FCC to move ahead with 'rulemaking' on Section 230

"Just educate users" didn't work when there were a few hundred to a few thousand users. It's one of the reasons, though granted not the only one, why Usenet was a hole and people migrated to saner pastures when they were available. What makes you think it's any more feasible when it's "now you just need to go administer your ration of racism and transphobia and personal threats" on a millions-to-billions scale?

If you're being legit with your post, you're falling for a tremendous okeydoke here on the part of people who wish to do civil society harm. Literally all this approach accomplishes, literally and exclusively and without exception all it does, is cede the public square to people who want to export misery or deal with the exporters of misery--a vanishingly small fraction of the decent people out there. We can and must be better and that means that no, we are under no obligation to waste time or resources on people who were never socially potty-trained.

Because phone companies and ISPs only facilitate private peer–to–peer connections between a small number of parties, whereas the platforms we’re discussing host often-public interactions involving millions of people.

It’s a fundamentally different problem. If people use my phone company to have racist companies, I don’t have to know or care. Whereas if I had to deal with people saying racist shit every time I went on Twitter, I’d stop using it.

Consider also that most people’s biggest complaint with the phone system is a consequence of them not moderating, i.e. spam calls.

I've reached the conclusion that this is not about censorship. It's really about attempting to force ideas into the definition of "the mainstream".

Facebook and Twitter legitimize content. From a social media perspective, they define the vanilla. When people say "I saw it on Facebook", you instinctively intuit it was on their feed between a photo of a kid and advert for Red Robin.

If you want rocky road rather than vanilla, you can go find it on (2^n)chan. It's not hard to find. The presence of FaceTwit doesn't stop those forums existing or censor them.

When the President has a tweet deleted or some covid conspiracy group is removed from Facebook, it's not that there isn't somewhere else that content could go. I mean Trump is literally continuously on TV and has the entire Federal government at his disposal to get his message out. The covid conspiracy nuts can go to some smaller/madder corner of the Internet.

The reason to raise a ruckus is because being kept out of TwitFace means being kept out of the mainstream. I saw the Proud Boys update next to that cute GAP ad. I got the latest @QAnon post after the one from @KimKardashian.

To hell with that. Don't normalize that garbage. Moderate away.

> Why would the rules that govern the phone network make sense to apply to Wikipedia?

Because it is a platform? I don't see a problem with enforcing neutrality on platforms, in the same way that I don't see a problem with enforcing it on my phone company, or my ISP.

> Do you think HN would be a better place

I think the old school reddit model is a reasonable goal to aim for for these types of platforms.

(yes reddit has taken down some communities as of late, but lets assume that this didn't happen, to clarify the example)

IE, delegating moderation to users, but allowing communities in general to be created, with their own sets of rules, feels pretty fair and neutral.

> I still don’t understand what outcome you want for social media. How do you imagine it will look?

The model would be that any form of "moderation" on non-illegal content would be driven entirely by users, or communities of users.

IE, we can still allow people to do things like have shared block lists, or even curated communities within that platform, as long as other users are also able to create their own communities on that platform, that ignore those sets of rules.

Users could still make the choice to have certain rules, or moderation, if that is what they want.

Or, in other words, the reddit model, but without reddit removing non-illegal communities (which, to be fair, doesn't happen that often on reddit anyway. Reddit still mostly tries to be neutral, and they do an ok job with it)

EX: if a user doesn't want to see NSFW stuff, or trolling, or "misinformation", or any other offensive content, then there could be general categories, that describe those things, and the user can have that as a setting to not see that stuff.

>> "leave this problem alone, it's working just fine"

You have the major internet networks 3 weeks before an election banning speech because if they allowed it it might hurt their preferred political candidate. I mean they can claim otherwise, but they don't apply the criteria they use in this instance to instances where the speech is done by their political party. It is clear what is going on here.

Maybe that is working fine for you, it isn't working fine for me.

The ask of companies under section 230 is that they be allowed to publish libel, publish slander, publish copyright violations, publish content that violates laws against discrimination, publish threats of violence, publish posts by terrorists coordinating their attacks, publish all this with no liability whatsoever.

That is a huge ask. The question is, what do we get back for allowing them that privilege? Increasingly, in my opinion, we get negative value back for that.

It's not working just fine for me, it's time to amend section 230 so that the law advances the policies it advocates or abolish it altogether and let internet content providers live by the same rules that print content providers have lived by.