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".
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.