If any “platform” censors beyond removing illegal or copyrighted content or spam, they should have their “platform” status revoked, and they should be considered a publisher.

This prevents such companies from using “platform” status as a cost saving mechanism to help them become large monopolies. Companies like Facebook would not have been able to take over so much of the market if they had to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on curating content to prevent lawsuits, etc.

I also don’t think of this as some kind of punishment. It’s perfectly reasonable to want to set up some kind of publishing company that has user-generated content; it’s just not reasonable to expect such a company to grow to such a global scale as Twitter or Facebook.

Edit: added “spam” to reasons

What about spam?

And would this extend to marketplaces? If a company allows users to sell educational resources for kids, what would happen if they start removing items that clearly don't fit?

> And would this extend to marketplaces?

I believe these are already considered publishers ? In any case it's no different than how traditional bookstores work

People say this, I don't think it's true.

I think there is ambiguity around when marketing crosses into spam. If you look at different communities, even HN and Reddit, you'll find different opinions about what kind of promotion crosses that line.

Individual communities need to be able to make their own decisions on that, they don't need blanket rules applied across the board to all platforms.

Is it OK to do that to a marketing post?

(Incidentally i started using twitter in "view latest" mode and i prefer it - turns out their expensive algorithms were pretty useless for me)

For an example to the contrary, look at how many Wikipedia articles get deleted as 'self-promotion' even when they're just simple informational entries about a business or semi-notable person.

I couldn't disagree harder. I'd go into detail, but a) I'm at work, and b) the fact that we disagree is evidence that there _is_ ambiguity.

Generally (and perhaps ideally), I like the idea of more visibility/transparency into what algorithms (and human moderators) do.

But I think it's worth noting that, pragmatically, there are at least a few minefields here...

- Providing full transparency into what gets flagged as spam is going to make it a lot easier for spammers to model, evade, and notice changes in the spam-identification code and practices.

- Perhaps you were imagining this being temporary, but the operational feasibility of keeping all of this spam in-platform ultimately depends on signal/noise ratio, scale, profitability, and time horizons. It's one thing to bear the burden of storing 1% of your plaintext post volume for one year--it's quite another to store 20 or 30% of your video upload volume in perpetuity.

- I'm having a hard time imagining the proceedings of the court-of-legal-vs-illegal-spam-filters. Without a lot of technical training (or a lot of reliance on expert testimony), the simplest way for an average person to grasp whether a spam filter is biased or not is going to be either looking "back" at what it did/didn't flag, or "testing" it with some sample corpus. In both cases, this process will be fraught with interpretation and sampling bias issues. This may hinge on a judge, panel, or jury being able to see through a bombastic argument that trots out the most respectable {ideology} opinions from the discard pile--they have to realize that nothing in the discard pile can be interpreted without a really good understanding of the input pile. (They'd have to be so good at this that they could spot someone who is trying to score political points and manipulate opinion by intentionally mounting an adversarial campaign that intentionally crafts seemingly innocuous ideological content that also gets flagged as spam).

- Likewise, there's probably no great way to make a litmus-test corpus. Spam looks very different in different contexts. A useful Amazon review or tweet may both look like spam if someone emails or DMs them to you. Even if you can create a set of corpora that cover the bases, they'll probably be useless if they don't evolve, and very vulnerable to political and ideological manipulation if they do.

- If there's a lot of legal fear around getting sued because your spam-filter has a taste for how {ideological subcommunity} likes to phrase its opinions, I'd expect spam filters to accumulate safe-words and rules that cause them to back off of charged topics. It'd only be a matter of time until legit spam/manipulation ops infer the existence of those rules and move to exploit them.

but how would this "solve" spam in any case where the ratio of spam-to-signal crosses whatever threshold it takes to start breaking a platform's network effects, reducing engagement, driving out existing users, warding off new ones, shifting how the community views what the platform is for, etc.?

This is partly because email isn't "for" anything except communication. The idea that platforms must stand for something is new and wrong. A good platform stands for nothing and is open to everyone.

It's one thing to have the platform equivalent of a spam folder for new top-level posts that smell like junk. But these platforms have more significant design challenges: to cleanly handle replies, retweets + commentary, mentions, comments, threads, and anything else that is sort of inherently contextual (including the possibility that there are legitimate non-spam posts that interact with a spam post to quote, comment, reply, warn others, and so on).

I'm a little skeptical about how well anyone can meet that design in a way that makes it easy to see what was flagged as spam and isn't also sensitive to the ratio of spam to legitimate posts...

Its possible you're imagining that spam posts don't show up at all in a thread unless you hit a single toggle that re-renders the thread with any pruned replies and branches in place. Interfaces like this don't spiral out if the ratio changes, but I also don't think they make it easy to spot the flagged posts.

An interface that marks the posts in-thread can make it easier, but they're sensitive to that ratio. Very sensitive if they shows the full post, and a little sensitive if they replace the post with a clickable indicator that there's suspected spam there.

My point is a more general one: people argue for censorship as the only way to maintain a workable forum, but, I don't believe that, based on my prior experience. I'm not saying it's easy to build a really great spam filter for social forums, but Slashdot proved out a lot of good techniques, and anyway censoring stuff en-masse just creates a different set of problems: social rather than technical.

Note that under this setup, a forum like HN would be basically impossible to maintain. How would you set up a publishing content that included user content without having a human pre-vet all of that content? And HN has, like, 3 moderators?

The practical end result of this would be that the Internet would split into a bunch of 8chans, and a bunch of TV stations, with nothing in-between. If you care about free expression, making businesses scared of user content is counterproductive.

Slashdot also had a rather sophisticated moderation and scoring system, that allowed spam (hot grits etc) to be downranked and appear auto-collapsed, whilst longer form content was upvoted and expanded by default - even if it was a reply to negative ranked content.

You may feel a personal preference for HN, or not, but they were essentially the same from the perspective of any lawyer.

In other words HN could easily keep its distinctive feel without ever banning or erasing anything, just by implementing sufficient controls that let users see what they want to see: in fact it already does via options like showdead.

If I have upvotes and downvotes, weighted the way I like, and I limit who can get an account in the first place, I can probably achieve the speech outcome I want relatively easily "without" human intervention.

edit: What about downvoting? Does that not count because it's by users? However the algorithm for ranking and matching is controlled by the platform, does that count as censorship since it will promote some posts over others?

That's not an issue with reddit - moderators are not paid, nor is reddit responsible for them - and when users subscribe in a sub, the contract is that they 'll abide by moderation rules and downvoting rules. That's not corporate censorship. The problem is when the company itself starts censoring what the users have voluntarily subscribed to read.

How do you square that circle? Surely you should object to what HN does - in fact why would a believer in no censorship even have an account here if HN are censoring (moderating and limiting) what everyone is able to say?

However, HN could instead be subreddit in reddit's platform, with HN (or preferably an unrelated external entity) paying the moderators.

Were HN and FB a publisher, and had a UK office (and similarly in other countries with strong laws in this area) they would be liable as well as the individual posters. Those laws are why when things like Snowden and Cambridge Analytica broke they were published both sides of the Atlantic.

You've now created a problem potentially far bigger than the one you fixed.

FB And HN are subject to US law where they 're based.It's up to the UK to block access to them if they think they 're illegal - Or preferably to fix libel laws.

If Fred Smith writes a piece in The Times that libels me, I sue the newspaper, not Fred Smith.

FB and the other globals are subject to the laws of every place they operate. e.g. See all the US companies causing controversy changing their policies within China.

The fact that stories like CA and Snowden have been jointly published in the US, rather than say Canada or France makes me suspect that chances of a successful suit are low in the US. That's probably the point. :)

https://towardsdatascience.com/understanding-k-means-cluster...

The property "interesting" is an individual decision. A forum like HN could implement K-Means Clustering instead of having dang madly moderating stuff. Over time, those HN users interested in "technologically interesting stuff" would aggregate together, and generally only see posts that are "voted up" by others in their cluster.

All the other crap would be seen by all those HN users that migrated over from 8chan.

The problem with this, of course, is that HN would be full of all sorts of sickening crap that you and I would never see (or, at least, until a small sampling of us saw it, and all down-voted it into the 8chan netherworld).

The great thing about this -- the FBI, et.al. would have much better tools to do their jobs: they could troll these seedy underbellies of HN, etc., and actually spear-phish and destroy the scum that is posting repellent garbage.

Or, we could carry on doing what we're doing, even though it can't work. Our choice.

One thing that comes to mind is how do you define "illegal" content? A huge hangup here tends to be free speech - lots of legal free speech is not legal in places like Europe - e.g. there generally isn't a concept of hate speech in the US, and in the US inciting violence literally means "lets go over here and beat these people up right now" - anything less tends not to be inciting violence. Europe tends to be a lot more restrictive on these fronts.

And if you want the bar to be "illegal anywhere", then places like China would make a lot of things illegal that everyone in the west would be fine with. If you want to say that of course we wouldn't pay attention to China, now you're back to picking and choosing countries likely based upon arbitrary metrics.

The obvious solution, for a US company, is to follow US law and accept that some content will be blocked in China, strict theocratic states and possibly Europe.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190613/03172142391/once-...

https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230

this whole thread is about the hypothetical situation in which the two are linked by new laws

I don’t think it’s too fuzzy, as long as companies don’t arbitrarily define “things we don’t like” as “spam”.

The second is that Facebook doesn't have to censor you to censor you. They just tweak your post so it stops showing up other peoples feeds. Youtube does this all the time, they don't censor anyone, they just make sure no one can find the voices they don't like. Meanwhile the content they like gets boosted, we've seen this all the time where you go to youtube for a video about puppies and thanks to autoplay 4 hours later you're hearing about how feminists are destroying western civilization from within by Jordan Peterson.

Youtube should be required to enable alternative modes (view all latest) and should be held liable if one can prove that they are e.g. suppressing a legal viewpoint in their searches. I see this as win-win for transparency

The companies can still choose to remain nonpublishers, i.e. platforms - but they have to be impartial. That doesn't mean that censored communities can 't exist in their platforms - but the censoring can only be done by an entity unrelated to them. I think it's a good compromise to separate the platform from the censors.

For instance, if a climate scientist provides concrete evidence and analysis showing that climate change is happening and is problematic, we wouldn't dismiss them for not simultaneously offering a solution to the problem.

Should FB resume its banning of sexually explicit, beheading, animal torture, and ISIS videos when it is a "utility"? And how will the product of FB change as a utility? In what sense is FB a utility other than a very common place people like to go to, like concerts or a sports stadium or something?

What is actually meant when we say "regulate technology companies built around communication as a utility"? How large before you become one? Is any app that has chat or public posting a utility now? What classifies? Is the only goal to make them dumb pipes? What other roles and responsibilities would the government hoist onto FB and require it do?

As soon as we can start suing them for the content they provide the sooner they will find resolution to it.

The same way they will get sued if they censor content that might be deemed socially important.

The NYT isn't a public utility nor a public broadcaster. I'm curious what you think would happen to the New York Times if they were to get sued in your imaginary hypothetical?

Editors can and have been jailed. They are ultimately personally responsible for what the paper published.

https://archives.cjr.org/opening_shot/opening_shot_july_augu...

And in any case, a publisher is different than a utility or a platform. Social media users are already punished for publishing illegal content (libel, copyright violations, etc). How does making Facebook a "utility" change that?

Same as newspaper vs postal service.

Only block content that is illegal, and do it on demand - so back to the days when the services like facebook were just a content aggregator, where filtering and curation was done by user, not for user.

> Indeed, as conservatives often point out, the existence of a market imperfection doesn’t mean that government intervention is justified, if only because it may actually make the problem worse. But as many people don’t seem to understand, especially among libertarians, the fact that government intervention is not warranted doesn’t mean there is no problem.

Here’s an obvious one: break up Facebook. Easily splits into Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

This is a conversation where people are not acting in detail but on generality.

What does moderation entail.

What are the rules needed

What rules for what type of conversations?

What does moderation mean.

What is an acceptable level of service ?

What is “service” in a web forum?

What’s actually wrong?