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>The president gets to tweet things that would get you, a non-president, quickly banned from Twitter. This is exactly why Twitter is an editor. > the federal

>The president gets to tweet things that would get you, a non-president, quickly banned from Twitter. This is exactly why Twitter is an editor. > the federal government is going to actually censor Twitter on his order Wrong. They will instruct the FCC to treat Twitter like a newspaper.

sneak 6y ago
By the application of this logic, every single web host that disables accounts serving malware or remote access trojans (legal to publish, mind you) is editorializing as well, because they are discriminating arbitrarily against legal content, even if it is UGC. If you remove section 230 protections for UGC from companies that "editorialize" under this definition, what will happen is that the only hosting companies that will remain in the wake of that are the ones large enough to be "too big to fail" (or friendly enough with the feds) like AWS and Azure and the existing social media giants. That makes the point-and-click censorship situation much worse, because then the only places you can reliably host are already integrated with the angry despot's military for realtime censorship as we saw demonstrated for us in the case of Wikileaks, and ongoing across the world. You do not want to live in that world. Already we have companies like Facebook disabling links in comments on Instagram to control the flow of information and attention. I don't want a web where all of our communications flow through 4 companies who can disappear our accounts and 100% of our private or public communications down the memory hole with no audit trail or legal recourse whatsoever.
- deathgrips 6y ago
  I don't think you should use Twitter or Facebook anyways if you're concerned about the free flow of information. They censor stuff and try to make walled gardens. I'm not sure what the good alternatives are... I've heard of confederated Twitter and Facebook clones but they all suffer from losing out on network effects. If 4 companies control the internet, having the government restrain from censoring them doesn't fix the problem. What do you think we should do? I'm at a loss here.

sneak 6y ago

By the application of this logic, every single web host that disables accounts serving malware or remote access trojans (legal to publish, mind you) is editorializing as well, because they are discriminating arbitrarily against legal content, even if it is UGC. If you remove section 230 protections for UGC from companies that "editorialize" under this definition, what will happen is that the only hosting companies that will remain in the wake of that are the ones large enough to be "too big to fail" (or friendly enough with the feds) like AWS and Azure and the existing social media giants. That makes the point-and-click censorship situation much worse, because then the only places you can reliably host are already integrated with the angry despot's military for realtime censorship as we saw demonstrated for us in the case of Wikileaks, and ongoing across the world. You do not want to live in that world. Already we have companies like Facebook disabling links in comments on Instagram to control the flow of information and attention. I don't want a web where all of our communications flow through 4 companies who can disappear our accounts and 100% of our private or public communications down the memory hole with no audit trail or legal recourse whatsoever.

deathgrips 6y ago
I don't think you should use Twitter or Facebook anyways if you're concerned about the free flow of information. They censor stuff and try to make walled gardens. I'm not sure what the good alternatives are... I've heard of confederated Twitter and Facebook clones but they all suffer from losing out on network effects. If 4 companies control the internet, having the government restrain from censoring them doesn't fix the problem. What do you think we should do? I'm at a loss here.