[throwawaygh]

I'm generally sympathetic to the idea that Section 230 protections should come with some sort of obligation to allow free speech.

However, the actual policy proposals for replacing Section 230 are all outright dystopian. Josh Hawley, in particular, is NOT a free speech advocate. His problem with Facebook/Tiwtter is perceived liberal bias, and the alternatives to Section 230 that he suggests are 100% about wrestling editorial oversight away from one class (tech CEOs) and then giving it to another (a politically-appointed board).

Does anyone have a good proposal for how to go about reforming Section 230 in a way that's workable and values free speech?

[jasode]

>Section 230 protections should come with some sort of obligation to allow free speech. [...] Does anyone have a good proposal [...] and values free speech?

Nobody has a good proposal because every discussion about the idealism of "values free speech" is always hiding the true difficulty: nobody wants to be forced to pay for others' undesirable speech.

E.g. Youtube can't be a "free speech" platform because advertisers have free will and can choose to not pay for it. (Previous comment about Adpocalypse: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23259087)

Always mentally translate "create a website that allows free speech" into "create a website that forces others to always pay for undesirable speech they don't agree with" -- and you will see that's a virtually impossible dream to accomplish. There is no broadcasting medium (including websites) in any country that doesn't have interference and pressure to remove/ban content via consumer boycotts, advertisers, subscribers, business judgement, or government officials.

Websites have the hard reality of requiring cpu/disk/bandwidth and they all cost money and that's the lever used by others that keeps "absolute free speech" from getting realistically implemented.

[haberman]

This is close, but misses the mark slightly I think. The cpu/disk/bandwidth to store and serve text are so small as to be irrelevant. I don't think it's a cost issue.

The issue is one of association. There are strong social forces that punish association with any distasteful speech. The association taints everything (and everyone) it touches, and the liability in the form of negative blowback can grow far beyond whatever costs were involved in actually serving the content.

Even if some set of individuals were willing to donate all the hosting costs of the distasteful speech, there would be strong social pressure for hosting platforms not to accept the money.

[jasode]

>I don't think it's a cost issue. The issue is one of association. There are strong social forces that punish association with any distasteful speech.

Yes, association is also an issue so there are at least 2 forces happening: cost and/or association.

Since I used the word "undesirable" and you used the word "distasteful", I believe we're thinking of 2 different scenarios:

(1) inconvenient/controversial content like politics or alternative COVID theories

(2) vile or obscene content like beheadings or adult porn

My perception is that the censorship topics I see getting press is more of (1) than (2) and the levers putting pressure on the money trail is the primary weapon for (1).

E.g. supporting Hong Kong protests are not category (2) vile/obscene (maybe your "distasteful"?) but nevertheless, Apple removed podcasts with that subject matter from the App Store to appease China[1].

Even with Apple's billions in its war chest, Tim Cook did not say "China can fuck off -- we're keeping the podcasts because our App Store is all about free speech!". That didn't happen because Apple wants to sell smartphones in China and so they will cooperate with China's limits on "free speech".

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jun/12/apple-rem...

[bilbo0s]

>The cpu/disk/bandwidth to store and serve text are so small as to be irrelevant.

Just wondering, in your view, if these costs are so "small", who pays them when advertisers abandon the website? Where does the money come from to cover these costs? (Small as they are.)

Full Disclosure: My own belief is that IRL these costs, especially for something at the scale of YouTube, are not likely to be terribly "small" at all. I seriously doubt most organizations could countenance such costs with no return on that investment.

[haberman]

The revenue from advertisers is supporting both controversial and non-controversial content.

If advertisers completely pull their ads off a website even though only 1% (say) of the content they were sponsoring is actually controversial, then the blowback has cost the platform 100x more than what they were paying to host the controversial content.

I think hosting costs can be significant overall, yes. But I think the marginal hosting cost of allowing controversial content is not significant.

It's only a significant cost when it impacts the revenue stream for the bulk of what the website is publishing.

[bilbo0s]

But if there is no way to remove content because of mandatory free speech, then the controversial content goes to 99%. No advertiser will pay for ads alongside a torrent of profanity and porn. It just won't happen. (Well, porn sites might? But no one else.)

Not to mention the fact that the sites could not stop advertisers from posting ads on their site in any case. (Since it would be illegal to remove content. Free speech and all that.) So why would I pay that 8 figure yearly sum to you that the big advertisers are paying today, when I can pay not even a million to a spam farm to post my ads as standard comments that you are forbidden from removing? And it's completely legal.

I just think you're being a tad idealist. Spam farms exist. Botnets exist. Pedophiles, porn stars, klansmen, all these exist. This stuff would be the majority of content, not 1% of content. Spam alone would overwhelm interesting content, and that's before you even throw in the porn, pedophilia, and klan rallies.

[CM30]

Is it really the case that advertisers won't pay for it though?

I get that many advertisers won't, but even companies who do want to advertise on controversial content don't really get the choice to do so, since platforms seem more prone to flat out removing/banning said content rather than putting it behind a 'controversial' flag and letting advertisers opt in/out of advertising on it.

These sites already have systems to mark what kind of content something is, and advertisers can already choose to market on content in some categories and not others. So it'd seem like if there are companies willing to pay for such speech, they should be allowed to.

[throwawaygh]

Yeah, I used to think of it like this.

In particular, my view was basically: "don't like FB/YT/Twitter policies? Spin up a wordpress; it's as easy as posting to FB/YT and you can pay the monthly bill for a quite decent audience using loose change."

I've come around in the past couple of years. Social networks/content platforms are... well, networks and platforms. Like it or not, the policies of the largest networks/platforms will have a non-trivial impact on public opinion. They have become a (perhaps the) public square. And the government doesn't have to extend Section 230 protections to those networks/platforms.

I really like the idea that individual users should be able to create their own content filters and buy/sell content filters. At least in the abstract, this seems like it would address the need for content moderation without centralizing the censorship.

[majormajor]

> Always mentally translate "create a website that allows free speech" into "create a website that forces others to always pay for undesirable speech they don't agree with" -- and you will see that's a virtually impossible dream to accomplish. There is no broadcasting medium (including websites) in any country that doesn't have interference and pressure to remove/ban content via consumer boycotts, advertisers, subscribers, business judgement, or government officials.

> Websites have the hard reality of requiring cpu/disk/bandwidth and they all cost money and that's the lever used by others that keeps "absolute free speech" from getting realistically implemented.

There seems to be a blind spot here in the idea that "websites" have to be big monolithic platforms that give everyone a megaphone.

"Websites" where you can say whatever you want are and have been cheap, and there have been famous examples of this for decades (Timecube!).

But expecting to get access to someone else's megaphone is a very different question. Recently it's been mediated by "engagement" which is a socially terrible base metric, editorially - it encourages the most ridiculous, provocative thing. But this is still a choice, not just some technological inevitability or "correct" ideal state. Big platforms will always necessarily do some sort of curation.

Putting the government in charge of that curation seems silly, since the real cost of bypassing the platforms is so low. Yeah, you have to earn the eyeballs then, instead of piggybacking on other people's shit, but is that so bad?

It's like saying "people shouldn't make independent movies anymore, we're just gonna have the government review all the scripts the big studios take on and make them take some they normally wouldn't."

[alkibiades]

thats not true. there are people who would be happy to advertise on the federalist or conservative content, but youtube/google bans it anyway because they are ideologues.

how hard would it to be to allow them to match with advertisers who specifically want to be on that type of content?

[thoughtstheseus]

Make it all dumb pipes and make users responsible for regulating what they see/hear. Make a market for filtering content, one great filter across a platform is not flexible.

Require platforms over a certain size to provide real-time data accessibility across platforms. Facebook and Twitter are monopolies by virtue of market position, anyone can build a platform that is functionally the same. Create competition here.

[throwawaygh]

This sounds like an excellent idea, but I'm worried about architecture/execution/implementation. Generally successful regulations set goals but don't prescribe how those goals should be met. There doesn't seem to be a super clean separation between "what" and "how" here.

[GoblinSlayer]

Implementations exist: Microsoft provides parental control filters, OpenDNS has community-driven content classification.

[throwawaygh]

Right. Building it is definitely not an Unsolved Problem, just like building a healthcare exchange website is not an Unsolved Problem. The problem is organizational and political, not technical.

[stronglikedan]

> Make it all dumb pipes and make users responsible for regulating what they see/hear.

Just like the good old days, until somebody "thought of the children".

[danShumway]

If you're looking for an alternative take, check out some of Cory Doctorow's writing on this. His position is that forcing platform neutrality is less important when platforms don't have a monopoly over communication.

Different people have come up with different plans about how you could address tech monopolies, with varying degrees of extremity:

- Splitting up companies that control entire vertical slices of a market. Warren in particular was campaigning pretty hard on this, especially in regards to Amazon/Apple app stores.

- Forcing companies to allow data exports by consumers, and specifically to allow automated data exports. For example, Facebook would need to allow you to access an API to pull your data, so you could plug that API into a competitor instead of manually downloading everything.

- Weakening Computer Fraud and Abuse laws around site scraping and adversarial interoperability.

- Adding additional exceptions to the DMCA around interoperability. For example, allowing companies to break Kindle DRM for the purpose of moving books to a competing service if Amazon didn't provide a way for them to migrate books on its own.

- Forcing certain data formats to be standardized, or requiring standardized API layers on top of services.

There's a lot of debate in those areas about how far is too far, and what counts as a natural monopoly, and what negative side effects might exist for particular strategies. But, the thread running through all of them is that Section 230 is fine, awesome even. There's no need to get rid of it, 99% of the time we want moderation on most of our platforms.

Platform censorship is really only a problem when consumers don't have the ability to easily switch platforms/hosts, and in that case we should break the monopolies, not the Right to Filter[0]. You see people complain about censorship on Twitter, you don't see as many people complain about censorship on Mastodon, because on Mastodon you can set up your own server if you really need to. One of the biggest points of federated services is to allow communities to choose how aggressive they want to be about moderation.

[0]: https://anewdigitalmanifesto.com/#right-to-filter

[throwawaygh]

Thanks for curating all of these proposals!

- splitting up: seems like a temporary fix at best (see ma bell).

- data exports: exporting is nice, but... then what? the network is still a network.

- weakening CFAA/DMCA and allowing scraping/interop: It'd be a terrible hacky world, but I could imagine it working. Probably would end up looking like a weird inverted version of the Wuph! bit from The Office. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WUPHF.com So not a good solution but maybe actually a solution. Plus we should do this anyways.

- standardized API: I like this combined with the sibling proposal of allowing people to build their own filters. I think that's my new position unless someone can convince me otherwise :)

[bilbo0s]

I don't have a good proposal really, but I agree that "politically appointed board" is exactly the worst thing we could have. That's the point where true free speech advocates will have suffered total defeat.

[WalterBright]

"Sure I believe in free speech, but you can't let that guy say those things."

[6510]

Not necessarily, a government board should only do law enforcement. You should at least get your day in court.

[olliej]

Define free speech in a way that allows a platform to ban offensive content, while requiring them to publish all content.

Also this is contextually a clear retaliation for speech that the government does not like, and their arguments are pretextual.

But also if a platform loses 230 protectIon if it restrict political opinions then sites would need to leave racist and homophobic comments up, personal attacks against the authors, etc. Because if they lose 230 protection they become directly liable for content on their site if the filter any of it.

That was the whole point of section 230 - sites have a legitimate reason to want to stop arbitrary content being hosted by them, but they only had the “i’m just a dumb pipe” defense as long as they left everything up. Preventing that is literally the reason section 230 exists.

But here we have a president who doesn’t like one platform’s content moderation policies, as has decided to rewrite the law in order to make that moderation illegal.

It is clearly retaliatory, and it is clearly with the intent of restricting the speech of those entities.

[ch4s3]

> some sort of obligation to allow free speech

Isn’t that the opposite of what the text of the law says? Doesn’t it provide for protection when moderate content that “one may find objectionable”, which could basically be anything.

[notahacker]

The text of the law is a mess: it gives content providers the ability to define whatever moderation policy they want, but also gives objectors the right to sue for punitive damages in the event that they disagree with how it is applied, with their claims being judged by an whether they uphold undefined 'fair dealing standards'.

It's not so much an attempt to defend free speech as to bury the affected companies in litigation if their moderation policies aren't either nonexistent or up front and aggressive: exactly the situation Section 230 was written to avoid. It's just in this case the lawsuits will come from the parties seeking to cause offence rather than the offended.

[ch4s3]

I can see how it could be read that way, but are content providers really buried in litigation in practice? I actually don't have much insight here personally, so I'm quite curious.

[Nasrudith]

No because have section 230 protections in the first place. They can arbitrarily start playing Mao and banning people for arbitrady undisclosed reasons and it would be legal. That is a major Chesterton's fence.

[pwdisswordfish2]

To me, the question is whether the web is a something people use through a middleman, i.e., someone else's website like Mark Zuckerberg's, versus a thing that we use directly, i.e., having our own websites. If we follow the later thinking, then of course we are personally responsible for what content we place on the website.

In either case, the web in its design is still a "public place" where "free speech" can occur, where anyone who is connected to the internet has the potential (setting aside issues of state censorship) to communicate, via a public website, anything to anyone, anywhere in the world.

Section 230 was reputed to be passed in response to a lawsuit against Prodigy, an online subscription service, which technically, IMO, was not the same as the emerging "web". IMO, services like Prodigy, Compuserve, America Online, etc. were walled gardens that could exist outside of the web. Rightly or wrongly, I always viewed Section 230 as protecting ISP's from litigation arising out of the content people included on their websites, not as protecting websites from litigation arising out of the publication of the content. It is up to the website owner to remove offending content, not the ISP to block access to it. This makes practical sense. We wanted ISPs to stay in businesss.

As crazy as it may seem to consider messing with Section 230, there is certainly an argument that the protection it affords has been usurped in ways never anticipated, by enormous "communal" websites larger than anyone could have imagined. When someone's website has billions of pages, comprising submissions from the general public, it becomes impractical to remove offending content. I doubt Section 230 was intended to address this problem, to keep a small number of individual websites in business and ensure the creation of a small number of advertising services billionaires.

[throwawaygh]

> It is up to the website owner to remove offending content, not the ISP to block access to it. This makes practical sense. We wanted ISPs to stay in businesss.

Yeah, it's interesting. That's how everyone thought about it back in the day. Section 230 was about ISPs, not phpBBs.

I remember actually worrying about this when setting up my own forums. Even talked to a lawyer and included CYA language in the EULA. I would also use this as a justification for bans ("I'm possibly on the hook for his bullshit, which might be called harassment by some local pd, because the law is new and who the hell knows what will happen").

Thanks for the reminder. That's really interesting, and it's also really interesting that I didn't even remember this.

[ensignavenger]

The whole point of Section 230 is to allow digital communications services to moderate their platforms without incurring liability for the things their users say. If you want to stop the moderation, all you would need to do is completely repeal Section 230- as it no longer serves any purpose under such a system.

[zucker42]

Without Section 230, if I host a unmoderated social network, could I face liability if one person libeled another using my website? My understanding was yes, but your comment suggests otherwise.

[geofft]

If you don't know about it, then no, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubby,_Inc._v._CompuServe_Inc. (This is one of the cases that spurred Section 230; the analysis is, I believe, still valid today for sites that don't moderate things, because the point of Section 230 was to provide equivalent protection for sites that do moderate things. But it's definitely valid if Section 230 goes away.)

[joshuaheard]

I think it's the opposite. If you don't moderate you are not responsible. If you moderate, you undertake liability.

[paul_f]

This is not really true, in fact, in my opinion, it is the opposite of this. Services are given immunity if they don't moderate their content. Once they moderate it, they lose the protections. Facebook want to moderate content and receive immunity, and that is the crux of the problem.

[ryukafalz]

You're mixing up section 230 with the situation prior to section 230. There were two important cases prior to its passage:

- Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co., in which Prodigy was found to be liable due to their content moderation, and

- Cubby, Inc. v. CompuServe Inc., in which CompuServe was held not liable for content, as they were unaware of it

Section 230 was in fact created to change this - to allow companies to moderate without making them liable for all of the actions of their users.

[elliekelly]

I like HN’s approach and wish more platforms would follow a similar format. As far as I know, nothing is ever “removed” from the site - it’s just greyed out or hidden by default. Anyone who wants to read the bothersome comments can flip the switch to see them but no one can reply to them which seems like a really effective approach to me.

If a “censored” tweet couldn’t be shared/retweeted/replied to but was still available for anyone who wanted to seek it out then the idea (however distasteful) hasn’t been censored strictly speaking but it also hasn’t been amplified. I’d prefer a compromise that leaves control over acceptable content in the hands of the platform owner or the users rather than the government.

[bootlooped]

In this comment thread you can find at least one comment removed. Search for the text "[flagged]".

[notahacker]

If you have showdead on you can still read the flagged comments, without even needing to click through like a Twitter content warning. I'm sure mods can permanently delete stuff where absolutely necessary, but generally seem to leave it even when it's obvious spam or highly offensive. I guess the big difference between this and social platforms is that nobody comes to HN to show off their edgy credentials to their adoring fan base or organize harassment campaigns via the platform.

[s_y_n_t_a_x]

I see you chose to attack the person, not the proposal.

You are wrong. The bill does not designate a political board, it requires tech companies that have over $30 million U.S. users per month and an annual income of over $1.5 billion, to publish all of their content moderation policies. Users who charge that the companies are not implementing content moderation policies fairly would be able to sue for $5,000 plus attorney fees.

I think it's reasonable for these social media behemoths to post their mod logs.

I'd even like to see sites like HNs do it. Lobsters does: https://lobste.rs/moderations

If you have a specific gripe with this, let's discuss the legal.

I really don't see how GP is currently top comment.

Forcing giant social media companies to publish their content moderation is transferring power from the tech ELITE to the public. No political committee is in charge, the company will be forced to be published their logs, the courts can be used when users think companies are still acting in bad faith and not properly publishing their moderation logs.

PSA: READ THE BILL, IT'S SIX PAGES!!!

https://www.hawley.senate.gov/sites/default/files/2020-06/Li...

[notahacker]

The published text doesn't require companies to publish logs, it requires them to publish a policy [something Twitter and Facebook already do to some extent] and then allows vexatious litigants to sue for $5k in imaginary damages if they disagree with how the policy is applied.

This isn't transferring power from the tech elite to the public, it's making trolling the new patent trolling.

[s_y_n_t_a_x]

Under that interpretation, companies will certainly want to keep a public moderation log for court documentation then.

Being transparent as possible will be best for the user and the courts to determine whether or not there is selective bias in moderation.

[throwawaygh]

Section 3.

Here's Josh's own description of the legislative intent: "Big tech companies would have to prove to the FTC by clear and convincing evidence that their algorithms and content-removal practices are politically neutral. The FTC could not certify big tech companies for immunity except by a supermajority vote"

If the FTC has the authority that Josh wants it to have then it will 100% be politically weaponized by whoever controls the white house at the time of passage (so, Trump, because it'll only pass if R's sweep in 2021). IMO it's quite naive to think otherwise. In general, but also specifically with respect to Trump.

But, assume Trump is this amazingly neutral and high-minded person uninterested in using political power to shape social media narratives. Okay. I have a PhD in machine learning, have tons of experience designing and deploying systems, and I'm pretty up to date on all of the fairness literature. I have No. Fucking. Clue. how I would convince even myself that a content moderation algorithm is "politically neutral".

Even with a clean spec, this seems hard because content moderation algorithms are huge and complex. Wasn't it just a few years ago that a bug in Java's sorting algorithm was found by trying to certify its correctness? Like, bugs live in freaking sorting algorithms of the most popular languages for years and years. Even with a ridiculously clean spec, ...

...and the spec here isn't nearly as clean as "sort the list". The question of what "politically neutral" even means is extraordinarily political. So even if the FTC wasn't explicitly weaponized -- and, dear god, it will be, because the counter-factural here is insane -- the judgements here will still be implicitly political because the spec ("politically neutral") is inherently political.

Proving that a hugely complex ML algorithm is fair simply won't be some sort of apolitical mathematical exercise.

Also, note well: I wasn't even referring to the Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act specifically. But I don't really want to start a debate around this point because that's all beside the point.

I'm curious. What do you think of the proposal made in this thread that people should be able to use their own filters and the big tech cos should be required to implement a clean api for enabling third party filters?

That seems like it solves the "some people don't want to see X" problem in a pretty politically neutral way, but also in a way that acknowledges the difference between the walled-garden network effects web of 2020 and the more decentralized web of 2005.

Seems strictly superior to Josh's proposal of creating a huge incentive to politically weaponize the FTC and giving that almost certainly weaponized body broad authority.

If you think that the "user-chosen filters" solution is not better than Josh's proposal, I'm really interested to hear why.

[geofft]

I'm not sure I agree with that framing of the relationship between Section 230 and free speech.

For reference, here's the law:

> (1) No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

> (2) No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of— (A)any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or (B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).

Section 230 was written to solve a very specific problem: Prodigy tried to moderate content on their site, and when someone posted libelous content and they didn't remove it, Prodigy was held legally responsible. CompuServe did not moderate content, and when someone posted libelous content, CompuServe was not held legally responsible. There was a perception that this was a counterintuitive result, and so Section 230 patched over it.

This has nothing to do with the ideological content of the communications. The messages in both cases were already unlawful because they were libelous - the question is whether CompuServe and Prodigy bore any liability (i.e., any obligation to not republish it), or just the end user.

Also, as written, Section 230 does not create an obligation to do anything. You don't have to moderate obscene, lewd, etc. content. You can choose not to moderate anything. The law simply says, 1, you the website operator aren't responsible for what people post, and 2, you don't gain any additional liability if you choose to moderate these things. It doesn't create any liability for not moderating them. The perception (which seems to have been empirically correct) is that Prodigy's approach would be more popular in the market than CompuServe's, and so the law should not create a legal incentive to act like CompuServe. The new law simply removed that incentive; it did not create a legal incentive to act like Prodigy.

The results of the two cases are only counterintuitive if you believe it is good for society for service providers to proactively moderate speech that is already illegal and err on the side of over-moderating. I don't think that belief is easy to reconcile with a strong pro-free-speech view - you're trusting a platform to be making decisions that would otherwise be made by courts, and you don't have nearly the representation/recourse/etc. you do with the legal system, if they decide to moderate you.

In particular, adding an obligation to protect free speech means that providers can only moderate content if they're confident it would result in legal liability. If they're not sure (suppose that, to pick a recent example, someone says that J. K. Rowling "cannot be trusted around children" - is this libelous, or a constitutionally-protected opinion?), they should err on the side of not moderating. But that matches the status quo ante Section 230. If you think that forums should err on the side of under-moderating, then it was perfectly fine to be in the legal situation where Prodigy's approach was riskier than CompuServe's.

Note also that neither of these scenarios does anything to discourage people from running forums where they tightly control what is said (ideologically or otherwise). If I want to host a personal blog with only my own posts, I can do that today, I could do that before Section 230, and I can do that essentially regardless of anyone's proposals (because I have a First Amendment right to say what I want and only what I want). If I want to invite my friends and only my friends to comment, I can do that too. If I want to invite the entire world to comment and I screen comments before posting, I can do that too (I also have a First Amendment right to free association). I'm still liable for unlawful posts (from libel to copyright infringement to whatever else), but if I'm willing to tightly moderate content, that's okay.

Another pro-free-speech opinion here, by the way, is that the real problem is with libel laws, and neither CompuServe nor Prodigy should have been held liable because the speech shouldn't have been illegal in the first place. This is entirely orthogonal to the "free speech" concern of perceived ideological bias.

It's only in the weird intersection of all of these things that the framing of Section 230 and ideological bias seems to make sense - you'd have to take the anti-free-speech view that ruinous penalties for libel are good, and then carve out an anti-free-speech exception that says that if you choose not to exercise your right to say what you want or associate with who you want, libel laws don't apply to you. And then, somehow, the two anti-free-speech approaches cancel out and turn into a free speech view - platforms are obligated to be non-ideologically-biased (in a sense defined by the government) for fear of arbitrary civil penalties.

(By the way, any free-speech reform to Section 230 really should start with repealing 230(e)(5), where FOSTA/SESTA partially removed Section 230's protections so that platforms became responsible for messages posted by users about "the promotion or facilitation of prostitution.")

[throwawaygh]

Yeah, I agree with a lot of that. Especially the point that creating an obligation to protect free speech is, even if a nice value, pragmatically totally impossible to implement. That's sort of what I was trying to say in my original post (poorly I guess): "sure, maybe free speech would be nice, but honestly how? all the medicine seems worse than the cure and this is a sort of fundamentally thorny problem"

What do you think of the proposal that, to keep section 230, websites with a large audience must implement a standardized api and then folks would be allowed to create their own content filters on top of that api?

Thanks for your post.

[geofft]

It's not solely that it's pragmatically impossible - it's that IMO it's not a free speech value. The government should not be in the business of telling private entities, regardless of size, that they are obligated to republish speech they don't agree with. Doing so may be a very important social/cultural norm but it shouldn't be a legal one.

(I think you can carve out a reasonable exception for the fairness doctrine and the equal-time rule for broadcast radio/TV based on the fact that spectrum is limited, and even imperfect attempts by the government at ensuring fair allocation of spectrum are better than none. But the internet is not limited in the same way; anyone can start a discussion forum without a resource allocation from the government. For the same reason, newspapers and magazines don't have anything like the fairness doctrine and never did - for about as long s there have been newspapers, anyone could start a new, competing newspaper, so there was little need to make a rule that everyone had the right to get their articles published in the local newspaper.)

Re a standardized API for keeping Section 230 - I still maintain that ideological neutrality is completely unrelated to Section 230, which is about directing the liability for speech that's already illegal.

Proposals to make Section 230 related to ideological neutrality are about weaponizing the threat of people making illegal speech to coerce websites to do things. I think that's a lot worse as a matter of policy than directly telling the websites what to do, if that's your actual goal.

Here's a thought experiment: suppose you have a group of 1000 honorable people who would never post libel/threats/copyright infringement/whatever. If I run a web forum that's restricted to these people, nothing about Section 230 can impact me, because they're never going to do anything that will incur legal liability for themselves or me. If 500 of those people are pro-abortion-rights and 500 are anti-abortion-rights and I restrict the forum to one of those subsets, that doesn't change the analysis - I'm still not going to be affected.

The only way Section 230 becomes relevant is if a couple of those people are dishonorable (and also boneheaded) and want to post illegal speech. Then they incur liability for themselves, of course, but if I lose Section 230 protections and I fail to moderate their speech, I also incur liability.

But the ability of those people to post illegal speech on my forum is clearly not a public policy goal - their speech is already illegal. Sure, there will always be a few such people in the world, but the law has, until now, taken the opinion that people shouldn't do that. Adding a new law that relies on people continuing this illegal behavior for it to have the right incentive seems like a poor plan: it is a complicated weapon and likely to work poorly in practice too.

If you want to make a rule that large websites cannot operate at all unless they are content-neutral in some definition, do that instead of merely making them subject to legal risk. But then you have to figure out exactly how setting up those rules is compatible with the right of private entities to engage in free speech and association. (And I think having to figure that out is a good thing.)

[christkv]

Just change the wording to illegal speech instead of vague definition like indecent speech.

[joshuaheard]

Use the First Amendment standard, which is basically anything but obscenity and threats of imminent violence.

[driverdan]

That's unreasonable. Without moderation you'd have a 100 to 1 ratio of spam to good content. Platforms should be able to control content in the way they see fit for their platform.

[dane-pgp]

Banning spam might be possible without giving platforms the power to make their own judgements about the truthfulness or decency of the content they host.

If 90% of (a random subset of) users agree that a given piece of content is spam, the platform should be entitled to delete the content. The company would then be allowed to ban a user after a certain number of strikes, possibly subject to an appeals process where a human employee checks that this isn't a case of a minority viewpoint being unfairly silenced by false reports.

This would democratise these platforms, and only give companies the discretion to allow more content than their users are interested in, rather than less.

[amanaplanacanal]

It seems that could easily be weaponized to remove minority opinions.

[christkv]

I would rather hope it kills the big platforms and forces a reverting to smaller platforms and message boards. Social media has become a scourge on humanity.

[paul_f]

Google is under fire for removing political speech they don't like, not spam. This is where losing the 230 protections become a problem for them.

[SN76477]

> His problem with Facebook/Tiwtter is perceived liberal bias

This seems to be because they live in a bubble where everyone agrees with them. But when they look at the real world they do not see the same. giving them the perception of bias, but there is none. They simply have an unpopular opinion.

[haberman]

Twitter is a bubble. In the public at large, Trump still polls at a better than 40% approval rating and Joe Biden easily beat Twitter darlings like Warren and Sanders.

[dane-pgp]

> Joe Biden easily beat Twitter darlings like Warren and Sanders.

It's worth asking whether Biden's popularity relative to Warren and Sanders is actually an artefact of an under-use of preferential/ranked voting systems for polls and primaries.

To pick an example from last September[0], Warren and Sanders had 19.7% and 17.1% support, respectively, while Biden had 29.6%. That's not to say that Warren or Sanders would have had twice as much support if the other had ended their candidacy then, but it does cast doubt on the claim that Biden "easily beat" them.

[0] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/9/25/20882026/d...

[haberman]

Even if I grant 100% of your argument, nowhere near 29.6% of Twitter expressed support for Biden as their first choice.

Twitter is not representative of the general electorate.

[throwawaygh]

> Twitter is a bubble

Yup.

So is Missouri's GOP.

[GoblinSlayer]

A politically-appointed board won't do stellar moderation, but it sure will prevent the worst form of moderation that CEOs do.