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.