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>The Internet companies lost the high ground in regard to censorship and 3rd party speech when they tried to shutdown Daily Stormer. When Google or CloudFlare w

by IBM 9y ago

>The Internet companies lost the high ground in regard to censorship and 3rd party speech when they tried to shutdown Daily Stormer. When Google or CloudFlare were told that the website was using their services, instead of taking the high ground with regard to the principle of free speech and 3rd party speech on their services, they used their right to free association to withdraw service. This lassez-faire attitude you speak of never existed. They lost the high ground the moment they started policing their platforms for spam, adult content, malware, copyrighted content, terrorist propaganda, etc., thereby expressing editorial control. They want to have it both ways, they want to absolve themselves of all responsibility (and liability) for anything that's on their platform and at the same time remove anything that is in-line with their commercial interests (for UX reasons or because their advertisers object to the content their ads run on).

RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago
I agree with you. When section 230 was passed in 1996, from my memory, they were a lot more lassez-faire, and also you had far more choice. I routinely posted on maybe a dozen sites at the time. Now, with everything consolidating and the monopolies censoring in favor of advertisers or PR, section 230 makes a lot less sense.
AnthonyMouse 9y ago
> They want to have it both ways Censorship is one party telling everyone else what they can and can't see. Prohibiting content is censorship -- it's telling people what they can't see. Prohibiting filtering is also censorship -- it's telling people they have to see your thing in place of the thing they want. Filtering is inherently a weighing of false positives against false negatives. If you require filtering then the false negative rate has to be low/zero, so the false positive rate goes through the roof. No Nazis but also no Republicans or Democrats. If you prohibit filtering then the false positive rate has to be low/zero, so the false negative rate goes through the roof. Everyone is deluged by spam and malware. Section 230 doesn't apply to copyright and look at the mess that has been -- worst of both worlds. Copyright infringement is still prolific but people use fraudulent copyright takedowns for things they don't own left and right, and the platforms execute them because they have minimal incentive to question anything. What you really want is the middle ground where platforms have to compete with each other for users, so they can ban things everyone hates (spam) but lose users if they ban things those people are legitimately interested in (e.g. minority political opinions). The problem isn't Section 230, it's the lack of competition which gives the major platforms too much power when they decide to censor something. It has to be the marketplace of ideas, not the monopoly of ideas.
- nnfy 9y ago
  >Prohibiting filtering is also censorship -- it's telling people they have to see your thing in place of the thing they want. This reads like a paragraph straight out of 1984. No one is forcing people to view anything by prohibiting filtering. It simply is making certain available on the platform. Now I suppose one could argue that filtering is a form of speech, but thats still reaching I think.
  - sgift 9y ago
    In 1984 you had the Telescreen in every house. You were not allowed to cover it up and it was used to broadcast propaganda into peoples homes without any filtering (plus it was a surveillance device, but that's besides the point here).
    - nnfy 9y ago
      No, the point is that in 1984 you had doublespeak, where people used words in ways that were contradictory to their meaning[0] - in the way that the GP claims that prohibiting filtering is somehow a form of censorship, when censorship is literally a form of filtering. 0.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublespeak https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublespeak
mtgx 9y ago
To a certain degree you are right about spam and malware, but I think those are quite in a different category, as it's pretty clear cut which is which. Spam is random email from people who seem to send a lot of those types of emails to many people, and malware is code that uses known vulnerabilities in the CVE database, so again, pretty clear-cut which stuff they are supposed to stop. Censoring speech is in a way different league. So I think things started going downhill when they started being very aggressive about copyright. That's certainly been the case with Google. They fought on our side against SOPA, because they figured abiding by SOPA would cost them too much manual work. But then they wanted TV content and music services on the Play Store and Youtube, so stuff like SOPA became more acceptable to them as they were trying to get those deals. So they implemented highly-aggressive and anti-fair use takedown bots across the Google search engine and Youtube to appease those companies with which they were making deals as much as possible. So now of course the governments are like: "Well, if you can identify copyrighted content, surely you can identify "extremist" content, too, right?"

by IBM 9y ago

RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago

I agree with you. When section 230 was passed in 1996, from my memory, they were a lot more lassez-faire, and also you had far more choice. I routinely posted on maybe a dozen sites at the time. Now, with everything consolidating and the monopolies censoring in favor of advertisers or PR, section 230 makes a lot less sense.

AnthonyMouse 9y ago

> They want to have it both ways Censorship is one party telling everyone else what they can and can't see. Prohibiting content is censorship -- it's telling people what they can't see. Prohibiting filtering is also censorship -- it's telling people they have to see your thing in place of the thing they want. Filtering is inherently a weighing of false positives against false negatives. If you require filtering then the false negative rate has to be low/zero, so the false positive rate goes through the roof. No Nazis but also no Republicans or Democrats. If you prohibit filtering then the false positive rate has to be low/zero, so the false negative rate goes through the roof. Everyone is deluged by spam and malware. Section 230 doesn't apply to copyright and look at the mess that has been -- worst of both worlds. Copyright infringement is still prolific but people use fraudulent copyright takedowns for things they don't own left and right, and the platforms execute them because they have minimal incentive to question anything. What you really want is the middle ground where platforms have to compete with each other for users, so they can ban things everyone hates (spam) but lose users if they ban things those people are legitimately interested in (e.g. minority political opinions). The problem isn't Section 230, it's the lack of competition which gives the major platforms too much power when they decide to censor something. It has to be the marketplace of ideas, not the monopoly of ideas.

nnfy 9y ago
>Prohibiting filtering is also censorship -- it's telling people they have to see your thing in place of the thing they want. This reads like a paragraph straight out of 1984. No one is forcing people to view anything by prohibiting filtering. It simply is making certain available on the platform. Now I suppose one could argue that filtering is a form of speech, but thats still reaching I think.
- sgift 9y ago
  In 1984 you had the Telescreen in every house. You were not allowed to cover it up and it was used to broadcast propaganda into peoples homes without any filtering (plus it was a surveillance device, but that's besides the point here).
  - nnfy 9y ago
    No, the point is that in 1984 you had doublespeak, where people used words in ways that were contradictory to their meaning[0] - in the way that the GP claims that prohibiting filtering is somehow a form of censorship, when censorship is literally a form of filtering. 0.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublespeak https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublespeak

mtgx 9y ago

To a certain degree you are right about spam and malware, but I think those are quite in a different category, as it's pretty clear cut which is which. Spam is random email from people who seem to send a lot of those types of emails to many people, and malware is code that uses known vulnerabilities in the CVE database, so again, pretty clear-cut which stuff they are supposed to stop. Censoring speech is in a way different league. So I think things started going downhill when they started being very aggressive about copyright. That's certainly been the case with Google. They fought on our side against SOPA, because they figured abiding by SOPA would cost them too much manual work. But then they wanted TV content and music services on the Play Store and Youtube, so stuff like SOPA became more acceptable to them as they were trying to get those deals. So they implemented highly-aggressive and anti-fair use takedown bots across the Google search engine and Youtube to appease those companies with which they were making deals as much as possible. So now of course the governments are like: "Well, if you can identify copyrighted content, surely you can identify "extremist" content, too, right?"