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It should not be the job of the social media companies to be judge and jury for truth. Let the people decide for themselves what is true and false. Basically t

It should not be the job of the social media companies to be judge and jury for truth. Let the people decide for themselves what is true and false. Basically the social media company argument is... we think people are too dumb to figure out what is "real" or not so we are going to censor. That to me is an extremely damning view of the common person. But then, everywhere on the platform.. "make a plan to vote". So you trust people to vote but don't trust them with the unfiltered information so they can inform themselves without outside intervention?

cycrutchfield 6y ago
If social media companies don't want to be used as transmission vectors of obvious foreign political influence, then they don't have to be. Just like if they don't want to be used as transmission vectors of pornography or any other type of content, then they don't have to be. In both cases it requires setting some sort of content standard and making decisions about whether the content meets that standard.
- cjjuice 6y ago
  If it is truly foreign influence, then it is on the FBI/DoJ to do the investigation and publicly declare it as such and order it to be taken down. Social Media companies are not equipped to make that distinction and should not do so.
  - cycrutchfield 6y ago
    "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes"
  - Splendor 6y ago
    Are you arguing that social media companies should not remove posts and instead let normal individuals determine what's true; while also arguing that billion-dollar social media companies are not capable of determining what's true?
La1n 6y ago
>That to me is an extremely damning view of the common person. But fake news has been spreading a lot, while maybe not in your circles it does still happen. And retraction or an apology article will not be spread as widely due to the fact that a lot of fake news is specifically inflammatory to be spread quickly and widely.
- goalieca 6y ago
  The truth is often not black and white and doubly so when in the context of persuasion. When you start censoring information for accuracy then you're only getting one person's version of the truth which is even worse because now you're putting a gold stamp on it!
  - munk-a 6y ago
    That is a really really big danger here - but it's also how American media worked for a really long time. It comes with an enormous inherent pro-establishment bias but I think it's valid to view that bias as possibly being the lesser of evils. I'm still on the fence personally, this is a really hard problem.
munk-a 6y ago
The "common person" is honestly pretty depressing. The common person primarily votes based solely on a historical allegiance to a political party (be it individually formed or inherited) with about 75% of America essentially being unmovable D or R safe votes. Censorship is a hard question and I think we do need to have better laws promoting free access to material (even "libelous" material) but this is also an area where I think it's pretty clear the government has failed in a big way - twitter + FB shouldn't be news platforms, the dumb news aggregators (like google news) do a pretty good job of being dumb platforms, but those commentary platforms are being run by private entities that can "censor" speech as they like depending on how it benefits or harms their platform. America is in a bit of a crisis right now since the extreme partisan divide has driven the real media (print, TV) to actually split into mutually disproving and incompatible bubbles. On election night one half of the country is going to be absolutely astounded since everything they consumed said their candidate was going to win. I'm not certain what the solution is but some moderation is required to prevent the apparent acceptance of some pretty hateful views along with conspiracy theories. The Internet introduced clickbait to the world in a manner it never previously conceived of - tabloids have been around for ever but never gotten serious consideration - suddenly major political figures are embracing and re-packaging tabloid headlines and it's a bit of a crisis of information for our society.
- dasudasu 6y ago
  With two parties divided along ideological left-right lines, it’s expected that a majority won’t be switching side too often in their lifetime. The opposite would be ideologically weak parties doing a form of clientelism that would change according to the trends of the day.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    Comparing the US system with parliamentary governments - I reject the assumption that the two parties are clearly divided along left-right lines. People all have a pretty wide diversity of opinions there are plenty of people I know that are both pro-life and pro-medicare for all - they don't have a home in the US political system and thus have to settle for one party of the other. The US's two-party entrenchment forces this false appearance of an us vs. them political battle. It's true that in the US you can only legitimately vote for either D or R in races and that this further entrenches the two parties - but issue voters should be flowing pretty freely between the two parties as their individual focuses shift.
ntsplnkv2 6y ago
Why? Who's job should it be? > we think people are too dumb to figure out what is "real" or not so we are going to censor. That to me is an extremely damning view of the common person. Maybe dumb is the wrong word - but most people are not that bright. There's nothing wrong with saying that - it's why BS marketing is so effective.
thereare5lights 6y ago
> That to me is an extremely damning view of the common person. Isn't it self evident by now that most people lack critical thinking skills?
- efa 6y ago
  Yes. And yet ever five seconds I'm bombarded by someone telling me to vote. I guess they don't care if people without critical thinking skills vote.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    It's my opinion that getting everyone to vote is the best option - there is a whole big chunk of the electorate that's quite uninformed but any attempt to narrow down the pool of eligible voters seems quite likely to fall into authoritarianism to me. We've got a lot of historical evidence about what happens if you let only people of certain skin colors, gender or wealth vote and all of those approaches were eventually rejected in favor of a universal voting system[1]. Democracy seems like our best bet for a fair and just government and I'm strongly in favor of having better representation of the actual beliefs of the citizenry - even if they're folks I disagree with. 1. Assuming you ignore American oddities like the electoral college, ignore tacitly socially accepted voter suppression and accept that minimum voting ages should be a thing (which I'm still pretty "meh" on personally but whatever).
    - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
      Do you think there is also a danger of uninformed voters bringing about authoritarianism?
      - munk-a 6y ago
        Absolutely yea - especially since we're sorta leaning that way in America right now. But I think that that risk is coming out of undemocratic qualities of our government rather than the democratic ones. I really really want to dump FPTP voting since I think it inevitably leads to two party systems and that two-party partisan us vs. them politics is what lets authoritarianism grow.
didibus 6y ago
> It should not be the job of the social media companies to be judge and jury for truth. Let the people decide for themselves what is true and false This only works if they remove themselves from choosing what to show who, what to promote, and what to demote. As long as they are actively choosing who will see what, how often, what things will be promoted, etc. Then they are basically the judge and jury. This is their current dilemma. That's why they're starting to have stronger moderation. They'd want to actively promote things that make them money, and moderate away all things that puts them in hot water, without it affecting the money they make.
colinmhayes 6y ago
Unfortunately most people are too blinded by political allegiance too correctly decide what is true. Might be a damming view of the common person but that doesn't make it untrue.
skybrian 6y ago
It's not that people are "too dumb" but rather that they aren't going to do the work needed to verify a story. How many phone calls do you make to verify something before resharing it? Most people make zero phone calls. If you don't do the work, there's no reason to believe that you can do as good a job judging plausibility of a story as a good journalist can do. It's not about who's smarter, it's about not having the evidence. I don't make any phone calls either, but I try to crib from people who do their homework. I also appreciate basic filtering to keep the noise down. It's not that I couldn't do my own spam filtering, but rather I don't want to.
HelloMcFly 6y ago
I can appreciate the deeply principled stand people on HN tend to make about this issue. I know there is a libertarian streak here around the access to content and information. I don't share those values, and think unchecked distribution of manipulated content creates a worse outcome for our society; I'd argue it is more inherently dystopian than straight-up government censored speech, which of course is not what's at stake here. It doesn't matter whether I trust them to vote because they have a right to vote no matter what I think. I definitely do not trust masses of people to identify real vs. manipulated content that is expertly designed to be misleading, and I think companies that directly facilitate the spread of information have some level of responsibility for the consequences of enabling manipulated media to infect their users. I don't know what the balance is, I'm not dogmatic, but I think everyone needs to be a little less dogmatic on this issue.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- cjjuice 6y ago
  Well argued point. However, I would counter that we should not do evil in the pursuit of good. Let's find another way that does not limit free speech. It will be a harder solution to find sure, but the converse is too dangerous and nuanced to be implemented. It also gives social media companies undue influence over our democracy.
  - HelloMcFly 6y ago
    I suppose at the end of the day, I just don't see Twitter or Facebook playing some level of QA in manipulated media as censorship of free speech. Requiring some level of investigative work before publishing potential election-changing "news" doesn't seem at all controversial to me. Social media companies already have undue influence over our democracy. I think we've already seen the damage they can do when they take a hands-off approach. There is no action they can take (or not take) that will not have major political implications. Do nothing and misinformation spreads like wildfire, likely first by bad-faith actors then by good and bad-faith actors. But doing something is fraught. Yet, I advocate for trying something over keeping one's hand off the till as we're talking about the real world here, and it is marginalized and under-served communities that ultimately pay the price.
varispeed 6y ago
Exactly this. Medium that uses censorship for any reason, they think you are too stupid to understand the content in front of you so they take that decision from you to delete something. That should be illegal with few exceptions.
- rhizome 6y ago
  >That should be illegal with few exceptions. And thus the right wing comes around to centralized government control of companies.
  - varispeed 6y ago
    Not sure what it has to do with right/left wing. Free speech should exist regardless of your economic or social views and should be protected with the force of law.
    - anthonypasq 6y ago
      how is forcing a company to platform your views free speech?
      - varispeed 6y ago
        Platforms should welcome users of any background and views. Company shouldn't be able to ban someone based on their views and opinions. If user will violating T&C or the law then company should be able to remove the account.
    - rhizome 6y ago
      Because the (US) right wing and libertarians are the forces first to raise a hue and cry of socialism and central planning in response to any suggestion of government oversight of corporate activities.
  - girvo 6y ago
    That’s just the AuthRight, which to be honest seem to make up most right wing discourse these days. It’s curious.
rhizome 6y ago
>Basically the social media company argument is... we think people are too dumb to figure out what is "real" or not so we are going to censor Why can't "we don't want this trash on our site" be the reason? It's "funny" how those who want to propagate banned material always cast themselves as some repressed group subject to the tyranny of government power. It can still be posted on Gab or Parler, right?
- hiram112 6y ago
  > Why can't "we don't want this trash on our site" be the reason? That's a perfectly fine stance, and it has worked well for traditional publishers like the NY Times and Washington Post for decades. They control all their content, and publish exactly the narrative they want. OTOH, if NY Times publishes an OP Ed that slanders and doxes me, causes me to lose my job, etc. then I have the legal right to sue them. See for example the Covington Kid[1]. Facebook and Google want to have their cake and eat it too. They want free rein to pretend like they're just aggregating content, but this election shows that they are definitely using both AI and humans to control what's published. So why should they enjoy all the rights of both a "tech platform" and also a traditional publisher, with none of the responsibilities and liabilities? Section 230 was crafted explicitly for tech. It can be modified or removed, too. [1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=covington+kid+lawsuit https://www.google.com/search?q=covington+kid+lawsuit
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    Well no, the entire point of 230 was to allow content aggregators to actively moderate content. As I see it, there are three options: 1. "platforms" are not allowed to moderate content (pre-section 230) without getting liable. 2. What we have now (sites can moderate as they see fit) 3. Some external board adjudicates on what it is acceptable to moderate Of these, 3 seems by far the worst, and 2 seems better than 1 on empirical grounds. > OTOH, if NY Times publishes an OP Ed that slanders and doxes me, causes me to lose my job, etc. then I have the legal right to sue them. You also have the legal right to sue Google if they publish content that slanders you. You can even sue them for doxxing you. You wouldn't win either one. Nor would you win if you sued the NYT for doxxing you, or if an NYT article caused you to lose your job. Keep in mind that "the covington kid" didn't actually win any lawsuits, he sued a bunch of people for ridiculous amounts and settled out of court for, likely, a relatively trivial sum. It might have paid for his college, and that was mostly "make it go away" money. He's the free speech equivalent of a patent troll.
chmod775 6y ago
> Basically the social media company argument is... we think people are too dumb to figure out what is "real" or not so we are going to censor. Most platforms, Twitter included, just wanted to be dumb service providers. They don't want to spend money and carry responsibility moderating content. It was large media outlets and the public outrage they produced over "fake news" and "the far right" that pressured them into taking a more proactive stance. People like me who were opposing it back then and saying "you don't know what you're asking for" got labeled far right, and essentially bunched with Trump, which was hilarious to me as a left leaning European. Newspapers now becoming angry Twitter is evenly applying the new rules - the rules newspapers lobbied for - is even more hilarious to me. And you have to understand that Twitter did not make a mistake in how they responded to this. The article objectively was against their rules. Whether these rules are good rules is another matter, but clearly the whole thing was dumb from the start.
- kelnos 6y ago
  > Most platforms, Twitter included, just wanted to be dumb service providers. They don't want to spend money and carry responsibility moderating content. Not really. They already spend time and money figuring out what content to promote and demote in order to increase engagement and maximize their ad revenue. They're just finding that the some of the kinds of things that tend to surface because of that are the kinds of things that they need to moderate, otherwise people (both users and advertisers) will get fed up with the platform and leave.
ilikehurdles 6y ago
> It should not be the job of the social media companies to be judge and jury for truth. You present this as an axiom, like it's some kind of foregone conclusion, but why? Why shouldn't they be allowed to curate what content makes on their platform? I'm not saying they should have a legal mandate to judge truth, but if they object to certain publications, articles, authors, posts, etc, that's up to them.
hellotomyrars 6y ago
"Unfiltered Information" is a nice ideal but it's also just not true. Additionally it doesn't account for intentional disinformation. Regardless of the source, the information has already been filtered through whoever is presenting it. (In this specific case I think the actions taken by Twitter were bone-headed/shortsighted but Twitter has no obligation to host any content or uphold your first amendment rights because they don't apply to Twitter.)
picardythird 6y ago
But here you have a man who stormed a pizza parlor with an AR-15, ready to uncover the global cabal of pedophilia that has infiltrated the Democratic Party. Or the woman who won't vaccinate her children because she believes vaccines cause autism. Or the person, communicating via the satellites that circle the Earth, who believes that the Earth is flat. These people aren't rare - they're common. We live in an era of disinformation, and the very idea of truth has been eroded. False stories spread over Twitter like wildfire, and to think that the majority of the thousands of readers who consume them are fact-checking them is perhaps a bit hopeful.
- rightbyte 6y ago
  Lack of mental institutions are to blame not free speech on Twitter and FB. How about not making policys to combat covid-5g and the flat earth club.
  - picardythird 6y ago
    Twitter is not a bastion of free speech though, because a huge fraction of it is simply propaganda posing as free speech. On the day of the 2016 election, one of the top ten most re-tweeted accounts was a fake Russian account posing as an American conservative organization. Covid-56 and flat earthers are some of the most outlandish examples, but the vast majority of misinformation is more subtle, and therefore more insidious. I'm not suggesting what the solution should be, but it's clear that complete un-regulation has lead to a completely broken information space.
SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
> Let the people decide for themselves what is true and false. They can't. They simply aren't capable. I don't even have to use a fallacy, this is literally happening: The US has a growing population of people who sincerely believe devil-worshiping democrats are drinking the blood of stolen children. 15 are running for US congress. We no longer need to even "slippery slope it", the worst-case scenario is happening: disinformation is usurping facts at an alarming rate with very real consequences.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
dahart 6y ago
Not disagreeing, but your comment leaves me with a lot of questions... What would be the difference in this argument between 'social media' and other media? For example, should the same be true of newspapers? What about scientific or government publications? If people should be allowed to decide for themselves what is true, should private for-profit companies also be allowed to decide what is true for themselves? Do you consider stories that are verifiably false to be "unfiltered information"? Why should it be considered "information" if it's not true? Does it matter if the information being presented was known to be false and is being published for subversive politically motivated reasons? Is your framing that they're saying people are dumb really true if the "information" is difficult or impossible to verify? Does it matter if it's a breaking story and there's only one such source of information? Does it matter if, statistically, there's a sizeable portion of smart people that will accept published stories as true?

cycrutchfield 6y ago

If social media companies don't want to be used as transmission vectors of obvious foreign political influence, then they don't have to be. Just like if they don't want to be used as transmission vectors of pornography or any other type of content, then they don't have to be. In both cases it requires setting some sort of content standard and making decisions about whether the content meets that standard.

cjjuice 6y ago
If it is truly foreign influence, then it is on the FBI/DoJ to do the investigation and publicly declare it as such and order it to be taken down. Social Media companies are not equipped to make that distinction and should not do so.
- cycrutchfield 6y ago
  "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes"
- Splendor 6y ago
  Are you arguing that social media companies should not remove posts and instead let normal individuals determine what's true; while also arguing that billion-dollar social media companies are not capable of determining what's true?

La1n 6y ago

>That to me is an extremely damning view of the common person. But fake news has been spreading a lot, while maybe not in your circles it does still happen. And retraction or an apology article will not be spread as widely due to the fact that a lot of fake news is specifically inflammatory to be spread quickly and widely.

goalieca 6y ago
The truth is often not black and white and doubly so when in the context of persuasion. When you start censoring information for accuracy then you're only getting one person's version of the truth which is even worse because now you're putting a gold stamp on it!
- munk-a 6y ago
  That is a really really big danger here - but it's also how American media worked for a really long time. It comes with an enormous inherent pro-establishment bias but I think it's valid to view that bias as possibly being the lesser of evils. I'm still on the fence personally, this is a really hard problem.

munk-a 6y ago

The "common person" is honestly pretty depressing. The common person primarily votes based solely on a historical allegiance to a political party (be it individually formed or inherited) with about 75% of America essentially being unmovable D or R safe votes. Censorship is a hard question and I think we do need to have better laws promoting free access to material (even "libelous" material) but this is also an area where I think it's pretty clear the government has failed in a big way - twitter + FB shouldn't be news platforms, the dumb news aggregators (like google news) do a pretty good job of being dumb platforms, but those commentary platforms are being run by private entities that can "censor" speech as they like depending on how it benefits or harms their platform. America is in a bit of a crisis right now since the extreme partisan divide has driven the real media (print, TV) to actually split into mutually disproving and incompatible bubbles. On election night one half of the country is going to be absolutely astounded since everything they consumed said their candidate was going to win. I'm not certain what the solution is but some moderation is required to prevent the apparent acceptance of some pretty hateful views along with conspiracy theories. The Internet introduced clickbait to the world in a manner it never previously conceived of - tabloids have been around for ever but never gotten serious consideration - suddenly major political figures are embracing and re-packaging tabloid headlines and it's a bit of a crisis of information for our society.

dasudasu 6y ago
With two parties divided along ideological left-right lines, it’s expected that a majority won’t be switching side too often in their lifetime. The opposite would be ideologically weak parties doing a form of clientelism that would change according to the trends of the day.
- munk-a 6y ago
  Comparing the US system with parliamentary governments - I reject the assumption that the two parties are clearly divided along left-right lines. People all have a pretty wide diversity of opinions there are plenty of people I know that are both pro-life and pro-medicare for all - they don't have a home in the US political system and thus have to settle for one party of the other. The US's two-party entrenchment forces this false appearance of an us vs. them political battle. It's true that in the US you can only legitimately vote for either D or R in races and that this further entrenches the two parties - but issue voters should be flowing pretty freely between the two parties as their individual focuses shift.

ntsplnkv2 6y ago

Why? Who's job should it be? > we think people are too dumb to figure out what is "real" or not so we are going to censor. That to me is an extremely damning view of the common person. Maybe dumb is the wrong word - but most people are not that bright. There's nothing wrong with saying that - it's why BS marketing is so effective.

thereare5lights 6y ago

> That to me is an extremely damning view of the common person. Isn't it self evident by now that most people lack critical thinking skills?

efa 6y ago
Yes. And yet ever five seconds I'm bombarded by someone telling me to vote. I guess they don't care if people without critical thinking skills vote.
- munk-a 6y ago
  It's my opinion that getting everyone to vote is the best option - there is a whole big chunk of the electorate that's quite uninformed but any attempt to narrow down the pool of eligible voters seems quite likely to fall into authoritarianism to me. We've got a lot of historical evidence about what happens if you let only people of certain skin colors, gender or wealth vote and all of those approaches were eventually rejected in favor of a universal voting system[1]. Democracy seems like our best bet for a fair and just government and I'm strongly in favor of having better representation of the actual beliefs of the citizenry - even if they're folks I disagree with. 1. Assuming you ignore American oddities like the electoral college, ignore tacitly socially accepted voter suppression and accept that minimum voting ages should be a thing (which I'm still pretty "meh" on personally but whatever).
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    Do you think there is also a danger of uninformed voters bringing about authoritarianism?
    - munk-a 6y ago
      Absolutely yea - especially since we're sorta leaning that way in America right now. But I think that that risk is coming out of undemocratic qualities of our government rather than the democratic ones. I really really want to dump FPTP voting since I think it inevitably leads to two party systems and that two-party partisan us vs. them politics is what lets authoritarianism grow.

didibus 6y ago

> It should not be the job of the social media companies to be judge and jury for truth. Let the people decide for themselves what is true and false This only works if they remove themselves from choosing what to show who, what to promote, and what to demote. As long as they are actively choosing who will see what, how often, what things will be promoted, etc. Then they are basically the judge and jury. This is their current dilemma. That's why they're starting to have stronger moderation. They'd want to actively promote things that make them money, and moderate away all things that puts them in hot water, without it affecting the money they make.

colinmhayes 6y ago

Unfortunately most people are too blinded by political allegiance too correctly decide what is true. Might be a damming view of the common person but that doesn't make it untrue.

skybrian 6y ago

It's not that people are "too dumb" but rather that they aren't going to do the work needed to verify a story. How many phone calls do you make to verify something before resharing it? Most people make zero phone calls. If you don't do the work, there's no reason to believe that you can do as good a job judging plausibility of a story as a good journalist can do. It's not about who's smarter, it's about not having the evidence. I don't make any phone calls either, but I try to crib from people who do their homework. I also appreciate basic filtering to keep the noise down. It's not that I couldn't do my own spam filtering, but rather I don't want to.

HelloMcFly 6y ago

I can appreciate the deeply principled stand people on HN tend to make about this issue. I know there is a libertarian streak here around the access to content and information. I don't share those values, and think unchecked distribution of manipulated content creates a worse outcome for our society; I'd argue it is more inherently dystopian than straight-up government censored speech, which of course is not what's at stake here. It doesn't matter whether I trust them to vote because they have a right to vote no matter what I think. I definitely do not trust masses of people to identify real vs. manipulated content that is expertly designed to be misleading, and I think companies that directly facilitate the spread of information have some level of responsibility for the consequences of enabling manipulated media to infect their users. I don't know what the balance is, I'm not dogmatic, but I think everyone needs to be a little less dogmatic on this issue.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cjjuice 6y ago
Well argued point. However, I would counter that we should not do evil in the pursuit of good. Let's find another way that does not limit free speech. It will be a harder solution to find sure, but the converse is too dangerous and nuanced to be implemented. It also gives social media companies undue influence over our democracy.
- HelloMcFly 6y ago
  I suppose at the end of the day, I just don't see Twitter or Facebook playing some level of QA in manipulated media as censorship of free speech. Requiring some level of investigative work before publishing potential election-changing "news" doesn't seem at all controversial to me. Social media companies already have undue influence over our democracy. I think we've already seen the damage they can do when they take a hands-off approach. There is no action they can take (or not take) that will not have major political implications. Do nothing and misinformation spreads like wildfire, likely first by bad-faith actors then by good and bad-faith actors. But doing something is fraught. Yet, I advocate for trying something over keeping one's hand off the till as we're talking about the real world here, and it is marginalized and under-served communities that ultimately pay the price.

varispeed 6y ago

Exactly this. Medium that uses censorship for any reason, they think you are too stupid to understand the content in front of you so they take that decision from you to delete something. That should be illegal with few exceptions.

rhizome 6y ago
>That should be illegal with few exceptions. And thus the right wing comes around to centralized government control of companies.
- varispeed 6y ago
  Not sure what it has to do with right/left wing. Free speech should exist regardless of your economic or social views and should be protected with the force of law.
  - anthonypasq 6y ago
    how is forcing a company to platform your views free speech?
    - varispeed 6y ago
      Platforms should welcome users of any background and views. Company shouldn't be able to ban someone based on their views and opinions. If user will violating T&C or the law then company should be able to remove the account.
  - rhizome 6y ago
    Because the (US) right wing and libertarians are the forces first to raise a hue and cry of socialism and central planning in response to any suggestion of government oversight of corporate activities.
- girvo 6y ago
  That’s just the AuthRight, which to be honest seem to make up most right wing discourse these days. It’s curious.

rhizome 6y ago

>Basically the social media company argument is... we think people are too dumb to figure out what is "real" or not so we are going to censor Why can't "we don't want this trash on our site" be the reason? It's "funny" how those who want to propagate banned material always cast themselves as some repressed group subject to the tyranny of government power. It can still be posted on Gab or Parler, right?

hiram112 6y ago
> Why can't "we don't want this trash on our site" be the reason? That's a perfectly fine stance, and it has worked well for traditional publishers like the NY Times and Washington Post for decades. They control all their content, and publish exactly the narrative they want. OTOH, if NY Times publishes an OP Ed that slanders and doxes me, causes me to lose my job, etc. then I have the legal right to sue them. See for example the Covington Kid[1]. Facebook and Google want to have their cake and eat it too. They want free rein to pretend like they're just aggregating content, but this election shows that they are definitely using both AI and humans to control what's published. So why should they enjoy all the rights of both a "tech platform" and also a traditional publisher, with none of the responsibilities and liabilities? Section 230 was crafted explicitly for tech. It can be modified or removed, too. [1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=covington+kid+lawsuit https://www.google.com/search?q=covington+kid+lawsuit
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  Well no, the entire point of 230 was to allow content aggregators to actively moderate content. As I see it, there are three options: 1. "platforms" are not allowed to moderate content (pre-section 230) without getting liable. 2. What we have now (sites can moderate as they see fit) 3. Some external board adjudicates on what it is acceptable to moderate Of these, 3 seems by far the worst, and 2 seems better than 1 on empirical grounds. > OTOH, if NY Times publishes an OP Ed that slanders and doxes me, causes me to lose my job, etc. then I have the legal right to sue them. You also have the legal right to sue Google if they publish content that slanders you. You can even sue them for doxxing you. You wouldn't win either one. Nor would you win if you sued the NYT for doxxing you, or if an NYT article caused you to lose your job. Keep in mind that "the covington kid" didn't actually win any lawsuits, he sued a bunch of people for ridiculous amounts and settled out of court for, likely, a relatively trivial sum. It might have paid for his college, and that was mostly "make it go away" money. He's the free speech equivalent of a patent troll.

chmod775 6y ago

> Basically the social media company argument is... we think people are too dumb to figure out what is "real" or not so we are going to censor. Most platforms, Twitter included, just wanted to be dumb service providers. They don't want to spend money and carry responsibility moderating content. It was large media outlets and the public outrage they produced over "fake news" and "the far right" that pressured them into taking a more proactive stance. People like me who were opposing it back then and saying "you don't know what you're asking for" got labeled far right, and essentially bunched with Trump, which was hilarious to me as a left leaning European. Newspapers now becoming angry Twitter is evenly applying the new rules - the rules newspapers lobbied for - is even more hilarious to me. And you have to understand that Twitter did not make a mistake in how they responded to this. The article objectively was against their rules. Whether these rules are good rules is another matter, but clearly the whole thing was dumb from the start.

kelnos 6y ago
> Most platforms, Twitter included, just wanted to be dumb service providers. They don't want to spend money and carry responsibility moderating content. Not really. They already spend time and money figuring out what content to promote and demote in order to increase engagement and maximize their ad revenue. They're just finding that the some of the kinds of things that tend to surface because of that are the kinds of things that they need to moderate, otherwise people (both users and advertisers) will get fed up with the platform and leave.

ilikehurdles 6y ago

> It should not be the job of the social media companies to be judge and jury for truth. You present this as an axiom, like it's some kind of foregone conclusion, but why? Why shouldn't they be allowed to curate what content makes on their platform? I'm not saying they should have a legal mandate to judge truth, but if they object to certain publications, articles, authors, posts, etc, that's up to them.

hellotomyrars 6y ago

"Unfiltered Information" is a nice ideal but it's also just not true. Additionally it doesn't account for intentional disinformation. Regardless of the source, the information has already been filtered through whoever is presenting it. (In this specific case I think the actions taken by Twitter were bone-headed/shortsighted but Twitter has no obligation to host any content or uphold your first amendment rights because they don't apply to Twitter.)

picardythird 6y ago

But here you have a man who stormed a pizza parlor with an AR-15, ready to uncover the global cabal of pedophilia that has infiltrated the Democratic Party. Or the woman who won't vaccinate her children because she believes vaccines cause autism. Or the person, communicating via the satellites that circle the Earth, who believes that the Earth is flat. These people aren't rare - they're common. We live in an era of disinformation, and the very idea of truth has been eroded. False stories spread over Twitter like wildfire, and to think that the majority of the thousands of readers who consume them are fact-checking them is perhaps a bit hopeful.

rightbyte 6y ago
Lack of mental institutions are to blame not free speech on Twitter and FB. How about not making policys to combat covid-5g and the flat earth club.
- picardythird 6y ago
  Twitter is not a bastion of free speech though, because a huge fraction of it is simply propaganda posing as free speech. On the day of the 2016 election, one of the top ten most re-tweeted accounts was a fake Russian account posing as an American conservative organization. Covid-56 and flat earthers are some of the most outlandish examples, but the vast majority of misinformation is more subtle, and therefore more insidious. I'm not suggesting what the solution should be, but it's clear that complete un-regulation has lead to a completely broken information space.

SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago

> Let the people decide for themselves what is true and false. They can't. They simply aren't capable. I don't even have to use a fallacy, this is literally happening: The US has a growing population of people who sincerely believe devil-worshiping democrats are drinking the blood of stolen children. 15 are running for US congress. We no longer need to even "slippery slope it", the worst-case scenario is happening: disinformation is usurping facts at an alarming rate with very real consequences.

deleted 6y ago
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dahart 6y ago

Not disagreeing, but your comment leaves me with a lot of questions... What would be the difference in this argument between 'social media' and other media? For example, should the same be true of newspapers? What about scientific or government publications? If people should be allowed to decide for themselves what is true, should private for-profit companies also be allowed to decide what is true for themselves? Do you consider stories that are verifiably false to be "unfiltered information"? Why should it be considered "information" if it's not true? Does it matter if the information being presented was known to be false and is being published for subversive politically motivated reasons? Is your framing that they're saying people are dumb really true if the "information" is difficult or impossible to verify? Does it matter if it's a breaking story and there's only one such source of information? Does it matter if, statistically, there's a sizeable portion of smart people that will accept published stories as true?