[donmcronald]

I think that would entrench the current tech giants because the liability to any startup entering the space would be huge and they wouldn't be big enough to partner with anyone.

On the flipside, you'd have Facebook, Twitter, etc. partnering with media companies big enough to negotiate an indemnification clause into a contract that allows them into the recommendations engine(s).

As soon as you start forcing liability onto those platforms, the content is instantly going to morph so it only includes "safe" publishers. The ToS will get updated so regular people agree to indemnification via forced arbitration and you'll only be able to post content that's widely seen if you're verified.

TLDR; It would be Digg v4, but mandated by the government.

Also, a lot of the current content is created by companies that are already considered publishers and nothing happens to them when they publish misleading news. So how does considering Twitter the publisher instead of Fox or CNN improve that?

IMHO the big media companies would love to see some type of alternate publisher label affixed to big tech because it would detriment big tech to the benefit of big media.

[Const-me]

> how does considering Twitter the publisher instead of Fox or CNN improve that?

People don’t register on Twitter to read Fox or CNN. They register to read other people.

Making Twitter a publisher increases costs a lot. Especially portion of the cost that’s proportional to count of users and volumes of content.

On-line ads don’t pay much per view, the only reason these companies are making so much money is they got crazy count of views with very low (in comparison) costs. They’ll have to find other sources of income.

They can charge readers, like newspapers did for centuries.

They can charge for publishing, I remember couple decades ago I was paying some reasonable subscription fee for a paid livejournal account, just to get rid of ads.

Either model is fine. They both fix the current outrage culture, by removing the incentive. These companies will stop optimizing content for count of views, and will start listening to users who became their customers.

[donmcronald]

> People don’t register on Twitter to read Fox or CNN. They register to read other people.

So if I follow an influencer that retweets a libelous news story from CNN, who's the liable publisher? Twitter, CNN, or the influencer? What if I retweet it? Am I a publisher now that I piped that into my feed?

The only way Twitter would be able to cope IMO is with a _massive_ increase in censorship and a _massive_ reduction in the ability for the average person to publish opinions. And I think the biggest beneficiaries of that are large media companies that already have their own platforms.

And what I meant when I asked how making Twitter the publisher is any different is how would having the ability to sue Twitter for libel be any different than suing CNN or Fox right now? The only way it's different is if the law treats them differently and makes Twitter beholden to government so the government can sanction them. Who decides what's true then? That sounds like a dictatorship to me.

I completely agree with your sentiment though. The misinformation is out of control and it needs to be reigned in. I just think it's much harder than pointing the finger at someone new and calling them the publisher. I haven't seen any really good solutions either. It's a really hard problem to solve.

[Const-me]

> I follow an influencer that retweets a libelous news story from CNN, who's the liable publisher?

I don’t know, but I think lawyers should know answer to that question. Pretty sure newspapers were re-publishing other media for quite some time now, centuries.

> with a _massive_ increase in censorship and a _massive_ reduction in the ability for the average person to publish opinions

I don’t think they can do that. People will just leave. I don’t read twitter, but I do use facebook. I don’t subscribe for influencers or other media. I personally know vast majority of people I read there.

> how making Twitter the publisher is any different is how would having the ability to sue Twitter for libel be any different than suing CNN or Fox right now?

Increases costs to run Twitter by orders of magnitudes. I think the only way forward for them is charging users. When users will become paying customers as opposed to product, this change incentives of twitter.

Currently, a public outrage like this or any other might be a PR and political nightmare, but financially it’s a gold mine for social media platforms. In the current model, their profit scales with page views. If the profit will only scale with count of users, I believe they gonna do many things completely differently. For instance, will be no point in tuning their algorithms to promote controversial content, quite the opposite, it would then increase their servers load for no good reason.