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Things from leaked audio of Mark Zuckerberg and his employees

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Re: Things from leaked audio of Mark Zuckerberg and his employees

#201

Post by pavlov »

Avicebron wrote: post #195
pavlov wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO revoking Section 230 would benefit incumbents like FB and Twitter who have already made billion-dollar investments into content moderation, and hurt the small guys who suddenly become liable for every user comment they publish. Can’t you imagine Mark and Jack telling Republican senators: “We wanted to enable free speech, we told you so, but you took away the protections around that so we had no choice but to turn…

You seem to work at FB so you might have some more insight than I do, if so please share. On the other side, I see new players arriving and proving to be competitive because FB will be forced to take a position, if people don't like that position they won't interact with the platform. Suddenly there's a market for a different platform.

I’m just a video rendering code monkey, I have no particular insight into this issue. (FWIW I believe Zuckerberg is genuine in his position, but I also think he’d change it rapidly if the legal environment tilted the other way and it became a genuine business threat.)

I wonder about those different platforms. They already exist — Gab simply isn’t that popular. Revoking Section 230 would expose Gab to a “Thiel vs Gawker” situation: a billionaire could sue them into extinction. That doesn’t seem desirable at all.

Re: Things from leaked audio of Mark Zuckerberg and his employees

#202

Post by cageface »

danielfoster wrote: post #2

So long as their speech remains legal, social media sites should not be the business of censoring elected officials. That is the job of voters and Congress. It’s too easy to walk down a slippery slope where suddenly these sites have to regulate in accordance with whatever is the popular opinion of the day.

The problem is that social media has made it possible for anyone to reach an audience of billions with a click of a button. This so radically changes the dynamics of how we communicate with each other that some new rules are going to be needed.

Re: Things from leaked audio of Mark Zuckerberg and his employees

#203

Post by jldugger »

emsy wrote: post #185
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> social media sites should not be the business of censoring elected officials. That is the job of voters and Congress It's explicitly not the job of Congress. That's the point of the First Amendment. Regulating free speech is up to private enterprise, using private enforcement methods like de-platforming (old school: you can't spew your drivel inside my bar) and shaming.

You could argue de-platforming is a violation of the first and amend accordingly.

If politicans want a platform for their speech, they'll have to buy a newspaper / website like every other tech billionaire already did.

Re: Things from leaked audio of Mark Zuckerberg and his employees

#204

Post by intended »

so wait - what would Facebook do during the Arab spring?

>“If we were entering a period where there may be a prolonged period of civil unrest,...

Should they be censoring rioters? What if foreign governments compel them to censor material? What if you censor the "good" guys?

Re: Things from leaked audio of Mark Zuckerberg and his employees

#205

Post by koboll »

danielfoster wrote: post #2

So long as their speech remains legal, social media sites should not be the business of censoring elected officials. That is the job of voters and Congress. It’s too easy to walk down a slippery slope where suddenly these sites have to regulate in accordance with whatever is the popular opinion of the day.

>social media sites should not be the business of censoring elected officials. That is the job of voters and Congress.

What about Paul Nehlen, a political candidate who (before he was permabanned) frequently railed on Twitter against the "Jewish media" and mused about the "JQ", which stands for Jewish Question? Who called Jewish critics "shekels-for-hire" and used the phrase "The goyim know!" as an imitation of their involvement in a supposed conspiracy? Who said he wouldn't mind "leading a million Robert Bowers [the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter] to the promised land"?

Is that something Twitter is within their rights to ban for, in your view? If so, would that change if he were elected?

Social media is a not a public square where people can plant their soapbox, it is a set of privately owned servers where people can persist small amounts of data that comply with a set of rules. You break the rules, you get kicked off the private property.

Re: Things from leaked audio of Mark Zuckerberg and his employees

#206

Post by Avicebron »

pavlov wrote: post #201
Avicebron wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to work at FB so you might have some more insight than I do, if so please share. On the other side, I see new players arriving and proving to be competitive because FB will be forced to take a position, if people don't like that position they won't interact with the platform. Suddenly there's a market for a different platform.

I’m just a video rendering code monkey, I have no particular insight into this issue. (FWIW I believe Zuckerberg is genuine in his position, but I also think he’d change it rapidly if the legal environment tilted the other way and it became a genuine business threat.) I wonder about those different platforms. They already exist — Gab simply isn’t that popular. Revoking Section 230 would expose Gab to a “Thiel vs Gawk…

I'm not a fan of Gab, but it could easily be not popular because it's offering a worse version of the current form of FB.

If FB's status changed, Gab could theoretically become more popular. Not all new platform/publishers would be the equivalent of a Gawker and thus raise the ire of a billionaire. There are plenty of independent journals, magazines, blogging platforms, etc that don't get sued out of existence.

Re: Things from leaked audio of Mark Zuckerberg and his employees

#207

Post by tuna-piano »

The problem is really pretty simple:

-Facebook has a culture that is extremely biased toward the political left. The left has a (recent?) trend of wanting to censor speech they don't agree with.

-America (and the world) has a lot more viewpoint diversity.

Zuckerberg is stuck with trying to keep his workers happy but also not wanting to alienate large portions of users, customers, politicans, etc.

In my opinion, he has chosen the path correctly and only those deep in an ideological bubble would think otherwise.

If you disagree with this, think to yourself - would you want Trump supporters deciding what you're able to post on Facebook?

Re: Things from leaked audio of Mark Zuckerberg and his employees

#208

Post by adventured »

dmicah wrote: post #186
emsy wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could argue de-platforming is a violation of the first and amend accordingly.

I don't think this is the case, unless the platform is run by the government. The First Amendment applies to restrictions on free speech by the government, and is not related to the actions of private enterprises.

> unless the platform is run by the government. The First Amendment applies to restrictions on free speech by the government, and is not related to the actions of private enterprises.

That's not quite accurate. There is precedence for regulating speech in private media for example, as in the case of broadcast networks. Broadcast TV networks are still restricted on speech/expression to this day, as are radio stations.

There's nothing to say that social networks can't also be brought under the regulation of the FCC and have their speech and terms of service dictated to them. This turns social media platforms into something more like a utility. All users must be treated equally or the platforms get massive fines. If I were attempting to get this through, I'd argue the major social media platforms are natural monopolies due to reinforcing network effects and the finite nature of user time (there can only reasonably be so many large social networks, and the market has already strongly demonstrated globally that that is a very small number). You can replace a natural monopoly with another (an independent Instagram, allowed to evolve as a threat, possibly could have killed Facebook for example and become the new monopoly), but you can't have 100 Facebooks that will all perfectly compete with eachother (some people will argue that in theory you could, but that would never happen in reality). For whatever niche / category / concept they target, social networks inherently trend toward either consolidation of users or death; it's why the Twitter clones were all killed off in the early days when people were still experimenting with that social concept. It's why there are not dozens of large scale YouTube or Reddit or even Stackoverflow clones (the rather brutal combination of network effects and finite user time wins in all cases and you end up with consolidation of users to just a few viable platforms). The market, largely left to sort things out on its own in the social media sphere, has provided a lot of proof that large social media platforms are natural monopolies.

Re: Things from leaked audio of Mark Zuckerberg and his employees

#209

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

dntbnmpls wrote: post #197
gruez wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You could argue de-platforming is a violation of the first There's literally no way you can read the 1st amendment and think it should apply to non government entities. It specifically mentions congress only. >and amend accordingly. The chances of getting such amendment passed is approximately zero.

> There's literally no way you can read the 1st amendment and think it should apply to non government entities. It specifically mentions congress only. It already applies to non government entities. Telephone companies can't deny you service because they don't like you or what you say. Your power and gas company can't deny you service because they don't like you or what you say. Trump can't even block people on twitt…

Is Facebook / Twitter / the internet in general infrastructure in a similar way to telephony and electricity?

There is an argument to be had there.

Re: Things from leaked audio of Mark Zuckerberg and his employees

#210

Post by kukx »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #174
danielfoster wrote: post #2

So long as their speech remains legal, social media sites should not be the business of censoring elected officials. That is the job of voters and Congress. It’s too easy to walk down a slippery slope where suddenly these sites have to regulate in accordance with whatever is the popular opinion of the day.

> social media sites should not be the business of censoring elected officials. That is the job of voters and Congress It's explicitly not the job of Congress. That's the point of the First Amendment. Regulating free speech is up to private enterprise, using private enforcement methods like de-platforming (old school: you can't spew your drivel inside my bar) and shaming.

Just because they legally can does not mean they should censor the official representatives of the voters. The bigger the audience the more important it gets to show all points of views. The sun is the best disinfectant. The wrong ideas should be publicly challenged, otherwise they may silently spread unchecked and surface when it is too late to stop them. You do not need majority to make quick and radical social changes.
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