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Social Media Platforms as Common Carriers? [pdf]

www2.law.ucla.edu

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Re: Social Media Platforms as Common Carriers? [pdf]

#81

Post by username90 »

joe_the_user wrote: post #64
Animats wrote: post #14

This can be viewed as an alternative under antitrust law. If you get big enough, either you get broken up, or you have to become a regulated monopoly. You get to pick. "Big enough" by EU standards is where there are less than four competitors of reasonable size and reach. The US tends to tolerate a higher threshold. Amy Klobuchar's "Antitrust" book suggests 40% market share as the threshold.

I'm in favor of regulated monopolies under some circumstances but making Facebook or any information-filter-platform into regulated monopoly sounds nightmarish. I'd sort of trust the US government, at its best, to do some things. But I would never trust any state regulate content filtering. Beyond that, making sure it's always possible to host content on the Internet would be the most reasonable way guarantee free sp…

State regulated content filtering already exists everywhere which is why you don't see porn lined up along every highway.

Re: Social Media Platforms as Common Carriers? [pdf]

#82

Post by [deleted] »

tedunangst wrote: post #30
Animats wrote: post #14

This can be viewed as an alternative under antitrust law. If you get big enough, either you get broken up, or you have to become a regulated monopoly. You get to pick. "Big enough" by EU standards is where there are less than four competitors of reasonable size and reach. The US tends to tolerate a higher threshold. Amy Klobuchar's "Antitrust" book suggests 40% market share as the threshold.

Would a regulated monopoly be subject to community decency rules? Would twitter be fined every time somebody posts Janet Jackson's nipple?

[deleted]

Re: Social Media Platforms as Common Carriers? [pdf]

#83

Post by GVIrish »

fabbari wrote: post #77
jmull wrote: post #75

These social media platforms don’t act like common carriers. It’s a fundamental necessity of the business that social media platforms be able to deliver enough good content that users want to join and engage while filtering out enough bad content that users don’t get fed up and leave. So they implement all kinds of mechanisms designed to promote and emphasize “good” content and minimize “bad” content. It’s important…

But all that spam would come into play with "generic" feeds. You don't expect spam from people, groups and organizations that you subscribe to. You can think of "discovery feeds" as an addon - and maybe even not provided by the same company providing the social network itself. Cherry on top? You would have to actively subscribe to those feeds, forcing them to be interesting/relevant.

But you're back to the problem of breaking the business model of these companies. If everything was opt-in, subscription-only, that would fundamentally change these platforms.

Even then, with zero moderation, feeds that people subscribe to could still get overwhelmed by trolling and vitriol.

Re: Social Media Platforms as Common Carriers? [pdf]

#84

Post by thaumasiotes »

chr1 wrote: post #76
thaumasiotes wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you block some content the way gmail blocks spam, it won't be censorship. Are you thinking of the spam folder? Because the primary way that gmail blocks "spam" is by never delivering the email at all. Not to your spam folder, not anywhere. I learned about this when I was unable to receive email from a personal friend.

Yes i was talking about the spam folder, i have never heard about this other way of blocking, and can't find anything about it on the internet. Is this behaviour documented anywhere?

https://support.google.com/mail/troubleshooter/2696779?hl=en

https://glockapps.com/blog/remove-ip-address-gmail-blacklist...

Re: Social Media Platforms as Common Carriers? [pdf]

#85

Post by comex »

triceratops wrote: post #78
wmf wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of this paper is that bad stuff would exist but you'd never see it unless you explicitly seek it out. You might not even be able to search for it; you might have to paste an exact URL to get it.

How is any of what you described different from the situation today? Except that said URL won't contain a TwitFace domain name if they don't want you on their platform. Is the domain name really that important, so long as the content is available?

For one thing, Volokh suggests that Twitter would also have to allow you to follow @BadStuff and then view its posts in your timeline – as long as you set your timeline to chronological mode. If you use the algorithmic timeline, on the other hand, he claims that you're now relying on Twitter to provide a kind of judgment on what tweets are better than others, so Twitter would then have the First Amendment right to refuse to show you some users' tweets entirely.

Personally, I suspect that any law like this would result in Twitter simply removing the chronological timeline altogether.

In addition, although the paper's title says "social media", Volokh also suggests the services which banned Parler – Google and Apple's app stores, and AWS – could also be subject to common carrier regulations. For those kinds of services, recommendation algorithms and domain names are irrelevant.

Re: Social Media Platforms as Common Carriers? [pdf]

#86

Post by temp8964 »

jmull wrote: post #75

These social media platforms don’t act like common carriers. It’s a fundamental necessity of the business that social media platforms be able to deliver enough good content that users want to join and engage while filtering out enough bad content that users don’t get fed up and leave. So they implement all kinds of mechanisms designed to promote and emphasize “good” content and minimize “bad” content. It’s important…

The article already clearly distinguished the hosting function and the recommendation function. What makes those social media platforms common carrier is their hosting function, you are taking about their recommendation function, which can be technically separated from the hosting function. For example, if they think Trump is bad, just hide him from everyone not following him. At the same time, still show his messages to everyone following him, for the hosting purpose.

Re: Social Media Platforms as Common Carriers? [pdf]

#87

Post by js8 »

GVIrish wrote: post #83
fabbari wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But all that spam would come into play with "generic" feeds. You don't expect spam from people, groups and organizations that you subscribe to. You can think of "discovery feeds" as an addon - and maybe even not provided by the same company providing the social network itself. Cherry on top? You would have to actively subscribe to those feeds, forcing them to be interesting/relevant.

But you're back to the problem of breaking the business model of these companies. If everything was opt-in, subscription-only, that would fundamentally change these platforms. Even then, with zero moderation, feeds that people subscribe to could still get overwhelmed by trolling and vitriol.

I think you're right, they cannot be a "common carrier" because decentralization (in the sense of giving people choice) of the selection algorithm makes them irrelevant. There is no other service they provide (to the end user) other than the content selection.

Re: Social Media Platforms as Common Carriers? [pdf]

#88

Post by js8 »

I think what happened with "social media" is a digital equivalent of land enclosures. In the past, there was Internet content, let's simplify it to blogs, which was available publicly for anybody to see, and then there was content aggregators/filters (search engines, blog aggregators) which selected and curated the content. But anybody could come and do that.

Social media effectively "privatized" the content, now you have the content within their walled garden, and only they have monopoly on content filtering and aggregation (within their realm). This allowed them to monetize the advertisements on this content.

So I believe wanting "social media as common carriers" really means going back to the state before they existed, where anybody could host content and anybody could filter content. I don't think it will happen, because then the business model is dead, and the force of capitalism will not allow it (just like there is very little public land now).

Re: Social Media Platforms as Common Carriers? [pdf]

#89

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

jmull wrote: post #75

These social media platforms don’t act like common carriers. It’s a fundamental necessity of the business that social media platforms be able to deliver enough good content that users want to join and engage while filtering out enough bad content that users don’t get fed up and leave. So they implement all kinds of mechanisms designed to promote and emphasize “good” content and minimize “bad” content. It’s important…

>It’s important to understand that “good” means good for business and “bad” means bad for business, .

The 'good' here is what people 'want', at least what they think they want and not what they 'need'. Overtime the users unconsciously or consciously(influencers) realize that the system overwhelmingly favors this behavior and resort to only broadcast content which people want irrespective of whether its factual or end-up hurting those who consume it in the long run or even if they themselves don't believe in that content.

You can verify this yourself, Subscribe to a Twitter topic of your expertise and check the home screen(mobile app) (or) if you're brave enough check the home page of LinkedIn and you'll see the algorithm's overwhelming bias towards conformity.

Re: Social Media Platforms as Common Carriers? [pdf]

#90

Post by shadilay »

wmf wrote: post #73
shadilay wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The phone system is a failure of innovation. Some kind of caller id should be mandatory. There is no technical reason something akin to DNS for phone numbers can't exist. Phone companies would rather cash checks than innovate.

Unspoofable caller ID is belatedly happening with STIR/SHAKEN but in general your point stands.

belated? This all should have happened 20 years ago!
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