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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

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?
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > Fundamentally, you're trying to involve the government in deciding what "truth" is. That seems much worse than misinformation, yes? We already have the courts involved in deciding what "truth" is. Has worked out pretty well in general, and certainly better than having private companies do it.
    - TameAntelope 6y ago
      Not to this extent, we do not. This would be a whole additional level, multiple levels even, more subjective. Honestly, it feels like a moot point anyway. The 1st Amendment makes all of this pointless to discuss. It will never happen, short of a literal collapse of the US Government and a reformation under a new Constitution that doesn't include the 1st Amendment. The government will never be involved in deciding what people can and can't say to the extent that this would require. It's antithetical to our current legal system (not to mention our cultural mores). Of course Twitter gets to decide what to publish on Twitter. There's literally no other way to operate, regardless of Section 230.
    - threatofrain 6y ago
      Misinformation is a flood by a million raindrops, and as courts are severely overtaxed, I shudder in asking for a magnitude more volume in a bunch of low severity cases. People will debate more or less police funding, but massively more judicial funding is on nobody’s radar. What the modern age calls for is the ability to easily enjoin a class of defendants and sue them all for $5, with adjudication taking 1 minute. Now your mom just lost $5 because she retweeted a MLM health scare scam 2 minutes ago.
      - Volundr 6y ago
        I don't think this is a good solution at all. If mom believed the scam at the time she retweeted it there's absolutely no crime there. Being wrong or deceived is not a crime. Frankly your proposing punishing the victim. Any actual solution would have to target the creators of the disinformation, and maybe those who knowingly spread it. Even that is hard in a freedom of speech context though. Even lies are free speech.
- cirno 6y ago
  > It allows the NYT to hide behind pawns they would love to sacrifice in the name of spreading convenient lies. And when it comes to Twitter or other sites, how do you sue one of its users who posts libel and defamation about your character, when said user is hiding behind a VPN anyway? Twitter is hosting the content, and chooses not to take it down, so if that content breaks actual laws (libel, cyberstalking, etc), they should be held responsible for it. Whereas if it falls within the purview of free speech, then they should have nothing to worry about. I realize it's not a popular sentiment here because we want to build platforms and not worry about the legality, but giving websites blanket immunity to host law-breaking content because "it was posted by someone else" means that all of our laws become unenforcable on the internet.
  - nradov 6y ago
    Twitter does take down content that breaks actual laws when ordered to so by a court. So the state you're asking for already exists.
    - cirno 6y ago
      I can't say I've even heard of a court order for Twitter to remove a tweet before. Is that really practical, though? To spend thousands of dollars on legal fees to take down a single tweet from an anonymous account that will just repost it again and again? Meanwhile every time Twitter is completely immune to any consequences for hosting and distributing said content? It's a sucky situation. A service like Twitter can't really function if they're responsible for the content on the site, but all our existing laws are effectively unenforceable on the web otherwise. I think the hope people have for the removal of section 230 shielding is that Twitter and other content hosting providers will take existing laws more seriously. For instance, Cloudflare today says "there should be laws to handle this stuff, we don't want to enforce anything", and to date the CEO has only ever made two exceptions to that. The contrarian side to that is going too far and Twitter et al becoming too censorious and taking down legitimate free speech content. None of these service providers can afford to have a legal team on standby to determine what constitutes fair use and free speech or not. I don't have an answer, I'm just saying this isn't a one-sided issue. Right now the internet has a real problem with libel and cyberstalking. It's one of those things that one tends to not realize or think/care about until it happens to them.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- threatofrain 6y ago
  If AI can do such things then we’d have much bigger questions to answer about how tomorrow should proceed, and what legal framework is right for the coming of a new era. In fact, we’d start talking about AI courts to scale with the flood of low severity cases.
- URSpider94 6y ago
  Misinformation and lies are rarely punishable by either criminal or civil statutes, unless they are defamatory about an individual, and even then the bar is very high, especially if they are a public figure. Repealing 230 would not have any measurable benefit when it comes to controlling fake news or conspiracy theories.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
imgabe 6y ago
What I'm trying to fix is the current situation where social media companies have carte blanche to abuse their position as the broadcast point to shape the public conversation. Most people don't seem to see the problem because so far the power has only been used for things they agree with, but consider if it weren't. Suppose Facebook was run by anti-vaxxers. They manipulate their algorithm so that posts that question the safety of vaccines are promoted and posts that say vaccines are safe and helpful get buried. If someone takes a strong pro-vaccine stance, Facebook bans them for spreading "dangerous misinformation". Under the current system, this would be perfectly fine for Facebook to do, despite the fact that this could completely warp public perception because Facebook is where a lot of people get most of their information. After all, they are a private company, right? They have no obligation to host information they disagree with. Yet, Facebook could, if it decided to, dramatically shift public opinion in any way it wants to, just by manipulating how information is presented. The world I would rather live in is one where social media companies are limited to removing information only if it is clearly illegal, by explicitly defined terms (such as child pornography) or spam. The rest should be left up to individuals to decide for themselves.

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?
- luckylion 6y ago
  > Fundamentally, you're trying to involve the government in deciding what "truth" is. That seems much worse than misinformation, yes? We already have the courts involved in deciding what "truth" is. Has worked out pretty well in general, and certainly better than having private companies do it.
  - TameAntelope 6y ago
    Not to this extent, we do not. This would be a whole additional level, multiple levels even, more subjective. Honestly, it feels like a moot point anyway. The 1st Amendment makes all of this pointless to discuss. It will never happen, short of a literal collapse of the US Government and a reformation under a new Constitution that doesn't include the 1st Amendment. The government will never be involved in deciding what people can and can't say to the extent that this would require. It's antithetical to our current legal system (not to mention our cultural mores). Of course Twitter gets to decide what to publish on Twitter. There's literally no other way to operate, regardless of Section 230.
  - threatofrain 6y ago
    Misinformation is a flood by a million raindrops, and as courts are severely overtaxed, I shudder in asking for a magnitude more volume in a bunch of low severity cases. People will debate more or less police funding, but massively more judicial funding is on nobody’s radar. What the modern age calls for is the ability to easily enjoin a class of defendants and sue them all for $5, with adjudication taking 1 minute. Now your mom just lost $5 because she retweeted a MLM health scare scam 2 minutes ago.
    - Volundr 6y ago
      I don't think this is a good solution at all. If mom believed the scam at the time she retweeted it there's absolutely no crime there. Being wrong or deceived is not a crime. Frankly your proposing punishing the victim. Any actual solution would have to target the creators of the disinformation, and maybe those who knowingly spread it. Even that is hard in a freedom of speech context though. Even lies are free speech.
cirno 6y ago
> It allows the NYT to hide behind pawns they would love to sacrifice in the name of spreading convenient lies. And when it comes to Twitter or other sites, how do you sue one of its users who posts libel and defamation about your character, when said user is hiding behind a VPN anyway? Twitter is hosting the content, and chooses not to take it down, so if that content breaks actual laws (libel, cyberstalking, etc), they should be held responsible for it. Whereas if it falls within the purview of free speech, then they should have nothing to worry about. I realize it's not a popular sentiment here because we want to build platforms and not worry about the legality, but giving websites blanket immunity to host law-breaking content because "it was posted by someone else" means that all of our laws become unenforcable on the internet.
- nradov 6y ago
  Twitter does take down content that breaks actual laws when ordered to so by a court. So the state you're asking for already exists.
  - cirno 6y ago
    I can't say I've even heard of a court order for Twitter to remove a tweet before. Is that really practical, though? To spend thousands of dollars on legal fees to take down a single tweet from an anonymous account that will just repost it again and again? Meanwhile every time Twitter is completely immune to any consequences for hosting and distributing said content? It's a sucky situation. A service like Twitter can't really function if they're responsible for the content on the site, but all our existing laws are effectively unenforceable on the web otherwise. I think the hope people have for the removal of section 230 shielding is that Twitter and other content hosting providers will take existing laws more seriously. For instance, Cloudflare today says "there should be laws to handle this stuff, we don't want to enforce anything", and to date the CEO has only ever made two exceptions to that. The contrarian side to that is going too far and Twitter et al becoming too censorious and taking down legitimate free speech content. None of these service providers can afford to have a legal team on standby to determine what constitutes fair use and free speech or not. I don't have an answer, I'm just saying this isn't a one-sided issue. Right now the internet has a real problem with libel and cyberstalking. It's one of those things that one tends to not realize or think/care about until it happens to them.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
threatofrain 6y ago
If AI can do such things then we’d have much bigger questions to answer about how tomorrow should proceed, and what legal framework is right for the coming of a new era. In fact, we’d start talking about AI courts to scale with the flood of low severity cases.
URSpider94 6y ago
Misinformation and lies are rarely punishable by either criminal or civil statutes, unless they are defamatory about an individual, and even then the bar is very high, especially if they are a public figure. Repealing 230 would not have any measurable benefit when it comes to controlling fake news or conspiracy theories.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

imgabe 6y ago

What I'm trying to fix is the current situation where social media companies have carte blanche to abuse their position as the broadcast point to shape the public conversation. Most people don't seem to see the problem because so far the power has only been used for things they agree with, but consider if it weren't. Suppose Facebook was run by anti-vaxxers. They manipulate their algorithm so that posts that question the safety of vaccines are promoted and posts that say vaccines are safe and helpful get buried. If someone takes a strong pro-vaccine stance, Facebook bans them for spreading "dangerous misinformation". Under the current system, this would be perfectly fine for Facebook to do, despite the fact that this could completely warp public perception because Facebook is where a lot of people get most of their information. After all, they are a private company, right? They have no obligation to host information they disagree with. Yet, Facebook could, if it decided to, dramatically shift public opinion in any way it wants to, just by manipulating how information is presented. The world I would rather live in is one where social media companies are limited to removing information only if it is clearly illegal, by explicitly defined terms (such as child pornography) or spam. The rest should be left up to individuals to decide for themselves.