7 ms·

If the speech on Twitter is Twitter’s speech, then if someone defames me on Twitter, I should be able to sue Twitter. Just like if a reporter in the New York Ti

• 8note 6y ago
  Don't have an obligation to censor it, sure, but they'll never have an obligation to keep it up. If they run out of money, the servers go down and the posts stop being available. Unless the government is taking over paying for hosting the user content, the server owners will be able to not host it
  • 6510 6y ago
    I don't know. If I want to publish something I need a tool that publishes it. If everything can just vanish at any time it can have terrible consequences. Competing with businesses that are allowed to make false promises is really hard. I would have much rather paid in stead of losing the audience and the communities I build again and again and again and again until I just gave up. Before I deleted everything I had many thousands of well organized bookmarks gathered over decades. 90% of it was dead links. My blog is 90% dead links. Many people have some perverted fetish with deleting the proverbial geocities, I have hundreds of articles that don't function without. I'm not allowed to republish [your] lost content either.
• bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  >Likewise Twitter and Facebook should be paying their users for providing content that they profit off of, like newspapers pay reporters. Then they can have standing to choose what they want to publish. What? This sounds like you're arguing that Twitter and Facebook are legally obligated to publish everything a user posts because they don't pay their users?
  • tgragnato 6y ago
    They are because there’s been an historical division between publishers and carriers. 230 is about that, it lets intermediaries create policies, without having to choose between being publishers or carriers. Disclaimer: I don’t like this side effect too
    • pron 6y ago
      Any platform has always had the freedom to shape its reputation by choosing what to publish/amplify and how, within the law, regardless of what it pays the speakers (TV stations don't pay interviewees, for example). 230 has absolutely nothing at all to do with that.
      • tgragnato 6y ago
        230 protects moderation of published content. I hate the framing of the practical issues stemming from this in a matter of bipartisan policy. I’d suggests people are realizing giant Internet companies are chokepoints on the flow of information, and don’t like how this is being handled.
    • michaelmrose 6y ago
      There has been a division because historically publication was expensive and labor intensive not because of some inherent virtue of the arrangements. Some people who don't like the moderation policies have created a fictional world where such policies are wrong instead of merely disagreeable like someone who hates pineapple imagining that putting them on pizza violates some moral principal instead of merely their own tastes. If you examine such a request the user nearly always desires not broader liability for websites but for the government to use such liability as a cudgle to force websites to accept speech they would otherwise object to and host it on their platform. Effectively they want to take away others freedom and compell their speech. This is so obviously immoral that one wonders what moral principles could possibly justify this.
      • tgragnato 6y ago
• TameAntelope 6y ago
  I'm trying to understand what you're trying to fix with these declarations. What is the consequence of Twitter/Facebook not being responsible for content that appears on their site? Maybe you should be able to sue the NYT reporter. I think you can, in fact! I just don't understand what we're trying to accomplish with the changes to how things are currently. Maybe it would help if you described the world you'd rather live in, and how it differs from this world.
  • kortilla 6y ago
    > What is the consequence of Twitter/Facebook not being responsible for content that appears on their site? Well it’s what we have now. Mass misinformation and lies constantly being spread around. The trade-off we made was that it was supposed to be an unfiltered cesspool because it wasn’t feasible to censor views to match the editorial decisions of the company. However, AI has made if feasible to censor at scale and the companies want it both ways. They want editorial control and they still don’t want any responsibility for defamation. > Maybe you should be able to sue the NYT reporter. I think you can, in fact! That’s worse than being able to sue the NYT. It allows the NYT to hide behind pawns they would love to sacrifice in the name of spreading convenient lies.
    • TameAntelope 6y ago
      AI has not made it feasible to censor at scale, that is not correct. And as the article makes clear, the idea that Facebook is not responsible for the content its users create has nothing to do with the problem of misinformation. To solve one would not even touch the other. The suggestions I replied to seem focused on holding Twitter and Facebook accountable for what is displayed on their own website, regardless of provenance. It's not clear to me how that would enable anyone to safely create content that Facebook doesn't believe should be published on its platform. Without the separation of the creator of the content and the organization displaying that content, Facebook would grow more strict, not less. Fundamentally, you're trying to involve the government in deciding what "truth" is. That seems much worse than misinformation, yes?
      • 6y ago
• pron 6y ago
  You don't need any kind of standing to do what you're not prohibited to do by law, and the freedom to choose what to publish and amplify -- not because it is obligated to but to shape the institution's reputation -- is both well-established and crucial to both media organisations and universities.
• qudchewer 6y ago
  There is someone deciding on what content to post with the New York Times. If a site like twitter is engaging in that activity - then they should loose 230 immunity, because they are acting like a publisher instead of a platform. It seems relatively straight forward, doesn't it?
  • qudchewer 6y ago
    I don't understand why someone would down-vote this, please explain.
    • michaelmrose 6y ago
      It sounds like you like a lot of people have insufficient understanding of what 230 is. Most people who express similar theories really just want the government to make it illegal to moderate deplorables with a thin justification. It's easier to vote down and move on the 95th time someone makes a bad argument.
      • kortilla 6y ago
        What is a “deplorable”? If you’re using it in the same context as Hillary, that’s not really helping your argument because it’s an ill-defined slur used to describe millions of people.
        • michaelmrose 6y ago
          A deplorable defined one who holds odious beliefs or views that aren't merely wrong but actively harmful to themselves and others. Bigots, anti vaxxers, anti science (the process not a particular theory), people who support violence as a means to political change it n functional societies.
          • kortilla 6y ago
            Yep, keep in mind she described half of the people who voted for Trump like that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basket_of_deplorables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basket_of_deplorables) so the word basically means “Republican”. Using it is only useful as a Shibboleth to indicate you’re aligned with American leftist views.
• michaelmrose 6y ago
  Since we passed a law that says they can have it both ways they can indeed have it both ways and moderate as they choose while also avoiding legal liability for their users actions. Which part of this is problematic?
  • kortilla 6y ago
    That they escaped the legal liability despite clearly having the capability and intent to moderate. The reason the exemption was put in place initially was because they had no editorial goal and could not reasonably moderate users. Now they are no different than the NYT with a crowdsourced author pool except they aren’t liable for libel.
    • michaelmrose 6y ago
      How can youtube personally vet years of videos that are added in a day. Hell even this sites moderation team can't read all content in a reasonable time frame.
      • kortilla 6y ago
        Yet they had done so for people who hinted at election fraud, anti-mask info, etc. They clearly have the capacity to quickly speech recognize audio and match on keywords. They could drop all videos that even mention Taiwan tomorrow.
        • michaelmrose 6y ago
          How do you know they aren't relying on user reports and tracking who gets reported for what? If 17 people per video report election disinfo over the majority of the content an account posts maybe they post election disinfo. It's still impractical to remove enough to avoid being financially destroyed by even a minority of bad content if they were personally responsible for their users content given a single case could incur a 6 figure cost to win an unreasonable case.
• DanBC 6y ago
  Your post is really confusing. S230 says that a company won't be held responsible for some (but not all) user generated speech on their website. But it also says they do not lose those protections if they moderate that speech. The people who made the bill realised that companies need the ability to moderate content, and so they built it into the law. The vast majority of Internet users do not want dumb pipes and unmoderated content.
  • hackeraccount 6y ago
    What the parent is saying is pretty plain. If <social media company> is moderating content then they should be liable for it. If they're not liable for it then they shouldn't be moderating it. I understand that point of view but honestly it won't work for the simple reason that no one - not the providers and not the users - wants it to work that way. I firmly believe that if you try and setup the legal framework to get that configuration people will create technical work around after technical workaround until they get back to the status quo. It will be like nothing so much as the way SPAC's are used today. Whatever else they are they're a way to do an IPO as it was done before SOX. It's a technical end run of a law no one likes.
• nradov 6y ago
  The New York Times frequently publishes editorial content for which they pay nothing. People who aren't NYT employees want to get their message out so they write for free.
• URSpider94 6y ago
  What you’re describing is an untenable situation. So, let’s say that Twitter operates as you suggest, as an open platform, and people start posting child pornography, multi-level marketing scams, and racist imagery. Do they have to just suck it up and wait for the police and courts to tell them to take it down? In the mean time, they’ll lose all their customers. If you say, well of course they can take down kiddie porn, then you agree that they have the right to curate what is posted on their site, just not how much. Let’s say I run a BBS for stamp collectors, and a crowd of new members join and start talking about their upcoming white supremacist rally on the site. Can I delete their posts and ban them while still having safe harbor under 230? Or should I instead lose my 230 immunity and be forced to face liability over that post where Fred calls Jenny a nitwit loser because she got the date of the Amelia Aerhart first-day cover wrong? What if they’re just talking about knitting, on my stamp collecting forum? Then can I take it down? What if my forum is for young Democrats? Can I take down posts supporting Republican candidates?