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Well, if we consider the various social media sites: Meta - Helped facilitate multiple ethnic cleansings. Twitter - Now a site run by white supremacists for w

Well, if we consider the various social media sites: Meta - Helped facilitate multiple ethnic cleansings. Twitter - Now a site run by white supremacists for white supremacists. Youtube - Provides platforms to Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro and a whole constellation of conspiracy theorist nonsense. Reddit - Initially grew its userbase through hosting of softcore CP, one of the biggest pro-ana sites on the web and a myriad of smaller but no less vile subreddits. Even if they try to put on a respectable mask now its still a cesspit. Linkedin - Somehow has the least well adjusted userbase of them all, its destruction would do its users a kindness. My opinion of social media goes far and beyond what anyone could consider "not liking". In any case, it would mean that those videos would have to be self hosted and published, we'd see an en masse return of websites like college humor and cracked and the like, albeit without the comments switched on.

falcolas 2y ago
YouTube and Facebook were also the original hosts of the Blackout trend videos and pictures, as I recall.
thephyber 2y ago
Baby. Bath water. You are arguing that mega social media companies should not be immune from liability. I could care less about those companies, but I do care about the unintended consequences of this ruling. The mega social media companies weren’t immune from liability before the ruling. But they are mega corporations, with lots of attorneys on retainer who craft the ToS / EULA / other contracts to shed legal risk. Even this ruling isn’t likely to hurt them much in the long run. The “baby” is every small blog that allows comments, every store / product review, every social bookmarking site, every game with multi-player chat, etc. These are examples of features available because of Sec230 protections. If some enterprising attorney can spin the _default sort order_ into a statistically significant harm to their plaintiff, every single website/app just became a far bigger target for litigation. And even if they can’t, now every mom and pop website will have to pay an attorney to find out if the plaintiff has a case according to this new vague standard. And this happened because of a judge / jurisprudence, not because of a lawmaking body who solicited feedback from both companies and consumers. This ruling is likely to stand no matter the legal / / social economic fallout. Craigslist already lost the Personals section to Sec230-modifying legislation. That was a drop in the bucket compared to what we could lose from this ruling.
thephyber 2y ago
> In any case, it would mean that those videos would have to be self hosted and published, we'd see an en masse return of websites like college humor and cracked and the like, albeit without the comments switched on. You seem to be making many assumptions here. (1) I don’t think this cripples the mega social media companies. They already have thousands of attorneys — they will be busy for a year shedding by liability risk by crafting more onerous ToS that we all end up agreeing to. (2) Nobody “self hosts” from soup-to-nuts (except for the biggest companies in the world). Your ISP, your DNS provider, your cloud host, etc. all benefit from Sec 230 protections to some extent. We have to wait to see the fallout of those layers. (3) Companies like College Humor and Cracked benefitted from viral marketing of social networks. If your implied expectation comes true and big social media companies are crippled by this ruling, there will be fewer upstart acts like College Humor and Cracked that grow to become something notable. (4) Even small companies like College Humor and Cracked won’t be immune from this new redefinition of the line between platform/publisher and speech. My suspicion is this ruling pulled out a Jenga piece, but it will be a while before we see how the tower of internet economics falls.
- Devasta 2y ago
  > Companies like College Humor and Cracked benefitted from viral marketing of social networks. Oh come off it, writers very explicitly blame Facebook lying about the viral impact of their social network on the collapse of CH and others. https://twitter.com/adamconover/status/1183209875859333120 https://twitter.com/adamconover/status/1183209875859333120

falcolas 2y ago

YouTube and Facebook were also the original hosts of the Blackout trend videos and pictures, as I recall.

thephyber 2y ago

Baby. Bath water. You are arguing that mega social media companies should not be immune from liability. I could care less about those companies, but I do care about the unintended consequences of this ruling. The mega social media companies weren’t immune from liability before the ruling. But they are mega corporations, with lots of attorneys on retainer who craft the ToS / EULA / other contracts to shed legal risk. Even this ruling isn’t likely to hurt them much in the long run. The “baby” is every small blog that allows comments, every store / product review, every social bookmarking site, every game with multi-player chat, etc. These are examples of features available because of Sec230 protections. If some enterprising attorney can spin the _default sort order_ into a statistically significant harm to their plaintiff, every single website/app just became a far bigger target for litigation. And even if they can’t, now every mom and pop website will have to pay an attorney to find out if the plaintiff has a case according to this new vague standard. And this happened because of a judge / jurisprudence, not because of a lawmaking body who solicited feedback from both companies and consumers. This ruling is likely to stand no matter the legal / / social economic fallout. Craigslist already lost the Personals section to Sec230-modifying legislation. That was a drop in the bucket compared to what we could lose from this ruling.

thephyber 2y ago

> In any case, it would mean that those videos would have to be self hosted and published, we'd see an en masse return of websites like college humor and cracked and the like, albeit without the comments switched on. You seem to be making many assumptions here. (1) I don’t think this cripples the mega social media companies. They already have thousands of attorneys — they will be busy for a year shedding by liability risk by crafting more onerous ToS that we all end up agreeing to. (2) Nobody “self hosts” from soup-to-nuts (except for the biggest companies in the world). Your ISP, your DNS provider, your cloud host, etc. all benefit from Sec 230 protections to some extent. We have to wait to see the fallout of those layers. (3) Companies like College Humor and Cracked benefitted from viral marketing of social networks. If your implied expectation comes true and big social media companies are crippled by this ruling, there will be fewer upstart acts like College Humor and Cracked that grow to become something notable. (4) Even small companies like College Humor and Cracked won’t be immune from this new redefinition of the line between platform/publisher and speech. My suspicion is this ruling pulled out a Jenga piece, but it will be a while before we see how the tower of internet economics falls.

Devasta 2y ago
> Companies like College Humor and Cracked benefitted from viral marketing of social networks. Oh come off it, writers very explicitly blame Facebook lying about the viral impact of their social network on the collapse of CH and others. https://twitter.com/adamconover/status/1183209875859333120 https://twitter.com/adamconover/status/1183209875859333120