[Sunspark]

Don't be so sure that some of the mods don't work for Reddit. Some of them are powermods modding multiple large subs in the millions of subscribers, and they seem to be able to get their way instantly with anything they want. Pretty lucky of Reddit to have people who can mod multiple huge subs for years for "free". Not only that, but Reddit wants to do a public IPO to raise more money. So let's see how that's going to go with the investors.. "we have vAlUe FoR tHe ShArEhOlDeR by not paying staff, but these are capricious little creatures who we have no idea who they are and they have control over user engagement and the user experience but don't worry about it". How well is that going to go? Not very well. At the very least, it'll be required to be published in the financial statements how much of the Reddit budget goes to PAY mods, and this will finally put an end the oft-repeated claim that all the mods are volunteers.

I hope the supreme court takes away section 230 from these people. They have abused their power so much by permanently banning people who simply have an opinion that is not the same as theirs, that they deserve to lose it.

[tptacek]

People are entitled to run their own private sites in ways that restrict you from sharing your opinions that are not the same as theirs. The view of the law that you're espousing is one where, simply by dint of letting people sign up to a service you run, you take on an obligation to carry their messages. That's an intense amount of authority to give the government over private enterprise, and a stultifying precedent for anyone who wants to stand up a site of their own.

Get a blog.

[brhsagain]

Calling sites like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc "private sites" is a bit of an intuition pump, even if the terminology is legally correct. You're basically evoking an image of Bob's Diner where a guy runs a restaurant and kicks out rowdy patrons. The story changes when these websites are massively popular, have majority market share in their space, have taken massive amounts of funding, etc. Any successful social network is also almost by definition a pseudo-monopology (I'm using this word loosely, not legally) simply due to the massive advantages you get from network effects. Reddit is pretty much the first place people go to start and join niche communities of likeminded people. You can say "go start your own website" but now you are competing with, well, Reddit. The basic counterargument to what you're saying is that possession of that kind of market-leader advantage should come with some level of responsibility.

> The view of the law that you're espousing is one where, simply by dint of letting people sign up to a service you run, you take on an obligation to carry their messages. That's an intense amount of authority to give the government over private enterprise, and a stultifying precedent for anyone who wants to stand up a site of their own.

Couldn't you use this formulation to say that anti-discrimination laws make it so that, simply by dint of providing a service, you take on an obligation to provide that service to everyone? That's an intense amount of authority to give the government over private enterprise, and a... you get it. We accept government intervention when we believe it benefits society. The argument being made here is that it would benefit society if these massive pipes of information that in practice everyone uses were similarly regulated in the types of discrimination they can engage in.

There's a calculus to be made about what level of control platforms having over their content would best serve the interests of society. It might be that despite all the things I listed above, the result of that calculus remains the same, but it is not immediately obvious that that is the case, as your "private sites can do what they want" formulation would have one believe.

[yellowapple]

> The story changes when these websites are massively popular, have majority market share in their space, have taken massive amounts of funding, etc.

Not really. The only substantial change is that getting thrown out of such a large and all-encompassing diner is a lot less convenient. The fundamental reality is still there: no website (maybe unless it's owned by your government, and even then) no matter how large is obligated to carry your message, and it is increasingly affordable and trivial to start your own website if other websites exercise their inherent rights of refusal to carry your message.

> Couldn't you use this formulation to say that anti-discrimination laws make it so that, simply by dint of providing a service, you take on an obligation to provide that service to everyone?

The obligation is to not make membership in a protected class or lack thereof a condition of providing a service. Bob can't throw you out of his diner on the basis of you being some race he doesn't like; he can nonetheless throw you out if you're shouting advertisements at everyone else in the diner. Same deal for a website. There is no implication there of any obligation to serve everyone: only an explication of constraints on the reasons someone can refuse to serve someone.

Marketers are, in short, not a protected class.

[brhsagain]

I know that that is the current state of the law. I’m not disputing that there is currently no legal framework to force Reddit to allow content.

I’m arguing the “ought” rather than the “is” here. I disagree with the philosophical stance that simply because Reddit is a private website, they are entitled to control the content as they want and that no level of qualitative difference between Reddit and the average website is enough to change this.

In general, we regulate private enterprise when it has negative externalities on society, and I think there is a discussion to be had about what those externalities are here. I don’t think “private companies can do whatever they want” is a sharp enough tool to engage this issue with.

[johnnyanmac]

>I’m arguing the “ought” rather than the “is” here. I disagree with the philosophical stance that simply because Reddit is a private website, they are entitled to control the content as they want and that no level of qualitative difference between Reddit and the average website is enough to change this.

I disagree on a philosophical level. the rules and users may be frustrating, but in the grand scheme of things, reddit isn't breaking the law nor spreading hate (well, no more hate than your average internet user. We're not talking about Infowars here). I see no reason for government interference on basis of their moderation and curation, like this thread is suggesting.

>In general, we regulate private enterprise when it has negative externalities on society, and I think there is a discussion to be had about what those externalities are here.

Sure, but I honestly can't think of any societal effects that wouldn't be felt from regular old physical analogs that is "people talking and arguing with each other".

- You can talk about groupthink, but that happens IRL and can be taken to an extreme with cults. Cults aren't illegal until they break other laws. - You can talk about restricting artistic freedoms, but said freedoms aren't really that protected in the world at large. - you can talk about freedom of speech and fall into the same conservative trapping as other groups. Convinently forgetting that those freedom of speech is meant to protect government from censoring your speech, not other individuals. - there are privacy concerns which are already being addressed. That's one of the few analogs not easily transferrable to the physical world. - Then there is the anonymity aspect of reddit, which has its share of issues caused ever since the days of "bathroom writings". There are plenty of ways to be offensive without yelling it in someone's face.

I just don't see an angle here that would justify a need to "anti-trust" the site as some public good and force all posts to remain up, nor clamp down and enforce civility in a website.

[brhsagain]

Okay, I'll take a step back and clear the table of about 50% of what you and the other replies seem to be objecting to. I don't think Reddit should be regulated by the government, or laws, or some anti-trust, anti-monopoly thing. I don't think 1A should be changed so that Reddit can be forced to allow speech.

What I am in favor of is recognizing, as a society, the value of free speech, not just as a constitutional technicality but as a principle. I believe we ought to value it as a good. And I think that as a society, we should stop and be like, hey, wait a minute, online communication is now dominated by a handful of sites, doesn't it violate the spirit of free speech if, in practice, all those sites enforce roughly the same overton window, and your options are to (a) get in line or (b) not use the 5-7 sites that everyone else uses?

In fact, I think the conversation about the constitutional limits of 1A, or governmental rights, or whatever, is a distraction. I'm not suggesting the government step in. I'm just saying we clearly have a situation where the principle of free speech is being violated — where people are not able to share certain ideas on the platforms that everyone else uses. I'm aware we don't have a law protecting that. I'm making a prescriptive argument that society ought to view this as a bad, dangerous thing.

So in terms of a practical agenda, I dunno, I would like to see a stronger shared appreciation of free speech, and bottom-up pressure for the big communication platforms to stop enforcing their own capricious filters. From this perspective — not the 1A perspective — I think the argument that "private enterprises can do whatever they want" is pretty weak and irrelevant. The actual question is what externalities it has on society when the platforms used by everyone decide what you can say on them. I think the answer to that is not obviously "nothing," and probably "something."

[yellowapple]

In that case, this hinges on whether websites having the right to moderate themselves as they see fit does indeed have negative externalities on society - and, even if so, whether those negative externalities outweigh the harm of dictating how websites moderate themselves. Perhaps we differently value the rights to speech, press, and association - all of which such a regulation fundamentally infringes.

Notice that I ain't mentioning corporations or individuals here, because that piece fundamentally does not matter; an individual could create a website used by billions, and a corporation could create a website used by a single person (not to mention that there are countless organizational structures beyond just corporations - especially once you go beyond the constraint of what's legally recognized). What matters is the size of the audience, and "you have such and such rights unless you're popular enough to have any tangible influence on society at which point the State will dictate what you're allowed to say or not say" doesn't sit well with me.

[swayvil]

But when you have 1000 people having a conversation there, it literally is not a private site.

[tptacek]

When the 1001st patron at Philips Crab House in Ocean City is seated, the Crab House does not suddenly become publicly owned or operated.

[lmm]

Maybe it should. There are plenty of similar laws (e.g. when you sell shares to your 2001st investor you're suddenly subject to a much stricter disclosure regime, and this is widely considered a good thing).

[tptacek]

That law is an OTC anti-fraud measure. The Constitution has something to say about the ability of Congress to nationalize and impose its own speech controls on private websites that happen to become popular. Congress also doesn't get a say in who performs the Super Bowl Halftime Show, despite its immense audience.

[brhsagain]

If we’re going to assert the inalienable right of free speech, then arguably free speech is such an important cornerstone of society that we should think long and hard before letting any company have such influence in that sphere to begin with.

To me the big glaring central point here is that everyone uses big tech platforms. It’s just a fact of life. If you tell people, sorry, I don’t use Facebook, I use some wonky alternative instead, can you add me there? you’ll get weird looks. I think it’s insane to just ignore that elephant and continue studiously down the path of, well, they’re a private company and therefore are entitled to publish whatever they want.

When we established the precedent that private entities can say what they want, we clearly didn’t have Facebook in mind. Like there is just intuitively an obvious difference between a private journal deciding what to write about and a huge platform everyone uses deciding what to pass through or not. The state of the law doesn’t currently reflect this but that doesn’t mean the difference doesn’t exist.

[lmm]

"Private" corporations exist on the people's, via Congress', sufferance. Any entity benefitting from limited liability is not fully private and does not deserve the same rights as private individuals.

[ilyt]

Do they have moderators running around telling people what they can't talk about ? No ? Then it is public enough

[tptacek]

I assure you that the crab house has rules.

[Sunspark]

Sorry, but if you have control over 5, 10, 20+ million subscribers, it's not your own private site. You're either a paid employee or you're a freeloader riding on someone's carriage, in which case they should be paying Reddit for allowing them a platform and bandwidth in which they can shape and control the narrative by controlling what speech is allowed.

It goes beyond just controlling the speech or opinions of people who disagree with you such as I am doing here, there is also money involved such as in controlling which links get published. Those links drive traffic to specific sites which host ads. Surely you do not believe that all the links to specific sites over and over is simply because they are "fast to publish" or something do you?

[tptacek]

No, that's not a thing, we don't nationalize websites because they become popular.

[johnnyanmac]

>Some of them are powermods modding multiple large subs in the millions of subscribers, and they seem to be able to get their way instantly with anything they want.

they don't work for reddit, it's even worse than that. They are very profitable for reddit despite not being employed so admins look the other way. That work they do may or may not be monetized in other such ways.

>I hope the supreme court takes away section 230 from these people

that's slashing your face to spite the zit. There are undoubtedly unfair moderation practives, but the implications of 230 go far beyond that.

Also, even if I agreed with 230, the issue of international boundaries will make it hard to enforce. No one's going to extradite some kid in brazil because they banned an American user on r/Art over an accusation that the American's art was AI. And that's even before going into how hard it is to win a Libel case in the US.