So, I am picturing the whiplash when a large part of the American left, that has been in favor of some kind of governmental control on companies like Facebook and Google, actually faces the possibility of the current administration being in charge of that regulation.
Leaked white paper proposes U.S. Congressional regulation of social media
81–90 of 164 posts
Re: Leaked white paper proposes U.S. Congressional regulation of social media
#82So, I am picturing the whiplash when a large part of the American left, that has been in favor of some kind of governmental control on companies like Facebook and Google, actually faces the possibility of the current administration being in charge of that regulation.
There's “large a part of the left” that supported legislation under which the executive branch would have discretionary regulatory power over Facebook and Google?
Re: Leaked white paper proposes U.S. Congressional regulation of social media
#83I think the faster we make companies liable for the content on their servers the better. Why? Because I want distributed/federated data to become an actual priority to these companies. I want it to hit their bottom line when they get sued for content uploaded to their servers so they consider keeping the data owned by the user who generated it.
I’ve been working on that. It’s a hard problem, but emule works quite well. I propose something based on that: when you start a program, you advertise all the sha256’s of all the files you share. Whenever you need a resource, you send a request to the dht for its sha256. Anyone who has the file will opportunistically try to send it to you. Since it’s a dht, there’s nothing to take down. And since it operates on sha25…
Check out ethereum swarm [1]. Optionally private (hosting and accessing), decentralized, p2p data hosting protocol with baked in payments if you want to pay the network to host your data for you.
[1] https://swarm-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.ht...
Re: Leaked white paper proposes U.S. Congressional regulation of social media
#84This leak looks like a trial balloon. I'm fascinated by the notion that requiring disclosure of people's physical location, as well as demanding that they prove their identity, would be conducive to an online culture of free and healthy expression. These proposals seem to be aimed at intimidation and breaching the privacy of each and everyone, rather than at the surveillance-like operations and propaganda-enabling st…
> I'm fascinated by the notion that requiring disclosure of people's physical location, as well as demanding that they prove their identity, would be conducive to an online culture of free and healthy expression.
"Fascinated" isn't the word I would choose to describe it..
Re: Leaked white paper proposes U.S. Congressional regulation of social media
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there something that can be done about our polarized discourse without trampling over our civil rights? I think this is necessary dialogue.
Absolutely! Is there something Congress should be doing? Perhaps it's not the thing for them to be involved in.
It's not clear to me what the role of Congress should be, perhaps the appropriation of funding to explore/build technologies and legal structures that are more distributed and less subject to concentrations of power.
Paul Frazee's 2018 JSConf EU talk on "Formalizing User Rights on the Web" makes an important observation: technology doesn't just interact with civics, it actually drives civics; it defines what the civic structure of a community is going to be (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-ffpAkviM0&t=920).
Re: Leaked white paper proposes U.S. Congressional regulation of social media
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Obscenity isn’t protected by the first amendment. Right, I must've missed the "except for obscenity" clause. Oh wait, there isn't one... that's just something the courts made up out of thin air. The freedom of speech includes all speech, even obscene speech. It is never appropriate to respond to speech with force.
I happen to agree with you, but it’s not our opinion that determines the law, it’s the Supreme Court’s. And they have clearly and consistently held that obscenity is not protected by the first amendment, for the lifetime of the Republic.
They also held that slavery was fine, until it wasn't. We have major problems in this country and the failures of our legal system are prime among them.
Re: Leaked white paper proposes U.S. Congressional regulation of social media
#87The financial industry created self-regulatory organizations (SROs) to police themselves (in theory) more effectively than the government. They set up rules of ethics and policies and have the power to fine companies and bar individuals. Agencies like the SEC let them take the lead, but will step in to investigate fraud and crimes. The industry may need to mature, but this would probably be the most sensible solution…
The financial industry collapses and needs to be rescued every ~10 years (S&L crisis in the 80s, Long Term Capital Management in the 90s, Great Recession in the 00's). Last time they crippled the world economy. Massive fraud is commonplace, based only on the fines they pay. I don't see them as a model of success!
The financial industry is enormous and diverse. What I was referring to specifically was the US equity markets and FINRA. They have been very stable and reliable through the years. Commercial and mortgage lending is a whole other ball of wax.
Re: Leaked white paper proposes U.S. Congressional regulation of social media
#88Ug, never proposals for education, grants for preferred alternative implementations, publicly funded communication platforms, recognition that the status quo is people's preference, data transparency encouragement (not user transparency...not "who", but "what" wrt internal analytics), enforcement of existing advertisement/fraud/collusion statutes, etc. The first step always has to be more legislation, very sad. I'd a…
To be fair, the only power people in Congress have is to pass legislation, so people in Congress will probably propose legislation if people with the power to do the other things you mention don't act to change things. The status quo you favor is most definitely _not_ what the vast majority prefers. And while it's unlikely that Congress will take the right tack here, Facebook and Twitter are at best willfully negligent actors. Their continued unwillingness to sincerely address the problems their platforms have created is shameful at this point. They have tremendous power and are using it poorly and for the wrong purposes. No one is in a better position to change the storyline than they are at this moment.
Re: Leaked white paper proposes U.S. Congressional regulation of social media
#89I doubt this would help. Judging by my Facebook feed Americans are perfectly capable of vicious, polarized discourse without foreign influence. In fact this may backfire as it would allow the hateful in society to have more of a right to preach on these platforms as no one would be able to accuse them of being foreign trolls. Its probable that this level of discourse is here to stay and that the previous elevated, co…
This is true, but it's amplified by the ugliness that you yourself don't realize is being pushed by malicious actors. Hateful, untruthful memes, conspiracy theories, Reddit comments, Twitter posts, and more are being constantly generated by entire buildings full of people who barely know what role they are playing in providing fodder for Infowars, Fox News, and the rabid extremists looking for hateful storylines to retweet, share, and like. All of that filters down to regular innocent people and distorts what seems like normal, what seems fringe, and destroys trust in everything a person sees or reads online. Sure, a lot of this is just people at their worst, and Americans being themselves, but your reluctance to admit that it's partially fueled by organized forces that don't have any particular mission beyond sowing discord and chaos is part of the problem here.
Re: Leaked white paper proposes U.S. Congressional regulation of social media
#90Ug, never proposals for education, grants for preferred alternative implementations, publicly funded communication platforms, recognition that the status quo is people's preference, data transparency encouragement (not user transparency...not "who", but "what" wrt internal analytics), enforcement of existing advertisement/fraud/collusion statutes, etc. The first step always has to be more legislation, very sad. I'd a…
>recognition that the status quo is people's preference...I'd argue in the scheme of things, it's not really that broken Continuing the status quo means the people in power stay in power. It therefore isn't surprising that the people in power prefer preserving the status quo. It also isn't surprising that the people who believe the system is broken and are most against the status quo are those that belong to historic…
As long as it isn't libel/slander or 'fighting words', we do allow it in the physical world.
Shouting words at someone is not illegal.