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The idea that a tiny number of billionaire investors who invested early in social media startups get to decide what political speech Americans are allowed to express on the internet makes a mockery of our values as Americans. Social media is the digital equivalent of telephone or postal service and at some point the largest social media sites must be regulated the same politically-neutral way those public and privately owned communications services are.
It depends. I'm a lot less concerned about Facebook, YouTube, et al. taking content down. I'm a lot more leery about CloudFlare refusing to host content, and DNS providers kicking law abiding websites off. Online platforms have a good reason to cultivate norms and manage good conduct. Infrastructure providers curating conduct seems more unnecessary. Making CloudFlare, DNS providers, and maybe AWS and Azure common carriers would be my preferred approach.
>Online platforms have a good reason to cultivate norms and manage good conduct.
Sure. But Twitter Facebook and Youtube are not just three out of thousands of online platforms. They are a near monopoly that openly polices the political speech of Americans. They can either be monopolistic or censor political speech but supporting them doing both is just opposing what it means to be an American.
>> The idea that a tiny number of billionaire investors who invested early in social media startups get to decide what political speech Americans are allowed to express on the internet makes a mockery of our values as Americans.
The Supreme Court allows it with Citizens United. Also, this idea of the minority wealthy controlling politics falls in line with the Supreme Court: it's appointed, not elected, judges can decide how to interpret a Constitutional document that has long-lasting personal impact to millions of people.
On a business perspective, CEOs make these decisions every day. Consider Rupert Murdoch and his influence on Fox News?
I fail to see how your stance of allowing billionaires to make arbitrary decisions for millions to be "a mockery of our values as Americans".
Are you arguing that the fact that the supreme court is not very democratic means that an even less democratic and much more censorious system of billionaires should be allowed to control political speech?
The supreme court has been a massive back door for billionaires to override the democratic process since the 1789 constitution took effect. America had already existed for over 150 year at that point and the principles of freedom of political speech stem from the existing people and culture not the flawed 1789 constitution.
>> Are you arguing
No, I'm highlighting the hypocrisy of the claim of "American values", showing how private billionaire control exists in many political influencing aspects besides social media-- and yet now how ironic it is that the SCOTUS (who are non-elected and non-accountable) is interested in reviewing the legality of such a thing.
https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/paxton-st...
This is the side of where younger me might jave started from, but it's not these billionaires fault, there's no privilege they've used other than being early (and acquiring many many would be competitors), and there's nothing holding Americans back from going elsewhere, to more favorable social network systems.
I vaccilate on how bad I think the social networks are. Personally I think the calls for them being political moderators is highly overrated. But most importantly, it is the very laws in question that would allow other networks the right & capability to host their own platforms as they see fit.
Social media is in no way the equivalent to the postal service or the telephone. You'd have to be insane to start a new postal competing national & internationally capable postal service or telephone company, the costs are astronomical. Social networks are literally started by random folks with a hobby, such as Mastadon.
There is nothing keeping us to the social networks we have. These views that thengovernment has a right to step in & tell them what kind of speech to allow & disallow is an insane & delusional twist, goose-stepping rapidly towards insanity, and the justifications for this begging, to be guaranteed right of reach by the government anywhere & everywhere, is madcap. Absolutely not. This is a sad game of political griping gone off the rails.
Media is not neutral, it has biases, and site holders have a right to make sites that express their bias. That it happens to be used by the public is immaterial, so long as the public has a choice to use it or not. I see nothing limiting what networks we travel, for the internet is a series of tubes.
> there's nothing holding Americans back from going elsewhere
Except for platform providers, such as AWS deplatforming customers, duopoly app stores doing the same, and even core infrastructure providers like cloudflare making editorial decisions.
There's a real problem here, and I don't know what the solution is.
I believe in the right of private companies to refuse service.
However, the Orwellian silencing of dissenting opinions from qualified health care professionals during covid illustrated in the most stark way possible, that the public has an interest in free expression on the internet.
I have no idea how that's achieved though, or how you balance the rights of all parties.
I guess that's why we hire congress critters - to figure all that out.
Whatever they come up with will inevitably make a lot of people unhappy, though.
Oddly enough, AWS didn't invent the internet, and the old ways still work. Mastadon exists, truth social exists, Gab and voat existed, r/conservative exists, the laptop sitting right next to me serving my website exists. There are PLENTY of programmers who have vile opinions, and they will happily take your money to make a scalable and robust controversial opinion platform. Fucks sake, infowars still runs. If people are too lazy or stupid to search out your platform that isn't on youtube or facebook, that's not youtube or facebook's fault.
You do not have a right to use the most effective means of communication that is owned, created, and operated by a private entity. The government should not be obligated to provide an industry scale PA system for whatever protest you want.
> Except for platform providers, such as AWS deplatforming customers, duopoly app stores doing the same, and even core infrastructure providers like cloudflare making editorial decisions.
I have absolutely 0 issue with people being "deplatformed" for pushing very obvious messages of hate. These providers have rules you must follow or you get banned. Literally no different than any business with a physical presence.
The exact same thing would happen outside the internet if some idiot decided to grab a megaphone and take up a prime location in your local town to push their hate. In fact in that instance they might actually ended up being arrested.
This really isn't that hard to understand.
I think the issue is that they want to be treated like common carriers (because then they aren't open to law suits about the content they allow) but also want to advertise and advertisers aren't keen on adverts appearing next to unmoderated content; one day they might get over the cognitive dissonance required, but I imagine that the end result will not be particularly consumer friendly, one way or the other.
I think they shouldn’t be common carriers. That said taking away their common carrier status will mean only those with the resources to sanitize at scale can compete without litigation risk. The existing players can afford it, and will likely build better and better LLM classifiers to protect themselves and auto police content. But the essential result would be there will be no new players.
>get to decide what political speech Americans are allowed to express
They're not stopping you from any speech. No one, including older news papers, radio channels, tv stations, etc., ever had to let anyone promote anything. You have no right to someone else's property for the tradeoff they don't have right to yours.
If anything, the social media startups gave vastly more people more voice than any previous medium. For example, we're chatting right now, something we'd not have done in any previous medium.
>must be regulated the same politically-neutral way those public and privately owned communications services are
be careful what you ask for - they might end up regulated like over the air TV or radio, where plenty of things expressible online are completely forbidden.
If telephone calls or mail content were public, you'd get a lot more stuff banned there too.
>You have no right to someone else's property
This is totally false in every sense. Try kicking out every African American customer from your restaurant. The Feds will bury your ass in lawsuits if not trumped up hate crime charges.
> be careful what you wish for
Why does everything you say sound more like a threat than a real argument? We can have different laws for the internet and telephone. Who are you saying would punish Americans by restricting speech further if we demanded more of it?
They are however allowed to kick someone out who the other patrons find abusive or offensive in their conduct or behavior. If you went into a restaurant screaming about killing all the black people, you shouldn’t expect a lot of sympathy from anyone when they kick you out.
> >You have no right to someone else's property
> This is totally false in every sense.
Every sense huh? Seems that's a bit overstated. Your rights to others property is extremely limited, and your example of a protected group does not apply to most groups. I can kick out everyone with last name starting with "A", anyone over 5'6", all left handed people, kids, blue eyed people, in fact, the majority of groups I can think of are perfectly bannable from all sorts of properties.
Very few groups (9 under Federal Law, maybe 10 if newer Genetic Material laws end up fitting) have special exemptions as a class to prevent this. It is in no way a concept that applies to any group except protected classes. These classes are given extra rights that do not apply to everyone.
And it does apply to my property. I can kick out all of any group from my house or car. Because they have no rights to that property.
It sounds like you're ignoring / neglecting the "public square" argument completely out of hand, which is the general response to stances like this.
A public square is a square of the public, not a private establishment. These are not public platforms, provided by the public for the public. They are private enterprises with a specific brand and desired code of conduct whose goal is to maximize engagement for profit. Essentially their existential risk is becoming a cesspool of toxic trolls and driving out the normals. This is the same, in the context of a public square being different than a private bar, which has an open door to the public but has discretion on who stays in the bar.
Example: You certainly can be kicked out of bars for being an asshole. Source: I’m an asshole.
The letters pages controlled by billionaire newspaper owners were "the public square" yet the courts did not intervene.
Arguably, that was a curation and numbers issue. When it changes from 10s of letters a day to billions, curation becomes less of a concern and the argument can resurface.
Edit: for an additional example of this concern in the other direction - when a company or person or government tracks the movements of 10s of its citizens who are under active investigation, that's not seen as much of a problem. It's a numbers issue. When the same can track tens of thousands or hundreds of millions, suddenly it's a human rights issue around privacy.
The billionaires aren't choosing what you can express. You are free to email your newsletter.
The billionaires are speaking through the masses. The information on these platforms are essentially limitless. To moderate a limitless and fluctuating sea of information is essentially speaking without speaking. You can make it "say" whatever you want.
You really think we'd be better off with such sites flooded with Nazi propaganda and Conspiracy theories?
Or (as is more likely) if those sites started restricting who could post things?
Actual freedom requires some restraint. Every "american" freedom recognises this from speech to religion to arms.
And that's without asking why a few billionaires who inherited major newspapers should be allowed to decide instead...
The restrictions on speech allowed under the first amendment are politically neutral. Letting billionaires decide what is “misinformation” is not.
This is the smallest fraction of the content censored by Facebook et al.
The censorship machine is large and high-volume.
Where does this idea that section 230 doesn't apply to recommendations because they "can count as their own form of content" stop? Why should it only apply to personalized recommendations? Why shouldn't the HN frontpage, or any HN comment page count as "its own form of content"?
HNs algorithm is driven directly by UGC (upvotes) and basic math. You could argue that HN should get 230 protection because the front page is decided by the users.
YouTube uses some algorithm that has all kinds of levers that YouTube controls, not the users.
HN downweights certain topics. Dang is quite open about this[1]. This is a kind of content moderation, which is what section 230 was written to protect. If removing posts is legitimate, downweighting them must be as well.
[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Dang deletes posts that are not in the spirit of HN. That is editorializing.
It is curating and editorializing compared to a dumb purveyor like an ISP.
Section 230 does not care, has never cared, and was never intended to care. The ENTIRE point of section 230 was to make it that someone posting child porn to facebook doesn't put Zuckerberg in jail for distribution of child porn
So what? Section 230 does not say anything about curating and editorializing. The insistence people have that Section 230 makes a "platforms vs. publishers" distinction is bizarre; it says no such thing and never has.
You may want to read the actual arguments that are being made [1]. Keep in mind that the US Congress passed a law in the 1990s (including section 230) that says you can't sue someone for x, y, and z. But then they passed another law in the 2000s that says you can sue somebody for a, b, and c. Resolving this apparent contradiction is exactly the point of the Supreme Court taking up this case.
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/21/21-1333/247780/202...
> Third, the Ninth and Second Circuits erred in holding that section 230(c)(1) protects a defendant if it sends to a user content which the user did not actually request. A defendant is acting as the provider of an “interactive computer service,” and thus within the scope of section 230(c)(1), when it is providing “access...to a computer server.” A computer functions as a “server,” as that term is used in section 230, only when it is providing to a user a file (such as text, or a video), which the user has actually requested, or is performing other tasks (such as a search) at the request of the user.
I don't even see how that's relevant. When I open youtube, I'm requesting recommendations. It's like a search, except I'm not searching for anything on a specific topic, but just for things that will interest me.
(Some search engines, like HN's, allow an empty search, which in HN's case just shows all posts sorted by score[1]. Think of recommendations as a personalized empty search.)
I don't blame platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc for removing content subjectively. After all, they need to control spam.
Unfortunately things have been stepped up a notch recently and Tier 1 ISPs are now engaged in site blocking themselves. Even if you run all of your own server, these ISPs can prevent customers from connecting to your web site. Only around 5 Tier 1 ISPs control access to all of the internet.
This was the situation Net Neutrality was designed to prevent, ironically gutted by Republicans in 2016.
>The suit argues that recommendations can count as their own form of content produced by the platform, removing them from the protection of Section 230.
Aside from the obvious point that all sites from day one had something similar to a "recommendation" algo, can you sue someone for recommending something that turns out bad? If the NYT recommends a restaurant and I go and get food poisoning, are they liable for that?
>the Supreme Court is expected to discuss whether to hear two cases that challenge laws in Texas and Florida barring online platforms from taking down certain political content. Next month, the court is scheduled to hear a case that questions Section 230, a 1996 statute that protects the platforms from liability for the content posted by their users.
The Texas and Florida laws sound to me like compelled speech which the Court doesn't typically approve of.
Section 230 increases free speech by limiting the liability of the platforms. I have a hard time seeing how that could be unconstitutional.
I've seen reform-section-230 folks have literally nothing to say about this point. 230 is the only basis that protects those who would host speech online. Murkying the freedom to host seems murderously bad for the internet & speech.
> I have a hard time seeing how that could be unconstitutional.
That case is not about whether section 230 is constitutional, it's about how it should be interpreted.
I think you are right, but this means the 230 haters will be super disappointed.
Section 230 is absolutely clear that the social media companies are allowed to censor as much as they want. It's the express purpose of the section to allow "censorship" without incurring liability for those things you fail to censor.
The idea that by recommending or curating content the website owner loses the right to censor (that 230 explicitly provides) feels like a huge stretch to me.
So the case becomes pretty narrow: Whether a) the action of YouTube promoting content is protected by 230 or b) promoting content is only protected by normal free speech rules including the 1st Amendment.
> Section 230 increases free speech by limiting the liability of the platforms.
Section 230 decreases free speech because platforms are able to curate their content and shut down certain voices.
"The ability to curate their content" does not come from section 230, it is guaranteed by the First Amendment and the prohibition against compelled speech. All Section 230 does is ensure that a site which does more moderation is not exposed to more liability than a site which does less.
Between this and your other comment above, you seem very confused as to what Section 230 actually says. I think you need to do some more reading about it before posting comments here.
Sites should just let people choose red bubble, blue bubble, or no bubble, so everyone gets what they want. It's not so big a change.