There's a reason NCMEC (the agency social media sites are required to report CSAM to) is a private organization and not "the government"; it's to protect your privacy rights via the 4th Amendment.
They get that info through legal processes like subpoenas that Twitter is entitled to fight because they’re private. And they put lots of legally unnecessary effort and their own money into fighting them; other platforms don’t try nearly as hard to stop it. See the DevinCow case.
Of course Elon just fired the exec who did this.
At least you think you do...
Also, this story seems to be fake anyway.
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/bullshit-reporting-the-i...
What I agree with is that Big Tech is forming digital Public Spaces (rather than being a government) and as such there should be parity in rights and protections of being in a digital Public Space.
The distinction for me is that ones rights in a Public Space are different to those in a Commercial Communal Space (such as communal space in a Shopping Mall). I'd like to see a trend to open digital environments being treated as Public Spaces and away from Commercial Communal Space.
Edit: for correcting typos
Because they're not like the big governments with armies, they're like the smaller, local authorities issuing building permits and whatnot.
Less dangerous but more annoying and and should be limited as well.
And services rarely act alone, when they do decide to target someone, they usually act in unison to deplatform, whether justified or not.
In some ways big tech is far more powerful than governments.
* Banning moderation is a form of regulation. It falls far short of treating them as governments. It is possible to say "I want to regulate Twitter" without having to make weird statements like "We should treat Twitter as a government".
Even if corporations are not governments, they are far more similar to governments then they are to private individuals.
Moderation is a form of regulation- it is a way of regulating speech. Banning moderation is deregulation.
"More platforms" is not the answer. In a democracy, when people are publicly discussing matters of public or political importance, other citizens have the right to participate in that conversation.
Under this definition, practically any organization "is a government". My college debate team, Tesla, your local Starbucks. All "governments", because they are organizations have a governance policy (which really just means "leadership").
> Banning moderation is deregulation.
No. The government controlling how corporations can act is, definitionally, regulation. You can argue that is good regulation, but it is regulation. If I am allowed to censor you, that is less regulation than if I am legally prevented from censoring you.
If your automatic detection is tuned well enough not to produce shittons of false positives, you should have enough people to review suspected cases. Real positives ought to be escalated to actual police.
(Also, actual police will not be happy about an automatic mechanism that locks out real CP producers out of their mailboxes, thus alerting them to the fact that there is something going on, and possibly giving them time and opportunity to destroy some incriminating evidence. There is a reason why suspected criminals are staked out carefully, then suddenly raided.)
Which will either clear or implicate the person involved, but either way cannot be done robotically.
Nothing. The programmer tried to open a lawsuit to gain back his rights but he couldn't afford a decade lawsuit against a mega corp.
So the programmer remains banned today, for Google's mistakes.
Google won't admit wrongdoing, because it reveals how flawed their system is and opens them to cases.
Should such an entity with no responsibility be allowed so much power over our lives?
https://ago.mo.gov/home/news/2022/09/29/attorney-general-sch...
We don't need any new law... we just need to apply existing legal principles and stop pussyfooting around it. Either they're Common Carriers or they're not. Either they're deserving of Section 230's protections or they're not. Pick one.
Assuming social networks are common carriers means also assuming that laws and law enforcement would need to adapt to the resulting spam filled environment. People would also need to adjust the way they communicate online, you'd need to create something similar to google plus circles to allow free and open discussion that is self moderated. You'd need new forms of trust protocols. You'd need...
Most people just can't fathom how much would need to change to make the internet work. They try to fit in what we have now and just say well that won't work so you're wrong.
I've noticed people also struggle with the big tech censorship argument. The amount of times I've said, censorship laws should extend to social networks and been met with "censorship only applies to government" arguments as if that wasn't the exact premise my argument started with just boggles the mind. Yes, I know, they're private companies, I'm advocating for changing laws so they do apply, not applying laws that don't apply.
Another obvious retort is that people saying as such are laboring under the delusion that the Freedom of Speech is a right granted under the First Amendment, rather than being a natural right which the first amendment states is outside the purvue of Congress to regulate... which leads us back to the original retort above.
Ultimately, though, people who make such arguments aren't actually interested in an argument. They're simply making up excuses for their class bias so they can go on oppressing the proletariat without having to just openly state that as a self-identified member of the petit bourgeoisie they align with the interest of the bourgeoisie and don't care what happens to you or I... since openly admitting that wouldn't allow them to go on larping as heroes of the revolution (or however they phrase it in the cosmic gag reel running in their head).
This is explicitly where Musk has stated he wants to take Twitter.
For instance, I HATE that people will quote people I've blocked, and I see their comment with a greyed-out quote box. I want blocking to work like Facebook. If you block someone there, you see NOTHING from them. I don't want to even see tweets that REFERENCE something they said. Twitter currently "eggs you on" with this dark pattern.
If we could tailor our own, personal "algorithm," the end result will be something like the proverbial "street corner." Any idiot can carry a sign and shout at people, but YOU can decide if you want to walk up and hear him, duck your head and pass by, or take another street, and NOT have Twitter make that decision FOR you. In my mind, this could be a very different scenario than what we have today.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/amp/ncna1245308
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Twitter-censoring-liberals
https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2020/10/26/censorship-cons...
.... that censors them. Key word.
> This idea that the left loves social media companies is a right wing narrative
You don't have to be right wing to observe leftists embracing censorship of anyone who opposes them.
When do they do that?
Section 230 says to information service providers "We understand your users might say stupid shit from time to time. Since, unlike a newspaper that prints letters from the editor, you can't actually vet their blatherings in real time, you're off the hook for this stuff. As long as you take down anything illegal as soon as you find out. Otherwise you're free to curate these posts in any way your heart desires."
The law actually recognizes that internet platforms aren't like old media and accommodates their unique constraints.
If this shield didn't exist, information service providers would have the following options:
1. Hold all posts in a moderation queue, and publish them only after review.
2. Verify every signed-up user's identity and current address so that libel lawsuits or law enforcement can be referred to them.
3. Some combination of 1 and 2.
So do you wanna give Zuck a copy of your passport? Or wait 20 hours until your food pictures are posted? If neither of those sound appealing to you, Section 230 is a good thing.
sigh That is literally what they are. Section 230 was enacted specifically to allow internet-adjacent services to avoid being treated as publishers for purposes of user-contributed content despite also engaging in some manner of curation (particularly with respect to removing obscene materials pursuant to the Communications Decency Act). You don't get to pretend they're not operating as a common carrier just because you grepped 47 U.S.C. § 230 and didn't find the words "Common Carrier" in it.
> Please educate yourself.
This is unnecessarily rude. HN is not Reddit. Please don't condescend like that.
> The law actually recognizes that internet platforms aren't like old media and accommodates their unique constraints.
Except, of course, that they are. You're either some specie of Common Carrier (in which case you aren't liable for what flows through your service), or you're a Publisher. If you want some manner of media via between the two then there needs to be some qualification of what you need to do in order to get the best of both worlds, and right now Section 230 simply doesn't provide that. It allows them to pretend to be a Common Carrier when someone says something outrageous and they want to escape liability for it, and pretend to be a Publisher when someone says something they don't like.
> So do you wanna give Zuck a copy of your passport? Or wait 20 hours until your food pictures are posted? If neither of those sound appealing to you, Section 230 is a good thing.
...or we could just write a new law that allows you to be treated as a Common Carrier but only subject to certain express conditions... which oddly enough is exactly what everyone and their brother has been saying for years now. I for one would be perfectly happy attaching a simple requirement that they not engage in viewpoint discrimination ('editorializing'), but merely remove posts that are off-topic, uncivil, or otherwise of low-quality according to clear, specific, and objectively verifiable standards. Is there some reason we shouldn't want that?
Section 230 calls them "information service providers", which makes them neither. You're saying stuff that you wish was in the law. Information service providers are not held liable for their users' content because it would be infeasible to police it properly in real-time. This is common sense. It's emphatically not because they're "claiming common carrier status to avoid liability". By allowing them to moderate and curate content on the platform the law outright says they aren't common carriers, because common carriers have to..."carry". Your phone company can't randomly bleep out your swear words in your conversations.
Internet Service Providers aren't even treated as common carriers. Why the heck should apps that work on top of them be treated as such? Is every 1-800 number a common carrier?
> according to clear, specific, and objectively verifiable standards
Every social platform has a terms of service and usually, community guidelines. Beyond that who defines and decides this? You want the government getting involved in this? How is that better for "free speech"? I'd prefer to let the free market decide, personally. It's weird to see conservatives argue against that.
I'm telling you what the law was before Section 230 was written and why it was written. I'm telling you moreover that Section 230 is a bad law as it carves out a media via between being a common carrier and a publisher but does not lay out any substantive requirements for obtaining this, resulting in providers censoring people arbitrarily.
> Every social platform has a terms of service and usually, community guidelines. Beyond that who defines and decides this?
Social platforms routinely have terms of service that are vague, ambiguous, and which are routinely misinterpreted to flag communications that are otherwise lawful as being "hate speech" or some other such violation so they may be removed, with absolutely no penalty to the service provider for falsely flagging such speech.
> You want the government getting involved in this? How is that better for "free speech"?
Do I want the government getting involved in compelling service providers to honor their terms of service, not fraudulently claim communications violate the same, and avoid editorializing? Yeah, I do.
> I'd prefer to let the free market decide, personally.
The free market does not allow you to break the law with impunity.
> It's weird to see conservatives argue against that.
Good thing I'm not a conservative... but if I were, would that really change anything? It's amazing that arguing in favor of the freedom of speech is suddenly a conservative position these days.
There's plenty of free speech online. You aren't entitled to free speech on others' property. Fix net neutrality first if you want true free speech.
And I definitely don't want the government to decide if something is "hate speech" or not. That's a slippery slope to actually losing freedom of speech.
...neither are others allowed to fraudulently claim speech acts violate their terms of service.
> Fix net neutrality first if you want true free speech.
Por que no los dos?
I understand that you want things to be a certain way. But you can't just make stuff up and expect others to accept it.
> Por que no los dos?
Which political party repealed net neutrality? Which political party's supporters also strongly dislike Section 230? We ain't gettin' "los dos" - what's Spanish for "neither"?
Which political party has held the house and the senate and done nothing to reverse it?
Honestly, people who pretend that bourgeoisie issues are somehow the province of just one party are worse than wrestling fans -- they at least know wrestling is fake.
None.
The Democratic Party has done a lot to undo the effect of that repeal, notably:
(1) Passing net neutrality laws in several states shortly after the FCC repeal, some—like California’s—significantly stronger than the ones that the FCC has passes and then repealed,
(2) Dropping federal opposition in court to those state laws shortly after Biden took office.
This amplification used to be a privilege of the media, and there are upsides and downsides to everyone having a chance at such reach now, and a lot of questionable incentives bound to how such reach can be attained. Instead of one Overton window, we now have multiple, bound to their social media audiences. To properly disseminate all this information is a full-time job for a human brain and most people just seem to stick with what seems proper to them.
When can we have this conversation instead of the tired "social media censorship" debate.
This would be a form of compelled speech, which does raise 1st Amendment concerns. But in principle it's no different from forcing telephone companies to carry all voice traffic without active censorship.
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/05/984440891/justice-clarence-th...
Likewise; large networks will happily grant access to governments in exchange for them staying off their back and keeping completion to a minimum.
These governments are not elected by the people and are primarily driven by profit. Inverted totalitarianism is when economics besets politics.
Communication on these platforms is public, protected speech just as it was on your street corner. And commerce on these platforms should be protected in the same way as commerce on the street. Government is government and need to be restrained in all of its forms or it will be a force of authoritarianism that either works on it's own or with the current machinations of government.
The EU is going the right direction with the Digital Markets Act. This act implicitly suggests that these gatekeepers have a special status though it does not outright call them what they are - governments. Speech protection should also be there as it is in all functional, modern governments. As should transparent legal process. Governments should have representation from their constituency.
Big tech is government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act