspected would endanger much of the rest of the law it was incorporated into.
If you want to allow the kind of private censorship S230 was intended to protect, and stay within the First Amendment, S230 is what you get.
> Social media has done nothing but harm its users
Nothing? I don't think it's that cut and dry. While there has been harm, no doubt, there has been a lot of positives too (maintaining connections, thoughtful conversations, etc).
Then why are you writing here on this social media and harming people?
Social media is such a big part of modern communications, that arguing against it is like arguing against telephone lines or the printing press. There's a lot to criticise the owner companies for, including how social media can harm people and infamously promote and accelerate genocide, such as Facebook is accused of having done in Myanmar. But the same accusations can be levied against any means of communication and publishing technology.
Thanks for your comment here on the social media site, Hacker News!
I think we have to reorient ourselves on what counts as social media. It's not just Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. It's forums like Hacker News, it's comment sections on your favorite blogs you frequent. It's the products available on Etsy or a small creator's personal Shopify store.
Free speech isn't just about photos and text, it covers all forms of expression.
I would argue forums are just a subset of social media. "Social media" being the high level umbrella for platforms where users interact. Differentiated from platforms which are "read-only".
“The idea that it’s a tech company is that Section 230 should be revoked, immediately should be revoked, number one. For Zuckerberg and other platforms. It should be revoked because it is not merely an internet company. It is propagating falsehoods they know to be false.” - Joe Biden
> My concern, ultimately, is what's going to happen when these laws are introduced and a republican congress continues to pursue a rejection of Section 230?
It's not a mystery. Look what happened when sesta/fosta became law. Craigslist had to dump their entire personal section for fear they miss a single ill intentioned post.
The consequence of 230 removal is only to destroy the ability for people to interact with one another publicly online unless one of them (or the platform) is willing to take on liability for the interaction.
that's bullshit, we don't need platforms to interact online, we were doing that fine before myspace and facebook and perhaps you're too young to remember that but it worked pretty well and we were all on the hook for what we hosted on our sites.
My point is that it wouldn't even be safe to run a comments section on a personal blog, as any comments would count as being published by the blog owner.
Private, p2p communication would be fine, but anything publicly consumable would present a liability risk for libel, slander, etc.
In Australia, our high court ruled that companies are liable for comments posted on their social media pages[0].
It's had massive chilling effects on the ability to engage in discourse.
Comments sections are almost always disabled on content produced by Australian media corporations.
Fine by me. These site can all die in a ball of fire. We were fine before them when we all had our own sites and all too responsibility for what we said and hosted. Returning to that is not a problem for some of us who were around before Facebook and YouTube.
I 100% agree with you that we should self-host more (and the surge in technologies like ActivityPub make me excited to think of what a future of self-hosted socials may bring). But that brings up another question:
If I self-host my own site and my estranged conspiracy theorist uncle posts something I don't agree with on my site and I remove it, will these laws make me liable for infringing on his freedom of speech? To my knowledge, there is no definition of what social media is or what companies/people/sites/technologies do these laws apply to.
> As distasteful as this content may be, it is protected by the First Amendment. But that protection only extends to government actors. Amici are private actors, and the forums they control are private forums. Those who are censored are free to make their own websites to host their speech. They are not free to hijack amici’s websites.
This is the crux of so much happening on the internet right now. Users treat our largest providers like google like public resources similar to roads, and governments want to treat our largest forums like twitter and facebook like government entities beholden to the same rules they are.
Neither is true, and to me it points to the massive impact our largest companies have been able to achieve. It seems larger than what the law has words for.
the answer is probably standards and thoughtful regulation to enforce them, but the chances that today's Congress can produce those things are slim to none imho
Uh, they should apply to the 350 million Americans that this government represents.
What is your point? Iran is free to tell Google to take a hike if Google censors their calls to violence. Germany is free to tell id software to remove the swastikas or hit the road.
Funny. What is a thoughtful regulation that would satisfy 50%+1 (democracy, yay!) of the 350 million Americans that the (or, any) government supposedly represents - or however many foolish enough of those 350 million citizens choose to actively participate in federal-level politics?
I'm willing to bet that it would be even harder to find any meaningful majority (50%+1) of citizens who are satisfied with such legislation in the second group I mentioned earlier
Just build a Gestapo this time with proper controls and oversights. That's weird, but if there are multiple mob groups doing the same, some even foreign, that's a threat to any free nation and their power shall be transferred to rightful governments.
The answer is simple: if the USSC would be against nationalizing these services, then they should also be against attempting to restrain their ability to moderate their own content. Nobody with even a pair of brain cells can logically conclude that actors like Google and Facebook have ever been either benign or neutral, nor should courts pretend that an inability to understand those facts should be burdens for said networks.
Just because, as Chaya Raichik complained the other day, that she should be able to say what she wants because "there's no law against lying," doesn't mean that platforms have to necessarily allow harmful bullshit either.
I think I'm down for this in the abstract, but that's because I'm not a powerful voice that has been censored by one of these big players, and I also am glad for most of the censorship I've seen them do.
But if I step out of my shoes and look at Trump for instance, does he have a legitimate grievance for being kicked off of Twitter if he actually _did_ think that he fairly won the election and was deplatformed because he tried to speak about it?
If Twitter at the time was as powerful as a government in regulating speech ... should it have to follow the same rules? If the playing field for social media was more level, it wouldn't be an issue. He can just go to another provider and have his speech.
Still, re-reading what you said I have to agree that the end goal should be people understanding that Google and Facebook (and Twitter) are not benign or neutral and never will be.
Hypotheticals are not reality. Trump should have been kicked off of twitter years before he was. He was a raging asshole and a bully long before he ever made up his grievances about losing the election. There was zero reason to keep him on the platform because he could literally call a press conference any time he wanted. Twitter is NEVER as powerful as the government in regulating speech, because governments have the ability to compel people via fines, jail time, and violence.
Well, one obvious option would be the government making its own competitors to Twitter/Youtube/et al.
Yes yes, I realize there's a bunch of issues there, like how the government would REALLY have to permit virtually any kind of speech, or general technical incompetence from government agencies in running such a site. But it could be done, there's nothing actually stopping it.
I actually think a government-run Twitter could work okay and be accepted by people IF they didn't do any kind of algorithmic recommendations, sorting, or even have a search function at all. You could see tweets/content that you got to via external link, you could go onto that person's page to see a chronological list of things they've said, they could have a manually created profile page that links to others, but no curation of any kind by the platform itself. The home page would be mostly blank, or maybe only have a list of official government accounts or something.
> Those who are censored are free to make their own websites to host their speech.
I'm very sympathetic to this argument. Seems fair to me.
But then Cloudflare, and any host big enough to withstand DDoS attacks, is strongly pressured by seemingly most people on the Web and in the US, to kick "bad websites" by "bad people" off their platform. So we can't just let bad people have their own website which we don't visit? I kinda wish we could. If most people hate that bad people can have public websites, just say that this is the best we can do, at least they're not on your parent's facebook/twitter.
There is a very valid argument in favor of treating ISPs and hosting providers the same as your electricity and water company, and prevent them from being able to ban users on a whim. However the companies that are currently being targeted are still a few levels removed from that. In fact the party advocating for this is also the one opposed to net neutrality.
Cloudflare is a weird example to pick here, since kicking i.e. stormfront or kiwifarms off CF doesn't deprive them of the ability to host a website, it just deprives them of obfuscation and a free CDN - effectively, the service CF is offering to them is not hosting but cost reduction and insulation from the consequences of their speech.
It's reasonable in an abstract sense to think that it's a good thing if CF offers those Bad People services like that based on philosophical goals or political alignment, but it's very distinct from 'having a public website'.
AFAIK it's still possible for anybody to put up a linux box with nginx on it and put any content they want there, other than the fact that a lot of consumer ISPs don't allow you to run servers anymore. But that's a different problem and cloudflare can't fix it.
> effectively, the service CF is offering to them is not hosting but cost reduction and insulation from the consequences of their speech.
This is somewhat tongue-in-cheek on my part, to be clear, but this raises an interesting point about whether orchestrating a DDoS attack is a form of free speech. I'm inclined to say "yes" more than "no."
(You could draw a parallel, for example, to counter-protestors who try to drown out Westboro Baptst Church picketers by holding up their own signs....)
You could try to draw a parallel, but it would fail.
The most technically rigorous difference is that a protest and counter-protest are aimed at the same audience, whereas a DDoS is aimed at the first "speaker".
Less rigorously but more practically, a "message" intended to cause technical malfunction is not "speech" and we all know it. It's even less "speech" than an extortion threat, which is already not protected. The "parallel" would be feeding the Westboro Baptists cognitohazards and crying "free speech" when they go insane and you get prosecuted.
Hacking isn't the only way to cause a malfunction; a hammer tends to do it.
You can't deny that one of the functions of a server is to reply to good-faith requests, and that a DDoS intentionally degrades that function. What is that if not causing malfunction? You're looking for nuance where there is none.
(And yes, it's a weird analogy. It was the closest I could come up with on short notice, and I think that's illustrative of the dangers of analogic reasoning. FWIW yours fails on the same audience/targeting aspect as the first one.)
One of the functions of a mailbox is to receive/reply to good-faith messages, but 10,000 people can get together and decide to send postcards that say "YOU SUCK." to a single recipient.
That person's mailman might not be pleased, but all the mail is conveyed through legitimate channels and legitimate means...
> FWIW yours fails on the same audience/targeting aspect as the first one.
Drowning someone out by being much louder and drowning someone out by packet flood have the same audience: other people that would receive the message.
> What is that if not causing malfunction?
We can use a narrow definition of malfunction, or a wide definition.
If we use a narrow definition, then making the server malfunction is always an attack on the speaker. But a DDoS does not cause a malfunction under a narrow definition.
If we use a wide definition that includes DDoS, then only some ways of causing a malfunction are an attack on the speaker. Yelling at someone is perfectly good counter-protesting, even though it degrades their ability to make a speech.
"causing malfunction -> attacking the speaker" and "DDoS -> causing malfunction" are not both valid at the same time for the same definition of malfunction.
You're too focused on specific technicalities that you picked.
If you had a server on a shared medium or a half-duplex connection then DDoS would be exactly the same as shouting over someone. The shouting is aimed at the audience and gets in the way of the server's signal.
Putting the server on a full-duplex connection changes the technical details but it doesn't have any meaningful effect on what happens. The purpose is not to break anything, the purpose is to cause so much extra signal that the server can't get its own signal out. Just like a counter-protest.
The thing being intentionally degraded is the connection. Not the "speaker". Or if it's a higher level DDoS then it's usually the DDoS clients filling the queue. Which is also a pretty normal counter-protest thing, getting in the way and taking up all the close audience space.
You're the one bogged down in mechanical details, trying to nitpick the definition of "malfunction". I'm only trying to argue that a DDoS isn't meaningfully speech. None of your what-ifs actually change that. Speech has the intent of communicating with humans. DDoSs do not (if they have content, it's incidental to their primary goal).
It's not weird, it's just an example of how the modern society treat anything with sufficient scale as public resources just by scale and reach, and how little it cares about private corporate rights.
You run the water to a town and the town now owns it. If it didn't, the town regulates it to the point you're essentially owned by the town, and the result is the same.
Good example with Cloudflare, and they offer an interesting flip side with Project Galileo, where they offer their Business tier product for free to groups they deem vulnerable:
> Any qualified vulnerable public interest site can seek participation in Project Galileo. Examples of participants include, but are not limited to, minority rights organizations, human rights organizations, independent media outlets, arts groups, and democracy protection programs.
The place I work for qualifies, and it has kept us afloat. It's another example where they change the landscape for a group they select (I'm just super glad they did).
We could have a threshold at which the nature of the network changes: if a network get more than half of the voting population it gets bound to the same rules as public carriers.
That would also solve a lot of other issues of network effect and disproportionate reach IHMO.
You're begging the question: your suggestion is the laws under debate, which put thresholds on users/revenue prior to kicking in (see the OP). The amici detail why they think the law in question (and thus, your suggestion) don't practically work. Address or refute the amici's arguments.
Sorry, this went right out of my head. You're right.
100 million users looked very low to me, but is basically a third of the US population.
I think my gut feeling is that a private network with that much of a reach is an issue in the first place, whatever positions we hold (just assume that network is eventually bought by your worse nightmare).
Social media as we know it not existing beyond that line doesn't sound outlandish to me (ideally it becomes the same as our real public spaces: they're so limited that nothing much happens on them except when the cops run in and loudly arrest streakers. Otherwise it just disappears).
The idealistic view is to let users decide, yet we're in a situation where there's nowhere left acting as a public space.
To add to this point: Twitter basically gets this treatment in some of the countries it operates, with gov. emergency alerts going straight into people's apps and the network having to disclose data breaches and unvailability incidents depending on the impact they have.
Current owner might be giving me the finger those, but that's a rule in place.
The law has dealt with large companies before. We used to understand that companies were unnatural constructs, permitted only to the extent that they serve the public interest. We regulated the railroads, we broke up Bell and Standard Oil. We need to get that spirit back.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has suggested that Congress consider extending Common Carrier legislation to cover online services. Essentially this would force them the allow all legal content, sort of like a telephone company.
I think they'd come together and create a certifying authority for authentic users with traceability. More compliance. Better filtering/admin tools for users.
I doubt it. That wouldn't provide any legal protection or cover to social media companies. Their main concern is with maintaining a positive brand image which keeps regular users and advertisers onboard. So, they don't want to host legal but offensive content that would decrease user engagement or drive advertisers away.
Forcing users to certify and authenticate themselves would drive a lot of users away and thus devastate advertising revenue. And many users will happily post offensive content using their real identities.
No repercussions, because being a common carrier is voluntary.
What I mean is, you can have a members only club that is not a common carrier. For instance a member of the hypthetical video snippet network SnipWit can communicate only to other SnipWits. This means that SnipWit is not a common carrier. They are obviously private, as you can only communicate to other members. Worse yet, there is obviously consideration required prior to use, which means they would be able to add even more draconian terms to their membership requirements.
I'll give a hypothetical. CostCo is members only. You're not a member, you can't get groceries there. Full stop. It doesn't matter if it's the only grocer in your area, you'll have to drive to find a Kroger. And to illustrate what I mean by the ability to take things further, CostCo could add racial exclusivity requirements to their membership clauses. Blacks would then be barred from shopping there like they are barred from certain country clubs. And it would be totally legal and well within the rights of CostCo, those country clubs, or the hypothetical SnipWit. Why? Because these are all private organizations and members only.
I guess what I mean is, a lot of people talk about Common Carrier being the solution while forgetting about the private/public aspect and distinction at play in those regulations. We normally entice organizations to become common carriers by offering them goodies on the other side of that. Like indemnifications for instance. But what happens when you have organizations that are already fat, happy and growing like weeds under their "private with membership" umbrella? What do you offer them? It's a tough problem. There's a lot of people and shareholders making a lot of money in the current model. Those people will almost certainly vote their shares against becoming a common carrier unless there is more upside in it for them somehow.
You have misinterpreted the case law. Although Costco requires a membership to shop there, courts have generally found such places to be public accommodations rather than true private clubs. Thus, they would be legally barred from instituting a racial exclusivity requirement for membership. (I am only commenting on the strict legal issue here; obviously racial discrimination is morally wrong.)
Anyone who has been dealing with phone scams should have a healthy sense of dread on the idea that internet services should achieve parity of quality with phone service.
Something to keep in mind, the way we view a lot of these cases is fundamentally different that the way platforms look at them. We care about a free-speech vs moderation debate whereas the platforms care about "can we make more money from our advertisers this quarter?". These are fundamentally misaligned and are the source of a lot of the friction between "publishers"/"carriers" and breathing humans.
The set of things advertisers will accept is wildly different than the set of things we accept because they believe that their brand is being associated with whatever content is on the platform.
Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are both protected by the First Amendment but are separable rights.
It doesn't infringe one's free speech rights if a paper (or media service) refrains from transiting one's opinion to their readers. Start one's own press.
It's not "technicalities;" these rights only exist in a legal sense because of the Constitutional protections.
Remove those protections and the rule doesn't become "Everyone gets to say whatever on Twitter;" they become "Twitter can tell everyone to pound sand, can lie, can commit fraud, can pretend to be other people and edit your messages in transit," etc. Without the law, it's might-makes-right and the corporations definitely control the wires and the databases.
I argue that forcing the corporations to transit bits of various users infringes upon their rights more than the law traditionally demands (and morality requires, since the existence of a corporation doesn't immediately infringe anyone else's right to start their own website).
> social media is different enough from "the press" that it should be treated accordingly
Hard for me to take this seriously when it opens with Tucker Carlson talking to me after he just finished doing a promotional campaign for Vladimir Putin, and your language in this comment + lack of details isn't helping. What do I need to know about censorship that he's going to tell me? What is this "pandemic of censorship"? Who is Mike Benz?
Wish it was text so I could scan through it to see if it has any merit.
> Wish it was text so I could scan through it to see if it has any merit.
There's a text transcript at [0] for you to read/skim.
> Who is Mike Benz?
Benz is a "former State Department official with responsibilities in formulating and negotiating US foreign policy on international communications and information technology matters" per his foundation's About page [1].
> What do I need to know about censorship that he's going to tell me?
He describes in detail that tech companies are not simply deciding what to censor themselves by, you know, thinking about it and exercising judgement. No. Instead, tech companies are told what to censor by, you know, the U.S.G. This has implications for the argument that "the gov doesn't censor, private companies are allowed to".
Benz is apparently essentially an activist/whistleblower letting people know that this is happening at scale, because apparently a lot of people do not know about it.
He describes the evolution of this infrastructure over time, as of the last 10 years or so (apparently based on his professional, bureaucratic, direct experience).
Does that help?
BTW, I empathize with your difficulty getting into it. Tucker and Benz frankly both seem like gatekeepers. But the gate they keep is still is well beyond what many wish to acknowledge or deal with, maybe?
It's such a tricky situation and there are so many questions (and opinions)!
What was the intent of Section 230?
Part of the text reads:
(3)to encourage the development of technologies which maximize user control over what information is received by individuals, families, and schools who use the Internet and other interactive computer services;
> The court cited several cases in support of this position, including Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins. In that case, the Supreme Court held that California could permissibly require a shopping mall to allow individuals to distribute pamphlets inside the premises—reasoning that a business establishment that holds itself open to the public has no “expressive” interest in who is allowed to speak in the establishment.
I don't understand how this can be true. If I have a bunch of hooligans handing out pamphlets to everyone that enters my private shopping mall such that the content on the pamphlets is actively deturing shoppers from conducting business in my privately owned establishment, I have a very compelling interest in the "expressive" content of the pamphlet.
Aside, this is akin to forcing my business to allow people to sling racial insults at shoppers with no recourse like kicking them out.
Pamphleteers who didn't hand out pamphlets? Does they only have pallets to peddle who went over to them and asked for one? Otherwise they would be disruptive.
I think the following, passages from the decision highlight why you're misunderstanding, or perhaps misusing the term "disruptive":
> Appellees are high school students who sought to solicit support for their opposition to a United Nations resolution against "Zionism." On a Saturday afternoon they set up a card table in a corner of PruneYard's central courtyard. They distributed pamphlets and asked passersby to sign petitions, which were to be sent to the President and Members of Congress. Their activity was peaceful and orderly, and, so far as the record indicates, was not objected to by PruneYard's patrons.
There's other similar passages, but broadly: no one except the owner appeared to complain, which makes arguments about disruption difficult to see. They weren't actually annoying any patrons. If individual shops felt compelled to leave, or patrons complained, the situation would be different.
In the case of malls, it probably comes down to how "open" they are.
To your case, imagine a mall that takes half of the city center, is an integral part of everyone's life and was permitted on the ground that it would be a true "third place" for the residents to hang out, which is why it includes structures and areas dedicated to community events and such.
That kind of mall can't be ran like a pure private business that has no accountability outside of its shareholders. There's a balance to strike of course, but if the hooligans have most residents' support, allowing them in would be a decent choice.
The obvious problem, then, is that the mall takes half of the city center and is an integral part of everyone's life. There should be no private actors like that. It creates numerous problems, of which the one under review here is not even the most egregious example.
I like David Sacks perspective on §230. Yes, there is a huge bias in Silicon Valley against conservatives. But if we get rid of 230 it will get even worse. The moderators are all liberal. Personally I think the bias is generational, and will work it self out with time.
This bias is overstated, if it's even true at all. There are plenty of conservatives in tech with lots of money and power, many of them run hosting companies or CDNs. Trump is easily one of the most reviled figures out there right now and he's had no problem operating an entire social media service of his own, for example. And conservative politicians do just fine - big tech CEOs and founders show up to meetings with them and make donations all the time.
Do you live in Silicon Valley? I've lived here for 15 years. All of my friends are liberal, The DPI (Democratic Performance index) of my precinct is D+95. That's North Korean level of political obedience. I'm one of just 18 people in my precinct to vote for the GOP. Looking around my precinct its not looking much better. In fact, in the Bay Area, not a single county has voted for the GOP since 1980. In California, the Dems have a supermajority. You could sift through political donations of every single tech company and they give at a 1:25 ratio to the Democrats. I'm not sure about your CEO comment either, a super majority of billionaires are leftists today.
Generalizations like "the tech industry has a liberal bias" are so reductive that they aren't useful. One of the pitfalls in discussions about the overall politics of the tech industry is a lack of nuance. Another is a general inability to ask the important question "who has the power in this industry?"
Is Elon Musk liberal? What about Paul Graham, Larry Ellison or Peter Thiel?
There is an enormous difference in the politics of rank and file employees at most tech companies and the founders/executives/management. This is true of nearly every industry. If you think the biases of regular tech workers matter more than the biases of the management and leadership of these companies — or fail to make a distinction — then you will probably come to a different conclusion about the biases of the industry as a whole.
Conservatives are finding out the hard way what liberals were complaining about a decade ago with Net Neutrality and Comcast's argument that charging Netflix up the ass was their free speech expression.
That being said, these bills are very, very bad ideas. Let's be clear: no broadcasting medium can work without some mechanism to censor spammers. And this role has to be specialized (rhymes with 'centralized') because nobody wants to spend most of their day online just manually selecting spam to be blocked. If these laws are upheld I can see companies moving to block Texans and Floridians to protect the rest of their country from their legally mandated political spam.
Let's also appreciate that a good chunk of the speech conservatives want to 'protect' is political speech explicitly calling for things prohibited by the 1st Amendment. Shit like banning an entire religion. I personally don't think that should be allowed, though I doubt this particular court's 6-3 conservative majority would go along with censoring the censors.
Funny to see people here cheering on these laws (because something something free speech) while simultaneously enjoying one of the most productive yet also heavily moderated social media sites on the web (HN). Things are already bad enough in the country with evangelicals dictating what books we can read and how we are allowed to have sex. I don't want them controlling the internet as well.
HN is quite lightly moderated compared to most forums I can think of. I see lots of boundary-pushing comments survive without getting downvoted. The team running HN work hard, obviously, and there's some smart tech managing things like the front page, but people are allowed to speak pretty freely on here as long as they adhere to the rules. Punishing rule violations is a little different from moderating speech too, I'd argue.
> Punishing rule violations is a little different from moderating speech too, I'd argue.
That seems... hard to argue. The rules are often about speech. HN, for example, has rules about being kind, avoiding flamebait, not sneering, avoiding ideological battle, accusations of astroturfing; the list of restrictions on speech is quite extensive. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
A reminder that “social media” is not just a bunch of gigacorps. I have a small Mastodon server that I host as a hobby. I’ve collected $0.00 in gross revenue from it; not net, but gross. I read the Florida law as best I could and didn’t find any carve outs for small, non-profit, personally run social media.
Well, nuts to that. I can and will censor whatever I and my users decide we don’t want to see. The people we censor are free to download and install their own copies and make their own moderation decisions based on their own community norms.
It’s ridiculous that we’re being held to the same standard as Facebook and X. And if that means these laws shouldn’t then apply to Facebook and X, then so be it. I’m not willing to give up my own 1st amendment rights to punish someone else.
The state wants to fully control the sources of media it currently only partially controls. How much more obvious can it get. It has nothing to do with the safety of anyone. It's all so tiring.
What prevents a quid pro quo where government officials pressure social media companies to restrict speech of their political opponents, with the understanding the social media will be given preferential tax/regulatory oversight in exchange?
266 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadArguments were heard yesterday. Luckily https://www.npr.org/2024/02/26/1233506273/supreme-court-soci... suggests that the justices were skeptical of the Florida and Texas laws.
Arguments are being heard today. https://www.oyez.org/cases/2023/22-555 links to a current recording.
> TABLE OF CONTENTS [...]
> ARGUMENT ............... 6
> Amici Censor Irrelevant and Inappropriate Speech to Cultivate Healthy Online Communities Built on Common Interests. This Includes Removing Death Threats Aimed at Members of This Court. ........... 9
> Amici Could Be Sued for Censoring Internet Trolls Who Are Calling for the Execution of Supreme Court Justices. ........ 19
> Those Who Are “Censored” by Amici Can Speak Elsewhere. ........... 22
> These laws are not about protecting speech. They’re about politicians ensuring that a favored constituency has access to someone else’s megaphone to spread a message
I was a high school teacher for a long time. When explaining to students how I facilitated discussion in the classroom, I talked with them about the idea of the loudest voice. If you don't moderate a discussion thoughtfully, it will be taken over by the few people with the loudest voices.
We see this same dynamic all the time in online communities. Moderators quiet the loudest voices so everyone else can have a meaningful conversation. These laws are aimed at letting the loudest people shout everyone else down, so the people trying to hold onto power can't be challenged.
I think this is an inaccurate characterization. Over the past 20 years content creators were encouraged to use and invest in building an audience on these platforms based on the tacit understanding that they would behave like content neutral common carriers. If the platform's willingness to abuse this power had been apparent from the start they would never have become so powerful.
People created their own "megaphones" over many years only for the platform to start dictating to them how they can communicate with the audiences they've built, often based on naked political animus. It was a bait and switch - a fraud.
That said, having listened to most of the oral arguments I think SCOTUS will strike down these laws.
The fundamental problem is that the Internet centralizes power in a small number of corporations which then become ripe for capture by powerful interests, whether political, ideological, or commercial.
IMO the ultimate solution is a decentralized Internet like https://freenet.org/ that doesn't require creators to hand over control of their voices to powerful third parties.
That's a strong assertion. Do you have any evidence to back that up?
AIUI, the law governing this (at least in the US -- which is relevant since we're discussing US state laws being challenged in the courts) is the Communications Decency Act of 1996[0], with section 230[1] of that law being the pointy end of the stick WRT these particulars. I would also point out that the above serves as a front-end (in that it allows the courts to reject lawsuits misdirected at platforms, when they should be directed at the source of the speech) to the First Amendment[2].
Please detail where, exactly, any of the above supports the claim that "content creators were encouraged to use and invest in building an audience on these platforms based on the tacit understanding that they would behave like content neutral common carriers."
Perhaps I'm missing something important (which is certainly possible) and I'd appreciate being enlightened. As such, I look forward to your response.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Decency_Act
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_...
Edit: Cleaned up prose.
Additional Edit: I'm responding to [3] below as I am apparently rate limited and wanted to make sure I was clear in what I'm trying to say as I am pretty passionate about it:
That's as may be, and I remember it fondly too.
However, it wasn't by government or the law that "content creators were encouraged to use and invest in building an audience on these platforms..."
Rather it was those platforms themselves. It would be easy for me to just say "sucker! you've been rooked!" and leave it at that.
However, I'll (attempt to) respond substantively by saying that the surveillance capitalism[4] business model was still nascent and there were many more options for interpersonal interaction back then.
It was inevitable that after the consolidation of "social" media that advertiser influence (since they're actually the customers -- not you) would be paramount to these platforms.
And that's what drives the moderation/censorship folks are complaining about -- because advertisers don't want to be associated with anything controversial, they just want you to buy their products/services and (the advertisers and the platforms as well as various middlemen) collect (ala [4]) as much information about you as they can to aid in that process.
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39527216
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism
If these platforms had started out censoring particular political content, they would not have had the same mass adoption, or there may have been more free-speech competitors.
As one of those people in question, it was never unthinkable. Even during the 2000's, it was common to ban people from MSN chatrooms. Before that, it was common to ban people from IRC channels, individual IRC servers, or even entire IRC networks. Did the GNAA have a right to "be platformed" indefinitely wherever they wanted?
Also, the "censorship" in question more often deals with things like insults and other incivility, spamming, death threats, etc. Not mere "political" speech. I doubt many folks were banned from /r/SCOTUS for politely saying "I politically disagree with this ruling". We see via screenshots in the amicus the sort of stuff that was actually moderated.
Indeed, the "censorship" which spawned these laws was the banning of a dude actively calling for violent insurrection against the government, and receiving it, and continuing to encourage it during the violent insurrection. That's the "political speech" the bill authors had in mind when drafting it. It's possible that the "censorship" in question is all that stopped the putsch from succeeding. One can see why fans of said dude and his insurrection were so upset by that.
If someone makes a threat on a person or groups life online, or doing something illegal, then I agree it shouldn’t be allowed. But censorship today goes far beyond that.
The purpose of the platform matters. MSN chats (group chats?) and sub-reddits are smaller places presumably set up by another user for a specific purpose. I have no problem with people being banned/censored for whatever reason from these smaller forums.
I have an issue with censorship when the platform is generic, not dedicated to a particular topic or group, like Twitter, YouTube, or Reddit as a whole. When one or more dominant third party platforms censor the same people, it has an effect similar to that of government censorship.
I also think the censorship will backfire, because by being shut down, it gives power to the ideas being censored. “There must be a reason they are shutting down discussion. They have no real answer to it!”
I agree that online harassment is ugly, but I still believe in absolute free speech on these generic platforms. The best solution to all of this would be to have block lists that people could opt-in or out of. Don’t want to see something? Subscribe to the block list.
I don't see how that justifies the government compelling you or I or IRC chanops or subreddit moderators or Twitter admins to say what the government wants us to say. None of those were used to ban the former president when he was engaging in the "political speech" of inciting a violent insurrection and encouraging it while it was happening.
> If someone makes a threat on a person or groups life online, or doing something illegal, then I agree it shouldn’t be allowed. But censorship today goes far beyond that.
And yet, the speech the government is trying to compel here includes, but is not limited to: insults; slurs; obscenity; spam; inciting violence; inciting insurrection; death threats; and more.
> The purpose of the platform matters
Does it, though? That seems like an arbitrary line drawn to avoid logical inconsistencies. Who defines what the purpose is? Who defines how it matters?
> The best solution to all of this would be to have block lists that people could opt-in or out of. Don’t want to see something? Subscribe to the block list.
Is it, though? This part of the post you replied to, bears repeating:
> Indeed, the "censorship" which spawned these laws was the banning of a dude actively calling for violent insurrection against the government, and receiving it, and continuing to encourage it during. That's the "political speech" the bill authors had in mind when drafting it. It's possible that the "censorship" in question is all that stopped the putsch from succeeding.
Blocklists wouldn't have prevented it. If you or I or Twitter don't want to aid and abet violence and insurrection, the government should not be able to compel us to do so.
> That's a strong assertion. Do you have any evidence to back that up?
I was there, I remember it. I co-founded a pioneering but ultimately unsuccessful online video company around 2006 called Revver that had to deal with moderation issues quite early on, YouTube, Vimeo, Google Video were our competitors. The idea that we would use this power in a politically biased way never occurred to us, it was obvious that it would be unacceptable, it was unconscionable.
And we weren't the exception, we were the norm that included companies like YouTube and Reddit. I think anyone working on a user-generated content startup at that time would tell you the same thing.
In 2006, the internet was probably dominated by western audiences. Now, the user base of any large social media site includes much more of the world, including groups like Hamas, ISIS, etc. and they would absolutely claim their content is political.
After 9/11 radicalization on the Internet was a serious concern - but most people seemed to understand that freedom of speech meant tolerating speech you didn't like.
For example, just a year after 9/11 the New York Times published a letter by Osama bin Laden explaining his views and motivations. That's almost impossible to imagine today (when apparently the NYT will fire a writer for admitting they like Chick-fil-A).
Maybe in the filter bubble of a comp sci student lounge.
You've forgotten how everyone else lost their mind in 2001, and rallied behind a folksy strongman, and his cabal of stooges, useful idiots, and bad Boyars.
Most people at the time seemed to believe that finding and exterminating every terrorist (Alleged or otherwise) the government could get its hands on would be the only way we could remain free. They hate us for our freedom, and all that. Things like the PATRIOT act have support outside the nerd-sphere, and the NSA revelations were a nothingburger to most people, and torturing people in Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, well, they are all guilty anyways.
The only reason those views and motivations get any airtime is so they can be attacked (without opportunity for debate or rebuttal). Had his values and goals had been less comically antithetical to ours, or if he wasn't condemned by his own actions as an irredeemable monster (which further damns anything he has to say), you wouldn't have seen a whiff of them. We only hit those we can beat.
My example of the NYT publishing Osama bin Laden had nothing to do with comp sci student lounges, can you imagine they NYT publishing something like that today? The equivalent might be an op-ed by Vladimir Putin, it wouldn't happen. The views of the legacy media have shifted dramatically on free speech over the past two decades, particularly over the past 8 years.
I personally fall on the "maximal free speech" side of preferences. If an ISIS video isn't calling for imminent lawless action [2], then I don't want YouTube deleting it. But I don't think that YouTube should be legally required to keep hosting an ISIS video that is technically legal under the First Amendment, and I also understand that my preference is unpopular. I'd be surprised if more than 10% of Americans agreed with me when I say that an ISIS member should be able to publish repugnant, bigoted, propagandistic, even violent videos so long as those videos are legal under First Amendment standards.
I personally want minimal filtering on this sort of content because:
1) I'm in no danger of actually being recruited to a terrorist cause.
2) Primary sources, like combat videos from the Syrian civil war (including propaganda videos that compile such clips) can provide more information about ongoing conflicts, combatants, and world events than general purpose news outlets can provide.
I think that most people are against dissemination of this sort of content because point 2 is irrelevant to them (they're not news junkies closely following armed conflicts) and, stochastically speaking, a few people who see terrorist propaganda videos will be persuaded to take up terror. Or maybe it's even less calculating: the reasoning could be as simple as "ISIS has a disgusting ideology, and disgusting ideologies shouldn't get free speech considerations."
The extreme breadth of speech protected under the First Amendment is more than what the median American wants protected, and spans more than what social media companies want to provide hosting for. High minded commitments to free speech like news outlets publishing a letter by Osama bin Laden in 2002 [3] are more notable for their rarity than for exemplifying a general standard of the time.
[1] https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/hearings/jihad-20-social-media-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_to_the_American_People
An online video is almost by definition incapable of being incitement to imminent lawless action. The threshold for this magic phrase is roughly along the lines of leading a mob and saying "there is <member of outgroup>, lynch them." Pretty much anything short of that is constitutionally-protected free speech under the First Amendment, and it's virtually impossible for an internet video to be sufficiently imminent for the purposes of incitement to imminent lawless action.
That is almost literally the opposite of what Brandenburg v Ohio held! (Many people tend to do this: they assume that the phraseology is meant to limit speech along the lines of Schenck v US or Whitney v California, what is now known as the "clear and present danger" standard, which is what Brandenburg v Ohio was explicitly overturning.)
Brandenburg v Ohio held that advocating violent overthrow of the government is free speech, but you need the very direct link between the speech and the illegal actions for the speech to become illegal. The emphasis in "incitement to imminent lawless action" of Brandenburg is meant to be "imminent", and later court cases have generally held that "imminent" is meant to be read in very short timespans.
Empirically speaking, we saw more than a few of these people on January 6th.
If I were to guess at the political motivation for allowing one group to be criticized in any imaginable way, while there were attendants that did not participate, while the summer of love can only be described without mentioning the participants involved in general mayhem: I'd suggest it's because the point is to create division among the masses and thwart any attempt at changing the status quo. The source of both is the violation of the social contract by those in a position to do so and the victims are roughly every participant in both events, whether they committed a crime or not, and nearly every other US citizen.
The "authorities" only interest is to redirect blame and avoid responsibility or disenfranchisement from control of society. Thinking they have any particular interest in one group or another, except for themselves , is delusional.
That's the real issue I see with more censorship, more control, more surveillance, more integrated intelligence services, more focus on "culture". All the things that matter to them will be protected by whatever means necessary while any material concern, or hope, for the rest is just a wheel to turn to keep the ship on course. Nothing personal at the top, I'm sure, just business as usual. Sorry, not sorry.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/how-democrats-could-...
Have a good one either way! Certainly, no reason to quarrel when, orientation ignored, we're overwhelmingly in similar circumstances.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Berman
In any case, there's enough "both sides!!1"-style equivocating on the net, and I'm not really interested in engaging with that sort of low-effort distraction on HN. Have a good one!
Apologies for not documenting the link, and I don't mind if you check it or not. I think it's unfair to say "the game is fixed" is conspiratorial, that is a fair criticism of the system we have when the DNC, and I'm sure the Republicans would be willing, to propose that, as Newsweek reported:
> The most recent court hearing on the case was held on April 25, during which the DNC reportedly argued that the organization's neutrality among Democratic campaigns during the primaries was merely a "political promise," and therefore it had no legal obligations to remain impartial throughout the process.[0]
and Salon:
> The DNC is advancing the argument that any claims to be neutral and fair to all candidates were nothing but “political promises” and are unenforceable by law. They claim that there was no expectation that they would actually be evenhanded in their treatment of Sanders and Clinton. They have made this case despite the fact that many in DNC leadership made claims of fairness when Sanders supporters clamored for accountability during and after the primary.[1]
---
> Based on the 1 cryptic sentence you provided before linking out, I'm guessing the link is similarly unrelated.
Well its an article about how the Democrats may form their own certification interruption if Trump wins and my assumption, which is not a judgement, is that given what I know, you would be more supportive of that than the event you mentioned. I think they're both childish but that doesn't mean you can't appreciate the possibility.
The relation between my comments and the article is that the summer of love, Jan. 6th, and the pandemic brought about previously unseen levels of censorship and propaganda on the internet. The powers that brought these about are apparently above the letter of the law because section 230 protections depend on acting as a common carrier, while the level of interference and integration of former natsec officers into media companies suggests the government is acting unconstitutionally through private companies.
> which is republican government efforts to compel speech in order to make sure the next insurrection is successful.
You say that as if corporations are people and that people cannot be trusted to be the judge of information and decide their own politics, which is a possible political position but not a statement of fact. Certainly corporations can editorialize and manage their content but can they do that and _still_ be protected by Section 230 or are they only protected otherwise?
Now this was a somewhat higher-effort distraction and I hope you have a good one too.
0: https://www.newsweek.com/bernie-sanders-rigged-hillary-clint...
1: https://www.salon.com/2017/05/13/the-dncs-elephant-in-the-ro...
> You say that as if corporations are people
The discussion here is whether republican government officials can compel me to speak because I own or operate a company (corporation or not), or because I volunteer to moderate a subreddit, or because I am an operator of an IRC channel, or otherwise operate some sort of online service on which people can post to each other. Which is what they're trying to do now.
Honestly, I challenge you to stay on topic without mentioning the Democratic party. They aren't the ones who passed this law. Republicans are. False equivalencies like this:
> Democrats may form their own certification interruption
...aren't relevant, especially when we're discussing the violent, deadly insurrection perpetrated by republicans, not a "certification interruption", which seems to be a term coined just now.
Here again, you say:
> The discussion here is whether republican government officials can compel me to speak because I own or operate a company (corporation or not), or because I volunteer to moderate a subreddit, or because I am an operator of an IRC channel, or otherwise operate some sort of online service on which people can post to each other.
But the 5th circuit points out, correctly in my opinion, that circumstantially conveying the message of a user in an open platform with privileges regarding liability is not compelled speech:
> The Fifth Circuit noted in its decision that the First Amendment protects the “‘right to refrain from speaking,’” and publishers cannot be compelled to publish specific articles or viewpoints. Yet the Fifth Circuit did not recognize “editorial discretion”—the right of private organizations to control the dissemination of third-party content—as an independent right. Instead, the Fifth Circuit explained that such discretion arises only where a law compels or restricts the speech of the private party itself—whereas the Texas law concerns not platforms’ own speech, but how platforms treat users' speech.
These platforms benefit from section 230, they can abandon that, accept responsibility as publishers, and do whatever they want outside some other asinine law controlling free expression.
...
I'm struck by how your stance seems to perfectly reflect a belief in guilt by association or representation since you're suggesting that it is as if the message was your own were you to moderate the forum, etc. and disagreeable content was outside your power to prevent.
I think it's a shame that there are so many angry and easily influenced people out there but the root causes aren't the mean words on the internets from other actual humans, as sad as that may also be.
Please especially avoid tit-for-tat spats like this one. They're not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I know I didn't flag them, but I dont know if they flagged me. I'd be surprised though, given their respectful replying.
Please especially avoid tit-for-tat spats like this one. They're not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Beyond what the other (excellent) comment had to say about this, why does what content creators may have believed mean fuck-all in terms of what these cases are arguing? Nobody would have used Facebook if they thought Facebook would "censor" them?
And besides that, your assertion that it's a bait and switch implies that all these creators would've been able to foster the exact same followings using, what, their own websites? Accounts on different social networks? Dubious at best. A lot of the aforementioned creators benefited strongly from the network effects of those platforms and the algorithms bringing their content to new followers. It's likely if they didn't grow up on whichever platform they picked, they wouldn't have grown at all.
I didn't say it did, I acknowledged that SCOTUS would probably rule against the TX and FL laws. I'm talking about the broader context.
> Nobody would have used Facebook if they thought Facebook would "censor" them?
I think if people knew then what they know now about how these platforms would behave starting around 2015 they would have had a much more difficult time achieving their dominant positions, there would have been far more skepticism.
Of course it's hard to prove a counterfactual but that's my view having been a small part of it.
Maybe. The polarization of the country has increased significantly since the covid era.
Plus most of this censorship discourse really only occurs at the edges. 99% of my meatspace social network cares about seeing puppy vidoes or whatever Taylor Swift has to say. Exactly zero of them have any expectation that their posts will ever be censored because they don't post anything oppositional.
I think that, even with censorship, void a real alternative competitor, the networks would have grown all the same. The only difference is maybe TruthSocial or Rumble would have spun off a few years earlier.
Maybe it's changed. I haven't touched Freenet since...I think 2010? I just remember seeing index pages with links to tons of sites on Freenet, and a considerable number of them were links to CSAM.
Nope. Deleted that. Ain't gonna be a part of that.
In any case, the original Freenet was never going to be a general-purpose replacement for today's centralized services as it can only handle static content. For the past few years we've been working on a sequel to Freenet that is much more general-purpose, you can learn about it at https://freenet.org/. While the original Freenet was analagous to a decentralized hard drive, the new Freenet is like a decentralized computer.
As part of it we're building a decentralized reputation system (based on a "web of trust") to address illegal/offensive/objectionable content.
On a more serious note - part of me really wants to know, and a much larger part of me doesn't.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percutaneous_transhepatic_chol...
For those wondering, the initialism relates to extreme child abuse. And now I too get to wish I hadn't looked.
edit: Or at least, if I was responsible for running IC, we would all be on the list with appropriate tags. Thankfully, I am not.
In short, the problem is that there is no universally agreed-upon definition of "problematic" content. No matter what definition you think is reasonable for moderation, there will both be people who complain that it is too permissive and people who complain that it is too restrictive. At a large enough scale, people on both extremes of the spectrum will be complaining about your moderation policies--and at very large scales, there will be politicians to listen to them!
With the new Freenet, we're using a decentralized moderation system that lets users control what they see or don't see, based on sensible defaults. This builds on a concept from the original Freenet called web-of-trust[1]. I believe this method, combined with the fact that centralized censorship is impossible in the new Freenet due to its lack of centralized control, offers a strong alternative.
[1] https://github.com/hyphanet/plugin-WebOfTrust/blob/master/de...
https://getaether.net/docs/faq/voting_and_elections/
In essence, you can either curate all content yourself, or you can upvote other people's curation for a given community. The curators who are voted for by the majority of a community effectively become the default moderators for it, but any member can explicitly opt out of curation by any given moderator.
I got banned from my city's subreddit for making a mild criticism about crime once. Now I'm shut off from events, networking, etc.
I'm from the southeast, which is a conservative area of the country. The internet I grew up on had thicker skin, wasn't trigger happy with banning, and because of that I was exposed to ideas and perspectives that I wouldn't have ordinarily been in contact with. People didn't have a disgruntled disposition that immediately banned opposing views on sight, so I was able to soak in so much information.
Expressly because of this, I was able to change my shape from a conservative kid into a well-rounded moderate. I don't think I could replicate this experience easily on today's internet. People are divided into factions and are quick to mute and ban those they disagree with. (The rage-centric algorithms also heighten confrontational language and showdowns, but that's another issue.)
Censorship almost always leads to imbalanced power dynamics and gatekeeping. It's become a tit-for-tat tool of retaliation and playing "gotcha". People enjoy digitally flicking each other off by banning them. It's super fucked.
Filtering is important, but we should have protocols for that where individuals have complete control and discretion. I don't know how that's supposed to work on platforms that are wholly controlled by profit-seeking corporations, but maybe legislation can craft a way forward.
I really hope we don't dive deeper into the censorship rabbit hole. It genuinely terrifies me more than any other issue facing humanity.
The mistake I made as a kid was in believing people wanted things like intellectual freedom and to contemplate things they don't agree as to potentially grow and learn something new.
People don't want that at all. I think we can see that largely, people want to be told what to think and then demonize those that think differently for entertainment. That is basically what defines our culture in 2024.
This is just the start of this new culture too. There is so much room left to run when you still have people who remember what things were like at the start of the internet.
What is gen alpha going to save the culture? I think that will be a really comical thought in 15-20 years.
We are still pretty close to the surface. Maybe I won't because of old age but as a society we are going way deeper.
But this is rather the point. What you need is a wall between hosting and discovery.
Alice has some rather controversial things to say, Bob wants to hear about them and Caren doesn't. So Bob and Caren should be using different filtering systems that they can choose for themselves. What shouldn't happen is that Alice gets banned from the internet or shadow banned on a dominant platform with a network effect just because Caren doesn't like her, because Caren should only be deciding for Caren and not Bob.
This doesn't mean Caren has to design her own filtering system. She can use someone else's. But she should have a choice in which one to use, independent of the underlying platform, and so should Bob.
Right now we tie the filtering system to the thing with the network effect and then have Zuckerberg or Musk deciding for everybody when it should be everybody deciding for themselves.
There can be one filter that only blocks spam and scams, another that blocks conservatives, another that blocks spam, scams and celebrity gossip, another that only shows technical content etc. You open the config options and pick one, like you choose an ad blocker or a radio station. If you don't like it you pick a different one. It shouldn't be that hard.
And if the answer is "AI", then who trains it and with what data?
Whoever makes it? The entire premise is that anybody could make one, however they want, and people could choose the one that works best for them. Go create one that operates by manual curation if you want to.
But here's an answer to this one:
> And if the answer is "AI", then who trains it and with what data?
You do. On a network where votes/ratings are public, make a filter that looks at how you vote, compares it to other users to find the users with the most similar tastes, and then shows you the things that they liked. Occasionally it shows you something generally popular or vaguely controversial at random to see if you like it and if you do it shows you more.
This isn't even modern "AI", it's old school machine learning and statistics. And it works pretty well until bots figure out how to game it, and then you have to come up with a way to detect the bots, and it becomes a cat and mouse game.
Which is why we need the evolutionary pressure on the other side. Have lots of different filter algorithms made by different people so the bots have to hit multiple targets at once, and users can pick the ones that are most effective at excluding them and don't get stuck with a crappy one they can't change because it's tied to the network itself.
> Bob wants to open up his feed and see all the content he likes from Alice and Dave and Erin and Frank. If Alice goes somewhere else, Bob can follow her, but then Dave and Erin and Frank are still on the old site, and maybe Bob doesn't want to give that up, but the others don't even know that Alice exists and have no incentive to move.
Why is it objectionable to you for Bob to have the ability to sort his feed differently than you?
This is objectively false. The forums run by a tinpot dictator who excludes too many things that people want to see have zero users, not the most users. Many of the most popular forums became popular before they had any kind of strong moderation and only adopted it after they already had a lot of users. HN is one of the rare examples where the moderation was present from the beginning, a major reason it works is that it's a specialized site that doesn't target general audiences, and it's "popular" but not half as popular as 4chan.
As a general rule people don't like spam, but if the place where their friends are has some spam, they're going to stay there while complaining about the spam. And, of course, they hate it when somebody excludes something that they want. But that might not get them to leave either, because network effects are powerful, even when they hate it. Twitter users have been calling it "the hellsite" for many years while continuing to be Twitter users.
Which is why large general-purpose platforms need different algorithms for different people -- because different people want different things.
Filtering content is a needed, but ultimately losing proposition (time and resource is one thing, accuracy is another).
Having the source choose which megaphone they'll use and have communities surrounding those probably works better for everyone. It's only an issue when Caren's goal is to have Alice silenced in the first place.
Which is where the network effect becomes an issue.
Bob wants to open up his feed and see all the content he likes from Alice and Dave and Erin and Frank. If Alice goes somewhere else, Bob can follow her, but then Dave and Erin and Frank are still on the old site, and maybe Bob doesn't want to give that up, but the others don't even know that Alice exists and have no incentive to move.
> It's only an issue when Caren's goal is to have Alice silenced in the first place.
That can be a problem, but what if it's just that Carol doesn't want Alice in her feed? If everyone can choose their own algorithm then she can choose one that doesn't show Alice and Bob chooses one that does. If everyone on the same site gets the same algorithm then Carol starts agitating for one that doesn't show Alice and now there's problems.
They simply work more effectively.
More specifically - having all actors in the same ecology ensures more opportunities for interaction.
Platforms are synonymous with a standard way to connect to nodes on their network.
I’m increasingly certain that (to some extent) platforms would be more effective if treated as public goods.
At the same time the idea of a public good platform is far too close to big brother.
Case in point - the great firewall of China.
The same thing does not necessarily happen on social media, at least not in the same way. Two people can talk and post at the same time without preventing each other from communicating to their audience. And you can filter obnoxious users should you wish to do so.
But if the platform bans people or deletes posts because they discuss things they disagree with politically, you prevent the audience from accessing content they might find interesting. In this case the moderation is trying to shutdown the debate not really facilitating it.
You need moderation, but the big platform have clearly shown that they have trouble resisting the temptation of abusing it.
Except it's not a megaphone because, as another commenter reminded HN in a recent thread about "federation" protocols, the internet is not a broadcast medium. (It's still point-to-point that's being used to spread the message.)
Yeah, you're not for censoring people, you're just for "moderating the loudest people". It definitely isn't censorship that you want to remove the voices of people you disagree with, definitely not censorship, you just want "the loudest voices moderated". Keep telling yourself that.
But I guess a bunch of people that full of themselves are full enough of themselves to think that SCOTUS is going to care about an amicus written by a bunch of anonymous Internet people. Sure, they moderate death threats, but they also moderate away anything they might have to disagree with. And then pull stunts on the order of "I'll reinstate your account if you write a 500-word essay on why you're wrong."
I would argue that the reason these subreddits are successful, has little to do with the moderation, most successful subreddits are simply successful because they have good real estate. They were simply the first to snatch up the common nouns "law" and "SCOTUS".
They write:
> Under the challenged laws, removal of such a scintillating contribution to legal discourse would require amici to provide HateSpeechLuvr with an individualized explanation for the removal, and expose amici to the risk of legal action by the state, or, more dangerously, private actors (like Mr. Luvr).
Do the challenged laws actually apply to Reddit moderators, as opposed to Reddit the corporation? I don't think on a plain reading they actually do. Both the Florida and Texas laws apply to actions by "social media platforms". Reddit itself is a "social media platform", but I don't think an individual volunteer Reddit moderator is – so I don't think this law would apply directly to them. In any event, were SCOTUS to uphold these laws, they could make clear the scope of their application in upholding them, such that private individuals such as volunteer Reddit moderators were clearly excluded from it.
And the "scintillating contribution" it is talking about is a single sentence with no meaningful content, just an extremely defamatory insult which includes the n-word. Even if SCOTUS upholds these laws, I doubt any attempt to challenge the moderation of that specific contribution is going to succeed in the courts.
Imagine this as the other extreme. Apple starts censoring your sentences at the keyboard level. How would you feel then?
Just trying to say there are some interesting perspectives here.
Based on what bar? Because they're popular services?
But why should that matter? There absolutely are a bunch of competitors available. And there's no "is a popular forum" exception in the first amendment that I've seen, people just seem to be making up this idea out of whole cloth.
And the government could start its own online public forum if it wanted. If Texas and Florida feel this way, why don't they make their own truly public message board or social networking site that's free of censorship?
That section says: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."
We're in this weird place where social media platforms want to claim that it's their speech in some cases, and not their speech in other cases, and that just seems unfair.
This has been resolved in the past by phone companies and similar platforms being declared common carriers - and that's true even if there are a bunch of competitors available. Why shouldn't that be true of social media platforms?
* Absolutely censoring nothing is an insane position to take. Even just spammers would flood such a site, let alone super extreme people like outright Nazis or KKK members. The typical person would have no interest in sharing a website with people like that, and they would flee. Very few people want to be posting on 4chan (and IIRC even 4chan has some moderation these days, underscoring the point).
* On the other hand, you can't realistically expect a company to take full responsibility for every piece of user generated content immediately. There's no way to do this well at scale, other than to use algorithms to get rid of what seems like the worst stuff, and deal with the grey areas when users submit reports of bad behavior. It's not feasible for a site that lets users upload random things, resulting in millions of pieces of new content daily, to manually approve every single one.
As for the government starting its own public forum, it would meet the same fate as every other big tech competitor. I wouldn't be surprised if they got bought out.
There is nothing in the Constitution about a "de facto public square". The first amendment concerns how the government can manage speech, and Facebook isn't the government, no matter how popular they are.
If you want to make a legal argument, it needs to be grounded in reality, not something you just made up.
Now if you want to argue that the current situation is fucked up and unhealthy for a society, sure, I'd probably agree. But that's not the same topic. The topic is whether these laws are Constitutional, and they very clearly are not.
Personally, I think having a government Twitter as a "digital public square of last resort" is fine as a solution, as long as it has no curation abilities whatsoever: no recommended pages, no default feed or algorithmic timeline, not even a search function. Any pages you get to come via external links, or internal links placed manually by whichever page you're looking at.
This way, you avoid any issue of bias, and while there may be Nazi pages somewhere there, you wouldn't be able to get to them except by getting linked elsewhere to Nazis, it wouldn't be the platform actually recommending Nazis to you (because it wouldn't recommend anything).
But there's a lot of keyboard manufacturers out there, I think many people would buy a different keyboard if the one they had did not serve the purpose they intended it for.
I don't think anything is really a common carrier unless they are or have been granted a monopoly or oligopoly over limited public resources.
There is a very extreme difference between the ability to choose an iPhone, and being able to choose which wires are on the pole in front of your house.
Common carriers are required to provide service under a special set of terms, in exchange for special and preferential treatment, like having exclusive access to public resources. That's not the case with a mobile phone, virtual keyboard, or OS. If you want to make one, go make one.
Vindicated by my choice of operating system.
But seriously, "what if <company> did monumentally stupid thing for their business?" can be asked about many sorts of things. What if Apple decides to only support Dvorak keyboards? What if Apple gets rid of all of their game-specific graphics APIs? What if Apple triples their prices overnight? Which of these should the government categorically ban businesses from doing?
The conventional answer within contemporary (say, post-1950) US capitalism is: nothing, unless they are a monopoly.
I don't agree with this assessment, but it has many believers and even a few arguments on its side.
If Apple wants to stupidly censor people at the keyboard level and thus incite everyone to switch to Windows or Linux (or Android), well that's dumb, but doing dumb things shouldn't be generally illegal.
Or are you referring to a common interpretation, typically of language that is absent from the Constitution?
>Or are you referring to a common interpretation, typically of language that is absent from the Constitution?
Not GP, but there is text that says this -- no interpretation required:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."[0]
And
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. "[1][2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
[2] [1] above is included as it extends [0] to apply to state and local governments as well as Congress.
> Private companies can't violate an individual's First Amendment rights. Only governments can.
Which part of the quoted text supports this claim? Answer: none of it. Interpretation: since it doesn't mention private companies in this context, private companies and the first amendment are not connected, and the former cannot violate someone's rights under the latter. Not an unreasonable interpretation, but not found in the text.
"Congress shall make no law..." And that extended to the states by the 14th Amendment.
Passing a law forcing someone (or a group of "someones", which is what a corporation is) to host/amplify speech they don't wish to host/amplify is "abridging free speech" and is explicitly forbidden by the First Amendment.
No interpretation required.
The original claim here was a corporation cannot infringe first amendment rights.
That was followed by the claim that this is actually in the Constitution.
But the constitution does not say this. It says (if you go with the corporations-are-people-with-first-amendment-rights interpretation) that the government may not abridge the first amendment rights of corporations (and, usually the accompanying implicit coda, nor the rights of individuals using technology provided by corporations).
Yes, because the first amendment is explicitly about rights protecting you from the government.
If a law says "the government can't do X to you", then nothing individuals or corporations do can violate that law. Obviously. I'm not sure why this is difficult to grasp.
"Precedent" would imply that this is merely the interpretation of earlier courts, but no, the first amendment is quite explicit about what the rights therein are protecting you from, and it's not private groups.
Other individuals and corporations have many rights with respect to other individuals and corporations that are not shared with the government.
In this particular aspect, the government cannot abridge your right to free speech, but this is widely understood as referring only to free speech essentially controlled by government (i.e. public contexts). I am (relatively) free to limit your "free speech" in my magazine or blog or youtube channel.
Part of the question before the court is the extent to which social media is closer to a government controlled space or context or a private publication.
Agreed, and those are written in things other than the First Amendment.
What were we discussing, again?
> Part of the question before the court is the extent to which social media is closer to a government controlled space or context or a private publication.
Which is patently absurd. There are some grey areas for the First Amendment, but "is a private corporation actually the government?" isn't one of them. That's extremely black and white. Republicans arguing otherwise just don't like that some corporations have at least attempted to moderate hateful speech and misinformation.
Now, maybe if tech platforms had been granted a monopoly by the government, like some utilities, then sure, but that's not the case here.
Whether (a) corporations can interfere with individual free speech (b) the constitution contains actual text that says so (one way or another)
Some GGGP or something claims that
> Private companies can't violate an individual's First Amendment rights. Only governments can.
to which a child comment claims
> It's not just precedent, it's written into the Constitution.
I am not a lawyer and not well versed in this case. But my 2 cents:
- This case does NOT necessarily appear to be about whether individuals' FIRST AMENDMENT rights were violated, or about whether individuals have a FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHT to express themselves on the social media platforms of private companies.
- Instead, this case DOES seem to be about in what capacity a STATE is allowed to REGULATE private companies operating WITHIN THAT STATE.
It might seem somewhat paradoxical, and my guess is that is because the issue is nuanced but not overly so. The STATES are introducing MORE REGULATION of companies, in order to help ensure MORE FREEDOM of individuals. This can be painted as "more onerous" or "less free", but that view may depend on who you are (e.g., if you hardline siding with corporations, or if you hardline side with less regulation, even if that particular regulation in fact requires less regulation by companies of individual flesh and blood humans). (This might also be painted as "more free", in terms of the STATE'S RIGHT to regulate.)
In theory, some states could "regulate and enforce" that companies must follow certain rules. In general, the states have broad latitude in making rules that are left up to them, and that are not really the main concern of the federal government.
If the courts were to consider or decide whether there are in fact more FIRST AMENDMENT FREEDOMS FOR INDIVIDUALS (NOT COMPANIES) in relation to social media, that would be huge but I think pretty unlikely at this time at least. But hey, big changes can always happen seemingly out of nowhere or too fast for some.
They may spend money in political campaigns. They may hold religious beliefs.
Do they not also have first amendment rights? Or put differently: are we not men?
Interesting take. So the platforms, as entities, want them some first amendment speech rights. And of course, it's all been about the terrorists. Thank you Google, Facebook and others, for keep us safe from those villains.
Ironically, if they had not taken steps as egregious and suspending the account of the current president of the US these laws would never have been considered by FL or TX.
I happen to think the Porsche Cayenne is an ugly midlife-crisis-mobile driven by assholes. Should the Porsche Owners Club phpBB forum be permitted to censor my speech, when I want to share my opinion that Cayenne owners can suck a fat one?
In 2002 the answer would be obvious - it's no problem if they censor me, there's like 1000 other forums I can go to.
Are things really so different these days?
More than that, forcing someone else to spread your speech when they don't want to is a DIRECT violation of their first amendment right, of the "government forcing you to say things" kind.
You cannot make "free speech is an ideal" without breaking someone else's free speech.
Yes, hugely different. No-one joins the Porsche Owners Club because they want to hear what the US President says about national policy. If the Porsche Owners' Club kicks you out, it doesn't really affect your life - official/important announcements aren't posted there, you're not going to get asked about your membership in a job interview. These huge platforms explicitly aspired to be the town square of the internet, not a private members' club; they need to accept the responsibility that comes with that.
If anyone wants to delete spam or kick people off their own servers, why should they be denied?
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/publisher-or-platform-...
If any post in this discussion called for it, this one does[0][1].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25697823 (9 January, 2021 -- 439 points, 304 comments)
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
So social media platforms are no longer able to censor any content posted to their sites (outside of specific cases), but are also liable for what users post to their platform?
If I was a conspiracy theorist I'd say these actions are specifically to make social media itself inhospitable in a legal sense. What company wants to take the risk of not being able to moderate user-generated content but are also legally responsible for that same content?
What about Reddit? If I post a story in r/AITAH that the other person discovers, this opens Reddit up to a possible libel lawsuit if the other person thinks I'm not being truthful. Do you think that's a risk that Reddit's legal department will let them take? I highly doubt it. Do you think unpaid volunteer mods want to be legally liable if they remove a post for violating guidelines?
Let's go another level deeper, your neighborhood's Nextdoor forum. If Susan from down the road starts saying I slept with her husband to bad mouth me on the app, I could not just sue Susan for libel, but I can also include Nextdoor in the lawsuit. Do you think Nextdoor's legal team will allow that? Again, nope. But Nextdoor wouldn't be able to remove Susan's post because it would be "silencing her freedom of speech". So instead, Nextdoor takes the logical legal decision to completely remove any user-generated posts, effectively killing their product.
And another level deeper, some random classic car forum with maybe 100 users per month. What do they do? I think you get the hint.
This isn't just going to affect social media platforms. This will affect all platforms that allow users to post in any capacity, text, photos, videos, links, etc.
Your presence here is your answer. Why are you here if social media doesn't provide any value?
You'd have to be braindead to not understand the immense value social media has added to society. But like all things, social media has it's negative aspects. But just because social media isn't perfect, doesn't mean it has no value. As I said, your presence here is proof of that.
Their presence here does not indicate they value their time here in a net-positive way. It offers no proof whatsoever.
They could be addicted. FOMO could drive them to compulsively check the site. It might be their only social interaction at all during the workday. This might be the only group of people on the internet with similar interests.
None of those things would necessarily make it a net-good thing, if it also has negative repercussions that outweight the benefits. Many drugs, legal and illegal, are fairly harmful. Sometimes the benefits are worth the negatives. Sometimes they are very firmly not. Much of the anti-social-media position is about social media being addicting and net-harmful.
I personally don't see the immense value that you see. I've seen some value for some specific sites for some short, specific times. My grandma could interact with some of her grandkids for a short while on Facebook, for instance. Of course, she (or we) used to just pick up the phone, which is what happens now too. I've seen some cool projects on HN I'd otherwise likely never have seen. Otherwise I'm drawing a blank.
Lets see shall we.
> None of those things would necessarily make it a net-good thing
Who is talking 'net' here? The commenter simply questioned whether social media added any value to society. To deny social media has provided any value to society is as braindead as denying that fossil fuels added value to society. Now whether the negatives outweight the positives ( aka net value ) is an entirely different question.
> My grandma could interact with some of her grandkids for a short while on Facebook, for instance. Of course, she (or we) used to just pick up the phone, which is what happens now too. I've seen some cool projects on HN I'd otherwise likely never have seen.
Oh so it does provide value. So you are agreeing with me then?
> Otherwise I'm drawing a blank.
You aren't braindead. You are disingenuous. So you never asked for or search for information on reddit, hn, stackoverflow, etc. You never found solutions to problems on tiktok, youtube, etc? You don't know anyone who found a job via hn, linkedin, etc? Bought or sold stuff on facebook, etc?
If you believe that the negatives of social media outweigh the positives of social media, then fine. That's your opinion. But to cavalierly dismiss or deny that social media provides value to society is being disingenuous at best or braindead at worst. Or more likely agenda driven nonsense.
Your comment reminds me of this excellent monty python clip: What have the romans done for us?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ
So what? And I mean that quite seriously.
To clarify, I despise the big social media platforms and refuse to use them even if that inconveniences me (and occasionally it does). At the same time, those platforms have the same free speech rights that I do, and curtailment of their free speech (and property) rights (in this case, the right not to publish/amplify the speech of others) also curtails my free speech (and property) rights.
And since I want to protect my own rights, I support the right of those rapacious scumbags to moderate/censor on their own private property.
So, for example if libel against you wasn't caught by a particular filter then that's not bias against you, and so they are not party to the libel (unless you can show the filter was specifically designed to fail to catch libels against you).
So what? You're taking it as a given that "if a website moderates content in a way I don't like, the government must step in and force them to do moderation in a different way I do like"; I don't accept that premise at all, it's quite totalitarian in both concept and real-world execution.
It's all politics and it always was. Claiming one is "common sense" and one is "political" misses what "political" means.
I think S230 set a pretty good tone in biasing in favor of the right of the service owner to set the tone over-and-above within the constraints of the law (for a simple practical reason: if you don't give them that right, they'll just stop providing the service). But that does mean that when your provider decides that, say, debating the humanity of trans folks is no longer acceptable, we toe the line there or we start our own service.
If a friend invited me to their house I can start calling their wife a fat cow and tell them how ugly I think their children are. It doesn't mean they have to put up with it or accept that sort of speech on their private property. That doesn't mean he censored me or inhibited my freedom of speech.
For me, it's an issue of scale. Your friend is a single person (or family). Twitter is a gigantic, faceless corporation (okay, Elon Musk makes it less faceless, but you know what I mean) that tries to cater to everyone—in effect, it tries to be a commons. Can we consider it one? Should we? Should we make a law that says once a social media company gets to a certain size, it can't censor anything anymore if that content is legal?
I'm generally against additional regulation. I don't think, for instance, a small pro-life forum should be forced to allow pro-choice people to spew vitriol, nor vice versa. I'm hesitant to say the same for a giant company like Twitter or Facebook. There, I think it might be more appropriate to have comprehensive filtering and self-moderation tools vs. shutting people out completely (assuming their behavior is legal).
My statements, while I myself do not necessarily agree with them, are what I view as possible when operating within the current legal framework our government has built for these private companies.
To me, if the government wants to hold a private company to the standard of a public service, then that private company must fully, legally, and entirely become (somewhat) a public service. I view that as becoming a service similar to the United States Post Office.
It's allowed to continue to operate as a company but has to comply with government regulations (whatever those may be). That also means that its goal is not profit generation. It can still charge users for certain services if it wishes but is no longer able to sell user data, and it must remain revenue-neutral.
But the solution to this problem is not to force those private service providers to be hands-off, but to make sure that none of them are big enough that it matters. Which the political forces that are pushing for these laws won't do, because their political economy boils down to "capitalism good, anti-monopoly bad", and that inevitably leads to the present state of affairs in practice.
Let me be very clear about how the law would work sans CDA 230: any time someone does not like what you are saying, they can sue the platform you host it on to get you censored. The only platforms resistant to this would be ones full to bursting with spam. This is already really bad. If you want a partial repeal, i.e. one where platforms are still allowed to "protect minors from child predators", I'm not sure that'll pass muster at SCOTUS. Selectively removing speech protections based on content is a no-go.
Furthermore, platforms being able to take down political speech they disagree with is not a "loophole". That's just what moderation is. The whole point of a moderator is to silence the loudest voices, so that others may speak.
If you want to allow the kind of private censorship S230 was intended to protect, and stay within the First Amendment, S230 is what you get.
I see nothing wrong with that. Social media has done nothing but harm its users, and people that know its users (or: everybody)
Nothing? I don't think it's that cut and dry. While there has been harm, no doubt, there has been a lot of positives too (maintaining connections, thoughtful conversations, etc).
Social media is such a big part of modern communications, that arguing against it is like arguing against telephone lines or the printing press. There's a lot to criticise the owner companies for, including how social media can harm people and infamously promote and accelerate genocide, such as Facebook is accused of having done in Myanmar. But the same accusations can be levied against any means of communication and publishing technology.
I think we have to reorient ourselves on what counts as social media. It's not just Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. It's forums like Hacker News, it's comment sections on your favorite blogs you frequent. It's the products available on Etsy or a small creator's personal Shopify store.
Free speech isn't just about photos and text, it covers all forms of expression.
The Democrats hate Section 230 as much as the republicans.
“The idea that it’s a tech company is that Section 230 should be revoked, immediately should be revoked, number one. For Zuckerberg and other platforms. It should be revoked because it is not merely an internet company. It is propagating falsehoods they know to be false.” - Joe Biden
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/08/white-house-renews-...
https://slate.com/technology/2021/03/section-230-reform-legi...
It's not a mystery. Look what happened when sesta/fosta became law. Craigslist had to dump their entire personal section for fear they miss a single ill intentioned post.
The consequence of 230 removal is only to destroy the ability for people to interact with one another publicly online unless one of them (or the platform) is willing to take on liability for the interaction.
If what GP describes comes true, they won't be anymore.
Private, p2p communication would be fine, but anything publicly consumable would present a liability risk for libel, slander, etc.
Where am I miscalculating?
In Australia, our high court ruled that companies are liable for comments posted on their social media pages[0].
It's had massive chilling effects on the ability to engage in discourse. Comments sections are almost always disabled on content produced by Australian media corporations.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/sep/08/high-court-rul...
If I self-host my own site and my estranged conspiracy theorist uncle posts something I don't agree with on my site and I remove it, will these laws make me liable for infringing on his freedom of speech? To my knowledge, there is no definition of what social media is or what companies/people/sites/technologies do these laws apply to.
This is the crux of so much happening on the internet right now. Users treat our largest providers like google like public resources similar to roads, and governments want to treat our largest forums like twitter and facebook like government entities beholden to the same rules they are.
Neither is true, and to me it points to the massive impact our largest companies have been able to achieve. It seems larger than what the law has words for.
I don't know what the answer is.
What is generally accepted as thoughtful in one world region, will likely not be considered to be generally thoughtful in another world region
Furthermore, the concept of "thoughtfulness" may not exist in some world regions -in fact, it may be a concept in a minority of world regions
Should these thoughtful regulations (whatever they may be) only apply to denizens of a certain region or regions, or everybody in the world?
What is your point? Iran is free to tell Google to take a hike if Google censors their calls to violence. Germany is free to tell id software to remove the swastikas or hit the road.
This isn't hard. Don't pretend it is.
Funny. What is a thoughtful regulation that would satisfy 50%+1 (democracy, yay!) of the 350 million Americans that the (or, any) government supposedly represents - or however many foolish enough of those 350 million citizens choose to actively participate in federal-level politics?
I'm willing to bet that it would be even harder to find any meaningful majority (50%+1) of citizens who are satisfied with such legislation in the second group I mentioned earlier
dc: not a US person
Where Poe's and Godwin's laws intersect.
Just because, as Chaya Raichik complained the other day, that she should be able to say what she wants because "there's no law against lying," doesn't mean that platforms have to necessarily allow harmful bullshit either.
But if I step out of my shoes and look at Trump for instance, does he have a legitimate grievance for being kicked off of Twitter if he actually _did_ think that he fairly won the election and was deplatformed because he tried to speak about it?
If Twitter at the time was as powerful as a government in regulating speech ... should it have to follow the same rules? If the playing field for social media was more level, it wouldn't be an issue. He can just go to another provider and have his speech.
Still, re-reading what you said I have to agree that the end goal should be people understanding that Google and Facebook (and Twitter) are not benign or neutral and never will be.
Well, one obvious option would be the government making its own competitors to Twitter/Youtube/et al.
Yes yes, I realize there's a bunch of issues there, like how the government would REALLY have to permit virtually any kind of speech, or general technical incompetence from government agencies in running such a site. But it could be done, there's nothing actually stopping it.
I actually think a government-run Twitter could work okay and be accepted by people IF they didn't do any kind of algorithmic recommendations, sorting, or even have a search function at all. You could see tweets/content that you got to via external link, you could go onto that person's page to see a chronological list of things they've said, they could have a manually created profile page that links to others, but no curation of any kind by the platform itself. The home page would be mostly blank, or maybe only have a list of official government accounts or something.
I'm very sympathetic to this argument. Seems fair to me.
But then Cloudflare, and any host big enough to withstand DDoS attacks, is strongly pressured by seemingly most people on the Web and in the US, to kick "bad websites" by "bad people" off their platform. So we can't just let bad people have their own website which we don't visit? I kinda wish we could. If most people hate that bad people can have public websites, just say that this is the best we can do, at least they're not on your parent's facebook/twitter.
It's reasonable in an abstract sense to think that it's a good thing if CF offers those Bad People services like that based on philosophical goals or political alignment, but it's very distinct from 'having a public website'.
AFAIK it's still possible for anybody to put up a linux box with nginx on it and put any content they want there, other than the fact that a lot of consumer ISPs don't allow you to run servers anymore. But that's a different problem and cloudflare can't fix it.
This is somewhat tongue-in-cheek on my part, to be clear, but this raises an interesting point about whether orchestrating a DDoS attack is a form of free speech. I'm inclined to say "yes" more than "no."
(You could draw a parallel, for example, to counter-protestors who try to drown out Westboro Baptst Church picketers by holding up their own signs....)
The most technically rigorous difference is that a protest and counter-protest are aimed at the same audience, whereas a DDoS is aimed at the first "speaker".
Less rigorously but more practically, a "message" intended to cause technical malfunction is not "speech" and we all know it. It's even less "speech" than an extortion threat, which is already not protected. The "parallel" would be feeding the Westboro Baptists cognitohazards and crying "free speech" when they go insane and you get prosecuted.
I'd say even "malfunction" is a stretch. DDoS isn't hacking.
You can't deny that one of the functions of a server is to reply to good-faith requests, and that a DDoS intentionally degrades that function. What is that if not causing malfunction? You're looking for nuance where there is none.
(And yes, it's a weird analogy. It was the closest I could come up with on short notice, and I think that's illustrative of the dangers of analogic reasoning. FWIW yours fails on the same audience/targeting aspect as the first one.)
That person's mailman might not be pleased, but all the mail is conveyed through legitimate channels and legitimate means...
Drowning someone out by being much louder and drowning someone out by packet flood have the same audience: other people that would receive the message.
> What is that if not causing malfunction?
We can use a narrow definition of malfunction, or a wide definition.
If we use a narrow definition, then making the server malfunction is always an attack on the speaker. But a DDoS does not cause a malfunction under a narrow definition.
If we use a wide definition that includes DDoS, then only some ways of causing a malfunction are an attack on the speaker. Yelling at someone is perfectly good counter-protesting, even though it degrades their ability to make a speech.
"causing malfunction -> attacking the speaker" and "DDoS -> causing malfunction" are not both valid at the same time for the same definition of malfunction.
If you had a server on a shared medium or a half-duplex connection then DDoS would be exactly the same as shouting over someone. The shouting is aimed at the audience and gets in the way of the server's signal.
Putting the server on a full-duplex connection changes the technical details but it doesn't have any meaningful effect on what happens. The purpose is not to break anything, the purpose is to cause so much extra signal that the server can't get its own signal out. Just like a counter-protest.
The thing being intentionally degraded is the connection. Not the "speaker". Or if it's a higher level DDoS then it's usually the DDoS clients filling the queue. Which is also a pretty normal counter-protest thing, getting in the way and taking up all the close audience space.
A counter-protest is primarily trying to overwhelm someone else's speech, not to tell people anything. But it still gets classified as speech.
Is there a crucial difference I'm missing here?
But usually a DDoS is done by one person. That's not analogous to counter-protesting.
You run the water to a town and the town now owns it. If it didn't, the town regulates it to the point you're essentially owned by the town, and the result is the same.
> Any qualified vulnerable public interest site can seek participation in Project Galileo. Examples of participants include, but are not limited to, minority rights organizations, human rights organizations, independent media outlets, arts groups, and democracy protection programs.
The place I work for qualifies, and it has kept us afloat. It's another example where they change the landscape for a group they select (I'm just super glad they did).
[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/galileo/
But, right now, they have kicked off well under one website per year. That is not a threat to free speech.
That would also solve a lot of other issues of network effect and disproportionate reach IHMO.
100 million users looked very low to me, but is basically a third of the US population.
I think my gut feeling is that a private network with that much of a reach is an issue in the first place, whatever positions we hold (just assume that network is eventually bought by your worse nightmare).
Social media as we know it not existing beyond that line doesn't sound outlandish to me (ideally it becomes the same as our real public spaces: they're so limited that nothing much happens on them except when the cops run in and loudly arrest streakers. Otherwise it just disappears).
The idealistic view is to let users decide, yet we're in a situation where there's nowhere left acting as a public space.
Current owner might be giving me the finger those, but that's a rule in place.
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/05/984440891/justice-clarence-th...
I think they'd come together and create a certifying authority for authentic users with traceability. More compliance. Better filtering/admin tools for users.
Forcing users to certify and authenticate themselves would drive a lot of users away and thus devastate advertising revenue. And many users will happily post offensive content using their real identities.
What I mean is, you can have a members only club that is not a common carrier. For instance a member of the hypthetical video snippet network SnipWit can communicate only to other SnipWits. This means that SnipWit is not a common carrier. They are obviously private, as you can only communicate to other members. Worse yet, there is obviously consideration required prior to use, which means they would be able to add even more draconian terms to their membership requirements.
I'll give a hypothetical. CostCo is members only. You're not a member, you can't get groceries there. Full stop. It doesn't matter if it's the only grocer in your area, you'll have to drive to find a Kroger. And to illustrate what I mean by the ability to take things further, CostCo could add racial exclusivity requirements to their membership clauses. Blacks would then be barred from shopping there like they are barred from certain country clubs. And it would be totally legal and well within the rights of CostCo, those country clubs, or the hypothetical SnipWit. Why? Because these are all private organizations and members only.
I guess what I mean is, a lot of people talk about Common Carrier being the solution while forgetting about the private/public aspect and distinction at play in those regulations. We normally entice organizations to become common carriers by offering them goodies on the other side of that. Like indemnifications for instance. But what happens when you have organizations that are already fat, happy and growing like weeds under their "private with membership" umbrella? What do you offer them? It's a tough problem. There's a lot of people and shareholders making a lot of money in the current model. Those people will almost certainly vote their shares against becoming a common carrier unless there is more upside in it for them somehow.
https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/good-question-why-can...
That you would have continue to host and serve whatever content I publish? Even if your userbase only interacts with my content to hide it?
The set of things advertisers will accept is wildly different than the set of things we accept because they believe that their brand is being associated with whatever content is on the platform.
the plot twist is how the figurative judge presiding over this contest is the literal will to the power of dictating how people ought to think
It doesn't infringe one's free speech rights if a paper (or media service) refrains from transiting one's opinion to their readers. Start one's own press.
but you divert the focus towards the technicalities of specific rights
further, this is not about "press", social media is different enough from "the press" that it should be treated accordingly
Remove those protections and the rule doesn't become "Everyone gets to say whatever on Twitter;" they become "Twitter can tell everyone to pound sand, can lie, can commit fraud, can pretend to be other people and edit your messages in transit," etc. Without the law, it's might-makes-right and the corporations definitely control the wires and the databases.
I argue that forcing the corporations to transit bits of various users infringes upon their rights more than the law traditionally demands (and morality requires, since the existence of a corporation doesn't immediately infringe anyone else's right to start their own website).
> social media is different enough from "the press" that it should be treated accordingly
How so?
network effects
Wish it was text so I could scan through it to see if it has any merit.
There's a text transcript at [0] for you to read/skim.
> Who is Mike Benz?
Benz is a "former State Department official with responsibilities in formulating and negotiating US foreign policy on international communications and information technology matters" per his foundation's About page [1].
> What do I need to know about censorship that he's going to tell me?
He describes in detail that tech companies are not simply deciding what to censor themselves by, you know, thinking about it and exercising judgement. No. Instead, tech companies are told what to censor by, you know, the U.S.G. This has implications for the argument that "the gov doesn't censor, private companies are allowed to".
Benz is apparently essentially an activist/whistleblower letting people know that this is happening at scale, because apparently a lot of people do not know about it.
He describes the evolution of this infrastructure over time, as of the last 10 years or so (apparently based on his professional, bureaucratic, direct experience).
Does that help?
BTW, I empathize with your difficulty getting into it. Tucker and Benz frankly both seem like gatekeepers. But the gate they keep is still is well beyond what many wish to acknowledge or deal with, maybe?
[0] https://dpaste.org/TgSkM
[1] https://foundationforfreedomonline.com/about
What was the intent of Section 230?
Part of the text reads:
Is this happening?I don't understand how this can be true. If I have a bunch of hooligans handing out pamphlets to everyone that enters my private shopping mall such that the content on the pamphlets is actively deturing shoppers from conducting business in my privately owned establishment, I have a very compelling interest in the "expressive" content of the pamphlet.
Aside, this is akin to forcing my business to allow people to sling racial insults at shoppers with no recourse like kicking them out.
> Appellees are high school students who sought to solicit support for their opposition to a United Nations resolution against "Zionism." On a Saturday afternoon they set up a card table in a corner of PruneYard's central courtyard. They distributed pamphlets and asked passersby to sign petitions, which were to be sent to the President and Members of Congress. Their activity was peaceful and orderly, and, so far as the record indicates, was not objected to by PruneYard's patrons.
There's other similar passages, but broadly: no one except the owner appeared to complain, which makes arguments about disruption difficult to see. They weren't actually annoying any patrons. If individual shops felt compelled to leave, or patrons complained, the situation would be different.
To your case, imagine a mall that takes half of the city center, is an integral part of everyone's life and was permitted on the ground that it would be a true "third place" for the residents to hang out, which is why it includes structures and areas dedicated to community events and such.
That kind of mall can't be ran like a pure private business that has no accountability outside of its shareholders. There's a balance to strike of course, but if the hooligans have most residents' support, allowing them in would be a decent choice.
Is Elon Musk liberal? What about Paul Graham, Larry Ellison or Peter Thiel?
There is an enormous difference in the politics of rank and file employees at most tech companies and the founders/executives/management. This is true of nearly every industry. If you think the biases of regular tech workers matter more than the biases of the management and leadership of these companies — or fail to make a distinction — then you will probably come to a different conclusion about the biases of the industry as a whole.
That being said, these bills are very, very bad ideas. Let's be clear: no broadcasting medium can work without some mechanism to censor spammers. And this role has to be specialized (rhymes with 'centralized') because nobody wants to spend most of their day online just manually selecting spam to be blocked. If these laws are upheld I can see companies moving to block Texans and Floridians to protect the rest of their country from their legally mandated political spam.
Let's also appreciate that a good chunk of the speech conservatives want to 'protect' is political speech explicitly calling for things prohibited by the 1st Amendment. Shit like banning an entire religion. I personally don't think that should be allowed, though I doubt this particular court's 6-3 conservative majority would go along with censoring the censors.
That seems... hard to argue. The rules are often about speech. HN, for example, has rules about being kind, avoiding flamebait, not sneering, avoiding ideological battle, accusations of astroturfing; the list of restrictions on speech is quite extensive. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But generally speaking it is not ideologically moderated.
Which makes it feel light.
Mods here lie, and allow government shills and others to astro turf.
What a joke and ill be silenced.
I've been downvoted to hell, but not banned or censored.
You can't read child porn, or have sex with minors.
If an anyone is dictating something else to you, I'm unaware of it.
Well, nuts to that. I can and will censor whatever I and my users decide we don’t want to see. The people we censor are free to download and install their own copies and make their own moderation decisions based on their own community norms.
It’s ridiculous that we’re being held to the same standard as Facebook and X. And if that means these laws shouldn’t then apply to Facebook and X, then so be it. I’m not willing to give up my own 1st amendment rights to punish someone else.