Maybe the model for internet forums should be nonprofit private clubs, rather than profit-making enterprises. If all members bought equity and a voting share in the administration of the forum, there would already be legally established means of determining liability for acts committed within the club. Is collective ownership of a commons such a crazy idea? You could still make your money as a subcontractor of the club providing technical services for hire, but instead of being a (benevolent) dictator for the users, you would be subject to the users. Shifting ownership would shift liability.
The essential ethical problem of the current situation, even from the days of people complaining that Youtube's primary business was illegally sharing copyrighted contet, is that liability was being shed to the users while all profits were going to the owners. Maybe that should just not be possible in future.
I can tell if a post is about chess with just a quick skim to a very high degree of accuracy.
Telling if a post is libelous will often require in depth investigation of its claims, often requiring emailing or calling people involved in whatever the post was about and tracking down and interviewing witnesses.
Relevant criteria is not whether something is liable. It’s whether someone might sue because they think it’s libel. At minimum you probably need a lawyer to evaluate claims, and even then you’re not sure you’re safe. When a group has assets it becomes more likely target.
> Is collective ownership of a commons such a crazy idea?
Legally yes. There is no way to shift liability from the club to an individual member who made a post under the model you’re describing. Liability would be for the site owner i.e. the whole club
If they only let rich people into the club it might work. The club could require members to agree to contracts that require the member to indemnify the club for any costs and damages associated with any lawsuits against the club over that member's posts.
Technically, that doesn't really shift liability to the member but if the member is going to pay the club's damages and the club's legal costs it's almost as good. That only works if the member can actually pay, hence the "only let rich people" in part.
I doubt those making these proposals upthread want these consequences. For whatever reason people really don’t think their proposals through. (Not referring to you)
The club being liable is no different from an individual being liable, which is the current situation, other than that the club has the ability to dissolve. Again, if libel law is broken, fix it. Somehow your alternative to the unthinkable outcome of only the rich being able to speak is to exclusively immunize the rich from the consequences of speech that they have direct and complete control over.
But imagine a form for them exclusively rich people. They have all taken out and Schoenes that will cover lawsuits of indefinite liability. Millions or billions. And if you find anything suitable on anywhere in the form you are guaranteed by the structure of the club that someone will make good to pay it if you win.
That’s the structure that you were arguing for. It’s a strange structure.
But I am not arguing that only the rich can speak. Regular users don’t face any real risk of libel for Internet comments.
The risk would arise for the private club because it has a target on his back: the money is here.
As a reminder the reason regular people couldn’t speak under your proposal is that in normal cases of form would itself be liable for our comments. So it would be uneconomical to run a forum due to the legal risk
I don't see a problem with that. The club should have vetted their members better, and since it didn't, it should be dissolved and its assets handed to the wronged party.
If libel law is broken, fix libel law. If a site distributes misinformation (that is not protected by law) that harms someone, someone should be responsible.
Indemnification of massive tech companies and not individuals is just a giveaway.
What's the precedent for TV and books? Are the TV networks or book publishers included in libel lawsuits? Not answering your question either way, just gathering information for now.
Neither is TV, for the most part. You have guests on talk shows who you can't control what they say, but you are also specifically choosing those people, so placing the blame on the publisher (TV Network) in that case makes a fair amount of sense.
With an online forum where anyone can sign up and start posting, you don't have that.
No. Any such law could easily have provisions that exclude moderation for off-topic content (which would be defined carefully so as to include spam).
It would mean you can't delete "trolling", "bullying", on-topic flamewars and other categories of things you might want. To do that you'd have to indeed become a publisher. And then you'd need to respond to complaints quickly and take down libellous content, or become responsible for it.
And if you would like to protect against that risk you should consider including a "flag" button or something on each post where I, member of public, can get ahold of you personally, without needing to create an account.
Meanwhile, you take down posts of people talking about how the tournament did not offer gender neutral bathrooms or how there aren't enough female chess masters, because that's "political" and off topic, but then turn a blind eye towards people harassing women on the forum and require them to keep begging you with the flag buttons to clean up your mess.
The result of this is just that the powerful majority gets something akin to a working filter and all the marginalized people don't just get lip service to their issues: they end up being unable to even bring up their complaints, because those complaints are divisive and often themselves against some terms of service banning meta-conversation (a common enough issue that this website--Hacker News--has such an indefensible clause).
This is all just not OK: you don't get to have immunity and have control. The idea that you should be able to restrict some of what happens but somehow not be even sort of responsible for everything else that happens is the kind of position you can only hold if you are part of the powerful majority, whatever it might be (cishet white males, corporate stooges, western prudes... take your pick) :/.
So, I guess, "congratulations tzs": you are demonstrating loud and clear that you think the legal position of running a chess forum that actively distorts the world view of everyone using it is more important to defend than the rights of groups like breast feeding mothers (a group that is routinely thrown off of websites and deplatfored even as alt-right groups are empowered).
(Meanwhile, the entire premise that people should get to sort of look like a platform without really being a platform is robbing the world of actual platforms, and it is ridiculous: the existence of things that almost work like platforms for the majority of powerful people means that getting people to tolerate the pain of using fully distributed systems is by and large off the table :/. Either these large websites should offer real platforms or they should be forced to not pretend to do so, so we can actually launch and use distributed systems instead.)
Wait, are you claiming chess forums are known to often discriminate against breastfeeding mothers? Or did you quietly jump from the specific to the general case? If so, are you saying Internet communities tend to discriminate against them? Hell, the closest I've seen is people IRL complaining about breastfeeding on public transit/other small, closed, public spaces. Justified or not, how is this infringing on any rights and how is any of this related to the Internet? How would one even know someone is a breastfeeding mother on a pseudonymous mostly text-based platform?
> The idea that you should be able to restrict some of what happens but somehow not be even sort of responsible for everything else...
But is that the case? If you don't restrict porn etc., you get hit by children's safety laws. If you don't remove ISIS videos you get hit by anti-terrorism laws. Same for hate speech, although I believe you're liable only if you refuse to take it down after being ordered to. (basing this on a mix of US and EU laws since I forger which are which). These things apply to "platforms" as well. But besides that, you can't have a perfectly neutral platform anyways. If you want the platform to survive, it needs to be usable. A chess forum that's full of politics is not usable and neither is a cooking forum full of nazis.
So the practical result is that only people with the resources to moderate their forums to the point that they're willing to accept liability will run moderated forums. That requires either significant resources to run the moderation program (and a chilling effect on what gets approved) or significant resources to deal with liability and American-style lawsuits. The breastfeeding mother who's setting up a blog for her three closest friends to comment on will technically be fine, but she can no longer grow her community beyond her three closest friends. The powerful (whether that's "big companies" or "socially powerful races" or whatever) are happy to keep restricting what happens on their platform and take on liability because that liability will affect them less.
I don't have a solution for this, and I find your argument mostly compelling, but I don't know that it gets us where we want to be either. I'm not really comfortable with "The price we pay for keeping MRAs from derailing forums is allowing people to say that feminists are derailing forums," but "The price we pay for making sure feminists can speak is making sure MRAs can speak" feels equally uncomfortable.
(BTW - I upvoted both of you because I think you both made good points.)
The problem with anonymizing the internet is that it prevents forming real-world communities. If you're forced to remain hidden so that you escape scrutiny, the breastfeeding mother has no way of finding others in her city beyond her three existing friends, because none of them want to be known as the dissident who supports breastfeeding. There's still value to the online communities, yes, but this seems like a significant abdication of the power of the internet to help society.
The problem with decentralizing the internet without anonymizing it is that any legal restrictions remain. If there's a law that says that Twitter can't kick breastfeeding mothers off their website without taking legal responsibility, that same law will say that my Mastodon instance must federate with every alt-right-but-toeing-the-line Mastodon instance if I don't want to take legal responsibility for everything that shows up on my Mastodon instance.
This seems highly unlikely to me. What if you are running a different version of the codebase or something from those instances? v2.0.1special. Even leaving aside constraints like that, volume of inbound traffic, etc. are direct costs to federation with other instances that I doubt laws would be willing to force you to pay.
I wonder if there are examples of this having been done in the past. Microsoft's antitrust case is the closest that comes to mind, but they were operating from an absolutely dominant standpoint at the time. If Mastodon/ActivityPub ever reaches that level, I'd consider it...a win?
(Providers like Twitter would love this law because it would kill decentralized systems. In fact this would allow Jack to "decentralize" Twitter https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766078468911106 while making sure no decentralized systems run by the powerless can compete. Everyone else can technically run a decentralized system, but Twitter is the only one worth using. It's the perfect regulatory capture.)
Sure, you can probably get by for a bit by just happening to fail to peer with Nazis, but you would immediately lose the ability to make a public shared block list with reasoning, a la https://github.com/dzuk-mutant/blockchain/blob/master/list/l... . You'd also have trouble successfully peering with non-Nazi instances - if you publish the protocol changes in v2.0.1special so other reasonable people can federate with you, the Nazis will just apply those patches too.
Even federated-by-design technologies like email have slowly turned into mostly centralized services. Just having to pick an email provider is too much work for most people. Gmail is good and free, so everyone uses that. As long as servers cost money and big corps can offer free things to get user share, decentralised services are doomed to never become mainstream.
The scenario you describe sounds like it makes for a pretty terrible chess site, and I bet people would like an alternative.
Death to independent free speech publishers.
And if some user X posted something about a dispute they were having with chess tournament organizer Y, and Y felt this was untrue and decided to sue X for libel, I'd also have responsibility for that alleged libel because I'm the publisher?
Before anyone says that this is a ridiculous scenario, that's pretty similar to that happened with Prodigy's bulletin boards before the CDA. Prodigy had content guidelines for their boards, moderators that moderated to enforce those guidelines, and software that screened for offensive language.
Someone posted a message that someone else felt was libelous, and that someone else sued both the poster and Prodigy. The court ruled that because Prodigy enforced content guidelines and had filters for bad language, they were a publisher and responsible for the content of all the messages.
It was that case that was one of the main inspirations for the CDA.
Before that, the way the case law was shaping up there were only going to be two options for an online forum.
1. If the forum does not want to be liable for what its users say, it cannot moderate or restrict their content, except as required by law.
2. If the forum places any restrictions on content, then it is essentially in the same position as a newspaper or a book publisher, and to keep its legal risks under control it is probably going to have to do a similar level of fact checking.