U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

Zuckerberg was free not to listen to anything the FBI had to say. No one forced him to do anything.

Will this apply to bots? What if I have a big list of a complaints about a certain politician (use your imagination, there's more than one politician to complain about), but the "other party" doesn't follow me, in fact, I have very few followers overall.

So I create a bot that spreads my opinions by replying to millions of other Tweets. Anyone who mentions the politician of interest will receive a reply from "me" (my bot) within 2 minutes. Now I will be heard by millions, and my lawyer is ready should I be banned from the entire site.

Now imagine many people doing this, what a cesspool, you make a Tweet and the bot flood gates open. You Tweet about your grandchild and 30 seconds later you have 400 replies expressing "political opinions" about shady websites with cheap Viagra. Twitter can't ban them though. Welcome to truly free speech. You better learn to code if you want to be heard.

We're already at the point where websites can't control bots. AI that can write better than most humans is knocking on the door, and it can run on my personal computer. This law will only make it worse by adding real legal risk to banning suspected bots.

Am I exaggerating here, or is this actually possible? This feels like a loss in the humans vs bots battle more than a political one.

An ideology that dies without censorship is not a very good one.

Seems like this is gonna get overruled, but who knows with this supreme court nowadays. Aside from that issue, I'd like to discuss why social media always seems so impotent in their response to misinformation. Seems Youtube, Facebook, etc, are all letting people post misinformation, it gains traction through whatever means and is shared to millions of people. Then after the damage is done they swoop in and block it after the damage has been done.

I think they could instead limit the possible exposure by building tiers/gates a post has to move through to truly go to a mass audience. First it would start with a mass audience of 10^1, mostly direct connections. If no keywords were triggered for misinformation, and none of the eyeballs on that post marked it as misinformation or offensive, then send it to 10^2 people outside their immediate social circle. Repeat until it hits 10^4, 10^5 or whatever and then it hits a tier of truly mass audience. Perhaps here it requires a real review by a moderator if it has keyword matches or isn't from a trusted source. Then it is let out to reach everyone because its just a kitty cat video, or about the best way to stain a table, or all the community content we actually want.

This approach is closer to an A/B test for a social post. If it is posted and highly offensive within a small group of close connections, then it never ripples out of those echo chambers. Again it's about uniqueness of the post, so grandma can click reshare or whatever, when she looks at her history she see's it in her timeline, but it's never massively put on others feed until its gone through above.

Ironically, the social platform killing it right now works somewhat close to this in terms of showing you others posts. My feed shows me a lot of big posters, but like 10% of the time I am reached by people i've never viewed, with a post with like 5-10 views. Then they measure engagement (how long did you watch, did you like, etc), before they decide to push it to more people. (My summary of their algorithm, not theirs). I'm advocating for similar but to gate for offensive/misinformation. Seems like it would work like a sieve where good/unoffensive content would rise to the top "in general" and the bad stuff would stay with a small amount of eyeballs.

It’s not accidental. I don’t see how the old “Wild West” era of the internet was ever going to be compatible with any two sovereign nations that had even a minuscule difference of opinion about any of copyright and database rights, privacy, obscenity, hacking, incitement, libel, or anything else that might come broadly under the heading of “free speech”.