3 ms·

> As the dominant informational networks of the twenty-first century, they need to be accountable for the content they broadcast, whatever its source. The arti

> As the dominant informational networks of the twenty-first century, they need to be accountable for the content they broadcast, whatever its source. The article seems to be arguing that social media companies need to be judge, jury and censor over every message that is "broadcast", i.e. sent to more than a few close friends. It admits that defining a "public interest" standard is basically impossible, but assumes that this ambiguity won't be exploited by whichever side is in control of whichever body gets to punish the social media companies for under- or over-censoring. If someone tweets "Click here to read my 400 page manifesto about what is wrong with America", would Twitter need to assign lawyers the task of scouring that document for "problematic" passages like "defund the police" or "give more power to ICE"? Perhaps if there were a workable system in place for silencing extreme and misinformed voices on the TV and radio, we could try applying it at scale to the internet too, but right now that's like trying to run before you can crawl.

sharpener 5y ago
I am not a lawyer, but... a public interest clause might not be the right tool, since public interest can be interpreted as restricted to information that would affect a person's voting preferences and nothing broader. In the UK TV broadcasters get their licences and general charter terms from the government, based on standards previously contested in law and, I believe, broadly enshrined in statute and/or regulations. One of those terms is a crucial clause to the effect that broadcasters are not allowed to broadcast anything that would make ordinary people throw up over their TV dinner or grannies die of apoplexy, etc. Various entities, people or single issue political parties for instance, have attempted to get broadcasters to show films containing grisly stuff, and when they meet refusal have attempted to sue broadcasters on free speech grounds. However, the right to free speech does not allow a legal entity or person to compel some other party to shout out noxious views on their behalf. So broadcasters in the UK can exercise their rights against such compulsion and filter out extremal horrors if they wish. The tests they use are designed to maintain the same two or three standard deviations of a normal distribution curve that maximises their customer base and matches the same standards civil law requires to maintain order on the civil scale anyway. In that context, what are social media companies if they are not media intermediaries between legal entities? Thus they can not be compelled to relay anyone's content to anywhere else if they don't want to. Their T&Cs typically say so anyway. Folks worried about censorship of their partisan or minority views on such platforms don't seem to get what rights those intermediary companies have. They play nice relaying messages because they like mass market incomes. So really the issue might be purely about how many messages could MetaFB/Twitter afford to kill off and still be popular enough to survive?

sharpener 5y ago

I am not a lawyer, but... a public interest clause might not be the right tool, since public interest can be interpreted as restricted to information that would affect a person's voting preferences and nothing broader. In the UK TV broadcasters get their licences and general charter terms from the government, based on standards previously contested in law and, I believe, broadly enshrined in statute and/or regulations. One of those terms is a crucial clause to the effect that broadcasters are not allowed to broadcast anything that would make ordinary people throw up over their TV dinner or grannies die of apoplexy, etc. Various entities, people or single issue political parties for instance, have attempted to get broadcasters to show films containing grisly stuff, and when they meet refusal have attempted to sue broadcasters on free speech grounds. However, the right to free speech does not allow a legal entity or person to compel some other party to shout out noxious views on their behalf. So broadcasters in the UK can exercise their rights against such compulsion and filter out extremal horrors if they wish. The tests they use are designed to maintain the same two or three standard deviations of a normal distribution curve that maximises their customer base and matches the same standards civil law requires to maintain order on the civil scale anyway. In that context, what are social media companies if they are not media intermediaries between legal entities? Thus they can not be compelled to relay anyone's content to anywhere else if they don't want to. Their T&Cs typically say so anyway. Folks worried about censorship of their partisan or minority views on such platforms don't seem to get what rights those intermediary companies have. They play nice relaying messages because they like mass market incomes. So really the issue might be purely about how many messages could MetaFB/Twitter afford to kill off and still be popular enough to survive?