[bcrosby95]

Be careful of what you ask for.

Section 230 exists because the courts punished Prodigy because they tried to moderate their forums but did it imperfectly, but didn't punish CompuServe because they let anything go. The idea is to allow imperfect moderation in addition to both zero and perfect moderation.

The internet without section 230 isn't a bastion of internet freedom. It's 4chan and 8chan. It's a shithole.

[geofft]

More precisely, the internet without section 230 is two things: it's 4chan and 8chan on one side and tightly moderated corporate-run comment sections on the other (because you need extremely proactive moderation to avoid liability for things people post). You'll still have social media, because the world loves it, but everything will be reviewed by a compliance team at a big tech company instead of being available immediately. Smaller sites won't be able to staff a proper review team - you can still run personal blogs and let trusted friends comment, but you can't do things like run a Mastodon or a phpBB open to the public if you want to do any moderation at all (and if you don't do any moderation, 8chan will raid you).

[shrimp_emoji]

Well, it's good to know it's not all bad then.

Between the corporately-curated snail mail and 4chan, I think social media will skew toward 4chan, which I'd gladly accept. Frankly, I like it even more than moderately-moderated social media; it's a lot funner. :D Shithole, yes, but charming and fun. But that's probably mostly a product of its anonymity.

Also, imperfect moderation is the thing that tends to annoy users most. With perfect moderation (like a blog with comments disabled?), you have no hope. With no moderation, there's no danger. With imperfect moderation, there's inconsistent or nonsensical bans, there's the urge to take chances and get punished, sometimes by capricious mods, and there's endless sidebars of rules to read before posting. Ugg.

[themacguffinman]

I doubt that it will devolve into 4chan & 8chan which are abhorrent to common people, there's no money in doing that.

The internet will find a different way to appeal to the mainstream, probably by becoming more similar to cable TV & Netflix & Disney: practically eliminate amateur content and stick to professional, big budget productions.

[Consultant32452]

I'm okay with imperfect moderation. What I'm not okay with is backdoor untracked political contributions under the guise of imperfect moderation. It feels, to me, that Twitter and Google have given Billions of dollars worth of political censorship/promotion/search bias. Let's get the FEC involved so we can measure and track this political spending.

[thomaslord]

I'm curious... What dollar value would you place on Twitter contribution to the Trump campaign? They have long failed to enforce their terms of use against Trump's account despite him posting tweets that violate them, despite other accounts that posted the same text verbatim having the tweets removed and/or being banned from the platform.

I can't think of any high-profile liberal politicians who have such a blatant disregard for the rules of the platform, so that must be what you're referring to, right? Or is your contention that rules like "don't use our platform call for violence" are themselves political censorship targeted at conservatives?

[Consultant32452]

You might be interested in research by Robert Epstein which calculates how Google search rankings impact votes. He measured how many votes this changed and put some economic value on it.

Here's a quick interview between him and Larry King. His Congressional testimony is also really great, but it's over an hour long. You can find it on Youtube if you're interested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xS3uETvzZZ0

To put it simply, Google decides who wins every close election. If that's the future you want, where tech oligarchs and/or a rogue lower level employee controls entire elections across the globe, then that's the world you have today.

Trump's tweets are a red herring. I'm not a Trump supporter.

[kthxbye123]

This is absolute incoherent nonsense. Are TV networks that air press conferences giving 'untracked political contributions'? Is a network that chooses not to air a particular speech or event giving an 'untracked contribution' in the form of 'political censorship'?

[prepend]

I don’t think everything devolves to 4chan. But if I had to choose, I suppose I’d rather have 4chan than Facebook. But I hope we never have to choose between those extremes.