Facebook et al.'s fundamental sin was optimizing the sorting and broadcasting algorithms.
I get it drove growth and made them the giant companies they are today. But it's not really a core competency, and now it's more trouble than it's worth. In fact, it's metastasized into an existential threat to them.
They should announce they're going back to naive ranking and sharing, and that they expect all external moderation requests to come through legal channels. (And then spend their billions digging the widest moat of integrated services and infrastructure they can)
The trouble is that algorithmic feeds work really well. If they remove algorithmic feeds in an environment where competitors are still able to have such feeds, then they will be outcompeted in the long run.
This is one area where legislation and strict enforcement barring algorithmic feeds would work, though execution would be difficult.
It matters so little that it’s kind of odd that these sites don’t give the option, so at least they could use it in their arguments to show they have it. Probably only 0.01% of users would ever actually use it.
Hence why supposedly there's an exodus to Parler.
What it does is to make clear that people or organizations who run internet sites that allow 3rd party submissions will not for the purpose of the law be considered the “speaker” of the content in those submissions. It also states that this hold even if they moderate including editing the content to conform to internal standards.
The law specifically allows censorship, algorithms, banning, and editing or anything users submit. The whole purpose is to clarify that content hosts are allowed to do this without being held liable for the content of the speech they are moderating.
I would also add that no one prevents the original poster, or anyone else from using other services. I mean, here we are on a narrow social media site discussing the topic.
But I believe this is at the core of the issue when people complain about moderation. I think it is very true, even sites like Wikipedia are negatively affected on political topics while paid external editors are free to roam to push up articles about themselves or their companies. This is the worst kind of moderation I can imagine.
If we talk about moderation against spammers and scammers, a vast majority would agree on the other hand. But these are two separate issues in my opinion.
> I would also add that no one prevents the original poster, or anyone else from using other services.
I think there is concerted effort to purge alternatives in the current market situation and I think this nothing else than an excuse to justify certain content moderation. I think platforms have this freedom, but there are also consequences to that.
That seems a fairly modest proposal.
I think people VASTLY overestimate the influence of things like the FB feed on the real world. The best evidence they ever seem to have for any claimed effect is the number of people FB say saw/interacted with a post. They have a long history of inflating those numbers, yet the critics are all too happy to use them. The activity on social media that seems to actually result in real world outcomes seems to generally be the boring work of community building.
Also, how do you deal with spam or noisy posters in a "1:1 and neutrally ranked (e.g. by timestamp)" feed?
I don't think we should design our legal frameworks around arbitrary user-hostile restrictions.
If grandparent is saying “algorithmic feeds are so popular-yet-dangerous that we should regulate them like alcohol” then ok, that’s a valid starting point - but we should at least acknowledge that this is user-hostile in the short term.
On what basis should website owners lose their right to determine what goes up on their own website? What about the creative control one's own work? What about free speech for the site creator? What about the property rights owned to those paying cash to keep the site operational? The law should not attempt to dictate the specific ways in which it is legal for computer programs to sort information for display on a website... this is absurd.
“ No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider”
It also provides protection for all good faith moderation even if constitutionally protected speech.
And the moderation exemption is very specific to types of content. It doesn’t, for example, allow blanket moderation for political reasons. It specifically mentions lewd/excessively violent content. It isn’t a blanket “moderation” exemption.
Also, “good faith” is explicit. Moderating one political viewpoint while allowing another isn’t good faith. Stop the Steal is censored. Many ANTIFA groups aren’t.
From the law:
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of— (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or (B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).
Says who? I hear this over and over, but there's no legal basis for any of this. It's horse-dung.
> It doesn’t, for example, allow blanket moderation for political reasons
Who decides what's political?
> Moderating one political viewpoint while allowing another isn’t good faith.
Define "good faith". Also, you missed the "otherwise objectionable" part of that law. What's "objectionable" to one platform may not be to another. If I run a message board for adherents of a religion that say, opposes gay marriage, should I not have the option to censor posts that support gay marriage? If I run a message board for environmentalists, do I have to let climate change deniers write whatever they like?
> shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider
Emphasis mine. I think that implies any information provided by themselves they're on the hook for.
GP was saying something else entirely. They were contending that if FB moderates or fact-checks even a single user post, they are now the publisher of everything that users post on their platform. Which is not at all how the law works.
Platforms are still liable for content that they author and post themselves. They just aren't liable for what their users post, even if they perform moderation or "censorship" on those users' content.
That said, I think most of their moderation is awful and their fact checking is ridiculous at best.
Facebook should only be allowed to show you a feed of all your friends' posts, in chronological order. Twitter should only show you the tweets of people that you've followed, in chronological order.
Aside from solving any potential censorship or manipulation problems, it would also make a much more pleasant user experience than the unnavigable garbage that is Facebook's current product.