And then the often-proposed solution to “Twitter and Facebook suck and are too powerful” is to regulate both as a public utility, as is done with other natural monopolies. Maybe that’s a good idea. But if you think about it for more than two seconds it becomes obvious that once you do that, all of this sort of censorship – including banning stuff like Q and Alex Jones – would surely run afoul of First Amendment protections.
The obvious play is to call Rs bluff, and take away the immense power that these social media companies have. Probably a regulatory regime in the middle that is better, but repealing Section 230 is better than the status quo of allowing the profit motive to not only permit but actively and aggressively promote and prioritize extremist material.
Liberals reflexively react with “well what if the other side does that to us,” ignoring that the lack of regulation is leading us, with astonishing speed and efficiency, to that worst case result they’re afraid of.
Refusing to publish literal Russian intelligence propaganda is fine. It’s not close.
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I don’t understand how you’re supposed to force a private company to publish stuff it doesn’t want to. If you don’t want it to be a private company anymore, that’s a different argument. Hell, these companies haven’t even been forced to be transparent about the algorithms that dictate what their users see anyway.
Congress could obviously take action on algorithm transparency. I think they could regulate how Facebook and Twitter regulate the speech of their users as well.
I’m not sure if this is at all relevant to your comment, but in general private companies are forced to publish tons of notices, disclosures, disclaimers, warnings, etc. that they wouldn’t otherwise publish.
The expert play would be for Twitter to just say fuck it and get bought out by a Chinese company like WeChat.
I assume that wouldn’t be allowed.
This is a good point. And I’m also aware that Twitter likes to claim they’re not a publishing company anyway, but what’s to stop the government then from forcing Science.com to publish articles from climate change denialists?
(I’m assuming science.com is a reputable science site?)
Man, latest Chapo with some absolutely awful takes on this topic. Yikes.
Yeah, I have a hard time thinking twitter/fb could have handled the last 5 years worse, with worse outcomes. We’re in the worst case scenario. Anything else would have been better and saved so many lives.
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I’m not sure if there’s a particular post I’m replying to, but isn’t the issue that Google/Twitter/Facebook have 2 choices:
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Exercise discretion over what they publish/allow users to post, and then face liability if some of those posts are libelous or otherwise legally actionable.
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Explicitly exercise no discretion over what they publish/allow users to post, and then be free of liability.
In @MimosaDef’s example of Science.com, of course Science.com should be allowed to select what they publish. But that discretion opens them up to potential liability, which is why they need to exert a lot of effort to make sure that they publish high-quality stuff.
I think Twitter’s decision to not allow people to post links to a NY Post story was bad.
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Can you expand upon why you think its bad?
I don’t have much faith that Twitter (or Facebook) is capable of actually making thoughtful editorial decisions.
This is a slippery-slopish argument, but when I think about the following scenarios:
- Twitter does not allow public linking of the NY Post story
- Twitter does not allow private DMing of the NY Post story
- Google does not allow gmailing the NY Post story
it’s not obvious to me that there’s an important distinction between 1 and 3. Twitter isn’t like NBC, where they’re broadcasting information to people. They’re a communication channel that lets people share information with each other. Going on to Twitter does not bring with it any expectation of curation or fact-checking (at least to me), other than my own choice of who to follow.
And if they are going to do fact checking to determine that some stories/sources are prohibited, I’m super skeptical of them jumping in and applying that discretion to the NY Post. I mean, it’s obviously a shitty paper, but it’s a pretty well-known paper. As for this story in particular, my assumption is that it’s complete garbage, but I don’t think I’ve even seen a clearly documented reason why it’s bannable.
[I don’t feel 100% confident about this take, because I know it leads to shitty outcomes. I just haven’t been able to land on what I think a better system is. It sure as shit isn’t Zuckerberg evaluating the quality and importance of each story that gets shared on Facebook.]
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They’ve been content moderating forever. The current problem is that the daily wire and other deplorable shitrags are in charge of verifying stuff.
The Hunter Biden stuff does seem to be closer to an edge case, but no one was arguing its a slippery slope when they banned Qanon. It really isn’t any different, its just that this time the GOP is complaining to the refs. Both were hard fouls, just one was committed by Demarcus Cousins so we have to hear all the whining.
This is exactly it.
There needs to a middle level. Pure misinformation absolutely needs to be policed heavily, and Facebook, Twitter, etc. should ban accounts, and should even be legally forced to ban accounts, that have been proven but disseminate misinformation, but there are still going to be tons of edge cases where its not clear. IMO this is such a case. Two things just don’t seem likely to me:
- Hunter Biden was making 50k a month because he’s a smart energy guy
- Joe Biden forced the firing of the prosecutor because he’s just so caring about Ukrainian corruption levels
Just the overall narrative that there was a base level of corruption going on with Hunter/Joe and Burisma seems likely to true. That said, it can also easily be true that large parts of the emails are complete fabrications possibly even constructed by literal Russian agents. Put a warning label by the links, force people to open separate windows, dunno do something. Just not loving the absolutist approach where all news is either perfectly fine or so fake we have to pretend it doesn’t exist.
Your first amendment is the problem. You need some limits on speech (eg hate) and the ability to seek easier remedies in the courts for libel.
How is US libel law different from Canada libel law? I saw that movie Denial, where Rachel Weiss, a US professor, was sued by some asshole English Holocaust denier for libel. She had to prove in England court that her criticisms of the holocaust denier were true rather than how it would be in the US, where the burden would be on the person making the libel claim to prove that they were false. Seems nuts. Even dumber than those fuckin wigs they make everyone wear.
Article in this week’s New Yorker about content moderation at Facebook. Some interesting behind-the-scenes stuff here.
They listed several ways in which, in their opinion, their supervisors’ interpretations of the Implementation Standards conflicted with common sense and basic decency. “I just reviewed an Instagram profile with the username KillAllFags, and the profile pic was a rainbow flag being crossed out,” Kate said. “The implied threat is pretty clear, I think, but I couldn’t take it down.”
“Our supervisors insist that L.G.B.T. is a concept,” John explained.
“So if I see someone posting ‘Kill L.G.B.T.,’ unless they refer to a person or use pronouns, I have to assume they’re talking about killing an idea,” Kate said.
“Facebook could change that rule tomorrow, and a lot of people’s lives would improve, but they refuse,” John said.
“Why?” I said.
“We can ask, but our questions have no impact,” John said. “We just do what they say, or we leave.”
I have no specific knowledge of libel laws but Canadian law generally parallels UK law, not US law. Because we love the Queen, etc.