[icheishvili]

FAANG will need to decide if they're platforms or publishers. They currently moderate the communities, albeit selectively, while enjoying the protections granted by being a platform. This can lead to abuse of power where only select viewpoints are moderated out because unaccountable corporate leadership says so.

It's correct to be thinking about this, notwithstanding the fact that I place little faith in the federal government to produce the correct outcome.

[nnq]

Where did people unearth this "platforms" vs. "publishers" argument from? It looks like a political tool someone with a dark agenda diged out of some dark swampy corner of polytics...

Everything is both!

Of course you'll have more and more proprietary-algos / blackbox-ML/AI-systems filtering content. And of course the content can't be manually reviewed (because SIZE) and you can't have the platform be responsible for it (what does it even mean to "be responsible for content"?!).

It's sad there's not much we can do to regulate away some of the toxic infos (like the "platform vs publisher" meme currently floating around...), but here it's actually a case where doing nothing and stomacking some of the bad consequences is 1000% better that doing something! Because that "something" whatever it may be will limit fundamental freedoms simply by having something exists in this space!

[heavyset_go]

> Where did people unearth this "platforms" vs. "publishers" argument from?

It's a red herring.

[azinman2]

Let’s be clear. The “conservative” voices that have been moderated out not because of the PC police, but because of obvious reasons that violate ToS (spreading racism, inciting violence, etc). Look over [1] and show me this consistent “abuse of power”.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions

[klipt]

There are a lot of misandrist "men are trash" posters on Twitter that haven't been banned: https://mobile.twitter.com/hashtag/menaretrash?lang=en

Unless they're equally blasé about "women are trash" posters, seems their enforcement against sexism is only one sided?

[azinman2]

I don’t work for twitter so I can’t speak for them. Trump is still on twitter saying all kinds of horrible things, and I can only presume many others are as well. I’m not sure what triggers crossing a line, but I don’t agree with this accusation of some great anti-conservative conspiracy. I see this often in reaction to Alex Jones who spreads all kinds of false lies that have lead to violence.

Note it’s not like there are humans evaluating each and every tweet so it’s going to be inconsistency applied.

I also find it interesting that since posting on HN someone is trying to reset my Facebook account. Talk about censorship...

[sneak]

Google are also taking down educational gunsmithing and hacking videos, and remixes of music videos and music that people have made—fair use.

Reddit has been censoring their less mainstream-friendly BDSM porn subreddits. To appear on most of the site your subreddit has to be whitelisted, now.

It’s not just politics. They are defining broad guidelines of what categories of (legal) things you are allowed to publish or not.

[creaghpatr]

I imagine Netflix considers themselves a publisher, Amazon is the most interesting test case imo- with both their content and physical goods marketplace.

[lallysingh]

I think they have to move to purely mechanical moderation. It's the only way. Keyword and user reporting. Everything else is a mess politically (and that will end up being a political mess).

[nradov]

That has never worked, and never will work. Keywords are meaningless without understanding the surrounding context. User reporting fails when activist users engage in brigading to flag posts that they don't like even when those posts don't violate any laws or terms of service.