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The courts decide what is a large platform. And they decide what is "not illegal" In Germany, there were actually cases where courts have ruled that facebook

The courts decide what is a large platform. And they decide what is "not illegal" In Germany, there were actually cases where courts have ruled that facebook is not allowed to delete non illegal posts: https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Oberlandesgericht-Meinungsfreiheit-sticht-Hausrecht-bei-Facebook-4156833.html https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Oberlandesgericht-Me... One big part of the argument of the judges was based on contracts. When a user makes a facebook account, it creates a contract between the user and facebook. The user agrees to share their data for ads and stuff, and facebook agrees to publish their posts. Thus they have to do that, they cannot just decide to not publish some posts, that would be a contract violation. Just like when you order a pizza with 10 toppings, the pizza service cannot deliver a pizza with 8 toppings and still expect you to pay the full price And as second part, the court has ruled that a clause "we choose which posts to publish" would be invalid in the contract, because a contract must be fair to all involved parties and not violate basic rights like freedom of speech.

mulmen 6y ago
Why would we ask the courts to decide what is large? What if I don't like their answer? Surely this is a legislative question.
ziddoap 6y ago
My post was meant to be more rhetorical in nature, to demonstrate that overzealous censorship is not an issue which can be solved by simply stating "force all non-illegal content to be/remain published". It's easy to hand-wave it to the courts, but there are many issues with that approach as well (e.g. non-technically competent people making decisions about technology, government not immune to corruption nor censorship, courts are slow by nature). Your answer also conveniently side-steps the nitty-gritty implementation issues. How does a platform deal with spam posts if they are unable to delete content that is legal? If you don't like a website, simply post a few thousand Viagra advertisements to their front page for a few weeks and they either have to advertise Viagra or shutdown. Speaking of advertising, why bother pay for ad-space on a website like Reddit, when I can just spam my product on every subreddit over and over again and they have no choice but to keep it up? Will these rules also be applicable to other forms of media which also have a viewership above the arbitrary "large" line? Newspaper, books, TV? If not, why not? These are just a few off-the-cuff issues that come to mind. I'm sure people smarter than me who take some time to seriously consider this approach will be able to find hundreds of such examples of why "forced to publish all non-illegal content" sounds great but is simply not a feasible solution to the problem. As an aside, I find it odd that the answer to censorship by private companies is to offload everything to the largest centralized system with the longest history of censorship: governments.

mulmen 6y ago

Why would we ask the courts to decide what is large? What if I don't like their answer? Surely this is a legislative question.

ziddoap 6y ago

My post was meant to be more rhetorical in nature, to demonstrate that overzealous censorship is not an issue which can be solved by simply stating "force all non-illegal content to be/remain published". It's easy to hand-wave it to the courts, but there are many issues with that approach as well (e.g. non-technically competent people making decisions about technology, government not immune to corruption nor censorship, courts are slow by nature). Your answer also conveniently side-steps the nitty-gritty implementation issues. How does a platform deal with spam posts if they are unable to delete content that is legal? If you don't like a website, simply post a few thousand Viagra advertisements to their front page for a few weeks and they either have to advertise Viagra or shutdown. Speaking of advertising, why bother pay for ad-space on a website like Reddit, when I can just spam my product on every subreddit over and over again and they have no choice but to keep it up? Will these rules also be applicable to other forms of media which also have a viewership above the arbitrary "large" line? Newspaper, books, TV? If not, why not? These are just a few off-the-cuff issues that come to mind. I'm sure people smarter than me who take some time to seriously consider this approach will be able to find hundreds of such examples of why "forced to publish all non-illegal content" sounds great but is simply not a feasible solution to the problem. As an aside, I find it odd that the answer to censorship by private companies is to offload everything to the largest centralized system with the longest history of censorship: governments.