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I would recommend tuning your language down from suggesting "holding companies accountable for ensuring their products follow the law" is "hideous and cruel". T

I would recommend tuning your language down from suggesting "holding companies accountable for ensuring their products follow the law" is "hideous and cruel". That seems really detached from the discussion. Similarly, insinuating that YouTube having to follow US or Australian law about published content is "Full Chinese Authoritarian" moderation is also unnecessarily ridiculous. The cost of bits has nothing to do with it. It's about ensuring companies are not causing mass global harm through their actions. Right now, Section 230-powered social media companies have been responsible for genocides, and you suggest that holding them to any sort of accountability would be "hideous and cruel". I think "dude can't spout off whatever defamation he wants unchecked on YouTube, but less people are slaughtered" is a fairly good tradeoff.

rektide 4y ago
> * I would recommend tuning your language down from suggesting "holding companies accountable for ensuring their products follow the law" is "hideous and cruel". That seems really detached from the discussion. You've fictitiously made up the link between the first part & the second. I was replying to your absolutely shocking (to me) proposal that we shut down youtube until human moderators can review all incoming content, currently around 720,000 hours/day, and calling the stream of content an "absolutely unhinged problem" (your emphasis). My words might better be expanded into: > [Your demand to human moderate all content/be afraid of/revile against content/sharing] seems like a hideous & cruel way to take away a basic right to expression that humanity ought enjoy, Again I feel "misconstrue" is a generous definition of your other fork here: > Similarly, insinuating that YouTube having to follow US or Australian law about published content is "Full Chinese Authoritarian" moderation is also unnecessarily ridiculous. Once again, I was discussing your proposal, not the law. Perhaps if we do take Australia seriously (hard to do at present), & regard them a publisher, sites hosting user-content have a higher bar to moderation than what they're doing. Perhaps just ongoing legal court cases are the check & balance they need & the system is working; they will refine their tools for filtering content to get better, fulfillent to the law perhaps without ever becoming anything humanity would ever have recognized in any way as a publisher before. Personally, I think that would reflect very poorly on the law, would define government as ignorant stupid & incapable of it's base sovereign duty, be unable to make even a simple grasp of reality, but perhaps modern expression can adapt & survive under such merciless ignorant stupidity anyhow. Alas, most likely, it will only be the very very large, existing companies that can navigate & adapt, wade through this legal hell, develop the complex & careful processes & systems to still accept user-content. I still don't see what you are trying to protect against or how. I don't see great evils about. I don't see these platforms as bad. It's a hard job trying to insure moderation standards are met worldwide. I don't see systematic bad behavior you write about, I see company's trying to do a pretty good job, trying to navigate hard social issues of the say safely (something you propose blowing up by eliminating Section 230 & it's ability to let these company's pick what content to host): > Scale is not an excuse. It isn't a defense for bad behavior This crystalizes what I find so terrifying. I've already said I disagree, don't find much of a compelling case for bad behavior. Whether or not scale is an excuse, it misses the obvious truth: the internet has vastly vastly empowered & enabled expression, in ways radically unlike what came before. This planet is vastly more capable. Scale isn't an excuse: it's a fact. One you propose unwinding & turning off. For unspecified spectres of evil & harm, that I think are mostly imagined. I don't see any recognition of the impossibility of the task you demand companys take, when you describe "accountability." Let's take on of the few truly agreeable awful large scale (more than a couple person sized) incidents, Myanmar (largely lain at Facebook (not Youtubes) feet). First up, yes, Facebook should have done more. They did not deplatform enough people fast enough or aggressively enough. But I have sympathys in abundance, rather than merely axes to grind here. The world is extremely difficult to grasp & understand, the case of what's happening on the ground somewhere is complex & actively developing, & there's so much regional contexts that are hard to acquire. Even if we understand the situation with objective clarity, people's creativity makes the task still further impossible: witness China's ever-expanding sea of banned terms used to talk about Tiananmen Square as prime example, or their expanding list of banned euphemisms that portray their leaders in less than sunny light. To let words or ideas be shared is a risk, always could have some covert or secret message, dogwhistle to the followers, that others might not know. In sum, this idea of accountability strongly implies a knowability, and it would be convenient & simple if reality had such clearly cut lines & shapes for us to govern ourselves well by, to impose order with, but the real factual truth is messiness & overflowingness & saturation & mis-order. It's not even techno-mystical thinking to imagine these companies can order & make safe all expression, that they can be fully accountable: it's the scaries worst branches of utopian thinking that we can legislate & insist upon perfection, that only ideas that have been fully vetted may be released & shared with each other. To demand of people who have given such great service, enabled so much to begin, because they cannot do it perfectly, is folly. We have to moderate our own expectations & demands to reasonableness. Hosting content must be possible, somehow, and safe harbor makes sense & is the only legal structure we've had to enable us to allow any user-hosted words online. The Anti-Section 230 brigade seems resolutely unable to back off from absolutism, to show nuance or respect or appreciation for these elementary simple facts. Making company's absolutely responsible/accountable for everything that goes through the network is madness, insanity, utterly impractical short of turning it all off & starting again, in something which very likely will end up very near a Chinese model where the State must govern & check all communications. This thirsty crusade against safe harbor is insanity & cruelty, demands impossible perfection of an imperfect world. It's unclear what the charges are: we are in such hyperemotional hyperreal times, and the cries, your pleas of the Anti-Section 230 brigade- to please make things better, please fix the problems- are emotionally highstrung, go for the weakspot of humanity: our willingness to listen to Fear Uncertainty & Doubt & be goaded in. But these claims re short of a real case. Doubt & sensationalistic hype & media frenzy around new online sites abounds, the world is markedly different & we have someone convenient to blame for all the world's ills- the people who have started letting us share with each other. That bad emerges is unsurprising, but I think the case has been vastly vastly overblown against these companys, that the harm they generate is under the rounding point of significance. The ills are not well defined, they are all in all quite rare. It's hard to really assess honestly. But there's no honest assessment when such simple Fear is how this debate is argued: > less people are slaughtered The Fear is just to sell something dark. There's no balance to these views, no middle ground. The Anti-Section 230 brigade pushes only harsh, brutal insistence of security & safety, at seemingly all & any cost, & seemingly gladly & readily willing to snuff out human expression as we have come to know it, as it has, unquestionably to me, arisen us from much smaller scale people to much more spanning & expansive & involved scale beings. So many people were not possible before, and can find themselves only because they have been able to use the internet, to find & explore & communicate with others. The Anti-Section 230 brigade has no recognition that bad would find other places & forms, that perhaps the massified giant platforms are doing a better job than the vaster seedier underbelly that would spring up if we dismantled the vast platforms, chopped them down in vengeance & anger. > In fact, the only thing 720,000 hours of video a day speaks to is an absolutely unhinged problem This says so much to me. I think this marks well a modern viewpoint, is shared widely by the anti-platform views. I think we need to be very mindful & respectful & appreciative when we consider what 720,000 hours/day of video posted represents. To me, we've made the world alive. The online world is interactable, open for discussion & will accept a diverse range of views, while, ideally, having some moderation guidelines posted to aid in preventing outright harm. Never has the world offered such openness before. Never have we been so able to accept transparency & to communicate so freely & openly, so publicly. The information age is young, it's new, and I still see so much more potential, so much hope that we can keep improving. Please, world, don't let yourself give in to fear.
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  Okay, like, are tech companies paying you by the word for this? The fact that you just "have sympathies" about a giant evil ad company enabling genocide because it would be so deeply troubling if companies were to be held accountable for their actions really sums up... everything here. I have no further notes, I think we've covered it here. Your comment here was so very "the NRA's thoughts and prayers are with the families of the kids gunned down" that there's really nowhere else to go. You'd rather genocide than Google and Facebook be less profitable. Full stop. Because that's the true result of what I'm talking about: These companies aren't going to disappear because they're regulated and have to be accountable, as much as their shills will claim is plausible. The information age isn't going away. But when tech companies bear responsibility for their decisions, they probably won't make up half of the Fortune 10. They're abnormally profitable because they're also abnormally unregulated. And you'd rather genocide than fix it.
  - rektide 4y ago
    > You'd rather genocide than Google and Facebook be less profitable. Full stop Again this abuse of Fear & emotions to deny engaging in actual discussion. I keep feeling like you have nothing but condemnation & scorn to offer, endless protest but no willingness to acknowledge, and that your words lack reason & justification & instead are loaded with emotion & zealous conviction. > a giant evil ad company enabling genocide Legally mandated genocidal information. The government & military itself were spreading the genocidal messages. I don't agree with this, everyone agrees the reaction could have been faster. But I also understand & appreciate that it wasn't always clear what was happening, that trying to respond to a government going bad, quietly, & pushing dark propoganda is not easy. You keep trying to make it look simple, to emphasize only how any disagreement, how any search of moderation is unreasonable: the word genocide sends chills down our spines, is starkly reprehensible. But the practical challenge here is still valid; identifying what's happening, figuring out how to deploy sufficient intelligence to resist governmental & civilian information war, fighting each battle, each piece of content, as it streams in from across the globe: the challenge is significant, is a war effort fought on behalf of a people, a hard war effort. Acknowledge that. Don't escape to reductionism. I think it's crass & foolish to regard companys with such grim-dark-shaded glasses. These companies are a mix of many things. Yes, they have ads (like all companies they seek to make money). Yes many are quite big/giants. But they also have some noble & good purposes (helping us find information, watch cool videos, share with our friends & family, host our content, provide online hangout places), and generally, I think they execute fairly well, that the tradeoffs are reasonable & all in all not badly slanted against users in the vast majority of circumstances. Ultimately they sell ads by competing to be better places than the other online places; that diversity & competition is something I cherish & which I believe in, keeps us pointed forward. You dismiss me out of hand, in my view because I have asked us to see & acknowledge shades of gray & difficulties & think these are hard problems. Again you violate site guidelines here, and reduce a long case to simplistic out of hand dismissal: > Please don't post shallow dismissals Your replies keep circling back to the simple, again in violation of guidelines: > Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. And you have only belittled and insulted me, rather than taken my arguments as serious. Violation of this guideline: > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. Let me restate my case, yet again, because I agree it might not be clear where I'm coming from, why I would mount these defenses. I think different sites have a right to govern themselves. Taking that away takes away diversity. That's of tantamount importance to me. I believe some sites we have today will wreck & ruin themselves all on their own good time. But if we try to regulate & restrict, I believe we'll create legal quagmires that newer smaller would-be upstarts will be unable to ever face: we should not be creating vast new barriers. Legal permissiveness, with some acceptance of mistakes, is required. We cannot expect techno-mystical solutionism, nor have utopian expectations of perfect regulation. As for genocide, the fact that the state & military of Myanmar itself were disseminating much of the information is one basic neutron-moderator I'd try to carefully insert into your nuclear-blow-up reaction of accusations against me. Trying to understand, no, the government is lying to us, they are are committing genocide & using us is hard to understand. Particularly for an insular far off country that generally lacks good telecommunications infrastructure for people to express & share with; the people suffering themselves also use big platforms to get the word out about what is really happening, when they are able to get access. Please, let's have nuance & balance in our views. Figuring out what to do with user-content is not easy. All in all, I'm quite proud of how organized & sensible what we have is. Personally I'd prefer other models, would like to see something better distributed, but I cannot argue with the level of access people have, and how unhindered & how possible it is for people to participate & share. It's remarkable, & anyone snubbing what we have needs to be able to demonstrate that they have some appreciation for how vastly more able everyone on the planet is at communicating & expressing themselves. I don't see that moderation or sensibility in your calls for restriction & constraint, I don't see the Anti-Section 230 brigade willing to acknowledge or address that simple fact, that unignorable wonderful human dignity that has gotten created & expanded upon in this age, imperfect though it may be.

rektide 4y ago

> * I would recommend tuning your language down from suggesting "holding companies accountable for ensuring their products follow the law" is "hideous and cruel". That seems really detached from the discussion. You've fictitiously made up the link between the first part & the second. I was replying to your absolutely shocking (to me) proposal that we shut down youtube until human moderators can review all incoming content, currently around 720,000 hours/day, and calling the stream of content an "absolutely unhinged problem" (your emphasis). My words might better be expanded into: > [Your demand to human moderate all content/be afraid of/revile against content/sharing] seems like a hideous & cruel way to take away a basic right to expression that humanity ought enjoy, Again I feel "misconstrue" is a generous definition of your other fork here: > Similarly, insinuating that YouTube having to follow US or Australian law about published content is "Full Chinese Authoritarian" moderation is also unnecessarily ridiculous. Once again, I was discussing your proposal, not the law. Perhaps if we do take Australia seriously (hard to do at present), & regard them a publisher, sites hosting user-content have a higher bar to moderation than what they're doing. Perhaps just ongoing legal court cases are the check & balance they need & the system is working; they will refine their tools for filtering content to get better, fulfillent to the law perhaps without ever becoming anything humanity would ever have recognized in any way as a publisher before. Personally, I think that would reflect very poorly on the law, would define government as ignorant stupid & incapable of it's base sovereign duty, be unable to make even a simple grasp of reality, but perhaps modern expression can adapt & survive under such merciless ignorant stupidity anyhow. Alas, most likely, it will only be the very very large, existing companies that can navigate & adapt, wade through this legal hell, develop the complex & careful processes & systems to still accept user-content. I still don't see what you are trying to protect against or how. I don't see great evils about. I don't see these platforms as bad. It's a hard job trying to insure moderation standards are met worldwide. I don't see systematic bad behavior you write about, I see company's trying to do a pretty good job, trying to navigate hard social issues of the say safely (something you propose blowing up by eliminating Section 230 & it's ability to let these company's pick what content to host): > Scale is not an excuse. It isn't a defense for bad behavior This crystalizes what I find so terrifying. I've already said I disagree, don't find much of a compelling case for bad behavior. Whether or not scale is an excuse, it misses the obvious truth: the internet has vastly vastly empowered & enabled expression, in ways radically unlike what came before. This planet is vastly more capable. Scale isn't an excuse: it's a fact. One you propose unwinding & turning off. For unspecified spectres of evil & harm, that I think are mostly imagined. I don't see any recognition of the impossibility of the task you demand companys take, when you describe "accountability." Let's take on of the few truly agreeable awful large scale (more than a couple person sized) incidents, Myanmar (largely lain at Facebook (not Youtubes) feet). First up, yes, Facebook should have done more. They did not deplatform enough people fast enough or aggressively enough. But I have sympathys in abundance, rather than merely axes to grind here. The world is extremely difficult to grasp & understand, the case of what's happening on the ground somewhere is complex & actively developing, & there's so much regional contexts that are hard to acquire. Even if we understand the situation with objective clarity, people's creativity makes the task still further impossible: witness China's ever-expanding sea of banned terms used to talk about Tiananmen Square as prime example, or their expanding list of banned euphemisms that portray their leaders in less than sunny light. To let words or ideas be shared is a risk, always could have some covert or secret message, dogwhistle to the followers, that others might not know. In sum, this idea of accountability strongly implies a knowability, and it would be convenient & simple if reality had such clearly cut lines & shapes for us to govern ourselves well by, to impose order with, but the real factual truth is messiness & overflowingness & saturation & mis-order. It's not even techno-mystical thinking to imagine these companies can order & make safe all expression, that they can be fully accountable: it's the scaries worst branches of utopian thinking that we can legislate & insist upon perfection, that only ideas that have been fully vetted may be released & shared with each other. To demand of people who have given such great service, enabled so much to begin, because they cannot do it perfectly, is folly. We have to moderate our own expectations & demands to reasonableness. Hosting content must be possible, somehow, and safe harbor makes sense & is the only legal structure we've had to enable us to allow any user-hosted words online. The Anti-Section 230 brigade seems resolutely unable to back off from absolutism, to show nuance or respect or appreciation for these elementary simple facts. Making company's absolutely responsible/accountable for everything that goes through the network is madness, insanity, utterly impractical short of turning it all off & starting again, in something which very likely will end up very near a Chinese model where the State must govern & check all communications. This thirsty crusade against safe harbor is insanity & cruelty, demands impossible perfection of an imperfect world. It's unclear what the charges are: we are in such hyperemotional hyperreal times, and the cries, your pleas of the Anti-Section 230 brigade- to please make things better, please fix the problems- are emotionally highstrung, go for the weakspot of humanity: our willingness to listen to Fear Uncertainty & Doubt & be goaded in. But these claims re short of a real case. Doubt & sensationalistic hype & media frenzy around new online sites abounds, the world is markedly different & we have someone convenient to blame for all the world's ills- the people who have started letting us share with each other. That bad emerges is unsurprising, but I think the case has been vastly vastly overblown against these companys, that the harm they generate is under the rounding point of significance. The ills are not well defined, they are all in all quite rare. It's hard to really assess honestly. But there's no honest assessment when such simple Fear is how this debate is argued: > less people are slaughtered The Fear is just to sell something dark. There's no balance to these views, no middle ground. The Anti-Section 230 brigade pushes only harsh, brutal insistence of security & safety, at seemingly all & any cost, & seemingly gladly & readily willing to snuff out human expression as we have come to know it, as it has, unquestionably to me, arisen us from much smaller scale people to much more spanning & expansive & involved scale beings. So many people were not possible before, and can find themselves only because they have been able to use the internet, to find & explore & communicate with others. The Anti-Section 230 brigade has no recognition that bad would find other places & forms, that perhaps the massified giant platforms are doing a better job than the vaster seedier underbelly that would spring up if we dismantled the vast platforms, chopped them down in vengeance & anger. > In fact, the only thing 720,000 hours of video a day speaks to is an absolutely unhinged problem This says so much to me. I think this marks well a modern viewpoint, is shared widely by the anti-platform views. I think we need to be very mindful & respectful & appreciative when we consider what 720,000 hours/day of video posted represents. To me, we've made the world alive. The online world is interactable, open for discussion & will accept a diverse range of views, while, ideally, having some moderation guidelines posted to aid in preventing outright harm. Never has the world offered such openness before. Never have we been so able to accept transparency & to communicate so freely & openly, so publicly. The information age is young, it's new, and I still see so much more potential, so much hope that we can keep improving. Please, world, don't let yourself give in to fear.

ocdtrekkie 4y ago
Okay, like, are tech companies paying you by the word for this? The fact that you just "have sympathies" about a giant evil ad company enabling genocide because it would be so deeply troubling if companies were to be held accountable for their actions really sums up... everything here. I have no further notes, I think we've covered it here. Your comment here was so very "the NRA's thoughts and prayers are with the families of the kids gunned down" that there's really nowhere else to go. You'd rather genocide than Google and Facebook be less profitable. Full stop. Because that's the true result of what I'm talking about: These companies aren't going to disappear because they're regulated and have to be accountable, as much as their shills will claim is plausible. The information age isn't going away. But when tech companies bear responsibility for their decisions, they probably won't make up half of the Fortune 10. They're abnormally profitable because they're also abnormally unregulated. And you'd rather genocide than fix it.
- rektide 4y ago
  > You'd rather genocide than Google and Facebook be less profitable. Full stop Again this abuse of Fear & emotions to deny engaging in actual discussion. I keep feeling like you have nothing but condemnation & scorn to offer, endless protest but no willingness to acknowledge, and that your words lack reason & justification & instead are loaded with emotion & zealous conviction. > a giant evil ad company enabling genocide Legally mandated genocidal information. The government & military itself were spreading the genocidal messages. I don't agree with this, everyone agrees the reaction could have been faster. But I also understand & appreciate that it wasn't always clear what was happening, that trying to respond to a government going bad, quietly, & pushing dark propoganda is not easy. You keep trying to make it look simple, to emphasize only how any disagreement, how any search of moderation is unreasonable: the word genocide sends chills down our spines, is starkly reprehensible. But the practical challenge here is still valid; identifying what's happening, figuring out how to deploy sufficient intelligence to resist governmental & civilian information war, fighting each battle, each piece of content, as it streams in from across the globe: the challenge is significant, is a war effort fought on behalf of a people, a hard war effort. Acknowledge that. Don't escape to reductionism. I think it's crass & foolish to regard companys with such grim-dark-shaded glasses. These companies are a mix of many things. Yes, they have ads (like all companies they seek to make money). Yes many are quite big/giants. But they also have some noble & good purposes (helping us find information, watch cool videos, share with our friends & family, host our content, provide online hangout places), and generally, I think they execute fairly well, that the tradeoffs are reasonable & all in all not badly slanted against users in the vast majority of circumstances. Ultimately they sell ads by competing to be better places than the other online places; that diversity & competition is something I cherish & which I believe in, keeps us pointed forward. You dismiss me out of hand, in my view because I have asked us to see & acknowledge shades of gray & difficulties & think these are hard problems. Again you violate site guidelines here, and reduce a long case to simplistic out of hand dismissal: > Please don't post shallow dismissals Your replies keep circling back to the simple, again in violation of guidelines: > Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. And you have only belittled and insulted me, rather than taken my arguments as serious. Violation of this guideline: > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. Let me restate my case, yet again, because I agree it might not be clear where I'm coming from, why I would mount these defenses. I think different sites have a right to govern themselves. Taking that away takes away diversity. That's of tantamount importance to me. I believe some sites we have today will wreck & ruin themselves all on their own good time. But if we try to regulate & restrict, I believe we'll create legal quagmires that newer smaller would-be upstarts will be unable to ever face: we should not be creating vast new barriers. Legal permissiveness, with some acceptance of mistakes, is required. We cannot expect techno-mystical solutionism, nor have utopian expectations of perfect regulation. As for genocide, the fact that the state & military of Myanmar itself were disseminating much of the information is one basic neutron-moderator I'd try to carefully insert into your nuclear-blow-up reaction of accusations against me. Trying to understand, no, the government is lying to us, they are are committing genocide & using us is hard to understand. Particularly for an insular far off country that generally lacks good telecommunications infrastructure for people to express & share with; the people suffering themselves also use big platforms to get the word out about what is really happening, when they are able to get access. Please, let's have nuance & balance in our views. Figuring out what to do with user-content is not easy. All in all, I'm quite proud of how organized & sensible what we have is. Personally I'd prefer other models, would like to see something better distributed, but I cannot argue with the level of access people have, and how unhindered & how possible it is for people to participate & share. It's remarkable, & anyone snubbing what we have needs to be able to demonstrate that they have some appreciation for how vastly more able everyone on the planet is at communicating & expressing themselves. I don't see that moderation or sensibility in your calls for restriction & constraint, I don't see the Anti-Section 230 brigade willing to acknowledge or address that simple fact, that unignorable wonderful human dignity that has gotten created & expanded upon in this age, imperfect though it may be.