We do have public parks in New York and other cities that are privately owned, and people walk through them.. homeless people sleep in them.. and, yes, people sometimes do drugs or other illicit activities. The police patrol them like any other park.

Here's an example: Zuccotti Park in NYC where the Occupy Wall Street protests were held: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuccotti_Park They're called POPS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privately_owned_public_space And here's a list of them in NYC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_privately_owned_public...

Are you now saying that the owners of these parks are legally liable for the actions people take in them? What about city parks: is the city government liable?

What do you base this legal theory on? Why haven't these park owners been arrested if this were true?

Do you have any legal training?

Comparing a physical space to a digital one is absurd.

Regulation will be used suppress speech and to further serve their paying customers: advertisers, politicians, special interest groups, corporations.

These platforms are already on their way to becoming sterile and for huge money incumbents, much like how cable tv is today.

If they have to be held accountable for the things their users do, they will simply wall it off even more, ban anything that seems slightly outside of the Overton window/status quo, and there will be absolutely no recourse for small content creators who are unfairly or wrongly banned.

> Comparing a physical space to a digital one is absurd.

I agree, it's an absurd idea because we tend to think of digital life and physical life as totally separate legal realms. I think over the next 10 years as digital and physical life become even more intertwined, this will start to change.

> Regulation will be used suppress speech and to further serve their paying customers: advertisers, politicians, special interest groups, corporations.

I also agree. But you have to balance that with the public benefit of moderated platforms vs unmoderated platform. It's a really tricky balance to get right, which is why I think a lot of people don't like the idea of more regulation.

It's a tricky problem. There might be a better solution. But I don't think the solution is to keep things working the way they are.

I'm an idealist who believes that all internet platforms should be decentralized to the greatest extent possible, with open protocols and open source desktop software from diverse origins.

To be able to do what you suggest, to have control over what the public does in a platform, the platform would need to be as centralized as possible, and that's why I disagree with you. I don't want our current software ecosystem to become even more centralized than what it's already become.

Friend-to-friend networks[1] bring the self-moderation most real-world networks rely on to the digital, without imposing a centralized power structure.

No surveillance needed: if you see one of your peers (/"friend") committing a crime, it's on you to report it. On the other hand, if they are breaking a law nobody cares about (e.g. buying weed), nothing is going to happen to them. That's how society works already.

RetroShare, though it's almost dead, was a wonderful example of this. File-sharing is anonymous, but limited by a certain number of hops through your friends and the friends of their friends. As such, for a regular user, it had all the warez any extended group of friend would like to share between themselves, but none of the child-pornography or snuff films you could expect to end up on in "global" anonymous P2P networks. And it could even be free of warez if your friends abided by intellectual property laws.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friend-to-friend

This falls down a bit in the GPs example though, doesn't it? Those in the stadium committing the "crimes" of roulette, drugs, or the rally would say that whatever they may be doing is "breaking a law nobody cares about."

That doesn't absolve anyone of responsibility in regard to the law. Whoever was in contact with them and suspected them could report them to the police. In most jurisdictions, witnessing a crime and not reporting it is also punishable. It simply prevents the over-zealous censorship that happens when you put all responsibility on a single actor (Tumblr, YouTube, ...).

>In most jurisdictions, witnessing a crime and not reporting it is also punishable

Usually such laws only apply to specific crimes.

> "This (again) highlights the need for tech companies to take responsibility for what happens on their platform."

Does it? They took the video down and revised their processes to respond to such incidents. What other responsibilities do they have?

Call the police immediately.

But the person was already dead.

Highly likely but are you certain of that?

Are you certain a crime has not taken place?

A death has happened. PR strategy would be the furthest thing from my mind - but I'm a human, not a corporate entity.

Plus it would be reasonable to assume at least one of the many live watchers already did that...

I don't see how that would be useful. Police are local and random internet streams are not usually traceable to a location, which is all they would be interested in.

The timeline in the story seems to confirm that assumption.

Really? I mean, either a few drug dealers slip through the cracks, you fill the nice fun stadium with creepy surveillance cameras to cover your own ass, or the stadium simply doesn't exist. I'm all for options (a) and (c), but option (b) is the worst.

> You brand the stadium as a "platform" and you invite the public to treat it as such. 6 months later you have people doing drugs on one side of the stadium, holding a white supremacy rally at the other end of the stadium, and then a group of people in the bleachers playing russian roulette with the occasional casualty.

So what? People are responsible for their own individual actions. None of what you described is hurting anyone else. It may not be a pleasant place, but that's okay because it's private property. Now consider that in the digital world there's no possibility for physical harm and the example becomes entirely pointless in any case.

We're talking about a suicide, so there is possibility for physical harm.

(I'm not at all saying TikTok should be responsible for this person's suicide. Only that moderation of online platforms can have real physical consequences. When moderators respond appropriately to posts involving suicide, stalking, and child pornography, they can help prevent abuse in the physical world.)

Doesn't take much imagination to switch up grand-parent's contrived examples for your own definition of actually threatening deeds to get their point, does it? Would "operating a slave-manned factory" or "training volunteers in crafting concealed remotely-detonated explosives" fit the bill?

You're putting words in my mouth. Your examples aren't consistent, either:

> operating a slave-manned factory

This is wrong. Slavery violates the personal liberty of the enslaved

> training volunteers in crafting concealed remotely-detonated explosives

I don't see an issue with this. The information is already available online.