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I think that every company should decide if they're a "publisher" or a "platform". If you're a platform, you're not responsible for what your users say (except

I think that every company should decide if they're a "publisher" or a "platform". If you're a platform, you're not responsible for what your users say (except directly illegal stuff, eg. child porn), and have no say in what stays on, or gets removed/hidden (except, again, illegal stuff). If you're a publisher, you have a say what is posted on your site, and you carry full responsibility for all the onsite content. Walking the line, and not wanting to take responsibility in some cases, but still deletin in other cases should be forbidden

srtjstjsj 6y ago
And how are platforms to be regulated? Do they allow anonymous posters? Who investigates and removes harmful content?
- trident1000 6y ago
  Really this is patchwork on what needs to be a major regulatory overhaul. Things that need to be addressed: no advertising to kids, mob control, fake accounts/social manipulation, free speech, transparent and auditable algorithms (screw their IP). Its not an easy task to achieve all of these and other goals but it needs to get done before society literally goes into a civil war.
- hyper0perator 6y ago
  The phone company does unfortunately allow spam callers
  - eli 6y ago
    Is gmail allowed to filter out spam? Or does doing so make them an email publisher no longer exempt from liability for email contents?
  - sixothree 6y ago
    I'm honestly quite sick of this argument. The issue with the phone company isn't the spam. It's the anonymity. All solutions to the spam issue don't deal with unwanted calls at all.
akersten 6y ago
HackerNews could not exist in your proposed world. I doubt YC would hire a full-time staff of moderators to vet every single post. Since we remove things for being off-topic or overly mean, the only possible conclusion is that HN would shut down because they do not want to bear liability for the posts they leave up. The Internet as we know it would not exist without S230. Please read this[0] for a primer. [0]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
- zarkov99 6y ago
  Different rules apply with scale. HN is fine doing whatever it does but global monopolies require special handling.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - gizmo385 6y ago
    Where does your cutoff apply? At what point are there "too many users"? How would you prevent something like that from being a completely arbitrary platform killer?
    - zarkov99 6y ago
      The courts would decide just like they do when a company is thought to have become a monopoly. This is not a new problem entirely but in this hyper politicized moment in the country it somehow has turned, just like everything else, into a left vs right issue. Its pathetic how we lost the hability to look at the issues without partisan glasses.
- the8472 6y ago
  A platform does not mean there can be no moderation. Part of the platform can be offering moderation tools. One could also draw a distinction between burying content vs. completely deleting it. A lot of HN moderation already works by just dropping the content from the frontpage or making comments invisible rather than outright deleting it. I presume the FCC would still consider this
the_pwner224 6y ago
This does not work. Example: I want to set up a forum where people can discuss a specific topic. Such as the Arch Linux forum, or ones for vehicles (https://www.ninja400riders.com/ https://www.ninja400riders.com/, https://www.civicx.com/forum/ https://www.civicx.com/forum/). I am clearly not a publisher; I do produce content and do not want to produce content. So I am a platform. Am I no longer allowed to decide what is acceptable on my platform? Even if I am running a forum about the Ninja 400 motorcycle, I now have to allow people to post about their Toyota Corolla or about how vaccines cause autism or the earth is flat? What about if I want to moderate the forum to keep discussion on topic and I need to delete trolling or spam, or lock/delete threads that devolve into political fighting among forum members? You can't have platforms without moderation.
- mc32 6y ago
  Metrics might matter. Exceptions for non profit (no ads) or orgs under undetermined amount of monthly active users?
  - tylerhou 6y ago
    That still doesn't answer the question — as soon as my forum gets popular, I can't moderate anymore? Do I limit the number of users so that I never hit these metrics? If I'd have to be non-profit (which doesn't mean no ads, by the way), then this kills a lot of business models.
    - snerbles 6y ago
      > Do I limit the number of users so that I never hit these metrics? A darkly amusing solution to Eternal September.
    - mc32 6y ago
      Right. After certain revenue or certain viewership or commercialization you have new responsibilities.
- juniper_strong 6y ago
ikeboy 6y ago
"I think we should abolish the first amendment"
mrtksn 6y ago
That’s the Turkish model. A pioneer in censorship and totalitarian media control, it evolved in licensing and controlling everything. It started with simply getting your platform/publisher license(so they can make you take down illegal content, save the kids), now Turkey dictates your content depending on your internet business. Just few days ago Spotify was forced to get a license and establish a contact(probably because of the podcasts, will see), recently Netflix was forced to cancel a tv show because of a LGBT character, remove other shows and so on. They are trying to get their grip on Youtube to regulate it like a TV. Booking.com & Paypal are gone since years due to licensing. As soon as you have your definitions somebody will have to make sure that you are acting accordingly, so rules for the publishers and licensing For the platforms to control the publishers will follow. With the everything happening, that’s the feature for everyone and let me tell you, it’s not fun.
- hyper0perator 6y ago
  Disagree. Newspapers and ISP follow under this regulation. Social media networks have been able to skirt the issue. If newspapers can get sued for their content and the phone company can't, it only makes sense that this applies to social media companies are held to the same liabilities or protections.
  - mrtksn 6y ago
    Sure, the issue is that now it is technically possible To do much more. With the phone company it’s impractical to listen to every conversation and “eliminate the threats”, it is practical with the internet. EU wants upload filters(stop singing “happy birthday” to your friend, that needs lives), UK want porn and crypto control(no dirty talk on the phone, no secretive talks, must speak load and clear). Turkey wants to control the narrative(An operator jumps in your phone conversation to correct you or stop you talking). I am sure That US, Canada, Norway , Iran, India etc all have their own agenda too and would loved to control your phone conversations. As for the liability, it’s already here. A lot of people are serving time or paying damages for the things they did on the internet. The new stuff is to make it controllable at scale.
zarkov99 6y ago
Not every company. But certainly google, facebook and twitter.
slg 6y ago
>If you're a platform, you're not responsible for what your users say (except directly illegal stuff, eg. child porn), and have no say in what stays on, or gets removed/hidden (except, again, illegal stuff). That sounds nice and easy until you start thinking about it for any length of time. The biggest problem might be who gets to decide what is illegal. This needs to be figured out in both a theoretical and practical sense. On the theoretical side does Twitter allow Holocaust denial which is legal in the US but illegal in much of Europe? Does the US get to impose its views of free speech on the world? Does every jurisdiction get a different version of the site? On the practical side, what happens when the legality of something is up for debate? Maybe an image is revenge porn or maybe it is perfectly legal porn. Maybe a movie clip is a copyright violation and maybe it is fair use. Does Twitter take down that content as soon as there is a complaint? Does it have to wait for some legal action to start or finish? What is the recourse if something is taken down and later found to be legal content?
- hyper0perator 6y ago
  Legality under US free speech laws. See first amendment law literature.
- jimmydorry 6y ago
  >Maybe a movie clip is a copyright violation and maybe it is fair use. Does Twitter take down that content as soon as there is a complaint? Does it have to wait for some legal action to start or finish? What is the recourse if something is taken down and later found to be legal content? We have the DMCA to cover this... however it's currently an extremely broken process. While there is a penalty codified for making claim to something you don't own, it is never enforced. That part of it needs to change and the regulation should then act in the manner it was designed to.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
blhack 6y ago
That is exactly what section 230 already does. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 Whats being talked about here is stripping the assumption that twitter is acting in good faith, and therefore removing the protection they get from this section.
- jellicle 6y ago
  So much confusion about this. What the prior commenter describes is exactly the OPPOSITE of what section 230 does. Under current law, companies are free to - specifically encouraged to - moderate and delete content as much as they want, while they are also immunized from being treated as the publisher of that content and immunized from any liability for that moderation and deletion of content.
  - blhack 6y ago
    Section 230 is outlining a way in which an internet service can be exempted from liability. What part of this is causing you to read it another way?
    - jakelazaroff 6y ago
      Section 230 shields platform operators from liability for user-generated content. It does not set conditions for immunity such as not moderating. In fact, it was arguably created expressly to prevent this publisher/distributor dichotomy. Look at the cases against Prodigy and Compuserve for examples of the ambiguity Section 230 was introduced to resolve.
  - NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
    Right. The historical context for Section 230 is that some providers that were trying to offer a family-safe online service (e.g. Prodigy) by moderating the content available, and therefore became liable as publishers. In fact, if you read Section 230 in its entirety, you can see that it is intended to encourage moderation of content based on what the provider considers to be objectionable.
newacct583 6y ago
> have no say in what stays on, or gets removed/hidden (except, again, illegal stuff). That would eliminate HN, Reddit, basically anywhere with a moderated forum. How do you run a site like Ravelry (knitting/crafting site) with a rule like that? Under your idea, the reddit would consist of "News Sites" and "4chan". (Actually even 4chan does some moderation). There's no way that would be acceptable.
jakelazaroff 6y ago
I have a blog. Let’s say I wanted to let people comment on my blog posts. One day, I get a ton of “I just made $X from my couch!” type comments. My readers try to discuss my latest post, but the spam is suffocating the conversation. What can I do? They’re not saying anything illegal. If I delete the spam or add some sort of filter, I’m now a “publisher” and liable for every comment my readers make. But if I leave them up, my readers will be frustrated that they can’t have a real discussion. So I don’t have comments. I really want discussions with my readers, but it’s just not worth the risk. Now imagine this happening to every website. Every community. Hacker News as we know it wouldn’t exist — probably no voting and certainly no moderation. The whole Internet would turn into a cesspool of spam and flame wars. Many apps wouldn’t even exist in the first place. All because we decided to enforce this entirely arbitrary “publisher vs. platform” dichotomy.
eli 6y ago
I’m surprised to see this point take on HN. Most people who suggest this don’t realize that it would eliminate public participation from most of the internet. There can be no comment sections or Reddit or HN or StackOverflow or Wikipedia in this model. It would be very difficult to have any discussion forum at all. It would lead to an internet where powerful voices are even more powerful (because they have big publishers that will stand behind their words) and where the average user has a much much harder time being heard.
sixothree 6y ago
This sounds incredibly anti-democratic.
morpheuskafka 6y ago
So a forum like HN cannot even have rules that a discussion has to be on topic/within the scope of the site? Wikipedia cannot have notability and credibility policies (I guess that is an edge case since it is other editors actually doing the removing, but according to community consensus guidelines)? A forum for a marginalized group needs to allow hate speech against them, so long as its not illegal? All the while they are not only putting up with the unwanted content, but paying out of their own pocket to host it? What you are saying about platforms should apply to utilities (ISPs, possible PaaS like AWS), which is where net neutrality comes in. ISPs shouldn't block stuff they or the government doesn't like, slow it down, or otherwise interfere with traffic.
- guscost 6y ago
  Is it time for Twitter to be considered a utility? ISPs evolved from “online service providers” which themselves evolved from “bulletin board systems”, and if you consider an ISP to be a utility today, then there was a point where that kind of service became a utility.
  - holler 6y ago
    Why? I'm not a fan of that idea as I'd rather find ways to spur new competition. Also, anyone can live without Twitter or any social network, whereas its harder to live without electricity, water, etc.
  - morpheuskafka 6y ago
    Historically, utilities/public services are things that have a natural monopoly, which absolutely applies to ISP/other wireline telcoms (city franchise licenses), mobile cell service (limited competition due to spectrum auctions and the need for enough nationwide spectrum to be accumulated to launch a viable service), water, sewer, power, gas, etc. It might apply to things like undersea cables, although there isn't really a natural monopoly (plenty of space under the ocean) and those primarily connect two privately owned datacenters. It applies to other services such as post office and city trash where either laws (private express statutes) prohibit competition for the sake of making the public service more profitable, or where taxes force the customer to "buy" the public trash pickup, making even the best-run private enterprise unable to compete. It is technically quite trivial to clone the basic functionality of Twitter and run a competing service. This has been done semi-sucessfully with Gab (not endorsing that community, but it is a good example), for example. People choose social media services based on their perceived value, social prestige, etc. There's no equivalent to "I have to use Twitter because they own the lines to the house/they have the only 5G coverage in my area/they are the only company licensed by my city." Twitter is not the only physically possible way to publish short messages to the world (unless the ISPs ruin that now that net neutrality is gone).
Meph504 6y ago
I'm having a hard time recalling any service that didn't have any content moderation, even on top of laws. The idea that content moderation makes you a publisher seems a bit silly to me. If I have a platform for selling say automobiles, and people keep trying to sell kitchenware of something equally not off brand. Removing that content doesn't make you a publisher, it makes you a steward of the purpose of a platform. The idea that moderation or cultivation of a platform, sudden makes you a "publisher" (which is frankly a term that shouldn't even be used in this case as it is too narrow for the web is) makes no sense. This is, a bullshit threat to try and assert control over platforms that people interact on by the government. It isn't needed, and is likely to be harmful.
argomo 6y ago
Is the following statement legal or illegal? "Man, nothing ends the day like a nice cold beer." Clearly, that's legal. But if I'm running a platform, I should be able to hide/downrank/shadowban/censor it based on what sort of community I'm trying to build. In a kid-oriented venue, it's inappropriate. In a recovering alcoholics group it's harmful/malicious. In a tech forum, it's low value. If you went to a school, an AA meeting, or a tech conference and talked about beer overbearingly, you'd be asked to leave the venue, and that would be their right. As onerous as it is to have legitimate, authentic speech banned from a popular platform, the alternative of allowing all speech effectively creates a worthless noise chamber dominated by bad actors.

srtjstjsj 6y ago

And how are platforms to be regulated? Do they allow anonymous posters? Who investigates and removes harmful content?

trident1000 6y ago
Really this is patchwork on what needs to be a major regulatory overhaul. Things that need to be addressed: no advertising to kids, mob control, fake accounts/social manipulation, free speech, transparent and auditable algorithms (screw their IP). Its not an easy task to achieve all of these and other goals but it needs to get done before society literally goes into a civil war.
hyper0perator 6y ago
The phone company does unfortunately allow spam callers
- eli 6y ago
  Is gmail allowed to filter out spam? Or does doing so make them an email publisher no longer exempt from liability for email contents?
- sixothree 6y ago
  I'm honestly quite sick of this argument. The issue with the phone company isn't the spam. It's the anonymity. All solutions to the spam issue don't deal with unwanted calls at all.

akersten 6y ago

HackerNews could not exist in your proposed world. I doubt YC would hire a full-time staff of moderators to vet every single post. Since we remove things for being off-topic or overly mean, the only possible conclusion is that HN would shut down because they do not want to bear liability for the posts they leave up. The Internet as we know it would not exist without S230. Please read this[0] for a primer. [0]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...

zarkov99 6y ago
Different rules apply with scale. HN is fine doing whatever it does but global monopolies require special handling.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- gizmo385 6y ago
  Where does your cutoff apply? At what point are there "too many users"? How would you prevent something like that from being a completely arbitrary platform killer?
  - zarkov99 6y ago
    The courts would decide just like they do when a company is thought to have become a monopoly. This is not a new problem entirely but in this hyper politicized moment in the country it somehow has turned, just like everything else, into a left vs right issue. Its pathetic how we lost the hability to look at the issues without partisan glasses.
the8472 6y ago
A platform does not mean there can be no moderation. Part of the platform can be offering moderation tools. One could also draw a distinction between burying content vs. completely deleting it. A lot of HN moderation already works by just dropping the content from the frontpage or making comments invisible rather than outright deleting it. I presume the FCC would still consider this

the_pwner224 6y ago

This does not work. Example: I want to set up a forum where people can discuss a specific topic. Such as the Arch Linux forum, or ones for vehicles (https://www.ninja400riders.com/ https://www.ninja400riders.com/, https://www.civicx.com/forum/ https://www.civicx.com/forum/). I am clearly not a publisher; I do produce content and do not want to produce content. So I am a platform. Am I no longer allowed to decide what is acceptable on my platform? Even if I am running a forum about the Ninja 400 motorcycle, I now have to allow people to post about their Toyota Corolla or about how vaccines cause autism or the earth is flat? What about if I want to moderate the forum to keep discussion on topic and I need to delete trolling or spam, or lock/delete threads that devolve into political fighting among forum members? You can't have platforms without moderation.

mc32 6y ago
Metrics might matter. Exceptions for non profit (no ads) or orgs under undetermined amount of monthly active users?
- tylerhou 6y ago
  That still doesn't answer the question — as soon as my forum gets popular, I can't moderate anymore? Do I limit the number of users so that I never hit these metrics? If I'd have to be non-profit (which doesn't mean no ads, by the way), then this kills a lot of business models.
  - snerbles 6y ago
    > Do I limit the number of users so that I never hit these metrics? A darkly amusing solution to Eternal September.
  - mc32 6y ago
    Right. After certain revenue or certain viewership or commercialization you have new responsibilities.
juniper_strong 6y ago

ikeboy 6y ago

"I think we should abolish the first amendment"

mrtksn 6y ago

That’s the Turkish model. A pioneer in censorship and totalitarian media control, it evolved in licensing and controlling everything. It started with simply getting your platform/publisher license(so they can make you take down illegal content, save the kids), now Turkey dictates your content depending on your internet business. Just few days ago Spotify was forced to get a license and establish a contact(probably because of the podcasts, will see), recently Netflix was forced to cancel a tv show because of a LGBT character, remove other shows and so on. They are trying to get their grip on Youtube to regulate it like a TV. Booking.com & Paypal are gone since years due to licensing. As soon as you have your definitions somebody will have to make sure that you are acting accordingly, so rules for the publishers and licensing For the platforms to control the publishers will follow. With the everything happening, that’s the feature for everyone and let me tell you, it’s not fun.

hyper0perator 6y ago
Disagree. Newspapers and ISP follow under this regulation. Social media networks have been able to skirt the issue. If newspapers can get sued for their content and the phone company can't, it only makes sense that this applies to social media companies are held to the same liabilities or protections.
- mrtksn 6y ago
  Sure, the issue is that now it is technically possible To do much more. With the phone company it’s impractical to listen to every conversation and “eliminate the threats”, it is practical with the internet. EU wants upload filters(stop singing “happy birthday” to your friend, that needs lives), UK want porn and crypto control(no dirty talk on the phone, no secretive talks, must speak load and clear). Turkey wants to control the narrative(An operator jumps in your phone conversation to correct you or stop you talking). I am sure That US, Canada, Norway , Iran, India etc all have their own agenda too and would loved to control your phone conversations. As for the liability, it’s already here. A lot of people are serving time or paying damages for the things they did on the internet. The new stuff is to make it controllable at scale.

zarkov99 6y ago

Not every company. But certainly google, facebook and twitter.

slg 6y ago

>If you're a platform, you're not responsible for what your users say (except directly illegal stuff, eg. child porn), and have no say in what stays on, or gets removed/hidden (except, again, illegal stuff). That sounds nice and easy until you start thinking about it for any length of time. The biggest problem might be who gets to decide what is illegal. This needs to be figured out in both a theoretical and practical sense. On the theoretical side does Twitter allow Holocaust denial which is legal in the US but illegal in much of Europe? Does the US get to impose its views of free speech on the world? Does every jurisdiction get a different version of the site? On the practical side, what happens when the legality of something is up for debate? Maybe an image is revenge porn or maybe it is perfectly legal porn. Maybe a movie clip is a copyright violation and maybe it is fair use. Does Twitter take down that content as soon as there is a complaint? Does it have to wait for some legal action to start or finish? What is the recourse if something is taken down and later found to be legal content?

hyper0perator 6y ago
Legality under US free speech laws. See first amendment law literature.
jimmydorry 6y ago
>Maybe a movie clip is a copyright violation and maybe it is fair use. Does Twitter take down that content as soon as there is a complaint? Does it have to wait for some legal action to start or finish? What is the recourse if something is taken down and later found to be legal content? We have the DMCA to cover this... however it's currently an extremely broken process. While there is a penalty codified for making claim to something you don't own, it is never enforced. That part of it needs to change and the regulation should then act in the manner it was designed to.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

blhack 6y ago

That is exactly what section 230 already does. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 Whats being talked about here is stripping the assumption that twitter is acting in good faith, and therefore removing the protection they get from this section.

jellicle 6y ago
So much confusion about this. What the prior commenter describes is exactly the OPPOSITE of what section 230 does. Under current law, companies are free to - specifically encouraged to - moderate and delete content as much as they want, while they are also immunized from being treated as the publisher of that content and immunized from any liability for that moderation and deletion of content.
- blhack 6y ago
  Section 230 is outlining a way in which an internet service can be exempted from liability. What part of this is causing you to read it another way?
  - jakelazaroff 6y ago
    Section 230 shields platform operators from liability for user-generated content. It does not set conditions for immunity such as not moderating. In fact, it was arguably created expressly to prevent this publisher/distributor dichotomy. Look at the cases against Prodigy and Compuserve for examples of the ambiguity Section 230 was introduced to resolve.
- NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
  Right. The historical context for Section 230 is that some providers that were trying to offer a family-safe online service (e.g. Prodigy) by moderating the content available, and therefore became liable as publishers. In fact, if you read Section 230 in its entirety, you can see that it is intended to encourage moderation of content based on what the provider considers to be objectionable.

newacct583 6y ago

> have no say in what stays on, or gets removed/hidden (except, again, illegal stuff). That would eliminate HN, Reddit, basically anywhere with a moderated forum. How do you run a site like Ravelry (knitting/crafting site) with a rule like that? Under your idea, the reddit would consist of "News Sites" and "4chan". (Actually even 4chan does some moderation). There's no way that would be acceptable.

jakelazaroff 6y ago

I have a blog. Let’s say I wanted to let people comment on my blog posts. One day, I get a ton of “I just made $X from my couch!” type comments. My readers try to discuss my latest post, but the spam is suffocating the conversation. What can I do? They’re not saying anything illegal. If I delete the spam or add some sort of filter, I’m now a “publisher” and liable for every comment my readers make. But if I leave them up, my readers will be frustrated that they can’t have a real discussion. So I don’t have comments. I really want discussions with my readers, but it’s just not worth the risk. Now imagine this happening to every website. Every community. Hacker News as we know it wouldn’t exist — probably no voting and certainly no moderation. The whole Internet would turn into a cesspool of spam and flame wars. Many apps wouldn’t even exist in the first place. All because we decided to enforce this entirely arbitrary “publisher vs. platform” dichotomy.

eli 6y ago

I’m surprised to see this point take on HN. Most people who suggest this don’t realize that it would eliminate public participation from most of the internet. There can be no comment sections or Reddit or HN or StackOverflow or Wikipedia in this model. It would be very difficult to have any discussion forum at all. It would lead to an internet where powerful voices are even more powerful (because they have big publishers that will stand behind their words) and where the average user has a much much harder time being heard.

sixothree 6y ago

This sounds incredibly anti-democratic.

morpheuskafka 6y ago

So a forum like HN cannot even have rules that a discussion has to be on topic/within the scope of the site? Wikipedia cannot have notability and credibility policies (I guess that is an edge case since it is other editors actually doing the removing, but according to community consensus guidelines)? A forum for a marginalized group needs to allow hate speech against them, so long as its not illegal? All the while they are not only putting up with the unwanted content, but paying out of their own pocket to host it? What you are saying about platforms should apply to utilities (ISPs, possible PaaS like AWS), which is where net neutrality comes in. ISPs shouldn't block stuff they or the government doesn't like, slow it down, or otherwise interfere with traffic.

guscost 6y ago
Is it time for Twitter to be considered a utility? ISPs evolved from “online service providers” which themselves evolved from “bulletin board systems”, and if you consider an ISP to be a utility today, then there was a point where that kind of service became a utility.
- holler 6y ago
  Why? I'm not a fan of that idea as I'd rather find ways to spur new competition. Also, anyone can live without Twitter or any social network, whereas its harder to live without electricity, water, etc.
- morpheuskafka 6y ago
  Historically, utilities/public services are things that have a natural monopoly, which absolutely applies to ISP/other wireline telcoms (city franchise licenses), mobile cell service (limited competition due to spectrum auctions and the need for enough nationwide spectrum to be accumulated to launch a viable service), water, sewer, power, gas, etc. It might apply to things like undersea cables, although there isn't really a natural monopoly (plenty of space under the ocean) and those primarily connect two privately owned datacenters. It applies to other services such as post office and city trash where either laws (private express statutes) prohibit competition for the sake of making the public service more profitable, or where taxes force the customer to "buy" the public trash pickup, making even the best-run private enterprise unable to compete. It is technically quite trivial to clone the basic functionality of Twitter and run a competing service. This has been done semi-sucessfully with Gab (not endorsing that community, but it is a good example), for example. People choose social media services based on their perceived value, social prestige, etc. There's no equivalent to "I have to use Twitter because they own the lines to the house/they have the only 5G coverage in my area/they are the only company licensed by my city." Twitter is not the only physically possible way to publish short messages to the world (unless the ISPs ruin that now that net neutrality is gone).

Meph504 6y ago

I'm having a hard time recalling any service that didn't have any content moderation, even on top of laws. The idea that content moderation makes you a publisher seems a bit silly to me. If I have a platform for selling say automobiles, and people keep trying to sell kitchenware of something equally not off brand. Removing that content doesn't make you a publisher, it makes you a steward of the purpose of a platform. The idea that moderation or cultivation of a platform, sudden makes you a "publisher" (which is frankly a term that shouldn't even be used in this case as it is too narrow for the web is) makes no sense. This is, a bullshit threat to try and assert control over platforms that people interact on by the government. It isn't needed, and is likely to be harmful.

argomo 6y ago

Is the following statement legal or illegal? "Man, nothing ends the day like a nice cold beer." Clearly, that's legal. But if I'm running a platform, I should be able to hide/downrank/shadowban/censor it based on what sort of community I'm trying to build. In a kid-oriented venue, it's inappropriate. In a recovering alcoholics group it's harmful/malicious. In a tech forum, it's low value. If you went to a school, an AA meeting, or a tech conference and talked about beer overbearingly, you'd be asked to leave the venue, and that would be their right. As onerous as it is to have legitimate, authentic speech banned from a popular platform, the alternative of allowing all speech effectively creates a worthless noise chamber dominated by bad actors.