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> But escaping legal consequences doesn't mean you're not conceptually responsible But what is "conceptual responsibility"? The thing is, responsibility is not

> But escaping legal consequences doesn't mean you're not conceptually responsible But what is "conceptual responsibility"? The thing is, responsibility is not really an aspect of reality, it is almost completely a social convention. Reality only shows you causal connections, and causal connections certainly are an important factor influencing how we distribute responsibility, but they do not determine responsibility in any simple way. Power plant operators are among the causes of people dying of electric shock. Does that mean that we consider them responsible? Generally no--because we as a society have decided that people running power plants is an overall benefit to society and we can prevent accidents in other ways and a whole bunch of other reasons. So, yes, you can have opinions about how responsibilities should be distributed differently, but I don't see any sort of "inherent responsibilities". > Simpler and more reasonable for the media platforms to actually be responsible for what they say, and not maintain the fiction that they have no influence or effect on the messages they "transmit". Well, first of all, I would object to the idea that because you have influence, you should necessarily be responsible. Telcos also have a massive influence in principle. But, I would argue for good reasons, we have decided that they are not responsible. Now, that doesn't mean that I think Facebook should not be held responsible for anything. But the problem that I see is that this kind of regulation does not hold Facebook responsible for what Facebook is saying/doing. It instead holds Facebook responsible for what other people are saying, with an in incentive to prevent speech that would be perfectly legal (and ethically somewhere between fine and really important), while actually missing the goal (or is it even the goal?) of holding Facebook accountable for the power they are exercising. > But the whole point of a modern media platform is that you don't need manual control; and indeeed you can never keep up with manual control. Algorithms will win against judges every single time, simply because no society can have that many judges Well, but what does that mean then? It's not obvious how judges could keep up, so let's forget about human rights? > If anything: the fact that they don't actively edit the contents of the messages only grants them more power, because it makes the control they do have opaque and hard to judge the impact of. I don't mean to imply they're intentionally Machiavellian or whatever here: it's just that indirect, hard-to-observe control is really hard to value. Yes, I agree. And that is precisely why I think this kind of regulation is dangerous. It causes collateral damage, and it doesn't even address the actual problem. Suppose this actually made hate speech go away. Does that change anything significant about the opaque and hard to judge power of these organizations? Or doesn't it rather just help hide it even better? If you will, we need to restrict underhanded manipulative speech of Facebook, not hate speech of its users. Or at least, if we restrict hate speech of its users, we shouldn't do it by incentivising Facebook to exercise more underhanded manipulative power.

emn13 9y ago
I'd say the telco's have essentially no influence over the content they transmit, and not just that: there are laws to ensure they don't get any. As to the human rights: there's no point in spending a lot of money deceiving ourselves; better not to pretend and face up to the fact there's a problem, than to delegate it to a legal system that will simply make matters worse. I'm not objecting in principle to a judicial solution; I just don't see how that has a hope in hell of doing more good than harm. I agree this kind of law is likely to cause collateral damage, but I don't believe the collateral damage is going to be worse than the alternative. But it's clearly not ideal, sure! But the point really should be: what's the alternative? I don't think there are any simple, politically acceptable alternatives. I mean, you could try to turn em into common carrier's or the like, or break up the companies, but that's all fairly extreme - try getting that past the lobbying.

emn13 9y ago

I'd say the telco's have essentially no influence over the content they transmit, and not just that: there are laws to ensure they don't get any. As to the human rights: there's no point in spending a lot of money deceiving ourselves; better not to pretend and face up to the fact there's a problem, than to delegate it to a legal system that will simply make matters worse. I'm not objecting in principle to a judicial solution; I just don't see how that has a hope in hell of doing more good than harm. I agree this kind of law is likely to cause collateral damage, but I don't believe the collateral damage is going to be worse than the alternative. But it's clearly not ideal, sure! But the point really should be: what's the alternative? I don't think there are any simple, politically acceptable alternatives. I mean, you could try to turn em into common carrier's or the like, or break up the companies, but that's all fairly extreme - try getting that past the lobbying.