[Tyrubias]

In a sane world, the US as a supposed bastion of free speech and personal liberties would enact legislation that requires companies to provide a specific, articulable reason for suspending accounts due to rules violations and offer everyone the chance to appeal. That would serve as a counterbalance to more authoritarian regimes insisting companies like Meta censor people, even if the US can’t guarantee it for people not affiliated with the US. Unfortunately, the US seems more intent on censoring its own residents and becoming one of those authoritarian regimes than actually doing anything about it.

[KaiserPro]

> requires companies to provide a specific, articulable reason for suspending accounts

wouldn't that violate free speech though? forcing a company to keep something up/take something down is entirely up to them no?

[traverseda]

You can be protected by safe harbour provisions, or you can editorialise your content. I don't think you should have both.

Free speech does not cover scams and fraud, something that happens on their platform. Society doesn't take any action against them for publishing illegal content, scams, libel, fraud, because they aren't a newspaper. They're more like a newspaper printing house.

In my opinion they should probably be losing those protections and should suffer legal consequences for the content their users post. The moderation has reached a point where they ate defacto editorialising content.

An alternative to that could be opting in to some kind of third party moderation arbitration process.

[KaiserPro]

> You can be protected by safe harbour provisions, or you can editorialise your content.

Aha, now this is an interesting distinction. I'm not an expert in this, as you might imagine, but what counts as editorialising?

To my naive eyes, having an algorithm that re-arranges posts, or injects new subjects seems like editorialising to me.

[traverseda]

I'm also not a lawyer, I was making that as a more vague moral distinction on the topic of free speech and accountability.

For practical reasons I think those algorithms are absolutely necessary. We need spam filters. A good line to draw would be "bring your own algorithm". A technical challenge to be sure, bit breaking up social media backend providers and content filtering seems like one of the only safe ways to allow these massive platforms to exist.

The algorithm can be just "Dan filters out spam".

[mystraline]

Even spam filters are problematic.

At first, its just unsolicited commercial crap.

Then its non-corporate allowed unsolicited commercial crap.

Then its 'hide commercial crap in posts to deceive'.

Then its 'fuck over screen readers by aligning everything weird like FB to prevent finding commercial crap'

Then its "hey we can add these other non-spam categories (like Palestine) to silence them".

[thaumasiotes]

> Aha, now this is an interesting distinction.

It's nothing new; the entire point of §230 is to provide protection to platforms that editorialize their content. Without editorializing, you have immunity anyway.

[pibaker]

Most online platforms will become unusable if it becomes legally untenable for them to set their own rules about what is allowed and what is not.

Just take this website for example. If HN stops all forms of moderation, I bet you it will be flooded by wannabe startup entrepreneurs selling vibe coded SaaS overnight, right before every thread devolves into generic flame war about politics and whatnot.

And by the way, making platforms liable for scam and fraud that they do not intentionally allow turns every platform into the de facto arbitrator of what is scam and what is not, ironically giving them more power to control speech than they already do. Just look at how often DMCA takedowns are abused or how often the fraud detection on google etc misfires and censors legitimate websites to get a sneak peek of the future your good intentions pave the way to.

[TulliusCicero]

> You can be protected by safe harbour provisions, or you can editorialise your content. I don't think you should have both.

That's hilariously impractical. Just because you want to and can moderate some things doesn't mean you can guarantee rapid moderation of illegal stuff. When your platform is nominally open to everyone, and has millions of users, that just doesn't work out well.

[LPisGood]

“The business can’t survive if it has to play by the rules” is not a compelling reason to not make rules in my opinion.

[pibaker]

What will happen in reality is the too big too fail platforms stay online by regulatory carve outs and smaller mom and pop forums shutdown, just like what is already happening now under other internet regulations.

[moron4hire]

Maybe platforms shouldn't be allowed to grow too large to manage themselves. Maybe, if strong self-regulation were a requirement, Meta and other companies wouldn't be market behemoths throwing their weight around in lobbying money to guarantee themselves monopolies while avoiding as much real scrutiny as possible.

[philipallstar]

Meta is enormous because it's useful. It's mostly useful now because of network effects. If it has no other use, Bluesky proves you can start a social media company in the time of Meta and have it be successful, given its slanty take on politics.

[8note]

facebook of course, has the money to be responsible for its users comments and posts

[GetTheFacts]

>You can be protected by safe harbour provisions, or you can editorialise your content. I don't think you should have both.

Hi. You seem to be confused or uninformed. Check out this link[0]. IT should help.

[0] https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...

[traverseda]

>You can be protected by safe harbour provisions, or you can editorialise your content. *I don't think* you should have both.

Personal opinion, not legal opinion.

[GetTheFacts]

>>You can be protected by safe harbour provisions, or you can editorialise your content. I don't think you should have both.

>Personal opinion, not legal opinion.

Fair enough. But not very charitable (or helpful/useful to freedom of speech) to anyone who doesn't have billions in cash on hand to fight the hundreds/thousands of lawsuits anyone who doesn't like what the thoughts of others that you (or I) choose to host on our platforms, whether they be web sites, mailing lists or video comment sections.

Section 230 protects the little guy much more than it does Meta, Alphabet, Musk, etc. As they have the deep pockets to fight those lawsuits. Do you? I don't.

[8note]

i disagree, this just leaves the door open for whatever your preferred manipulation style is. Moderation was added with a purpose

just take away safe harbour as a whole. we dont need to subsidize the existence of Facebook and AWS and ISPs.

[no-name-here]

Without safe harbor, would Hacker News have to be shuttered?

[sampo]

> wouldn't that violate free speech though?

Free speech can mean two things:

(1) The general philosophical postulate, that society is better when there is a high level of freedom in the exchange of ideas and critique of other's ideas.

(2) One aspect of the above is that government should not censor speech. Like the 1st amendment in USA.

But if most public discourse takes place on forums owned by companies, and the companies start to practice high levels of censorship, then we might formally satisfy (2) but still won't get the cultural benefits of (1).

[michaelmrose]

No. We compel and restrict commercial speech all the time.

[skywhopper]

Requiring a provider of a public accommodation to explain their decisions and have standard policies for implementing them is no restriction on free speech.

[philistine]

Free speech is specifically limiting the government’s ability to limit your speech, not private enterprise, and its limited to the US. The US government can legally try to restrict the speech of … I don’t know let’s say Palestinians.

[JumpCrisscross]

> wouldn't that violate free speech though?

It's balancing the company's freedom of association against the individual's freedom of speech.

Look, the world criticised Facebook for facilitating a genocide in Burma [1]. There is a moral argument for American social media companies policing their speech to some degree. But that doesn't mean there shouldn't also be a process of appeal, data offloading, et cetera.

[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

[xboxnolifes]

I'd think, in a sane world, an individuals free speech trumps a company's.

[funimpoded]

It shouldn't. But under this Supreme Court it might.

Corporations are creations of the state and treating them as strictly private, especially when they're trampling rights, is illiberal horse-shit, and is straight up insulting when done under the guise of defending liberalism. And there's plenty of room for nuance, we don't have to (and already do not) regulate family businesses or 50-employee enterprises like we do transnational mega corporations with more capital than many entire countries.

[like_any_other]

Don't conflate the broad concept of free speech, with the specific attempt at its defense that is the 1st amendment of the US constitution.

Giant unaccountable companies privatizing the public square harms free speech. Forcing them to at least reveal why something was censored would help free speech more than it would harm it. Unless you subscribe to the myopic legalistic 1st amendment position that "free speech" is maximized when companies can act with the least restrictions, no matter how unable to speak or be heard that makes individuals, so long as it wasn't the government that silenced them.

[KaiserPro]

I'm british, so I am not an absolutist by any stretch of the meaning. I just know that whenever I have queried why companies like facebook are not held liable for the content they promote, I am told that the 1st amendment allows them to do pretty much what they like, along with Section 230

[montroser]

You don't have a constitutional right to post on Facebook. When you invest your life into platforms run by for profit corporations, you agree to play by their rules. Merging state and big tech is not going to help.

[Retric]

You have many constitutional protections that do apply in business relationships. Extending that list is at minimum worth considering.

[thaumasiotes]

> You don't have a constitutional right to post on Facebook.

Well, that depends on who says you don't. If the government says so, they are wrong, because you do have a constitutional right enforceable against the government to post on Facebook.

The idea of saying "you don't have a constitutional right to post on Facebook" is that you don't have such a right enforceable against Facebook.

Which is true. But under current US law, you do have a civil right enforceable against any public accommodation to be offered the same service that they offer to the public generally.

[JumpCrisscross]

> You don't have a constitutional right to post on Facebook

Which is why OP describes the U.S. enacting legislation creating a statutory right.

[montroser]

You are correct. But it's a ridiculous suggestion. Can you imagine the local corner store with a bulletin board, and some patron tacks up a picture of a swastika, and the owner of the store is not allowed to take it down?

[prasadjoglekar]

Au contraire, enacting such a law is akin to forcing FB to support certain speech. That itself is unconstitutional and any such legislation would be struck down.

[heisenbit]

There is a reason moderation decisions are not perfectly transparent: They are gamed otherwise. So there needs to be legal recourse with discovery and meaningful liability attached to submitting to the role of acting as the agent of a foreign government.

[benoau]

Unfortunately we live in a world where any attempt to regulate "big tech" is met by massive campaigns to prevent it.

[NetOpWibby]

Just realizing that being a lobbyist is job security these days

[stinkbeetle]

Presumably Kuwait could just assemble a panel of self-proclaimed experts to denounce the speech of people threatening to the regime to be "very dangerous to our democracy", "hate speech", islamophobic, etc.

[dev_l1x_be]

Becoming? It has always been this way.

[OtomotO]

The US are an oligarchy with the PR department being instructed to claim they are thr bastion of free speech though, so ex falso quodlibet.

[tamimio]

Oligarchy and oligopoly as well.

[toasty228]

> the US as a supposed bastion of free speech

Only americans believe that, this is almost as dumb as when they try to use dollars in Europe, "but it is valid tender I tell you!" or when they believe their TSA precheck works in China

[_DeadFred_]

dang has made clear this sort of nationalistic generalities aren't allowed on HN. I'm guessing he'll be clearing out a bunch of these comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48100358

[Tyrubias]

My point is that Americans claim this, but it’s partially propaganda.

[gatlin]

Do Americans often try to use dollars in Europe?

[toasty228]

They also try to drive to canada with their guns, and believe they can't be "foreigners" because they're american. 30% of americans are functionally illiterate, no surprise really.

https://immigration.ca/americans-frequently-caught-bringing-...

[blacksmith_tb]

Embarrassing, but the statistic cited there is 6 cases in 2017 for a single crossing point, looks like there are ~1.5M visits a year[1] so I would imagine even if we're talking hundreds of cases (generous), still not too common?

1: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/as-canadian-visits-to-t...

[edent]

Yes.

Everyone has a story about being stuck behind an irate American who can't understand why their currency isn't accepted abroad.

I've seen it in the UK - when a tourist tried to leave a tip in dollars for a bemused waiter.

[jandrewrogers]

US currency is accepted in a surprisingly large number of countries abroad. Just not in Europe proper. US dollars are even accepted in some European sovereign territories outside of Europe.

It is very convenient for Americans. Depending on the parts of the world you've traveled it is easy to get the impression that the US dollar is a sort of universal currency.

Which isn't to excuse the people in your story. It is pretty easy to find out if US currency works where you are traveling.

[sib]

I've seen plenty of waiters, taxi drivers, etc., be quite happy to receive tips in USD in many countries where USD is not the official currency. In fact, I can't think of a single time when I've seen such a tip be rejected because of its currency.

That's quite different from trying to pay a bill (invoice) in USD in those countries.

[dotancohen]

In Romania, at least a few decades ago, tips from foreigners were expected to be in dollars. Tipping in Lei would be weird.

[ciupicri]

No one expected anything and there wasn't any weirdness in getting a tip in your national currency. It's just that people happily accepted strong/popular foreign currency like the US dollar (I think that the Deutsche Mark was another option).

Sometimes you could even pay with it even if it wasn't officially accepted. Getting some money and then exchanging it yourself into the national currency (so that the accounting books are in order) is better than getting no money. And if it's a fuss, just charge a big extra, there's no need to make a big deal out of it.

[ebbi]

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. The US is only a bastion of free speech when what is said aligns to their thinking and goals. UK is the same - if not worse.