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I view it as a failure of the current political climate that we need to turn to Facebook to fund an oversight board. A few months ago, Congress had a chance to
by Aunche 6y ago
I view it as a failure of the current political climate that we need to turn to Facebook to fund an oversight board. A few months ago, Congress had a chance to cross examine the world's most influential CEOs about Section 230 to help them come up with meaningful legislation. Instead, they squandered the opportunity by complaining about decisions or content they found objectionable.
- saddlerustle 6y agoDespite all the talk, ultimately, the first amendment means congress has relatively little power over the content on social media websites.
- codezero 6y agoMy experience workin with lawyers enforcing content policies for social media sites based on laws, I uh, can’t quite agree with you. Example: recommended not to go to trail to keep questions & answers about math homework problems on a site because there was a successful argument that it’s illegal to copy/distribute the answer key to a copyrighted math textbook, so having them collected in a category on a website at scale would create an easy target for many publishers to litigate on some subset of content, and the content would be at high risk of being considered illegal under DMCA. (A good argument for decentralization, but leaves big gap in curation which many people consider critical) Fun part is that this hasn’t been tested (or hadn’t since I was doing that stuff) but the fact that lawyers direct these decisions based on experience and companies choose to pay or not pay based on that, your fantasy of some kind of unambiguous first amendment that the US government or legal system doesn’t regulate sounds hilariously uninformed.
- saddlerustle 6y agoCopyright is one broad exception to the first amendment, yes, but note it's only an exception because enforcing copyright is a power explicitly granted by the constitution. Most acknowledged first amendment exceptions are relatively narrow, at least compared to the controversial parts of the facebook content policy.
- codezero 6y agoThey are narrow, but broadly applied when useful, or abused by holders.
- chrisco255 6y agoWhat even is this? A board funded by Facebook is supposed to be some sort of neutral arbiter of what's allowed to be on their site?