Just come out and say it. Our new rule is “behave and we will remove what we don’t like“. You don’t like our decision? Go somewhere else.
I don’t know how you could ever apply objective standards to 500,000,000 tweets per day. It’s not feasible. So stop pretending to try.
That's the deal: you can be a service provider or a publisher. They want to have their cake and eat it too.
Any examples?
> Algorithms can be made that are content neutral
How so?
Where does the law say you can be either a service provider or a publisher?
The law before Section 230 was such that if you moderated content, you were responsible for it. You can read about CompuServe and Prodigy's different approaches to moderation and liability. Congress decided that internet services should be given immunity from liability for third-party content, but it's clear their intent was not to allow two or three megacorps to act in partisan ways by blocking access to journalism. They are acting as publishers now and I would not be surprised if Section 230 is amended by congress.
> it's clear their intent was not to allow two or three megacorps to act in partisan ways by blocking access to journalism
Is it clear? Have you read what the authors of Section 230 have had to say recently?
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200921/00260045345/autho...
"The first is that Section 230 does not require political neutrality. Claiming to "interpret" Section 230 to require political neutrality, or to condition its Good Samaritan protections on political neutrality, would erase the law we wrote and substitute a completely different one, with opposite effect. The second is that any governmental attempt to enforce political neutrality on websites would be hopelessly subjective, complicated, burdensome, and unworkable. The third is that any such legislation or regulation intended to override a website's moderation decisions would amount to compelling speech, in violation of the First Amendment" (pg 17)
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7213938-2020-09-17-C...
From roywiggins' post earlier[1], a direct quote from one of the authors of 230:
"The first is that Section 230 does not require political neutrality."
Which platform, when, and for how long?
It won't, though, because the best feed algorithm for increasing engagement and stoking outrage and making money off ads is not the one that is best for fostering calm discussion and building a community.
Twitter etc. want you to use the engagement one, but in order to actually fix the social problems created by their platform, people have to use something else that will make them less money.
I personally think that's fine, but I doubt Twitter will be happy with that. And I'm not sure how you legislate a requirement that your platform isn't psychologically tuned to bring out the worst in people.
The danger of social media is that it fosters radicalization by connecting extremists far more efficiently than is possible offline, and that in creating communities of extremists who give themselves psychological permission to act out their beliefs. The consequences of this spill out into the real world in ways that society is not fully able to manage.
People using social media to call each other shitheads for supporting (or not supporting) Joe Biden isn't a problem. No one outside of those involved in the conversation will have any reason to care and the people involved will get over it.
Social media connecting unhinged people, however, and helping them create a parallel reality where burning down 5G towers becomes the right thing to do to protect people from autism, is very much a problem. This kind of activity spills over into the real world and does have direct consequences.
Regulations of social media platforms ought to be far, far more concerned with mitigating the risks of the latter problem than with maintaining civility.
For this, I wonder if this could be a feature of who you follow / engage with. When someone you engage with flags something, then you don't see it. And vice-versa on prioritization. You are more likely to see things that people you follow engage with.
Ultimately, I hope there can be a solution to this that let's everyone see the content they want and engage in the public square without censorship.
There are rules about what constitutes spam on a phone network - laws limiting robocalls in some situations for example - but it isn't the phone company making those rules.
"Historically, American law has divided operators of communications systems into three categories", he says, and he describes the third category as:
"Platforms, such as telephone companies, cities on whose sidewalks people might demonstrate, or broadcasters running candidate ads that they are required to carry."
His description of the liability rules for platforms:
"Platforms weren't liable at all. For instance, even if a phone company learned that an answering machine had a libelous outgoing message (see Anderson v. N.Y. Telephone Co. (N.Y. 1974)), and did nothing to cancel the owner's phone service, it couldn't be sued for libel. Likewise, a city couldn't be liable for defamatory material on signs that someone carried on city sidewalks (even though a bar could be liable once it learned of libelous material on its walls), and a broadcaster couldn't be liable for defamatory material in a candidate ad."
If you see a difference between that and "common carrier" that is relevant to whether an entity considered a traditional platform would have to carry spam or porn, what is it?
I don't imagine the monopoly platforms will follow this though, too much risk of losing users once feeds are no longer optimized for "engagement" and revenue. It's easy to realize how boring Facebook and Twitter are once the algorithm is stripped away.
Would definitely bring down botting on these platforms - if card fraud can be prevented effectively.
Social media is cheaper than that, on a per user basis (at least amortized across all users, very active users are a net cost, but also lead many others to participate). I don't know what the price would be, exactly. But let's estimate. Twitter has approximately 300 million users, and brings in around $2.5 billion to $3 billion a year (over the past several years) in revenue. So to get an ad free experience and, assuming they're at least breaking even, cover their costs would be about $10/user.
That isn't to say they'd drop paid content, but they could.
This is a simple solution that should make everyone happy which does not require lawyers or revoking sec 230. It also provides the opportunity for others to publish algorithms that are less polarizing which we very much need right now.
Both Wolfram and Dorsey support this idea.