71–80 of 434 posts
So long as their speech remains legal, social media sites should not be the business of censoring elected officials. That is the job of voters and Congress. It’s too easy to walk down a slippery slope where suddenly these sites have to regulate in accordance with whatever is the popular opinion of the day.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Where do you draw the line between my living room, where I'm free to regulate who my visitors are and what those visitors can say, and Facebook? Unless you have 22% of the worlds population passing through your living room this is a pretty poor analogy. Maybe the town square is more apt.
Everyone has more of a right to a public space (like a town square) than a private living room or a private website (hadn't occurred to me that being publicly traded may have implications actually). As I've written in another recent comment, the problem is when Facebook or other networks become quasi-official sources for public communication. If the primary means that the government thinks I will find out about publi…
Zuck will follow the ad dollars. If revenue drops due to the Trump hate speech then it'll be gone already.
Which seems more likely than him being ruled by a small impact on a few months of ad revenue.
So long as their speech remains legal, social media sites should not be the business of censoring elected officials. That is the job of voters and Congress. It’s too easy to walk down a slippery slope where suddenly these sites have to regulate in accordance with whatever is the popular opinion of the day.
Free For All of Social Media censors won't last very long. It became mainstream to hate the internet and push for the end of platforms, effectively turning Twitter/Facebook/Google into publishers. By doing that they automatically loose the ability to claim to be platforms and become publishers. As a publisher it is much harder to guaranteed that things said in the platform won't end up in the arrest of your employees…
So long as their speech remains legal, social media sites should not be the business of censoring elected officials. That is the job of voters and Congress. It’s too easy to walk down a slippery slope where suddenly these sites have to regulate in accordance with whatever is the popular opinion of the day.
You know what would help. More alternatives. What if Instagram, WhatsApp, Youtube, etc were all still independent or there was interopability between Google Circles, Facebook and whatever else? Watch how fast Facebook would adapt and be monitoring news and trying to conform to the public opinion if they felt they needed to compete. The only reason we're in this position is because a reduction in real competition in t…
In markets concerned with serving European users, GDPR already allows you to download your data. Facebook has allowed one to download all of one’s own messages, pictures, etc. for many years now.
The problem is that, in order to avoid infringing on other people’s privacy rights, downloaded data has to be anonymized: you can see your own messages as your own, but anything from another user will just be identified with a random identifier instead of their real name. This then makes it a challenge, when you want to import the data into a new service, to have all those messages associated with your friends’ accounts on the new service.
So long as their speech remains legal, social media sites should not be the business of censoring elected officials. That is the job of voters and Congress. It’s too easy to walk down a slippery slope where suddenly these sites have to regulate in accordance with whatever is the popular opinion of the day.
This is a false dichotomy. If a leader publicly prods his followers to attack some one on FB or Twitter, should they stand back?
So long as their speech remains legal, social media sites should not be the business of censoring elected officials. That is the job of voters and Congress. It’s too easy to walk down a slippery slope where suddenly these sites have to regulate in accordance with whatever is the popular opinion of the day.
This is a false dichotomy. If a leader publicly prods his followers to attack some one on FB or Twitter, should they stand back?
So long as their speech remains legal, social media sites should not be the business of censoring elected officials. That is the job of voters and Congress. It’s too easy to walk down a slippery slope where suddenly these sites have to regulate in accordance with whatever is the popular opinion of the day.
* Is the way that people view large public figures on social media all that different than how they did with newspapers?
I'm not sure if these questions imply anything about how social media sites should deal with regular small-audience / low-influence users, but I think any platform sharing influential posts to a large audience has similar responsibilities to a newspaper.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd agree with you but private entities are not bound to freedom of speech. Only government forums
Sorry but you are incorrect. Platforms have protections while they act as a free and open forum. This protection ceases to exist the time you start fiddling with the content. Obviously, Terms of Service are there to filter the garbage out but any double standard can end up with your Platform credentials revoked and your business down the drain.
Section 230(c):
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
Furthermore section 230 (c)(2) states:
> any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected
So to be clear, it's not that the law is unclear on this, it's very clear on this: The publisher has no responsibilty to consider whether speech is constitutionally protected at all. Not only is there no qualification that these platforms need to meet in terms of moderation, but the law actively states that the platform can moderate speech.