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Be careful what you wish for. If social media platforms are considered common carriers they will have a 'duty to serve." They will need to provide their servic

Be careful what you wish for. If social media platforms are considered common carriers they will have a 'duty to serve." They will need to provide their service to anyone not judged by a court to be breaking the law. That includes spam, pornography, and many forms of online abuse and harassment. There is a strong case to be made that ISPs should be common carriers, since they don't (and should not) know what is contained in the packets they transport. But treating Twitter or Facebook or Hacker News as common carriers makes no sense. They are not "carriers" who are neutrally transmitting data they have no control over. That's not what they want to be, and that's not want their users want them to be. 4chan has it's place, but most people don't want to whole web to look like that. == Edit: Keep in mind the the law is a blunt interment. Claiming small social media sites don't need to worry about laws restricting big social media sites, is like claiming that honest citizens don't need to worry about laws targeting terrorists.

wmf 5y ago
The point of this paper is that bad stuff would exist but you'd never see it unless you explicitly seek it out. You might not even be able to search for it; you might have to paste an exact URL to get it.
- triceratops 5y ago
  How is any of what you described different from the situation today? Except that said URL won't contain a TwitFace domain name if they don't want you on their platform. Is the domain name really that important, so long as the content is available?
  - comex 5y ago
    For one thing, Volokh suggests that Twitter would also have to allow you to follow @BadStuff and then view its posts in your timeline – as long as you set your timeline to chronological mode. If you use the algorithmic timeline, on the other hand, he claims that you're now relying on Twitter to provide a kind of judgment on what tweets are better than others, so Twitter would then have the First Amendment right to refuse to show you some users' tweets entirely. Personally, I suspect that any law like this would result in Twitter simply removing the chronological timeline altogether. In addition, although the paper's title says "social media", Volokh also suggests the services which banned Parler – Google and Apple's app stores, and AWS – could also be subject to common carrier regulations. For those kinds of services, recommendation algorithms and domain names are irrelevant.

wmf 5y ago

The point of this paper is that bad stuff would exist but you'd never see it unless you explicitly seek it out. You might not even be able to search for it; you might have to paste an exact URL to get it.

triceratops 5y ago
How is any of what you described different from the situation today? Except that said URL won't contain a TwitFace domain name if they don't want you on their platform. Is the domain name really that important, so long as the content is available?
- comex 5y ago
  For one thing, Volokh suggests that Twitter would also have to allow you to follow @BadStuff and then view its posts in your timeline – as long as you set your timeline to chronological mode. If you use the algorithmic timeline, on the other hand, he claims that you're now relying on Twitter to provide a kind of judgment on what tweets are better than others, so Twitter would then have the First Amendment right to refuse to show you some users' tweets entirely. Personally, I suspect that any law like this would result in Twitter simply removing the chronological timeline altogether. In addition, although the paper's title says "social media", Volokh also suggests the services which banned Parler – Google and Apple's app stores, and AWS – could also be subject to common carrier regulations. For those kinds of services, recommendation algorithms and domain names are irrelevant.