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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm sorry but this is ridiculous. How on earth do you think Meta has money? Scale. If you descale it, it has no money to pay people to review everything.
And that's the less troubling issue. The more troubling one is you would be crazy enough to entrust Meta with the task of inspecting everyone's messages on the planet. That's some planet scale, ruinous communism.
>>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.
(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).
Requiring a provider of a public accommodation to explain their decisions and have standard policies for implementing them is no restriction on free speech.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.