| Well in your case with the New Yorker, they actually review and actively publish the information. Where is the peer reviewed check from Facebook? Where do these status' imply that Facebook supports and endorses them? And what is the social difference between a publisher and a platform in terms of expected social responsibility? This distinction only now exists because people attempted to use a legal definition that isn't real. So, again, I think this entire line of thinking falls flat upon inception. > But too often do we give Facebook a pass since it doesn't make the content, it only curates it. But that is true, no? Do we honestly believe that between ML and a real person Facebook is validating and approving every comment on Facebook? I sure don't. Do we believe that Google is publisher because mailing lists can exist or because they allow an email to be sent while blocking perceived malicious emails? Is that not some form of validation that happens that we could imply makes Google a publisher of every email sent from GSuite? I just don't agree that an algorithm is undeniably curation in the same sense as a newspaper. The process isn't the same, the intended outcome isn't the same, and the inherent approval of the content isn't the same. So while they may be like conceptually, they aren't the same functionally whether you measure it by the spirit or letter of the systems. The idea of user moderation vs service based moderation is purely a feature set. If we don't like that feature set or it doesn't meet the needs of the way we use the service, the service sucks at it's job. The correct solution isn't to try and have all these convoluted/philosophical discussion around where to draw the line. The solution is to have a service that does it better get the userbase. Today people like Facebook because it already achieved a wide enough userbase, which lead to default integration into other services. It seems we are willing to trade convenience for expectations, which is an issue for the user, not the service. Now, if we want to say that they practice anti-competitive market strategies and are monopolies, I can entertain that argument. It still does not require this discussion at all. |
They do it to save their own ass. Since they publish it, they are responsible. Facebook should either review the all content they publish, or they should stop being a publisher.
> Do we honestly believe that between ML and a real person Facebook is validating and approving every comment on Facebook?
I never said that; here's my point: if, say, the New Yorker replaced their human editors with AI ones, then the outcome is the same and they are still publishers. Alternatively, say they made human-run personal curations---each subscriber gets an individually-tailored set of articles which are suggested---then they are obviously still publishers. So if they replace these human curators with AI, are they still publishers? Because that would be what Facebook is today.
And on your Gmail point, Google is not a publisher, it acts like a phone service. You send your email, the recipient receives it, unconditionally, without modification. Facebook actively shadow-bans, time-delays and puts fact-check warnings on posts. Since that show they disapprove of some posts, it kind of implies that they approve of all the others.