Plus i m not sure the principle of Free speech is that limited, speech doesnt count as speech if it cant reach anyone. And giving to a handful of employees the power to shape the messaging of millions is directly affecting democracy itself.
This means 25Mbps uncapped IPv6 (no NAT) symmetric bandwidth for everyone and safe harbor laws for individuals and not just corporations. I think at that point centralized services for Internet-based communication become unnecessary, though centralized storage for things like long video posts may still be needed.
Facebook and other such platforms have become a town square of sorts.
This idea that the principles that founding fathers championed, especially the Bill of Rights, should somehow be restricted only to what was possible with the technology of their time is pretty preposterous.
This is true, but also, the town squares were public places. Are you suggesting to nationalize Facebook?
Adding to this, maybe the best thing to do is to just fund a public social media site, where constitutional protections apply, and treat that as a virtual town square.
I would rather suggest something along the lines of this.
At a certain scale (user count), sufficient implicit selection of users and their content revokes section 230 rights. If you start implicitly removing specific viewpoints and topics it's no longer "user-generated content" and is now your content. Of course there have to be provisions for explicit content scope and spam, but that's roughly where I would start.
Can you explicitly tell me how you would codify that scale in law? And whatever you make the cap, what then is the incentive for a website to allow more users over the cap?
> Of course there have to be provisions for explicit content scope and spam
"Of course" they can moderate spam. Can you tell me how to objectively identify spam?
If I have a religious forum, and it passes the user cap, suddenly we have ourselves a public town square. Then someone comes in and starts saying "God isn't real!" several times in literally every thread. Is that spam? Because to me, it looks like an exercise of free speech, so you can't erase those messages. Certainly if someone was repeating that in a public space, we wouldn't silence them. By exceeding the user cap, that site would become a worse experience because you've severely limited moderation abilities by your proposed law.
If someone was repeating that in a public space, we probably wouldn't, but if he had a series of megaphones screaming that at everyone, ala spammimg everyone's convos, many societies have laws against just that. Much of law is already using a "reasonable man". Standard, so why not this one?
But a big reason behind all of this censorship on private platforms is that companies are trying to appease advertisers and customers downstream. It's already about money, because we're talking about private enterprise. Coca-cola doesn't want an ad appearing next to a comment promoting Nazism on your all-speech-must-be-allowed platform. It seems to me that forcing sites to have any and all content once they reach a certain size would do the opposite of generating revenue.
> If someone was repeating that in a public space, we probably wouldn't, but if he had a series of megaphones screaming that at everyone, ala spammimg everyone's convos, many societies have laws against just that.
This may or may not be legal in the US. But even if it is, I have a hard time imagining how we would define spam on the internet in a way that won't get subjectively abused and bring us halfway back to where we are now anyway.
How about this approach: force companies at the level of ISPs, domain name registrars, payment processors, and maybe cloud providers, to allow any legal content and not censor. That seems like infrastructure that's too hard to build from the ground up. Anything built on top of that, like a website, is free to act how it acts today.
Somewhere in between, communication is far too critical for private monopolies to have a stranglehold over.
Remember, this announcement is about speech that occurs outside of Twitch entirely. So what you'd really need to argue is that anyone who ever wants to be able to speak freely on their own time shouldn't depend on income from big companies... including, at the rate things are going, even income from minimum wage retail jobs.
If we really want free speech platforms, lobby government to craft spaces for it in the digital age. Instead of muddying public rights in private property, let's just fund more public property (i.e. nationalized social media platform).
“A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take everything away.”
I disagree this is a job for government directly. No, I don’t want government socialized Facebook!
I want the government to enforce the spirit of antitrust law. They are ignoring that a competitor to Facebook CAN NOT exist because Facebook will smother or absorb them. I would like government to compel Facebook to use open data standards I can use to take my data to a service that isn’t actively trying to psychologically bleed me daily.
If Google trying hard couldn’t dent Facebook, there is no chance an organic startup will do it. And double extra certain a state run expensive and uninspired clone would do it - not to mention you’d be more wise to trust Facebook with your data than the government directly.
The smart move is to hit them with the hammer of regulation here. They can either be the small exclusive club with tight control over their members and their behavior, or the mass market app with minimal control over their userbase.
The alternative is to have the full cyberpunk future, where "I like <wrongthink>" means being cut off from everything. Banks, search, email. We're already seeing the slope, and it's pretty damn slippery.
Nope. You can have a smaller, simpler substitute if you have comparative advantage in some other niche.
DuckDuckGo is making a decent showing against Google, despite arriving on the scene almost 2 decades later. A handful of righty / unPC social media properties (Gab, Parler, whatever Lindell’s app is called this week, etc) are slowly eating into Facebook/Twitter market share because they promise less moderation.
Moreover, this is only something that's fine if you accept ceding control of the vast majority of communication to private control. I. E, we now get cyberpunk thoughtcrime dystopia.
When our lifetimes has it not always been this case? Newspapers, television, internet have always been this way (owned by an organization and provided with contractual limitations). Talking face to face in your own home is the only unabridged communication method, even in the USA. I have always found this issue strange that people demand that App Stores, cloud platforms, web hosting, etc must allow any content despite the companies’ freedom of association (and disassociation). We aren’t talking about companies which are covered by Common Carrier laws.
And “existential” doesn’t mean what you think it means. They are rebuilding on different platforms and other substitutes are coming online.
Instead of a centralised government backed platform, how about a decentralised platform.
Maybe something like Signal-with-Blog-Posts, with "public" posts hosted on IPFS?
Even this latest Delta, Coca-Cola, etc. seems to be just bullying: https://twitter.com/AmyBeePhoenix/status/1379295393301868546
It's just an upheaval of the elite.
Protected classes are narrowly defined. You may or may not have an issue with what those protected classes are, but that's a separate argument. The main argument is that businesses must follow the law to stay in business.
Who won that case again?
Edit: someone built that town square. Someone founded those forums. At the end of the day, someone is always in control of something.
You can make an argument about whether or not people should have thicker skin, but you can't make an argument that people should not be allowed to react to speech without forfeiting the moral concept of freedom of speech.
Someone did build the town square, and if that someone was a private entity, that someone can kick everyone right the heck out of the town square, because it's theirs. If the people of the town want to make that reality different, they should probably band together and purchase the town square and own it collectively, as a government.
If you think Twitch, Twitter, HN or Reddit are such critical infrastructure, then you should lobby your government to purchase them.
Homeless, poor, young and oddities get removed from malls for being themselves. We're seeing the same online.
Governments don't buy malls. Malls are designed to get you to spend. These sites want you to spend and if you do or don't they will send all of the info they collected about you and sell it to someone else.
We need more hobbiest sites. Government should provide free spaces.
Furthermore speech as the forefathers probably meant was people physically going to town squares and talking there.
There is free press, which is what social media is more like, and the owner of a press has the right to decide what he/she will print--the Constitution prevents government interference, not private interference.