First of all, here is a selection of the Findings section:
"(3)The Internet and other interactive computer services offer a forum for a true diversity of political discourse, unique opportunities for cultural development, and myriad avenues for intellectual activity."
...
"(5)Increasingly Americans are relying on interactive media for a variety of political, educational, cultural, and entertainment services."
Obviously the intention of the law is to preserve diversity of political and cultural discourse. Not eliminate entire points of view which is the point in question here.
Next, here is the pertinent section of the law that I feel covers the
(c)Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material
(1)Treatment of publisher or speaker
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.
(2)Civil liability
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
(A)any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
(B)any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).[1]
In (c)(1) above it's important to define "interactive computer service":
> (2) Interactive computer service The term “interactive computer service” means any information service, system, or access software provider that provides or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server, including specifically a service or system that provides access to the Internet and such systems operated or services offered by libraries or educational institutions.
While it's true that at their basic foundations one could call Facebook an “interactive computer service” it has become SO MUCH more than that. It controls massive quantities of communication and the dissemination of editorials and diverse opinion. They can't hide behind this one vague definition with a straight face.
Just as a news organization would be held in contempt of the public interest for selectively editing a recording of someone to make them appear to say things that they didn't say, it's equally unethical to call oneself a provider of an "interactive computer service" while selectively editing the flow of diverse viewpoints and opinion to essentially accomplish the same cultural effect of selectively editing a recording.
Now, in (c)(2)(A) the "interactive computer service" is allowed to take steps to filter at its discretion what it deems "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable." The last bit otherwise objectionable is essentially a blank check and really should not have been in the law. The US flag may in some circles be considered "objectionable". Should this give Facebook the right to censor patriotism to the US flag as it may be "objectionable"?
The problem is that "objectionable" is based on opinion where the other criteria are more closely definable.
I am all for blocking some speech. I just believe that, for example, incitement of violence means that one tells another to hurt another explicitly. Not implicitly.
I cannot recall any misinformation campaign as spectacularly successful as the one that has convinced many Americans that the GP post's publisher/platform distinction is actually the law. And they don't seem to have had any special trick to it, they just repeat the lie enough times that people believe it.
It's impressive considering how readable the text is. I'm especially impressed with ted Cruz who is a lawyer and literally works in the same building as the guy who wrote it but still manages to spend his days misrepresenting it.
>And they don't seem to have had any special trick to it, they just repeat the lie enough times that people believe it.
That is the special trick. It's a technique often attributed to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
You don't need to convince people to believe a lie, despite arguments about "truth being the best disinfectant" and "good speech being the solution to bad speech," because belief is not a process of logical deduction, rather it's an adaptation to stimulus. Surround a person in an environment of coherent lies long enough and their minds will simply adapt to it.
Absolutely! Indeed, the protection was crafted specifically for platforms to engage in moderation without being held liable for the content they host. The whole point is to encourage moderation.
But section 230 is not a blanket immunity for anything a platform may wish to do with their content. If the actions of the social media platforms fall outside of section 230 protections (and I think such a thing could be argued) it is on the following grounds:
1. One of the stated purposes of this legislation was to maximize user control over what they view (230[b][3]). Social media censorship and algorithmic feeds take away that power.
2. Protection from civil liability extends only to those actions taken in "good faith" (230[c][2][A]). I'm not fully prepared to to outline what I think is meant by good faith here, but I think it is fair to say that not all moderation actions we have seen are "in good faith".
Outside of section 230, I also think that platforms which employ "fact-checkers" should be open to defamation suits if they make false statements of fact. Recently a court ruled that these fact-checks were "protected opinion", which is utterly stupid.
> If the platform picks and chooses what goes on its platform then it's a publisher, not a platform. Thus it loses it's Section 230 immunity.
This isn't true and not apart of section 230.
> 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.
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected
The discretionary removal of content is explicitly protected, exactly opposite of what you are claiming. Please stop spreading this easily refuted false information.
> If the platform picks and chooses what goes on its platform then it's a publisher, not a platform.
As far as I'm aware, picking and choosing, moderation, and editorial decisions, don't waive section 230 immunity. Although that is a US law, and the MP in question is Canadian, so I'm not sure how the jurisdictional issues would be decided.
That's a great idea! Let's ban all moderation! What could go wrong?
I, for one, am so tired of Google CENSORING these so-called "spam" emails! How DARE they declare themselves the arbiters of what is and isn't spam! It's an OUTRAGEOUS ABUSE of POWER!
Ditto for Twitter, where "end all moderation" seems to be working fine. (I am in fact writing that with a straight face, because the day-to-day experience of being on Twitter is very different from what you hear in the headlines.)
Of course, being on a highly moderated site, it's unlikely that a viewpoint like this will seem reasonable to most readers. But it can work.
The problem happens when (like here) the goal is to show people specific things, rather than people choosing their own things. Facebook, I think, doesn't really want people to choose -- the algorithm is basically why their business prints money, and the algorithm has its own optimization agenda.
I know everyone is pointing out that's not what it says but there is a solution hiding in plain sight. Give us the moderation tools that Facebook/Twitter etc have.
For example, Twitter routinely announces things like "we cleared out 50,000 fake accounts". Why can't I see the little score that an account has telling me if it's likely to be a bot, or a troll? Twitter has this info, why can't I?
Why can't I filter out all people who appear to be X, Y, or Z? It could be anything that the social network's moderators can see. Why can't I have proper search? Why can't I order my feed according to how I wish it to be? I bet moderators can get this kind of thing when they're looking at posts.
The answer to all of these things in the media is usually to limit speech because someone was nasty to someone else. Just let us have the tools, give power to the people instead of taking it away and treating us all like children.
The article says Facebook considers this a mistake in their censorship system; they aren't ok with banning Christmas messages. Although keeping an eye on them for signs of overt racism and religious bigotry is a good idea given the amount of power they have and their willingness to exercise it over political topics.
It's easy to blame the algo or some low level staffer when a platform gets called out publicly for blatant censorship.
The ex-CEO of Twitter, Hipster Rasputin whatshisname, admitted that censoring the Biden laptop story from the NY Post in October 2020, and shutting down any account that shared the story, was a "mistake" and only reinstated the NY Post account 2 weeks after they said it was a mistake. Of course he blamed the Post because they "only" needed to delete the tweet with the link to the story in order to reinstate the account.
If the ban was a "mistake" then why do they need to delete the tweet?
Twitter engages in political censorship on behalf of the left wing. But that is different from what is discussed in this article and this thread. Christmas enjoys broadly bipartisan support.
With or without section 230, platforms that don't make any editorial decisions aren't liable.
Section 230 was specifically crafted to allowed platforms to make editorial decisions while retaining good faith protections.
Section 230 doesn't actually make any distinction between a platform and a publisher. It makes a distinction between first and third party content. And it protects sites from 3rd party content liability, but not first party. So a "publisher" like the NYT can be liable for an article, but not for the comments on that article. And a "platform" like Facebook or Twitter can be liable for their own official posts, but not for user's replies.
That’s never what section 230 said, or was intended to do. In fact that’s explicitly what it allows them to do, and without this protection the moderation decisions would be infinitely worse because they would become liable.
Repeating FUD misinformation doesn’t make it true.
> There was a solution to all of this created back in the '90s. It's called Section 230. It says that platforms that host content aren't legally responsible for what people post on it. If the platform picks and chooses what goes on its platform then it's a publisher, not a platform. Thus it loses it's Section 230 immunity.
Wow that would be way to clean and beautiful of an solution to be an option nowadays
Not really. It would crush things like small forums and startups -- if you can't delete porn, spam, off-topic posts, etc. without a full-time moderation crew, then only megacorps can operate websites with user-contributed content.
Better to break them up to address the monopsony problems, and maintain the full strength of Section 230.
It's the reasonable solution to dealing with big tech's recent censorship abuses (yes, censorship; they operate as oligopolies, which means they possess censorship power).
Congress and or the DOJ refuse to go after big tech on this front, they refuse to hold them to account to Section 230. There is a contingent of the political elite that is shielding them for obvious reasons.
I think the problem lies in the vague definition of "obscene" material. Nobody would have a problem blocking gratuitous nudity/violence from making it on their platform. But that's a very wide distinction from political/religious messaging.
I’m annoyed that Apple requires Telegram to block sexual content. I perceive sex as a generally positive thing, a common source of joy.
I strongly dislike realistic violence, to the extent that the poster adverts for the Saw films are things I wish I had not seen. I think the frequency of it in popular entertainment reflects badly on the human condition.
Nevertheless, I have recently seen there is evidence showing that violent media reduces real life violence, so even despite my visceral reaction I wouldn’t make a general censorship against violence just to satisfy my personal preferences: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/05/health/video-games-violen...
That said, simply because everyone is different, I think there is a place in the future for automated filtering on a personal basis. Perhaps a social media plug-in that stops me seeing violence, while somebody else has a different one that stopped them seeing nudity — and not the built-in ones! When Twitter started using “likes” as an alternative retweet, they kept showing me BDSM[1] that someone else liked.
[1] For me, S&M in particular pattern matches to “violence” rather than “sex”, but (unlike the mere existence of gore films) that doesn’t mean I think it reflects badly on anyone. Like boxing, I don’t need to grok it: I trust the people-I-perceive-as-victims saying they enjoy it.
Spam detection is quite distinct from content moderation. Your email provider most likely does have some form of spam detection, but probably not much content moderation.
Also, I think most of us are not that puritan, and don't think that platforms should ban all porn.
I thought it was the middle class being anti working class myself. It conjures images of Guardian readers at a dinner party saying things like "Oh, aren't we British just so awful!" when someone brings up British tourists in Magaluf or something.
You'd never hear that from anyone not absolutely riddled with a kind of middle classness that looks like self-loathing but is really loathing anyone who likes being British. Rinse and repeat with deriding "whiteness", or whatever else is in fashion.
>You'd never hear that from anyone not absolutely riddled with a kind of middle classness that looks like self-loathing but is really loathing anyone who likes being British.
Two centuries ago, British politician George Canning had a good description of such people:
> It says that platforms that host content aren't legally responsible for what people post on it.
This works, but is only halfway there. If platforms are to be uncensored, then they shouldn't allow anonymous participation. Publicly anon is fine, so long as they can be identified if a court orders it so.
Zuckerberg's "excuse" is to blame his choices on "automated systems".
Occassionally he takes personal responsibility. Maybe he will admit "I made a mistake" a few times. But the solution is never to remove the person at cause. The Board cannot remove Zuckerberg no matter what decisions he makes. The response to the public is "We just need to fix the algorithm." Misjudgment is always portrayed as a computer issue, not a human one.
Google/Facebook want to profit from news without having to hire editors and journalists. Even worse, they want "creators" to produce content for free and then give them a cut.
