[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?