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Thought experiment: a US government-hosted social network. Because the government is the host, they can't censor anything on the platform, unlike private socia

Thought experiment: a US government-hosted social network. Because the government is the host, they can't censor anything on the platform, unlike private social networks. The moderation policy would effectively be the content of the first amendment, barring actual illegal content. Call it publicsquare.gov

yibg 5y ago
That'll just be a social network full of spam and trolls.
- mattcwilson 5y ago
  Honest question: what keeps the present private-for-profit social media platforms from falling in the same pit?
  - munk-a 5y ago
    Don't they? FB is full of anti-vaxxer and foreign propoganda as it is and trolling is legion. The only reason spam is partially dealt with (commercial spam at least) is because FB (and similar networks) don't want spammers to shoulder in on their profit center.
  - rainsil 5y ago
    It's not clear that the government is legally able to censor all types of spam. If the spam is commercial, the Central Hudson four-pronged test on commercial speech restrictions applies,[1] which requires, among other things, that the restrictions be "no more extensive than necessary to serve [the government's] interest". Non-commercial forms of spam would probably be protected from removal by the First Amendment, unless, perhaps, they overloaded the government's servers. Trolling categorised as "obscene" would be removable, but otherwise may be protected by the First Amendment. Also, the fact that every content moderation decision may be subject to litigation would make it extremely difficult for the government to meaningfully moderate content. Private platforms, not bound by the First Amendment, and allowed to moderate without assuming liability by Section 230, wouldn't suffer these problems [1]: Via White Buffalo v. UT Austin
    - BizarroLand 5y ago
      The difference is they could require proof of identity and American citizenship to be able to access the site, and the site itself could have rules that are enforceable to limit human generated spam without violating the first amendment. They would not be helpless to moderate the site just because of the first amendment, they would just need to pass moderation clauses for the site before going live with it. In a similar vein with the fact that it's illegal to yell out "FIRE!" in a crowded theater unless there is actually a fire, they could make it illegal to advertise private businesses and make posters directly legally responsible for what they post. If this does come about though, I hope they prohibit businesses and "Media Groups" or whatever from creating accounts or at least lock them into a walled garden that you have to voluntarily enter, segregating them from the general populace.
  - dntrkv 5y ago
    Those profits incentivize them to keep spam off their networks. The only incentive US Gov entities have is keeping their contracts alive and the money flowing in without ever needing to turn a profit.
- glial 5y ago
  So, a lot like our existing national conversation?
- tomjen3 5y ago
  That seems fine, as long as I can just not subscribe to them.
pentae 5y ago
Imagine how many billions they'd waste on building that for it to get hacked 15 seconds after its launched
- visualradio 5y ago
  Well this already happened and we're still using it, but it's called ARPAnet. Instead of building a hypertext website they could finance an ARPA-E program to develop new federated content publishing protocols. Then have the Department of Energy build out and maintain the initial cloud infrastructure as a public utility. Any user files stored on network slices have the same legal and privacy protections as mail held at the United States Post Office, and people are free to store encrypted files using whatever encryption scheme they want in the same way that they are free to send pages of gibberish through the mail. If DoE builds out a cloud network then DoD could also lease a portion of the infrastructure for JEDI.
michaelmrose 5y ago
They are probably utterly incapable of doing so effectively. In truth they would probably have to contract out to another player to effectively provide a government sponsored Facebook at a cost of billions of dollars per year. Anything you posted on facebook.gov would be instantly available to advertisers AND the government so a huge segment of the population would refuse to use it especially young people. It would probably end up with a mixture of a minority of socially minded people and people so odious they would be censored anywhere else. See the kind of folks you have on the conservative reddit clone. As soon as people conspiring on facebook.gov are guilty of something really terrible like say a mass shooting there will be calls to implement some sort of additional content controls and we now have 2 facebooks one paid for by ads another by our tax money.

yibg 5y ago

That'll just be a social network full of spam and trolls.

mattcwilson 5y ago
Honest question: what keeps the present private-for-profit social media platforms from falling in the same pit?
- munk-a 5y ago
  Don't they? FB is full of anti-vaxxer and foreign propoganda as it is and trolling is legion. The only reason spam is partially dealt with (commercial spam at least) is because FB (and similar networks) don't want spammers to shoulder in on their profit center.
- rainsil 5y ago
  It's not clear that the government is legally able to censor all types of spam. If the spam is commercial, the Central Hudson four-pronged test on commercial speech restrictions applies,[1] which requires, among other things, that the restrictions be "no more extensive than necessary to serve [the government's] interest". Non-commercial forms of spam would probably be protected from removal by the First Amendment, unless, perhaps, they overloaded the government's servers. Trolling categorised as "obscene" would be removable, but otherwise may be protected by the First Amendment. Also, the fact that every content moderation decision may be subject to litigation would make it extremely difficult for the government to meaningfully moderate content. Private platforms, not bound by the First Amendment, and allowed to moderate without assuming liability by Section 230, wouldn't suffer these problems [1]: Via White Buffalo v. UT Austin
  - BizarroLand 5y ago
    The difference is they could require proof of identity and American citizenship to be able to access the site, and the site itself could have rules that are enforceable to limit human generated spam without violating the first amendment. They would not be helpless to moderate the site just because of the first amendment, they would just need to pass moderation clauses for the site before going live with it. In a similar vein with the fact that it's illegal to yell out "FIRE!" in a crowded theater unless there is actually a fire, they could make it illegal to advertise private businesses and make posters directly legally responsible for what they post. If this does come about though, I hope they prohibit businesses and "Media Groups" or whatever from creating accounts or at least lock them into a walled garden that you have to voluntarily enter, segregating them from the general populace.
- dntrkv 5y ago
  Those profits incentivize them to keep spam off their networks. The only incentive US Gov entities have is keeping their contracts alive and the money flowing in without ever needing to turn a profit.
glial 5y ago
So, a lot like our existing national conversation?
tomjen3 5y ago
That seems fine, as long as I can just not subscribe to them.

pentae 5y ago

Imagine how many billions they'd waste on building that for it to get hacked 15 seconds after its launched

visualradio 5y ago
Well this already happened and we're still using it, but it's called ARPAnet. Instead of building a hypertext website they could finance an ARPA-E program to develop new federated content publishing protocols. Then have the Department of Energy build out and maintain the initial cloud infrastructure as a public utility. Any user files stored on network slices have the same legal and privacy protections as mail held at the United States Post Office, and people are free to store encrypted files using whatever encryption scheme they want in the same way that they are free to send pages of gibberish through the mail. If DoE builds out a cloud network then DoD could also lease a portion of the infrastructure for JEDI.

michaelmrose 5y ago

They are probably utterly incapable of doing so effectively. In truth they would probably have to contract out to another player to effectively provide a government sponsored Facebook at a cost of billions of dollars per year. Anything you posted on facebook.gov would be instantly available to advertisers AND the government so a huge segment of the population would refuse to use it especially young people. It would probably end up with a mixture of a minority of socially minded people and people so odious they would be censored anywhere else. See the kind of folks you have on the conservative reddit clone. As soon as people conspiring on facebook.gov are guilty of something really terrible like say a mass shooting there will be calls to implement some sort of additional content controls and we now have 2 facebooks one paid for by ads another by our tax money.