Re:FCC to move ahead with 'rulemaking' on Section 230
by jakelazaroff on Thursday October 15, 2020 @11:33PM
(#24797178)
That's my understanding as well, and my claim is that nothing would be fundamentally different from how it is now. Twitter would take on the role of today's ISP, and the moderation services would take on the role of Twitter/Mastodon/etc, and we're back to square one. There would be a couple big ones that people would flock to because of network effects, and some small "free speech" ones that most people avoid because they don't actually want to see spam/porn/propaganda/etc.
Re:FCC to move ahead with 'rulemaking' on Section 230
by webmaven on Monday October 19, 2020 @02:15AM
(#24823734)
Well, the one thing that would be different is that backend-Twitter has an incentive to keep all the baby-Twitters interoperable, so we kind of get federation for free, via an unlikely route.
Yes, we have federated services now, but the largest and most popular services are non-federated walled gardens.
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.