I could be wrong.
Maybe it’s time for another step.
where so long as it's clearly defined in TOS and moderation policy you can remove it. E.g. fb has a more clear policy that's public that says no false facts that can cause harm.
I'm a 100% skeptical of this administration and the (run on rant ahead) insanely religious zealot by the name of Barr who is terrifying in trying to force his crazy beliefs on all of us whilst creating a monolithic fascist-esque unitary executive who's whim (or that who has his ear last..) controls virtually all aspects of our lives...
but this seams reasonable and seems like it would answer a lot of the problems we see complained about on HN all the time?
right now one of the top posts is about YouTube take down with no info/recourse.
The only thing I don’t like about Barr is it’s hard to see him curtailing the surveillance state, but frankly that applies too almost everyone in politics since those who speak out against the cia/nsa tend to get into unfortunate high-speed car accidents.
Barr himself is horrifically partisan, which as the AG of your entire country is scary as all hell. Just read his speech in November 2019 to The Federalist Society (which itself is horrifying, the societies goals are simply at odds with what the USA has claimed to be).
It's as partisan as it gets.
Or is that okay, because its in-line with your own opinions?
he thinks that religion is needed side-by-side with our individual liberty style government.
read this whole speech it's truly insane i can't believe someone so intelligent (and effective), who was given so much power by Trump, has these views it's truly scary
"But today – in the face of all the increasing pathologies – instead of addressing the underlying cause, we have the State in the role of alleviator of bad consequences. We call on the State to mitigate the social costs of personal misconduct and irresponsibility.
So the reaction to growing illegitimacy is not sexual responsibility, but abortion.
The reaction to drug addiction is safe injection sites.
The solution to the breakdown of the family is for the State to set itself up as the ersatz husband for single mothers and the ersatz father to their children.
The call comes for more and more social programs to deal with the wreckage. While we think we are solving problems, we are underwriting them.
We start with an untrammeled freedom and we end up as dependents of a coercive state on which we depend."
https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-william-...
f9 is suspicious how? This document is not intended in anyway to prevent anti-trust actions, so why is a specific exclusion suspicious? There's a lot of public push right now to act on anti-trust issues for large tech companies, so there's no secret there.
5c... is more complex, and I'm not sure it means what you think it does.
c2A does seem particularly problematic to me in the context of trying to combat disinformation which is neither illegal nor obscene, nor violent.
Can you explain more, I'm not really seeing it...
Also how is disallowing shadowbanning problematic? I always never liked it.
If instead you outright ban them, they adjust or learn about your anti-spam algorithms and just keep going.
I'd say this administration has resonated with its base by treating bans as politically-motivated.
Facebook also regularly censors viral pro-trump content and project veritas has exposed this.
I wish it weren’t so, but it is. I’ve experienced it firsthand.
It's tough to take these at face value because we trust and believe in the things that define our ideology and take any challenge to our presentation of that as an attack on the underlying ideology.
Also this sort of stuff can lead to real world violence like when Facebook let violent vigilantes organize on their site it led to Kyle Rittenhouse killing two people.
I get to take down any flyers on my fence, even if I leave up the ones I like. Or I can vandalize the ones I dislike, maybe entirely changing their message. My fence.
No they're not; the government has already shown itself able and willing to do an end-run around the First Amendment by e.g. pressurising payment processors to refuse to do business with such websites.
> The owners of the shadow-banning websites should also have the right to decide what thoughts are exposed on their website.
> I get to take down any flyers on my fence, even if I leave up the ones I like. Or I can vandalize the ones I dislike, maybe entirely changing their message. My fence.
If you're hosting a private website you can privately decide what goes on it. If you're holding yourself out as a public communications provider and want the benefits of section 230, you're being granted special privileges by society and you need to hold up your end of the bargain by hosting the kind of uncomfortable discussion that society needs.
I cannot see how a change to a law that's proposed by the enforcement arm of government will actually protect people from abuses done by that same enforcement arm. If they act in bad faith now, why assume good faith will follow?
>you need to hold up your end of the bargain by hosting the kind of uncomfortable discussion that society needs.
I don't think Amazon's user reviews are where uncomfortable discussions need to happen. But I do think the government demanding what should be discussed on servers owned by private citizens is a clear violation of the First Amendment.
This seems like an argument that no government will ever reduce its own power, and so constitutional protections, due process etc. are all pointless. Even a single arm of the government is far from a monolith, and the boundaries of what government should and shouldn't do are always evolving. I'm sure this proposal isn't coming purely from the good of this administration's heart; part of it is public pressure, and part of it is the consideration that they may no longer be in power come November. But realpolitik is always a factor; good laws are still good laws.
> I don't think Amazon's user reviews are where uncomfortable discussions need to happen.
I'm sure a lot of vital IRL political discussion happens in the checkout queue at the supermarket (I'm sure that sounds like a joke, but I'm completely serious). As life moves online, we need a corresponding public sphere.
> But I do think the government demanding what should be discussed on servers owned by private citizens is a clear violation of the First Amendment.
Private citizens acting in their capacity as private citizens are still free to discuss whatever they like, or ban whatever discussion they like. If you want to have a capaciously moderated website that's fine, but such a website will not and cannot be a Section 230 public communications provider.
Type 1: Errors, ignorance, human foibles. Primarily annoying/asshole behavior.
Type 2: Malice and malformed content. Spam, propaganda, trolling.
I can argue against shadow bans for the first type. For the second type, any evidence of your operational method is a data point to break the moderation barrier and infect/manipulate users.
If a spammer knows its been banned, it switches over to another account. If a troll knows where your ban lines are, they come back and stay exactly on the edge to trigger someone or make them fall over the line.
Section 5c is particularly problematic. It disallows shadow-bans if I'm reading correctly.
Section f9 is...suspicious.
Section d4 seems painful for small providers. You lose good samaritan status if there isn't a good way to contact you.
Section c2A is the important one. It basically means that a site cannot remove content unless it is objectively obscene or extreme. Section g5A suggests that you can have a ToS that explains your moderation decisions. But c2A seems to say that you aren't a good faith actor unless you use the objectively reasonable moderations standards defined by the law.
It's not clear that this would even have an effect since clearly you can moderate based on your ToS. A sports site can remove non-sports content even if it isn't obscene.
It seems like the goal would be to say that content moderators are biased in some way and drop section 230 protection based on that pretext, but that'd require a court to find that the moderation is being done inconsistently, and being done inconsistently intentionally. I have a feeling there'll be difficultly proving that.