FCC to move ahead with 'rulemaking' on Section 230

It's not a UI/UX problem. It's a "you are offloading moderation to the end user" problem--it is a fundamental failure of the approach. If you are going to put all of the work of moderation on the end user, regardless of whether you dress it up as "shared moderation" or whatever, the end user is going to leave and cede the floor to those who want to dominate the public discourse with sewage and crud and threats because the end user has a life to live and things to do with their day. There is a fundamental human cost to being exposed to the kind of garbage that Twitter et al filter out on the regular. It takes a toll on the psyche. It will drive people away. And that's not a "but muh engagement" for whoever's metrics and KPIs are involved--it is a realization that this is now the public square and ceding it to actively anti-civil movements is bad for liberalized society in general.

If there's a failing of technical imagination on my part, fine. There strongly seems to be a failing of appreciation of how modern supremacist movements operate on yours. This is not a technical problem, this is a human problem. It's a question of whether the psychic damage inflicted upon bystanders by constant and unending exposure (because that is, genuinely, what the end state here is) is worth whatever hypothetical benefit is realized by giving these parties a place from which to abuse others until they definitely, yessir, are blocked by all of them and never, ever seek to get around it to continue their abuse.

> And why would I be otherwise?

Speaking frankly? Because this discussion is dominated by bad-faith types whose axe to grind is really that there's a movement against their favorite flavors of supremacism and they generally use arguments like the one you're putting forth as retrenchment now that the tide has turned against them. If that isn't your bag, I appreciate that; I think you're incorrect, but that's separate from disingenuous.

Any challenge to what? I don’t understand what you’re proposing here. Even if Section 230 were repealed, Twitter would be perfectly free to e.g. censor all conservative content. The issue is that by doing so, they might be liable for unrelated content they allow that ends up being defamatory.

> Twitter is categorically different from a small/personal website. You could argue that it is a natural monopoly.

This would be a hard argument to make. There are hundreds of competing social networking communities, some of which are even bigger!

> Firstly Microsoft monopoly got thrown out because of unethical behavior of the judge (which is why there isn't two Microsoft entities today. The whole thing hinged on "Microsoft installed its browser by default which gave it an unfair advantage." To allow the DOJ to save face, Microsoft agreed to make it easier to install other browsers.

Nothing was 'thrown out', rather the penalty was changed after the higher court issued a ruling that actually changed the liability implications for MS, which allowed MS to negotiate a lesser judgement. Findings of fact and the ruling were not overthrown, despite questions about judge Jackson's impartiality.

Beyond that, the US was not the only jurisdiction in which Microsoft was taken to court and found guilty of monopolistic practices. "DOJ" is meaningless in courts outside the US, so your statement doesn't even make logical sense as a component of your argument.

Second - you seem to be standing behind a single dictionary definition for what constitutes a monopoly. That's fine when discussing certain technicalities in abstraction, but completely ignores the fact that the dictionary definition is meaningless in terms of law. A monopoly can absolutely exist even in the presence of competitive options, and that is very clearly laid out in many ways in various laws and legal precedents. The Sherman Act* alone has very clear statements about this, and absolutely contradicts what you are saying. Monopolistic behavior is about controlling the market and/or using market/industry dominance to prevent or stifle competition. It is not about the sheer absence of competition.

* https://www.justice.gov/atr/competition-and-monopoly-single-...

> It is technically quite trivial to clone the basic functionality of Twitter and run a competing service. This has been done semi-sucessfully with Gab (not endorsing that community, but it is a good example), for example. People choose social media services based on their perceived value, social prestige, etc.

It is quite simple to create software that mimics Twitter, sure. It is very, very hard to create a platform like Twitter. That further reinforces it as a natural monopoly to me. You can even look at how the companies rise and fall; typically if the incumbent fails, they do so entirely, and the new competitor eats all of their lunch (i.e. MySpace and Facebook, Digg/Slashdot/Reddit, etc). There are very rarely situations where a new competitor comes and splits the market share; they either take it all, or they get none.

> There's no equivalent to "I have to use Twitter because they own the lines to the house/they have the only 5G coverage in my area/they are the only company licensed by my city."

There absolutely is. "I have to use Twitter because that's where everyone I want to talk to is, and they don't allow any interoperation with other social networks." It's fundamentally the same thing, and treating them like a utility would involve forcing them to treat their platform like utility poles. They can charge a fee to the other companies that interoperate to recoup their costs and get some profit, but they have to allow the interoperation.