Nah. This is just mendacity on behalf of the right wing of American culture that has changed their mind and decided that, yes, facts have to care about their feelings.
Moderation on the client side is a thing. It already is practiced on networks like Twitter and Mastodon. It was the historical model on Usenet too.
At this point you're just posting excuses for prolonging the monopoly of centralized moderation. The bogeyman of "the right wing of American culture" doesn't help, given how international the discourse of the subject is.
I do wonder.
I'm trying to assume good faith in your reply so let me point something out to you: the people who are wringing their hands about this used to bleat about shared block lists being used to get some semblance of value out of "client-side moderation" (which is not to say that it is successful at dealing with shitty actors, just that it's less unsuccessful, when you use them), just as they're bleating about this. Because the real beef here is not with Twitter Deciding, it's with Anyone Deciding that they are not entitled to the attention of anyone they demand it from.
But they lost re: shared block lists, and this is a retrenchment to attempt to keep relevance when they can, and should, lose this one too and be shown the door. If they want "unmoderated", there are platforms like Parler and Gab where they can have that. Relatedly, those platforms are full of literal-not-figurative fascists. I wonder why.
Are you claiming that the phone system does not work? Or that ISPs do not work?
I think that they work pretty well, even though there really is not much top down moderation.
> If they want "unmoderated"
Why can't we consider the phone network, or ISPs, which are successful examples of the kind of unmoderated approach, that people are asking for?
It’s a fundamentally different problem. If people use my phone company to have racist companies, I don’t have to know or care. Whereas if I had to deal with people saying racist shit every time I went on Twitter, I’d stop using it.
Consider also that most people’s biggest complaint with the phone system is a consequence of them not moderating, i.e. spam calls.
ISPs have to follow common carrier laws.
If social media platforms were subject to these same common carrier laws, then that is good enough for me.
That is what I mean by unmoderated. I mean, that they are following things such as common carrier laws, which have very significant requirements.
Firstly, you're wrong about that. This same FCC voted to remove ISPs from common carrier classification.
Also, what do you think common carrier means? It doesn't mean "completely unmoderated" as you appear to believe. As I already demonstrated, even common carriers perform network-layer moderation, since they provide the network layer. Social media provides the application layer, so why shouldn't they be allowed to perform moderation at the application layer?
Systems such as the phone network are pretty darn unmoderated. It is mostly unmoderated, even if common carriers are allowed to do a small amount, of highly restricted moderation actions.
> as you appear to believe
I have just clarified. It means that there are very strong regulations, that ban many forms of moderation.
> so why shouldn't they be allowed to perform moderation at the application layer?
I am saying that I would be fine if they were banned from doing most moderation actions, as is the case for common carriers.
And I am saying that I would be OK with them engaging in the very small amount of highly regulated moderation, that common carriers are allowed to do.
Common carriers have large restrictions on the amount of moderation that they are allowed to do. I want those same restrictions to apply to other media platforms.
Yeah, I don't think you know what common carrier actually means.[1]
The moderation that telecoms and ISPs perform relates to traffic that can negatively affect other users of those systems. Social media platforms can easily argue that their moderation already follows similar principles. It just happens that they deal with content, not raw bits, so they have to moderate content.
You also didn't address my other point, which is that ISPs aren't common carriers at all and this same FCC voted to make it so. So this seems pretty hypocritical behavior on their part.
Social media platforms are not currently subject to common carrier laws.
And I am saying that the law should be changed so that they are, or whatever needs it be done to make that happen.
Common carriers are absolutely restricted from engaging in certain actions.
Were you not aware that there are regulations that restrict what common carriers do?
Do you disagree that common carriers are subject to certain restrictions?
I am not sure how you could possibly not recognize the fact that we have common carrier laws.
> You're repeating the same things
You are misphrasing the things that I am trying to say, so I have to slightly rephrase it so that you cannot misinterprete my statements.
Re client side moderation, it's possible that users can be educated about effective approaches. Just like they started warming the non-geeks about email with hollywood films (You've Got Mail, 1998), and I'm sure there must have been similar sort of concerted media efforts for older technology. Automobiles, for example. I -bet- we can dig up content (old films) that basically were teaching the American public how to use cars using movies.
Given the inherently democratic aspect of client-side filterings, and serious inherent political concerns with centralized moderation, it seems wrong to give up on the idea simply because the avant garde generation on internet (using mostly antique kludgy UI/UX, btw) had problems with it.
We can fix client side moderation with education. It is a transitory issue, only.
Centralized moderation is inherently problematic for public platforms. (I have no issues with private, members only, platforms opting for centralized moderation.)
If you're being legit with your post, you're falling for a tremendous okeydoke here on the part of people who wish to do civil society harm. Literally all this approach accomplishes, literally and exclusively and without exception all it does, is cede the public square to people who want to export misery or deal with the exporters of misery--a vanishingly small fraction of the decent people out there. We can and must be better and that means that no, we are under no obligation to waste time or resources on people who were never socially potty-trained.
> you're falling for ..
You seem to think that you know a lot about me. Let me gently suggest that possibly your technical imagination is failing to show you alternatives that solves all these issues.
So, actually, it is not a case of falling for anything, rather waiting since 1996 for someone else to start discussing having social models for networked virtual spaces.
> If you're being legit with your post
And why would I be otherwise? I found that quite offensive, and entirely un-necessary.
It's not a UI/UX problem. It's a "you are offloading moderation to the end user" problem--it is a fundamental failure of the approach. If you are going to put all of the work of moderation on the end user, regardless of whether you dress it up as "shared moderation" or whatever, the end user is going to leave and cede the floor to those who want to dominate the public discourse with sewage and crud and threats because the end user has a life to live and things to do with their day. There is a fundamental human cost to being exposed to the kind of garbage that Twitter et al filter out on the regular. It takes a toll on the psyche. It will drive people away. And that's not a "but muh engagement" for whoever's metrics and KPIs are involved--it is a realization that this is now the public square and ceding it to actively anti-civil movements is bad for liberalized society in general.
If there's a failing of technical imagination on my part, fine. There strongly seems to be a failing of appreciation of how modern supremacist movements operate on yours. This is not a technical problem, this is a human problem. It's a question of whether the psychic damage inflicted upon bystanders by constant and unending exposure (because that is, genuinely, what the end state here is) is worth whatever hypothetical benefit is realized by giving these parties a place from which to abuse others until they definitely, yessir, are blocked by all of them and never, ever seek to get around it to continue their abuse.
> And why would I be otherwise?
Speaking frankly? Because this discussion is dominated by bad-faith types whose axe to grind is really that there's a movement against their favorite flavors of supremacism and they generally use arguments like the one you're putting forth as retrenchment now that the tide has turned against them. If that isn't your bag, I appreciate that; I think you're incorrect, but that's separate from disingenuous.
> There strongly seems to be a failing of appreciation of how modern supremacist movements operate on yours.
Well, the internet gifted to us, with its flat namespace and the inevitable conflation of user identity with device identity, [empowers] bad actors. I alluded to this.
A facade of politeness & shaming, a reality of censorious rules. The encroach was slow, almost imperceptible, but here we are at last. The current state of the Twitter rules is impacting investigative journalism. Internationally recognized journalist Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept explains:
Look carefully at what Twitter is saying to justify censoring the Biden story. If applied consistently, it’d mean that some of history’s most consequential journalism — the Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks’ war logs, Snowden docs, Panama Papers, our Brazil Archive — would be banned. [1]
Ceding the full power to the platforms has failed us.
--
[1] https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1316720230450724864
Anyway, your examples are unconvincing. Twitter is primarily moderated by server-side spam and abuse prevention tools. The other two are both far smaller, and don't exactly do a great job at content moderation.
That’s seems bad.
One could also draw a distinction between burying content vs. completely deleting it. A lot of HN moderation already works by just dropping the content from the frontpage or making comments invisible rather than outright deleting it. I presume the FCC would still consider this
I not sure how this could work for a single-purpose community like HN. Maybe if YC ran a neutral HNaaS then the HN-prime could be operated and moderated by independent staff.
An alternative approach would be exemptions for non-profit sites.
I think it would be possible to operate within these broad rules if the details are crafted right, but even then it would require significant adjustments for many site operators.
Another alternative would be "leave this problem alone, it's working just fine". Site operators can and should have the ability to ban anyone or remove any content, for any reason or no reason, and doing so does not mean they should be liable for everything they might have missed. (In practice, "liable for everything they might have missed" is equivalent to "unable to operate" for anything but the most massive sites that could theoretically afford an army of moderators, and it'd have a chilling effect even there.)
Destroying the concept of moderation does not make the world better. The liability shield is the whole reason Section 230 exists: to make it possible to have enjoyable communities online, without incurring so much liability that you have to shut them all down for fear of getting prosecuted.
If you want unmoderated communities, they exist. Go use them. Stop trying to destroy the concept of moderated communities.(Removing the liability shield would be tantamount to destroying such communities.)
Some people want the audience of moderated communities, but they don't want the standards of those communities. There's a reason unmoderated communities have fewer (and different) users.
You have the major internet networks 3 weeks before an election banning speech because if they allowed it it might hurt their preferred political candidate. I mean they can claim otherwise, but they don't apply the criteria they use in this instance to instances where the speech is done by their political party. It is clear what is going on here.
Maybe that is working fine for you, it isn't working fine for me.
The ask of companies under section 230 is that they be allowed to publish libel, publish slander, publish copyright violations, publish content that violates laws against discrimination, publish threats of violence, publish posts by terrorists coordinating their attacks, publish all this with no liability whatsoever.
That is a huge ask. The question is, what do we get back for allowing them that privilege? Increasingly, in my opinion, we get negative value back for that.
It's not working just fine for me, it's time to amend section 230 so that the law advances the policies it advocates or abolish it altogether and let internet content providers live by the same rules that print content providers have lived by.
> The ask of companies under section 230 is that they be allowed to publish
No. "publish" is a distortion promoted by people trying to use the repeal of Section 230 as a weapon. To the extent liability should exist for speech at all, companies should absolutely be liable for what they publish. They should not be liable for what their users publish. Without that distinction, the Internet cannot exist as a medium for any kind of user-generated content. Centralized services providing curated content would fare just fine, but anything that allows users to interact or contribute would die.
> The question is, what do we get back for allowing them that privilege?
A functional Internet. Websites that contains content supplied by others, that aren't "anything goes" cesspools. An Internet that helps people interact in a read-write manner, not just consume content in a read-only manner.
Not true, someone running a small blog can read every single comment that gets submitted. Twitter can't.
>> The world you propose does not have functional real-time public communication, because nobody could risk the liability of allowing the posting of content they haven't checked yet
Not true, even pre-internet the world had functional real-time public communication. We called them telephones. You didn't get cut off if your politics didn't match the phone company's. And if you act as a platform like that on the internet, you could allow the posting of content you haven't checked yet.
Platform or publisher, pick one.
>> The world you propose is one in which nobody could take the risk of running a community online
Not true, there are print communities that publish users' content - people take that risk.
>> "publish" is a distortion promoted by people trying to use the repeal of Section 230 as a weapon
Dictionary definitions of publish: "to make generally known", "to disseminate to the public". No, "publish" is not a distortion, it's a dictionary definition, you just don't like the consequences of that definition.
>> "Without that distinction, the Internet cannot exist as a medium for any kind of user-generated content"
Not true, user generated content exists in print and it should be cheaper on the internet than in print. False claim.
>> A functional Internet
An internet where 3 weeks out from an election, the major providers of information ban information that hurts their political candidate is not a functional internet, it's an Orwellian dystopia.
No. Just no.
Telephone calls are private; not public. There are two parties. It's literally against the law for other parties to attempt to become privy to those communications under most circumstances (wiretapping).
Please explain how something like HN works on the telephone.
>Not true, user generated content exists in print and it should be cheaper on the internet than in print.
User generated content does indeed exist in print, where the cost of printing and shipping that content are incumbent on the party that wishes to make their opinion known. When unsolicited or tiresome, we refer to this as junk mail or chain-letters.
But they then have to choose between allowing every racial epithet, porn link and scam, and risking a lawsuit because a commenter says something that’s construed as defamatory.
> Not true, even pre-internet the world had functional real-time public communication. We called them telephones.
Telephones are not public communication.
> An internet where 3 weeks out from an election, the major providers of information ban information that hurts their political candidate is not a functional internet, it's an Orwellian dystopia.
It’s interesting to me that the same people who are up in arms about the response to the NY Post story — the veracity of which has been questioned by several prominent publications — had nothing to say when Twitter announced that they would suspend accounts of users wishing the President would die of COVID. If I had to label one of those an “Orwellian dystopia”, it would not be the suppression of pro–ruling party agitprop.
Yes, that's correct. They have to choose what content to allow. That's called being a publisher.
>> Telephones are not public communication
I'm guessing that you are too young to have heard of party lines.
But yes, telephones were public communication.
Wishing the president would die of COVID would obviously be allowed under a platform scenario, what law do you think it breaks where a content provider wouldn't publish a wish that the president of the US dies of a disease?
Also, I don't think you know what the term agitprop means.
If you're really advocating forcing individuals and small communities to choose between filtering spam and risking lawsuits, we'll have to agree to disagree. Hopefully the chilling effects that would have on speech are self-evident.
> I'm guessing that you are too young to have heard of party lines.
> But yes, telephones were public communication.
Unless I'm misunderstanding what party lines are… no they weren't. How would I listen to a conversation happening between two people outside of my local loop?
> Wishing the president would die of COVID would obviously be allowed under a platform scenario, what law do you think it breaks where a content provider wouldn't publish a wish that the president of the US dies of a disease?
This wasn't a hypothetical; it happened last week. Twitter announced it would suspend the accounts of people wishing the president would die, and the people who would go on to cry foul about the NY Post article were curiously quiet.
> Also, I don't think you know what the term agitprop means.
Yes I do.
Or it's a sign that Twitter and FB shouldn't be "major providers of information".
Yeah, it really does seem some times like what Section 230 abolitionists really want is better accomplished through antitrust law. Trying to use liability for unrelated torts as a lever to force sites not to moderate is a very indirect and messy way to get back at the major platforms while creating a lot of collateral damage for smaller sites.
On the other hand using communications regulation does sound kind of obvious when you use the telephone or previous net neutrality disputes as reference points. Although it is ironic that the current anti-NN FCC now wants to push for platform services in the name of neutrality.
Should conventional printing press owners be considered utilities because you might want to post a bunch of posters somewhere, and by refusing to print your posters they censor you?
The difference in the printing press analogy is that if a printing company won't print my poster, I can take it elsewhere.
You don't lose those for being too successful.
That isn't true for internet content providers due to section 230.
If internet publishers make active editorial decisions, they are also liable. Consider the new york times online.
I gave an example elsewhere that the owner of a physical bulletin board wouldn't be liable for posters on it, even if they occasionally came by and took down ones that they felt should be removed (for any reason).
Section 230 claims that internet sites are more like a physical bulletin board then a newspaper, in that they are remove-later, not review-first models. Aa such they deserve the same liability as physical remove-later systems: relatively few.
That's called false dichotomy.
If a major fraction of human communication, especially during lockdowns, is facilitated by social networks then they are fulfilling a utility role. So being in the position of dictating what millions of people will talk about is at least questionable.
> for anything but the most massive sites that could theoretically afford an army of moderators
Ok, I have not considered this angle and it is indeed concerning.
> Destroying the concept of moderation does not make the world better.
That may be the goal of the FCC, but I for one did not say that I am in support of destroying moderation. Quite the opposite, I was thinking how it could be made to work while providing more open communication platforms and putting more control in the hands of the users rather than the companies.
Removing the ability of those sites to moderate will not make them better. (Even if it did by some metric, that still wouldn't be acceptable; what constitutes "better" is entirely up to the site owner to determine. But it's even less reasonable given that it wouldn't have the intended effect, unless the intended effect is to cause harm.) Having many users should not suddenly mean you don't own the site, nor should it mean that you cannot moderate the site as you see fit. "We came up with a new algorithm to automatically detect spam" should not need to come with "and several years later we managed to get the government to say we're allowed to use it without incurring liability".
>> for anything but the most massive sites that could theoretically afford an army of moderators
> Ok, I have not considered this angle and it is indeed concerning.
That angle is why Section 230 was created in the first place, and why it should remain intact.
> That may be the goal of the FCC, but I for one did not say that I am in support of destroying moderation.
Removing the liability shield for sites that moderate will destroy either the site or the moderation, and either way the usefulness of the site comes to an end.
> Quite the opposite, I was thinking how it could be made to work while providing more open communication platforms and putting more control in the hands of the users rather than the companies.
Make a new network that puts control in the hands of the users in the way you envision, and test it to see how well it works. Or join one of the existing efforts already working on that. This isn't a legislative problem; it certainly shouldn't have a legislative non-solution masquerading as a solution.
I think most people's experience with moderation puts more weight on any encounters they've had with being moderated, and little to no weight (except perhaps in the abstract) on the volume of what they don't see. Moderation, when done well, is close to invisible; I think as a side effect of that, people underestimate its value in contributing to their good experiences.
You continue to own it, but that does not mean you can do arbitrary things to your users. That's precisely how things work for utilities. You can do whatever with your private road or power generator. But if you're providing essential services to the masses then eventually universal service, non-discrimination and neutrality rules come into play.
If doctors coordinate their covid response over facebook groups, elon musk makes stock-affecting announcement over twitter and the police sends out warnings via twitter than they're taking on the role of a public communication provider.
You could argue that it's a free service and you're not a customer as you're with a utility. But on the other hand you're paying with your data and attention.
> Removing the liability shield for sites that moderate will destroy either the site or the moderation, and either way the usefulness of the site comes to an end.
You're assuming that there is no way to adapt to the new rules. Separation of platform services and moderation would be one. Would it work? Maybe not and you could be right and communities would be destroyed. Or maybe it would result in more Bloggers, Wordpresses and Signals.
> Make a new network that puts control in the hands of the users in the way you envision, and test it to see how well it works.
Regulation is a valid approach though? I'm not saying that the FCC is intending to do good here, just that I can can imagine a hypothetical well-intentioned version of what they're doing.
> That angle is why Section 230 was created in the first place, and why it should remain intact.
Let me rephrase, I find it concerning that it could specifically empower the entrenched players while harming the smaller ones. Requiring an army of moderators when you want to create a global communication platform on the one hand but impose your preferred corporate image (and be it just to remain attractive to advertisiers) on all participants then I am not feeling all that sympathetic. And this isn't just about communication in the narrow sense. The controversy around the apple app store is in a similar vein. On the one hand they pretend that they act as a simple market facilitator, a platform. On the other hand they categorically ban certain categories of legal software because it goes against their corporate interests. Forcing them to choose between platform and publisher could result in either a smaller, carefully curated official apple store + sideloading or larger, more open default app store. Either outcome seems desirable to me.
If you're liable for user-posted content, you either need massive resources to review literally everything your users post (and a sufficient delay for such review to take place, and a massive insurance policy for the inevitable mistake), or you stop allowing user-posted content entirely.
This proposal would make it nearly impossible to simultaneously have user-posted content and moderation. Sites that post read-only content for user consumption would do just fine, but any site that enables the usage of the Internet in a read-write contributory way would be dead. There's no "adapting" to that, nor should there be.
> if you're providing essential services to the masses
Twitter is not in any way an "essential service". The collective set of communication platforms that people use are, in concert, important, but it'd still be a stretch to say even that combination was "essential"; I certainly don't think it's reasonable to consider any one of them "essential" by itself. If any one of those sites went away, people would adapt and use others, and more would arise rapidly to fill the void.
If the power goes out, people die. If Facebook goes down, people probably become on balance happier.
Ignore for a moment that Facebook is publicly traded; imagine it weren't. Do you believe, by way of example, that Facebook should be prohibited from pulling the plug and formatting all the servers one day, just because they decided they were tired of it? I don't.
Twitter is not an "essential service". It's useful. We're not utterly dependent on any one site; we're dependent on some site. If it went away, life would go on, and people would find alternatives. The only critical issue would be if all such sites went away simultaneously, rather than just one. "Widely used" is not "essential".
Yes, I am concerned about the collective of privatized communication mediums. More and more private, personal communication runs over these platforms. Facebook is not just your timeline, it also is whatsapp. Twitter has DMs too. Those get filtered too. This is unlike telephone or face-to-face communication.
Their continued existence is not essential to life, I agree. But they shape communication which is essential to society as a whole. If we can't do anything about the network effect then having a disinterested network should be preferable.
> This proposal would make it nearly impossible to simultaneously have user-posted content and moderation.
I already mentioned this in another post, but let the userbase collectively handle the moderation of what would now be considered "community guidelines", let the platform provider handle moderation of illegal content. This may require much better tooling and different ways content is amplified (or not) than social media platforms currently offer but it doesn't seem as impossible as you say.
I don't want a disinterested communication platform. I want a highly interested communication platform that actually cares and maintains standards. I've tried both, and I find moderated platforms far more enjoyable. I'm not telling other people what kind of platform they should prefer; I'm stating that both such platforms should be available to those who prefer them. Freedom of association is valuable.
> let the userbase collectively handle the moderation
First, it's not at all obvious why user moderation would avoid the liability, and why that wouldn't put either the site or the user at risk under this new draconian liability scheme.
Second, user moderation like that requires some form of meta-moderation ("which users get to moderate"), and then you're back to the same problem.
Third, you're arguing that a site isn't allowed to pay people to moderate, and instead should rely on unpaid labor by volunteers to make the site more useful.
Fourth, you're effectively arguing that people who run websites (as opposed to those who use them) are not allowed to have standards. (And "not allowed without incurring liability" means "not allowed", in practical terms.) No. If I host a chat server, and someone comes on and starts chanting "butts butts butts butts" (saw this one happen) or "you should be gassed" (also saw this one happen) or "good ban all (slur)" (saw that one in a flagged comment on this website today) or "such-and-such group are mentally ill" (I've seen this one too), they're getting banned, whether I own the server or not, the same way they'd get kicked out of a party, or a cafe, or a business. Do you believe that, because I have standards and norms, I should not be allowed to run a server? Because if that causes me to incur liability for user's content, I cannot run such a server. Why is that a problem? Use someone else's server. I do, in fact, have freedom of association, and (modulo protected classes) believe very strongly in "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone".
Looking at your comments it seems like you at least agree that common carriers are subject to some laws.
Great! It seems like you agree with me that there are laws and things that common carriers have to do, and that there is content that they are required to carry some content.
I've specifically clarified that common carriers are subject to certain restrictions on what they can do, and am saying that those restrictions should apply to social media, with a law change.
> the current FCC
My specific claim is that the law should be changed such that they are subject to common carrier laws.
Social media companies are not currently subject to them, but I am saying that the law should be changed so that they are.
If you want to say that the law should be changed so that ISPs are subject to those as well, then go ahead and argue that, but that does not contradict what I am arguing for.
Anyway, I am just glad at this point that you agree that common carriers are subject to certain restrictions, which was my point the whole time. And I am saying that those same restrictions, that you agree exist, should be applied to social media companies, via a law change.
And that’s different from present situation because…? We already have Twitter Prime (Twitter), as well as the constellation Twitters — Conservative Twitter (Parler), Nazi Twitter (Gab), [Niche Interest] Twitter (various Mastodon people instances), etc. We haven’t fundamentally changed anything; all we’ve done is move the moderation “problem” around a bit.
I think the actual escape hatch would be enabling users to filter content collaboratively in a way so that there is no entity in the system could be considered a commercial publisher. The platform providers only remove illegal content and the "not a publisher under the law" users do the community-interest moderation rather than corporate-interest moderation.
Of course some could still choose to play under publisher rules and allow user submissions, but that wold probably be much smaller scale if they want to be on the safe side and and pre-check things individually.
> like spam and porn.
I assume (without having checked) that filtering spam would still be allowed even under platform rules.
Sure, but that’s orthogonal. Let’s say for the sake of argument that all those things came true — business models changed, financial interests separated, etc — but from the users’ point of view, everything works exactly as it does today. Success?
> I think the actual escape hatch would be enabling users to filter content collaboratively
This exists today — shared block lists, etc — and it’s insufficient. There’s a reason that when Twitter announced that they would suspend the accounts of people hoping for Donald Trump to die of COVID, the response from people who often receive death threats was “you mean you could have been doing this the whole time?!”
> I assume (without having checked) that filtering spam would still be allowed even under platform rules.
What is spam? “I made $X from my couch”? Repeated links to my blog? Trolling conservative communities with liberal posts?
The problem with carving out exceptions to your ban on moderation is that it moves your complaint from “all censorship is bad” to “censorship of speech I don’t like is bad”.
That is a logically inconsistent outcome so I would expect nasal demons. But yes, it's probably a success because it means the social networks have less of an interest to and a legal reason not to influence content (maximizing engagement, removing content that harms their brand, conforming to the advertisers overton window, etc.).
> This exists today — shared block lists, etc — and it’s insufficient.
I agree that it's insufficient, because it's not first-party tooling that's designed to scale as well as the rest of the network. You can't propagate them in realtime, delegate moderation to trusted peers and so on.
> The problem with carving out exceptions to your ban on moderation is that it moves your complaint from “all censorship is bad” to “censorship of speech I don’t like is bad”.
That smells like a bogus argument to me, akin to complaining that net neutrality will make DoS prevention impossible. Aspects of spam are things being unsolicited and in bulk. But how much you need to do about it in the first place also depends on communication platform is structured in the first place. Do you see any unsolicited content without prompting for it or do there have to be some network edges between you and the spammer? If the latter, sever them, if enough people do that then the tree will fall in the forest and make no sound.
If your position is "never remove anything ever", you circumvent this. But when your position becomes, "actually, you can delete only spam, but nothing else" then you're back in the exact same situation we are currently in - some things are removed by judgement call and not everyone is going to agree on every judgement. It completely removes the very core of the argument - that judgement calls should be unnecessary or not allowed.
If you're suggesting crowd sourcing moderation in a democratic fashion, I would contend this both isn't effective and also that by providing systems that facilitate this, companies would be implicitly affecting the "censorship" of their platform. After all, someone has to decide what the voting algorithm is, what the chance of being a spammer before you are blocked is, etc.
I think that what is being suggested is that there be multiple, user-selectable, opt-in providers of crowd-sourced moderation services that are orthogonal to the unfiltered communication platform.
Something like the 3rd-party spam filtering services for blog comments or email.
I imagine, though, that a 3rd-party "view" of the Twitterverse would also be a Twitter client, have it's own web presence, and basically be a white-label version of Twitter. Twitter itself would be largely relegated to being a backend pipe that the different sites have in common for interoperability.
I can't imagine how these federated Twitter clones would themselves be able to provide a curated experience without running into the same liability problems.
The alternative is that these optional collaborative moderation services are somehow integrated into Twitter itself, which, while not impossible, poses some serious issues of combinatorial complexity, scalability, and sustainability.
Yes, we have federated services now, but the largest and most popular services are non-federated walled gardens.
Provably, definitively wrong.
1. HN relies on the "platform" choice to avoid responsibility for 3rd party posts. HN also relies on operators like dang moderating at the server side.
2. The proposed model would prevent operators moderating at the server side, when the "platform" model was selected.
3. Historically, Usenet had workflow, content, and userbase similar to HN - multiuser, near-realtime threaded discussions with text and links, on technical & related subjects.
4. Usenet didn't rely on centralized moderation by the operators; instead the moderation was performed at the client side, by end users. This was entirely sufficient for the purpose. This was done partly in collaborative ways, with sharing of moderation tools & datafiles.
5. Certain groups were centrally moderated through middlemen; participation in those was optional, and content was explicitly submitted to moderation. Those were generally ran in parallel to similar unmoderated groups.
HN, and other fora, would do just fine as "platforms whose operators abstain from interfering in the flow of content", as informed by the historical precedent.
It irks me how quickly we forget the hard wrought lessons from the early internet.
w.r.t. your #5: how does 'participation in some groups is subject to moderation, but participation is optional' fit with the platform/publisher dichotomy?
No different from the present day centrally moderated platforms - whether Facebook, Twitter, or HN. There's significant amount of objectionable and even illegal content on Twitter. The central moderation is a figleaf over it.
>w.r.t. your #5: how does 'participation in some groups is subject to moderation, but participation is optional' fit with the platform/publisher dichotomy?
To re-emphasize: >>Certain groups were centrally moderated through middlemen; (participation in those was optional), and content was explicitly submitted to moderation.
Easily the key distinction is that the moderators weren't part of the platform. It was not the platform doing the moderating. It was pre-arranged users that were designated by the community to have a say who selects the best posts to then forward. It wasn't "this post breaks our ever-shifting rules"; it was "this post is good enough for me to to forward it to the list". The proverbial firewall separating the platform from the users doing the selection is the key distinction.
The closest modern analogy of how the moderated Usenet groups were is "a public-read, private-commit Git repo, with project heads accepting pull requests at their discretion".
Where "entirely sufficient" == put several newsadmins in jail; saw newsgroups collapse under huge amounts of spam; and left newsgroups vulnerable to obvious trolling.
I doubt YC would hire a full-time staff of moderators to vet every single post. Since we remove things for being off-topic or overly mean, the only possible conclusion is that HN would shut down because they do not want to bear liability for the posts they leave up.
The Internet as we know it would not exist without S230. Please read this[0] for a primer.
[0]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...