As someone who started an ISP in 1996 and was heavily involved in all of this, I can assure you the internet in the US would be absolutely fucked.
Like I said, the legal profession would eat well off of it, that is about it.
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Okay, keep the protections for ISPs as they are truly akin to a utility. But we have tremendous moral hazard from all these social media companies that profit from shitposting without being responsible for it. And to make it worse, they Lean In to the moral hazard.
It is possible to post news/online content in a responsible manner, every news publication does it under the threat of libel lawsuits and vast majority of them are able to do so without getting sued out of existence. Even places like Breitbart.
That kills 99% of user created content. I don’t even know if it would be logistically possible if money was no issue to moderate the information out there.
I don’t see stripping the protections and then trying to make exceptions to try and protect the “correct speech” as working very well, and the net result is a freezing of online communications and interactions.
Lots of lawyers here on unstuck but if this change happened the site would need to employ a lawyer and 99.999% chance the lawyer would say “lol shut it down”.
I realize it is being abused right now but repealing it destroys much more than it fixes. Republicans and Democrats have both said they are interested in revamping it in the future. They just have no interest in Trump’s personal motives.
As for media, media doesn’t get sued out of existence because they have a ton of lawyers and a lot of editors. This is expensive, especially when broken down per piece of content.
Imagine google being held liable for search results? We have a taste of that with the European right to be forgotten. This is only everything, at any time is a liability they have to address.
Entire swaths of the internet would likely become delisted almost right away.
Basically turning the internet into AOL.
I support laws to define more of what needs to be moderated. That’s not a problem. But the core production needs to stay and the moderation needs to be the exception not vice versa.
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You say this as if making it easy to create and widely distribute user generated content is necessarily a good thing. Look around the world and check your priors. I’d happily give up this space if RWNJs didn’t have their own places to stir up trouble.
Email can still be a thing, PMs can still be a thing, you can even still setup a blog. And again, we’d still have tons of responsible and accountable mass media news, entertainment, convenient shopping, etc. on the internet. Tons of positives from the internet that we can still enjoy and improve our lives.
What cannot happen is that media companies take in trillions of dollars spreading pure crap across the world and leave the rest of us powerless to hold them accountable for it.
Who’s gonna host your blog? You gonna install IIS on your PC and tell people to go to http://65.92.183.7 or something? Don’t forget that you yourself could get sued now if you put something up that turns out to be a problem.
And I know people will say “oh good Facebook will die, good riddance”, but places a lot of us go every day for discussion/opinions about things would likely go with it. Reddit, Twitter, 2+2, Discord and other chat sites, this place. I don’t know about you but I’m gonna feel massively isolated if I’m suddenly limited to the small circle of often weird/dumb people I know IRL for analysis and discussion of things like the next election or the dumb 4th down decision in last night’s game. (Yes, I know this is what the world was like for thousands of years until like 1993. No, I don’t think it’s a good thing.)
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In a worst-case scenario, I assume all of us will initiate the Phase 1 Group Chat.
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Go Daddy or whoever can also be carved out to allow domain names to be a thing. I don’t think domain names are responsible for poisoning the world. And you can already be sued personally for your social media posts. Contrary to the posting ITT, lawyers don’t go around suing people left and right for BS.
Re: isolation, it’s not a good thing that we ignore people in our community to talk a bunch of nerds on the Internet. Maybe it’s more comfortable, especially to the extent we have social anxiety, but we end up coming here talking shit about the people we are ignoring in our community and they go on Parler to talk shit about us. Bad!
Barrack Obama loves to tell the story about how in the early 2000s, he could go into the reddest community and at least get a fair shake and have a conversation with people. Now you don’t even feel safe talking politics as a D in a red community.
Not going to list the ridiculous number of ways that user generated content has made the world better because it is absurdly long and encompassing.
You are absolutely choosing the wrong path on this and in my opinion it is not even a little bit close.
You know all these cell phone videos we see online? Yeah all gone. No more. A handful might get sold to media outlets to vet and air. This is literally one of a thousand things.
It’s not like the ability to share information is a one way street. Cutting off the sharing of information because people abuse and misuse it is not a solution.
Just the sharing of information has drastically changed how we all live.
I get the issues with people spreading lies. I am well aware of the consequences. Still not the right move.
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I know for a fact, that the internet would not be the internet without those protections.
It’s not fear lingering, it is reality. It is literally what happened. And without it almost none of the internet would exist as it does today.
Like I said I was there, I was taking the risk myself in the very early days. I was in conversations and meetings and conferences about all these issues.
It’s just flat out reality.
If people think these tech companies are going to finance the necessary lawyers and editors to allow every person to share every dumb thing they think of, well that is naivety to the nth degree.
Will you take on the legally responsible role for Unstuck in that new world? Will you take that responsibility for literally any site you use on the internet?
We will have streaming services, shopping sites and traditional news media but most everything else goes away, unless you plan on taking on the liability.
It’s not just about the merits of a lawsuit, it’s about being able to financially afford to address the deluge of lawsuits you would face.
A massive amount of information sharing would disappear. What remains would be insanely expensive.
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Unstuck will disappear. Facebook will stay because they can afford the lawyers, moderators and algorithms to protect themselves.
It’s not cutting off content. It’s holding people responsible for distributing content that they profit off of, and protecting people from being victimized and slandered to massive audiences with no practical recourse.
Absolutely nothing stopping you or anybody else from starting your own blog soliciting and sharing cop abuse videos or whatever in my brave new world. All you have to do is, gasp, take reasonable steps to make sure they are real before you post them to your blog. Then you don’t need to hide behind Section 270.
You still need someone to host the blog. And with their legal team on the hook every time a cop objects to you putting up a video of them kneeling on a guy’s head, how long will the hosting for your blog last?
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The very worst thing about our law system is that it absolutely does not matter who is correct or what justice is. If one party has more means than the other, then they can hire better representation, spend longer in court, use time and money to their advantage. How many weeks can you take off work to defend your cop videos blog? Do you have money to pay for a lawyer for months?
Its capitalism. Money = might = right. Removing 230 is just another way to make sure the little guy has no options and only those who can survive prolonged legal fights will win.
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How is Section 230 helping the little guy when it only protects the Internet giants from liability? Right now, I’m still liable for my Facebook posts but Facebook itself is not.
Not all content hosts are Facebook. Yet lots of very small businesses and individuals instantly become targets. In fact juicier targets than Facebook because Facebook can lawyer them to death.
And no competition for any of these entrenched companies can ever come into existence with these protections.
I have been telling people to not use Facebook as long as anyone. I get the issues.
This is still not the solution.
Trying to solve content moderation through the broken legal system is a horrific premise to me.
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Once the conservatives aren’t able to find gay and/or incest porn available on the internet they’ll be onboard with not revoking Section 230.
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You get that the ISP of the little guy can basically block whatever they want, and if they become liable not only can they, they will.
Do you think the average little guy has the ability to be their own ISP?
The best part (for FB, not us) is once they survive the onslaught and become the only damn place you can share stuff online with others, they can happily introduce their introductory $9.95/mo membership fee.
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I agreed that ISPs should retain the protections as well as domain name providers. I’m advocating for enough protection for anyone to be able to setup their own website but then be responsible for what is posted on that website.
Our current system is a cancer on society because websites have every incentive to attract eyeballs which leads to $$$$, and the market combined with Section 230 provides almost no constraints on how they accomplish that goal.
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What do the good countries do to mitigate this? Netherlands? Finland? Sweden?