Yeah, ok, I'm with you there...
> ... by holding twitter and facebook liable as publishers for the content of every post on their platform, and letting them defend in civil litigation every time they re-publish their users' false statements for profit.
Whoa there, hold on. If we hold Twitter and FB liable for that stuff, then that means we also have to hold every single web forum, support forum, mailing list, blogging platform, etc. liable as well. So those things essentially just disappear overnight, because no one is willing to expose themselves to that sort of legal liability.
Eventually, the only things you can read on the internet come from big corporations that can afford big legal teams, or people who have the technical know-how to host their own blog. HN is gone. Slashdot is gone. The Raspberry Pi support forum is gone. Hell, the LKML is gone. That's not an internet-world I want to live in.
With potentially infinite violations and incalculable damages, it’s no wonder why no one who runs any kind of user-submitted content site wants what you suggest here.
If you want to run a system that amplifies shitheads, you're a shithead, and if they can be sued, so should you be. We're past the point where we need stimulus to encourage people to start message boards by shielding them from liability for what their users post. Again, this isn't an argument for censorship whatsoever, just allowing private parties to apportion blame when aggrieved. So even then, the scale of allowing something on a baby message board is nothing compared to the network effect of Twitter or FB. Let them bear the social costs that they're so desperate to externalize. FB and Twitter made their explosive growth exactly by exploiting their exemption from the thing that closed down publishers, namely, bearing responsibility for the content they publish.
You called me a shithead.
I don’t think your argumentation strategy is convincing me, but I’ll admit I’m not the smartest guy.
Not about you.
I guess I’m more of a discordian, or a culture jammer type, and I view the kinds of conspiracies you’re talking about as cognito hazards that spontaneously occur when you have a large enough target demographic for them to appeal to. I suppose I just find your cure worse than the disease. I’d rather take the bathwater and the baby than just the baby. Call me crazy, but I think that variety is the spice of life. Some conspiracies are true, and are only theories until proved. I look at them as pathogens that are endemic, yet without them, we would have no EICAR test files for validating legitimate points of view and nothing with which to compare the status quo. Outsider voices have free speech rights too, even if they use them for ends antithetical to our own; that we oppose them doesn’t justify annihilating them, or their views.
If discourse got us into this mess, I can’t see how less of it is going to get us out of it. We need more spaces for productive discussions, and we need more outreach to the fringes. How else will we convince anyone? If all you want is compliance, then the law is a poor tool for that. It only incentivizes circumvention once ratified.
I do have a breaking point, as far as ideas and speech; I believe that some ideas are stalking horses for violence, and the people who spout them have no goodwill. Some ideas can't be reasoned with. I'm glad I live in a country that still allows people to speak those ideas, but very few people will defend that notion anymore. I'll defend their right to speak those ideas. I just don't think a private company should be immune from the result of providing them a platform.
The right to free speech should be absolute. But there's no right to be heard. Somewhere along the line, people seem to have misconstrued that, because social media made it so easy to be heard that people assumed that was the definition of free speech.
There’s no right to be heard, true. Yet, these are users complying with TOS. Beyond that, do the users have any obligation to not spread content that they haven’t validated? It seems an unreasonable burden to place on users who don’t post content for consumption by folks who care about such things. Can you blame people for speaking their mind and playing to their audience? Maintaining the platform and only posting constructive, mainstream content only appeals to a certain kind of person, and they may never reach their intended audience with such messaging, warping and contorting their content into something else entirely, potentially alienating the very people they are trying to reach in the first place.
I’m a descriptivist in the linguistic sense, and when it comes to free speech. More is better. Full stop.
I remember when everything was hard online. I don’t wish for those days to return, especially just to comply with misguided, ineffective government mandates at the behest of megacorps and special interest lobby groups.
That is certainly a take on what The Discourse should be! Return to the print media era, basically. But it is weird to see this take expressed in the same form it wants to end. Hacker News is social media and YCombinator is surely not going to stand beyond everything everyone posts here, or turn it over to spammers.
Hacker News does, to a large degree, moderate what people write here. Much more so than any social media platform. That's why it's still a functional platform. You can't just go on here and slander or espouse libelous conspiracy theories. You won't get far.
I'm not saying the gov't should regulate it! Not at all. I'm saying the content distribution networks shouldn't be shielded from civil litigation. HN and Facebook and Twitter aren't general carriers. If they simply delivered messages from point A to B, they might not be liable; but the more a service like FB news feed chooses to re-distribute something, the more they should be held liable for content. Simply putting it on top and letting it be downvoted, like HN, is far less nefarious than re-targeting it and repeating it relentlessly to the most vulnerable 15% of dumbasses who'll believe it. One person posting and having it sink isn't a big deal. But re-targeting that post to others makes you a re-poster. They aren't the postal service. They aren't neutral. Re-posting lies has monetary, reputational and social costs. Facebook profits directly from massively re-posting lies, but bears none of the cost. All I'm saying is that no one in a position to determine what's re-posted or not should be allowed to profit from spreading disinformation with one hand while externalizing those costs onto society, without a neutral arbitration willing to reassess the cost to individuals they harmed.
[edit] The current system can't support free speech, because shielding the re-printers of false speech makes it impossible to disentangle truth from propaganda; and in an asymmetrical field, propaganda always wins. Letting the courts sort it out and putting the social media networks on notice that they were responsible for veracity would solve this silly debate over whether "free speech" is being quashed on private networks, and also, encourage better forms of debate that conformed to certain standards of logic. And if you don't want to conform to any kind of logic, you can always set up your own server.
Opening up user-submitted content sites to civil damages would ensure that the largest social networks are the only ones that can afford to fight these cases in court. Smaller sites would become self-censored, even if they weren’t likely to be a target of a civil suit. This would lead to a further entrenchment of the largest social media sites, as they would go to bat for their users at least some of the time. They have to be seen to support their users, or else they would just find an alternative host that isn’t subject to the jurisdiction of the civil suits.
This whole idea seems like a nonstarter, impossible to implement, and with a laundry list of unintended consequences and is counterproductive to your stated goals of reduced propaganda. Instead of being primarily on centralized social media, fake news would be relegated to smaller fringe sites where it can’t be monitored as effectively as on the larger sites, further contributing to the echo chambers you argue against. Your intentions also seem antithetical to free speech between willing participants freely associating.
The original argument against pushing extremists onto fringe sites was that the fringe sites were dark to law enforcement. I also don't buy that argument. It's a weak anti-encryption argument, and I also don't believe they're anywhere near as dark as LEOs claim. There might be some chatter that existed in the clear, but no one is currently plotting terrorist attacks out in the open on Facebook who will suddenly switch to Telegram if Facebook becomes party to civil suits.
Working back to your previous argument, the idea that the legal juggernauts of the big social networks will protect them while smaller sites self-censor is directly contradictory to what you say about fake news migrating to fringe sites. There's certainly less financial burden on a small site with less traffic to regulate what's posted, and as it stands, small sites do have to regulate what's posted, so it wouldn't be much more difficult. The only people who have broad exemptions over their liability for what's posted, currently, are the big social media sites. So let them spend that good money on their lawyers.
The platforms that are the biggest targets of this are, unfortunately, extremely compromised already by their failure to regulate their own users. Take that and a dose of populist anger, and it's pretty easy to see how important freedoms will be eroded and ultimately, any kind of private speech will be held as grounds for suspicion, even though that speech has nothing to do with these platforms or this law.
Private speech and personal files never belonged on those platforms in the first place, and to me it's hard to believe anyone doing anything illegal at scale would even be using those platforms. What we're concerned with here is how the demolition of their privacy regulations might turn public opinion against those of us who manage our own privacy.
The one bright spot is that we all see it coming.