The decentralized web and the future of Section 230

> There's no way around this.

Uhm, yes there is.

> If you try to "keep them around", then you have to say that these are reasonable ideas.

No, you don't.

Apologies for the terseness, but there are solutions here. It's a problem of signal-to-noise ratio, not an issue of principles and tolerance. Reddit has done a lot by looking at user behavior, as opposed to content, and it's the best system so far for any public, global social media with plenty of bad actors. They've also federated human moderation, which is a step in the right direction.

> No. A rational person can tell that 'sky is made of marshmallow' is bs. If they cannot, some thinning of the herd is clearly necessary. If a person struggles with basics of life and cannot comprehend basic language, I have little to offer.

Not sure what point you're trying to make here. What in the world does "thinning of the herd" mean?! Are you advocating for eugenics?

> If I tell you that all humans are in fact cappucino makers, do most people go into existential crisis?

Who's going into an existential crisis? Flat Earthers are being told that their beliefs are garbage, and they are going into crisis and forming their own communities to reinforce their beliefs.

I’m don’t understanding the claim of Matrix being decentralised. In the end I host a server and you talk with me. I give you the choice of choosing the authentication. For that I need an account at the authentication provider like Microsoft.

So all authenticate with Microsoft.

I create a user for them at my server which is still be needed to have the at least the timeline saved.

At which point I have decentralisation here?

And because I can’t handle the traffic on my raspberry I host this on a PaaS/SaaS provider like AWS.

That would assume all web servers are decentralised web3 technologies.

Holy crap is this a stupid backwards article. First and foremost, like so many online, IT HAS NO IDEA WHAT "FREE SPEECH" ACTUALLY IS.

>With this success came controversy. Critics of content moderation decisions came to view Section 230 liability protections as a de facto subsidy for censorious platforms to limit public speech or to be less than judicious in limiting speech

These "critics" are either ignorant or malicious or both. Free Speech is about keeping violence out of the search for truth. That's it. It's not some saccharine unicorn crap where all ideas are equally special and get a gold star, some ideas suck. But since we have no oracles it's dangerous to allow violence to solidify that in place, so instead the search is kept in the social and economic space. Saying something of course is free speech, but so necessarily is NOT saying something. Keeping things off your own soap box, not wanting to associate with people who say things you think are wrong enough, and so on are all themselves core free speech too. Those who you think are wrong and think you are wrong may put out their own soap boxes. There is no right to an audience or social approval or economic rewards, one must successfully argue and convince others for that. That's the whole point! "Censorous platforms" is pure propaganda. Moderation isn't censorship, it's free speech too.

And "platform" doesn't fucking mean anything either. Section 230 is as much about the tiniest sites as it is the largest.

>Now the internet is pushing towards decentralization that may make Section 230 and centralized content moderation moot.

No, that's completely backwards. Section 230 is a bedrock of decentralization! It's what means some rando individual or tiny startup or whatever can host something and allow anyone else to post. From comment sections in blogs to all those shiny new Mastodon services. Without it, only gigantic corporations could afford to carry the insurance and do the moderation to allow user content.

>Government agents must find and identify individuals involved with each incident.

Haha (on multiple grounds). First, the big threats are civil, not "government agents". It's anyone who feels like filing a defamation claim or whatever else. Suggesting that lots of tiny entities with zero in-house legal council or budget is hard to go after is like saying that the copyright cartels could never go after individual bittorrent users or sites back in the day, or patent trolls after tiny businesses. Ie., laughably at odds with observed actual reality. What would actually happen is what has, in fact, happened repeatedly: firms will come about that will send mass threat letters. Host some little fun forum for a niche tabletop game or ultralight planes or something? Somebody posts some comment that could maybe vaguely be construed as defamation. If your forum or channel or Mastodon or whatever is on a topic then you must be moderating which means you're not a common carrier, so without Section 230 you are liable. So you get a letter saying they'll take you to court or you can settle for a mere $2000-6000 or whatever it is (calibrated to what they think they can squeeze from you). Now what? There will be a profit incentive to develop ML systems to go hunting through whatever federated networks there are looking for anything that might be legally actionable. There will be profit motive for someone disgruntled at a given forum to call attention to anything actionable they can find. There will be a profit motive to try to post defamatory material from sock puppet accounts and then sue over it! Say goodbye to any sort of non-IRL ID verified accounts, except even that might not be good enough for small players given the stakes and how much even going to court at all costs when you have to go to discovery vs dealing with it via summary judgement at the earliest stage.

The growing drumbeat against one of the foundational parts of the net, which makes the very site here where all of us comment possible, is definitely worrying though.

> I am advocating for taking off warning labels. Take it as you will.

What are the "warning labels" on believing that the Earth is flat?

> It is both fascinating and scary to me that you think presentable ideas require your explicit permission to exist.

Not sure where you're getting any of this. You seem to have built up quite a straw man that you are getting really upset about. Here it is put simply: I am under no obligation to entertain your beliefs. If you get offended by that and run away to form your own community, thats your problem. You can't force me to pretend as if Flat Earth is a reasonable idea. We're thousands of years past that point.

I really don't understand your position. You are simultaneously aggrieved that Flat Earthers are being ignored, but also seem to think they should die.