11 ms·

This all sounds very nice, but there's a bit of sleight of hand here since the article goes out of its way to avoid details. That way everyone reads into exactl

• Nursie 5y ago
  > Will the services be forced to accept whatever unmoderated feed of filth the linked to service sends their way? I was kinda wondering that. If a user gets banned, and moves off-platform to continue the behaviour there, but is somehow magically still linked to everyone they were linked with before... has anything really changed? Will facebook be forced to show its users the same nastiness it just booted off, because of the interop necessities?
  • PontifexMinimus 5y ago
    > Will facebook be forced to show its users the same nastiness it just booted off, because of the interop necessities? Facebook should be forced to show me the feeds I choose to subscribe to. I'm perfectly capable of deciding for myself whether I find something nasty, and I find the idea of Zuckerberg as an arbiter of morality both absurd and dystopian.
    • Nursie 5y ago
      You seem to want some sort of aggregator ... ? I'm not sure facebook's the best model to start with there. I think you'd be happier with a third-party service that could receive from FB, and then we wouldn't get into forcing facebook to carry stuff.
      • PontifexMinimus 5y ago
        I don't want to force FB to do anything. I want to require all social media companies to allow aggregation (though ActivityPub etc) but if Zuckerberg/Facebook decide they don't want to be in that industry, I would have no problem with them simply closing down.
    • justbored123 5y ago
      So, you are in favor of things like pedophilia/child grooming online, revenge porn, defamation, false advertisement, fraud, etc. because YOUR moral may approve of it regardless of laws or harm to others. Got it. The idea of no-regulation free for all is childish/sick nonsense. If you want to have your own nazi-phedo site/feed, host it yourself and face the cost and consequences yourself, don't force private for profit companies to do it for you for free at the expense of their brand and their advertisers.
      • djrogers 5y ago
        There’s a huge gap between ‘legal but morally unacceptable to some’ and ‘blatantly illegal’. Making an argument against the latter while ignoring that the discussion is largely about the former is the very definition of a straw man.
      • robertlagrant 5y ago
        Characterising people who want free speech as the criminals who will use that speech for the worst ends is no different to people who opposed a fair trial for all because criminals would want a chance to avoid jail.
      • int_19h 5y ago
• catlifeonmars 5y ago
  Why not platform-specific moderation? All social media content is available for consumption by a set of platforms the user authorizes. Those platforms are free to filter or moderate the content as they see fit. While not explicitly spelled out in TFA, this seems like the trivially obvious implementation.
  • ashtonkem 5y ago
    Don’t we already have platform specific moderation? Isn’t that what people are complaining about?
    • catlifeonmars 5y ago
      We have platform specific moderation, in conjunction with high switching costs. If the content and connections themselves are owned by the platform then you have high switching costs. If the content and connections are instead owned by the user and all platforms share a compatible protocol for exchanging content/connections data, then the switching cost vanishes because there is no switching.
• MrStonedOne 5y ago
  Why does a town square need moderation? You can't just ignore the fact that social networking has become the new town square because its inconvenient
  • owisd 5y ago
    The town square analogy would be fine if there was a ‘net neutrality’ for social media: they have to show me everything I follow in chronological order with no filtering or recommendations. As it stands it works more like the letters page in a newspaper, where an editor is deciding what gets included and what doesn’t.
  • totony 5y ago
    >You can't just ignore the fact that social networking has become the new town square because its inconvenient That's not a good analogy. Facebook is most used as a semi-private space (akin to an open-house), or as just private (private party with friends). No one moderates that; you don't want to listen to it, you don't join the party (aka follow the person/page). In a town square, if you scream profanities, harass people, etc, they have to listen because it's the only town square.
  • SyzygistSix 5y ago
    I would say that social media sites are more akin to a bar/coffee shop/pub/public house. While free speech is not protected there by the first amendment (as far as I know), it is still important to value it broadly to create an open atmosphere. I think of the role they played in the run-up to the American Revolution and in organizing workers, and until the dawn of the internet and the plasticized commercialization of my town, the role it played in my social and artistic life. But what you say is an excellent point about where we are now engaging in public discourse; it has changed drastically, very quickly, and there are significant concerns about free speech now that we all hang out on websites mostly owned by large corporations. It feels gross to me. Like meeting up at the food court of Wal Mart because every other place in town has put out of business. And the town square is almost dead and gone, both online and in real life.
• MrStonedOne 5y ago
  >But what's the concrete proposal here? How would things actually work? Will the services be forced to accept whatever unmoderated feed of filth the linked to service sends their way? If not, how is this supposed to fix the moderation problem? Does gmail block emails from your friends containing misinformation? Why should facebook be allowed to do the same thing?
  • throwawayboise 5y ago
    Google is apparently going to be doing that with content on Drive. Not sure what they've said or not said about gMail but what's the difference, really?
    • shrimpx 5y ago
      The difference is that gmail isn't publicly serving your emails to an open audience. The restrictions on Drive are only for publicly-served content.
      • throwawayboise 5y ago
        So they say. For now.
        • int_19h 5y ago
          I dunno why this is downmodded, given that e.g. OneDrive already applies its rules to all content, not just shared stuff; and Facebook is actively censoring even private chats (it will refuse to send some links, e.g. to certain websites about cannabis).
      • lmm 5y ago
        That isn't true, they already block you from downloading content from private shared folders that they decide to restrict.
  • jsnell 5y ago
    Gmail does all kinds of filtering on the incoming messages, such as detecting spam, malware and phishing. So it certainly isn't the case that they're just delivering every email to your inbox. Do they block misinfo? I genuinely have no idea. But if it's not happening, it seems pretty obviously like an explicit product decision rather than some kind of regulatory requirement.
• claytoneast 5y ago
  What's wrong with: anything a user can do on your app in the interface must also be doable via API call by that user. You don't have to map everything so the platform interactions are the same, simply make them equal-access via API call. It seems flawless to me but I also only spent the time I took to type this thinking about it, so it may be 98% flawed.
  • jsnell 5y ago
    Your solution doesn't address at the problem the article was describing. The stated problem is the "censorship" by tech companies. Allowing posting via API rather than just a user interface does nothing to solve that. If it doesn't solve the problem, why are we doing it again? Your solution creates the new problem that normal users don't understand what access they're granting to an API. Every API you expose is a tool for an unscrupulous app to exfiltrate data about you or your contacts. It's an avenue for sending spam. It's an avenue for monetizing your account's reputation by taking actions such as liking content, following/subscribing channels to boost their engagement numbers, scraping content that your contacts had not shared publicly. It makes abuse-fighting much harder, since you can no longer trust the application to collect any kind of bot detection signals, and since huge tons of user interactions will be getting artifically concentrated at a few API gateways. And finally, while nobody has a right to their business model, it's maybe useful to consider what the implications would be. It basically makes ad-supported services impossible, since somebody will inevitably implement an ad-free client for the service. (Or even worse, a client that just shows their own ads instead). Do you think we're really willing to go back to a world where the only free (as in money) services are ones that are being subsidized?
  • jensensbutton 5y ago
    What if the platform added 1 day of latency to every call?
• belorn 5y ago
  A good question, but much of it does get answered in the linked articles discussing the proposal. Large social networks already have API's with partners, but who and how they are allowed to be used is defined through legal agreements and access controls. The access act is intended to regulate how those legal agreements over the API should be defined. The EFF wants to allow third-party to ask consent of those users in order to use those API's for interoperability. In theory this would not put any additional requirement on the social network, and the consent request could occur out-of-band. The only change would be the legal ramification and access control. In theory there could be a dominating social network without any API for third-parties, in which this proposal might be defeated. In practice that is very unlikely given the need of large companies. The proposal could also require if needed that internal API, if they exist (which all of them have as a matter of practicality), get opened up in the lack of any external API that can be used to enable interoperability. I would however guess that such a broad brush would be problematic, and a bit unnecessary since again every large social network already has third-party API's. Do Discord have an API that a selected group of partners has access to? Do Instagram have it too? Given the correct permission, interactions between those two networks would be a matter of a third-party using those API's.
  • jensensbutton 5y ago
    > In theory this would not put any additional requirement on the social network This falls apart as soon as you examine it though. If the law only required a platform to give competitors access to whatever API they currently have without actually detailing what needs to be accessible then it would be trivially easy for platforms to change/restrict those APIs in ways that make them useless. And as soon as you try to address this you're back at the original problem of how you create a standard model that works for everyone.
• busymom0 5y ago
  Supreme Court of the United States Justice Clarence Thomas opined couple months ago discussing big tech censorship quite extensively. The case was regarding whether Trump was allowed to block people on Twitter and it being a 1st amendment violation. While the case was declared moot as Trump left office, Justice Clarence Thomas took the opportunity to discuss censorship. How politicians aren't allowed to block users on big tech but big tech is able to block and ban politicians and government employees and how this creates a weird power dynamic. I would highly recommend reading his opinion: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/20-197_5ie6.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/20-197_5ie6.pdf Here's a few excerpts: > "But whatever may be said of other industries, there is clear historical precedent for regulating transportation and communications networks in a similar manner as traditional common carriers. Candeub 398–405. Telegraphs, for example, because they “resemble[d] railroad companies and other common carriers,” were “bound to serve all customers alike, without discrimination." ... "Internet platforms of course have their own First Amendment interests, but regulations that might affect speech are valid if they would have been permissible at the time of the founding. See United States v. Stevens, 559 U. S. 460, 468 (2010). The long history in this country and in England of restricting the exclusion right of common carriers and places of public accommodation may save similar regulations today from triggering heightened scrutiny—especially where a restriction would not prohibit the company from speaking or force the company to endorse the speech." ... "The similarities between some digital platforms and common carriers or places of public accommodation may give legislators strong arguments for similarly regulating digital platforms. [I]t stands to reason that if Congress may demand that telephone companies operate as common carriers, it can ask the same of ”digital platforms." ... "For example, although a “private entity is not ordinarily constrained by the First Amendment,” Halleck, 587 U. S., at ___, ___ (slip op., at 6, 9), it is if the government coerces or induces it to take action the government itself would not be permitted to do, such as censor expression of a lawful viewpoint. Ibid. Consider government threats. “People do not lightly disregard public officers’ thinly veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings against them if they do not come around.” Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, 372 U. S. 58, 68 (1963). The government cannot accomplish through threats of adverse government action what the Constitution prohibits it from doing directly. See ibid.; Blum v. Yaretsky, 457 U. S. 991, 1004–1005 (1982). Under this doctrine, plaintiffs might have colorable claims against a digital plat- form if it took adverse action against them in response to government threats. The Second Circuit feared that then-President Trump cut off speech by using the features that Twitter made available to him. But if the aim is to ensure that speech is not smothered, then the more glaring concern must perforce be the dominant digital platforms themselves." > "As Twitter made clear, the right to cut off speech lies most powerfully in the hands of private digital platforms. The extent to which that power matters for purposes of the First Amendment and the extent to which that power could lawfully be modified raise interesting and important questions. This petition, unfortunately, affords us no opportunity to confront them." The last 2 points are important as Justice Thomas is basically saying "give us a case which brings up these two questions and then we will have a deep look." One can even cite Amazon's recent censorship of SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas's own documentary as well as Eli Steele’s documentary as examples: https://archive.is/aNv3B https://archive.is/aNv3B