Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

I've been doing some thinking and it seems to me like Section 230 being repealed would be disastrous for smaller websites/startups/content creators.

If I create a small-scale forum - I am now legally responsible for what is posted on that platform and can be sued repeatedly into the ground until I'm not able to continue running my business/forum/whatever. If someone has the capital to do that and a mission to remove me from the internet, then they're able to.

With section 230, it has that "monkey's paw" style penalty. Sure, it would be nice to go after social media companies that continuously abuse their power and act on behalf of the government to control what you can say, when you can say it, but then you'd also potentially open up a bunch of legal trouble for smaller outlets.

If there was a way to enact something where above a certain threshold, section 230 no longer applies to your company and you need to be responsible for the content on your platform - maybe that would be ideal, but I don't know what that threshold would be - profits, incorporated vs LLC vs sole proprietorship, I'm not sure.

I disagree. The problem is that nobody is willing to be realistic about the limitations of automated moderation and proceed accordingly.

If we can't create an automatic method that catches context, the solution isn't to bemoan that AI can't magically do what we want. The solution is to remove the rules that require AI to understand context in the first place, because it is fundamentally outside of our technical ability, and any attempt to achieve it will fail.

The problem is people who think that context-based censorship is reasonable for a massive platform. It simply is not. It is reasonable at an individual level. It is reasonable at an interpersonal level. It's even reasonable at a small-group level, where specific individual human beings who are invested in the community can be aware of these context issues.

It is not reasonable at Facebook scale, full stop. Facebook should not be in the business of deciding to ban things like this. That is a responsibility that belongs at a lower level. What does that look like in practice?

If an individual posted it on their wall:

* That individual uses their judgement and chooses to post it or not

* The people who see it use their judgement and click the block button if they don't like it

If an individual posted it in a small group:

* The group can socially police such actions by commenting that they are upset by it

* The group's administrators can privately reach out to the person who posted it, explain that they can't post such things in that group, explain why, and explain what actions they could take to remain in good graces

* The group's administration can make a judgement call and remove the post, not on the basis of crude keyword detection, but on the basis of human understanding

If an individual posted in a large group:

* The large group can adopt clear and unambiguous rules that do not require context to administer, and enforce them accordingly on a case-by-case basis

* The large group can pre-commit to not dealing with such issues, and require their members to deal with it privately, like human beings

Trying to automate this process will always fail, and it will cause massive false-positive and false-negative issues as it does so. Engineers used to understand these concepts when I first entered industry 20 years ago. It's very disappointing to me that they either can't or won't now.

You can dislike republicans all you want but this is just another level.

No one really hears any attacks against GB 2016's critics now, but before release, they were all tantamount to racists and sexists.