Section 230 is at core of problem. And the lobbying efforts the profits can buy.
Legally wsj nyt twitter vogue and instagram are completely different despite clearly being the same product.
It’s insane these platforms aren’t the same.
If you don’t believe this compatible free speech on the internet, post content you don’t think belongs on the internet here and see how quickly the community gets rid of you.
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.
Those 26 words enabled all the forums and social media we have today and ensured they’d all eventually end up full of garbage. At this point I’m not sure how we’d throw out the bath water and keep the baby.
When those words were written there was no concept of "algorithmic" feed.
Those words make sense and indeed worked well when "information content providers" remained more or less neutral with regards to what content they provided beyond some common-sense rules.
The problems really started when algorithmic feeds appeared, where the provider now assumes an editorial role and is able to tailor the content to each user individually, with no oversight nor accountability.
This is a very good point - if the content seen on a feed is curated and tailored to a specific user based on some unseen algorithm, that uses tons of opaque metrics about that person, it feels more and more like these companies take an editorial role.
A news outlet understands that there’s tons of stories daily they could report on, and they have to selectively choose those based on their target markets. I don’t see how social media sites are any different other than being able to be _more_ specific.
At this point, we've moved well past baby and bathwater metaphors. If we want to call socials something, let's at least admit it is the opiate for the masses. The people have become addicted to it. It is the number one way of keeping the masses cowed. The original opiate quote as used for religions, but it hasn't been that for quite some time even before socials came along. I know I'm channeling Neil Gaiman a bit.
It seems a bit weird, I can see how the platforms might not want to aggressively police bots as like a first-order thing (they are highly engaged “users”), but you’d think actual users would be annoyed enough with them, and advertisers would be aware enough of the fact that they are essentially a skew on the stats, that the market would align against them.
Why would we keep the baby? Is it just because the baby is providing employment, or is the baby providing an essential service that can't be provided by anyone else?
At the risk of stating the obvious: people actually like social media. Yes, it’s actively harmful for society but that doesn’t mean people aren’t addicted. If a politician proposed disabling FB, Instagram, Twitter and all the rest tomorrow they’d probably not get re-elected.
Get rid of Section 230 and sites like Hacker News would be forced to go offline overnight.
People like to disparage social media platforms they don’t use, but forget that the sites they do use are playing under the same laws.
> If you don’t believe this compatible free speech on the internet, post content you don’t think belongs on the internet here and see how quickly the community gets rid of you.
You’re missing the point. The moderators and/or community getting rid of someone after they posted the content is too late. It would have been up and available for a while. The content would have already been “published” and the liability already triggered in a world where no Section 230 like protections existed.
If you like being able to post things online on websites you don’t own, you need protections like this to exist.
Correct. Section 230 is so wildly misunderstood. What it's doing is protecting the owner of a website from being liable for content users post. Without those protections, there would be no comment sections, no sites like FB/IG/Twitter or Hacker News, because absolutely no one is going to take the risk of allowing user-generated content that they are liable for.
The people who rail against Section 230 and "censorship" have it exactly backwards, if they got their way and 230 went away, instead of having specific content removed they wouldn't be able to post anything at all.
It looks like 230 was passed in ‘96, but Usenet was around for more than a decade before that… somehow, there seems to be a way to make it work? Email could still be possible. I wonder if something like AIM could work without 230.
Maybe federated social media? You’d only want to host people you actually trust, but maybe that isn’t so bad.
Edit: I think it is not that surprising that people misunderstand 230, specifically 230c2. We have:
* A constitution that prohibits restrictions by the government on free speech
* Provides “decency” restrictions on speech in some cases
* An exception for sites that act more like communication service providers, as long as they don’t editorialize, which considers the content they host not their speech
* A Good Samaritan exception for sites to do moderation, so their edits and redactions are not interpreted as editorializing
An exception to an exception to an exception is easy to misunderstand.
Legally wsj nyt twitter vogue and instagram are completely different despite clearly being the same product.
It’s insane these platforms aren’t the same.
If you don’t believe this compatible free speech on the internet, post content you don’t think belongs on the internet here and see how quickly the community gets rid of you.