4 ms·

>You are uploading graphic content to the web? We call the police, nice and simple. And let the judiciary deal with it. This is fantasy, even if it were desira

>You are uploading graphic content to the web? We call the police, nice and simple. And let the judiciary deal with it. This is fantasy, even if it were desirable. In most places the judiciary struggles to enforce the laws we already have. In the UK something like 90%+ of burglaries and robberies go unsolved. The figures for rape are even worse. And those are crimes where there is a certainty they were committed by someone in the same country as the person reporting the crime (at least at the time) and where there is broad agreement they are serious crimes, worthy of police attention. If you hand out really graphic leaflets in the street you might eventually be arrested and you might eventually up before a judge (but this is no way certain) but you'd really have to go out of your way to annoy people. You're more likely to just be told to stop it and have your leaflets taken away after a fight occurs. If you were handing out child porn then sure, you'll get arrested but that's because you're standing right there and it requires very little police time to investigate the matter.

CaptArmchair 5y ago
The problem isn't just people sharing illicit content. The problem is those who facilitate that. The 'town square' notion isn't apt because that's a public space. A better analogy is a private party as each and every platform is, at the end of the day, owned and managed by private legal entities. If publishers were to verbatim publish whatever crazy, illicit content was mailed to them by their subscribers/readers, they'd be prosecuted within a fortnight. There's plenty of jurisprudence in the U.S. alone. Online platforms escape legal liability because of Section 230 which states: > No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. The big dilemma is that Section 230 needs to be reconsidered if you want to do something about the platforms that facilitate sharing graphic content, hate speech and so on. That's problematic because Section 230 has, arguably, allowed for the Internet to become a free haven for whatever anyone wants to share and build. The other option is passing the buck to the free market. That is: if you don't like what you see, move over to a different platform. Or: don't use, or work for a platform that doesn't align with your own morals and values. While that's a nice sentiment: the reality clearly doesn't work like that. Why does someone decide to work for Facebook as a moderator in the first place? Is it because they genuinely want to make a career out of this? Or is it because social/economic circumstances push them in that direction (e.g. lack of other career options, tradeoffs preventing them to move towards other career options,...)? The same is true about the rise of social media. Billions of people are connected online. And they might seemingly have a ton of agency. But reality is that the vast majority of ordinary people spend the vast majority of time on a handful of social media, posting and sharing content, building an online identity... on a 3rd party platform which they don't own. Without hyperbole: they can't readily migrate lest they lose connection with the digital communities which is inextricably hosted on these platforms. That's just how a matter of networking effects. All in all, in closing this diatribe: law enforcement and justice can't do much unless there's a clear, modern legal framework which can be readily applied to the middle men.

CaptArmchair 5y ago

The problem isn't just people sharing illicit content. The problem is those who facilitate that. The 'town square' notion isn't apt because that's a public space. A better analogy is a private party as each and every platform is, at the end of the day, owned and managed by private legal entities. If publishers were to verbatim publish whatever crazy, illicit content was mailed to them by their subscribers/readers, they'd be prosecuted within a fortnight. There's plenty of jurisprudence in the U.S. alone. Online platforms escape legal liability because of Section 230 which states: > No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. The big dilemma is that Section 230 needs to be reconsidered if you want to do something about the platforms that facilitate sharing graphic content, hate speech and so on. That's problematic because Section 230 has, arguably, allowed for the Internet to become a free haven for whatever anyone wants to share and build. The other option is passing the buck to the free market. That is: if you don't like what you see, move over to a different platform. Or: don't use, or work for a platform that doesn't align with your own morals and values. While that's a nice sentiment: the reality clearly doesn't work like that. Why does someone decide to work for Facebook as a moderator in the first place? Is it because they genuinely want to make a career out of this? Or is it because social/economic circumstances push them in that direction (e.g. lack of other career options, tradeoffs preventing them to move towards other career options,...)? The same is true about the rise of social media. Billions of people are connected online. And they might seemingly have a ton of agency. But reality is that the vast majority of ordinary people spend the vast majority of time on a handful of social media, posting and sharing content, building an online identity... on a 3rd party platform which they don't own. Without hyperbole: they can't readily migrate lest they lose connection with the digital communities which is inextricably hosted on these platforms. That's just how a matter of networking effects. All in all, in closing this diatribe: law enforcement and justice can't do much unless there's a clear, modern legal framework which can be readily applied to the middle men.