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Re:230, or not 230? That is the EARN IT question by saurik on Wednesday April 08, 2020 @11:36PM (#22819543)
I personally think you would be surprised at how much of what we currently have could continue to work in a world without Section 230. Right now, people are just taking a cheap shortcut of "let's just hire some moderators to moderate it", and enjoying it as it gives them control over narrative (letting them choose when to apply a firm hand in moderating and when to be lazy about it: there are just so many examples of companies abusing their moderation power in ways that have nothing to do with politics, along with issues of both subtle and not so subtle racism and misogyny--such as bans on photos of women breastfeeding--being perpetuated by the current system). I bet most of what we have right now could continue to work, albeit with pretty major architectural changes to the web... ones which admittedly might not still be conducive to large players extracting rent for hosting and organizing everything (maybe with more decentralized client-side mechanisms as opposed to centralized server-side mechanisms for helping people navigate content); and, what doesn't translate, was maybe not worth preserving in the first place. Either way, it seems to me like we should be having an honest conversation about the details of what we have and what we like and what we need to keep pulling it off, so we can figure out what the tradeoffs are, and this article from Signal equating a loss of Section 230 with somehow not being able to have end-to-end encryption is the exact opposite of that: it is more misinformation being thrown at an already giant mess of misunderstanding.
Re:230, or not 230? That is the EARN IT question by danShumway on Thursday April 09, 2020 @01:26AM (#22820045)
> I personally think you would be surprised at how much of what we currently have could continue to work in a world without Section 230

Hackernews wouldn't.

I advocate for digital rights online; particularly the Right to Communicate[0]. But the Right to Communicate goes hand in hand with the Right to Filter[1]. Human moderation isn't a shortcut, it's the backbone of small, cozy forums and independent sites. Human moderation on a personalized scale is what makes smaller communities so much nicer than giant algorithmically curated platforms like Twitter or Youtube.

The way we marry the Right to Filter and the Right to Communicate is with systems like the Fediverse that make it easy for people to form new communities on the fly, to join and leave existing communities without any pain or fuss, and to copy their content around or download it out of data silos whenever they'd like to. While we give users that convenience, we also recognize that communities have an inalienable right to organize themselves and filter the content that they host and see. In this way, the Right to Communicate and the Right to Filter reinforce each other, filling in the problematic gaps and abuses that either right would have in isolation.

Section 230 is what makes that possible. Decentralization isn't magic. The law and the DOJ will attack community organizers and label them as publishers regardless of whether or not they are personally hosting the content in their communities. It doesn't matter what architecture you use; if you're going to have an open community someplace, that community needs to be able to enforce its own rules and norms. And Section 230 will make them liable if they attempt to do so.

And even outside of the Fediverse, so much of the Internet matters.

To hear you very lightly say something like:

> and, what doesn't translate, was maybe not worth preserving in the first place

I'm almost not sure how to respond to a claim like that. HN isn't worth preserving? IRC channels aren't worth preserving? Matrix isn't worth preserving? Self-publishing storefronts, independent forums, and comment sections on blogs aren't worth preserving? Email isn't worth preserving?

> Signal equating a loss of Section 230 with somehow not being able to have end-to-end encryption

For Signal, no, maybe not. For a lot of other services, including the vast majority of the Fediverse, yes. I think your reading of Signal's status as a distributor is pretty reasonable. But don't jump from that reading to saying that this won't have an impact on encryption.

Signal is a zero-knowledge, closed communication platform. It's not decentralized, it has essentially no moderation of any kind, and it has no communities of any kind. An open community with its own norms, memes, and content standards is not zero-knowledge about the content it's hosting. A law that meant that only closed, blind systems like Signal could make use of E2E encryption wouldn't eliminate all encryption, but it would restrict a large number of platforms from using encryption to make themselves more private and more secure.

[0]: https://anewdigitalmanifesto.com/#right-to-communicate

[1]: https://anewdigitalmanifesto.com/#right-to-filter