> Edit: Within the law. To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP.
The thing is, people are never going to agree where the line is drawn. So I’d rather let individual companies decide where they draw the line and if that happens to be not where you’d agree, then you can go support an alternate, if this there are many, who draws the line elsewhere. And for those who don’t want a private entity owning the infrastructure, there is always solutions like IPFS.
> The thing is, people are never going to agree where the line is drawn.
True, but I currently trust the line drawn by the law orders of magnitude more than I trust the one drawn by a bunch of faceless reactionaries at a handful of megacorps.
Also, theoretically, I can participate in changing the law when it's either insufficient or overbearing. I have zero say in the corporate policies of the day.
If you can determine that a particular piece of information belongs to some unpleasant or dangerous category, mark it as that, like a spam filter does, or vaguely how FB does with posts. Importantly, do not remove it unless the law forces you to.
Then let users switch between the filtered and unfiltered view, or look at the analog of the "Spam" folder.
This allows to study pieces of information that are deemed "controversial" or even "malevolent" and make your own opinion, if you're so inclined.
Even more, it could apply several different cultural filters, like "content likely offensive for X", where X is a major religious or cultural group, much the same way as many providers currently mark content as inappropriate for children.
and then there will be a million "Top 10 things the government doesn't want you to know" videos that amplify whatever it was they were trying to censor
The Govt pontificates about big tech issues without putting in the effort of making laws. Big tech is forced to anticipate what might defame them or be used by the Govt as ammo to garner public sympathy. It is a delicate balancing act between censorship and freedom.
Zuck tried to put the onus on the Govt to define right and wrong, true and false, but to no avail. It is hard to please everybody unfortunately.
I really don’t see the hard part. Just because we consider something to be harmful and negative (like propaganda) doesn’t mean making it illegal is desirable.
Even for the things that are illegal, it can be illegal to publish something but legal to provide connectivity services to the offender.
I apologize if I missed your point, but in the case of fake news for instance, iiuc, you're arguing that fake news on FB is legal and that FB isn't responsible for such content on their platform.
Information warfare is fairly real and potent in how it has weakened US democracy and vaccination efforts recently. Ultimately, arguably, this has real consequences for the economy, national security etc.
I am not saying that FB is not responsible. I am saying that FB should not have their services blocked by ISPs or government because of fake news on their platform.
You're correct in your observation but state-sanctioned censorship is not the solution.
In case we're talking around each other; what kind of laws would you like to see put in place?
> So user generated fake news is ok, and so is foreign propaganda influencing elections?
I mean... yes? People are ultimately responsible for their own worldview and vote. They are also perfectly entitled to consume any information from any source they please, aren't they?
A side note: foreign propaganda is not worse than domestic propaganda. Swarms of dedicated activists using rioting and other violence to achieve political goals (the dictionary definition of terrorism), in collusion with a sympathetic tech industry that suppresses any dissenting thought, is propaganda and it does influence elections. When these companies do things like ban Trump, they are illegally making a campaign contribution without abiding by the laws of campaign finance. When they do things like censor discussions of the lab leak theory, they propagandize the entire world by freeing the CCP of the bare minimum for accountability.
I am not a fan of any approach here and largely agree with you.
Media censorship did very well exist in pre-tech journalism as well and was more blatant. Eg. Iraq war WMD claims etc. Big tech censorship mirrors this but in a very limited manner since we know it is happening at any point in time and such information is available outside of the major platforms, which wasn't the case pre mainstream internet.
Ultimately, big tech regulation of content is similar to how a WSJ or NYT would manage what they publish. They've been forced into this position with all the criticism over the last few years - it isn't something they wanted to invest in. It looks more like censorship because of the stepping back from the previously laissez faire approach to content, whereas NYT's baseline was self regulation (so it wasn't as apparent). Big tech media is privately held like a bar or a restaurant and in my opinion have every right to control who is on the platform and what is not ok to say - if one doesn't like it - they can leave.
If you live in a more populous state like California, you have much less voting power in the Senate and somewhat less voting power in the house and the executive office.
I can much more easily leave a company that I don’t like than the government. A company does not have the power of the state to impose its will on me.
This is the same government that less than a year ago wanted to come down on Saturday Night Live for being mean and is passing laws on the state level right now to forbid teachers from teaching history that doesn’t conform to it’s world view.
It never ceases to amaze me that people want to give the same entity more power that can and will actually take your freedom away.
> A company does not have the power of the state to impose its will on me.
No, but it may have the economic power of a (near or total) monopoly to do that which - depending on the time and the place - may be more powerful than the state.
I don't think it's hard to extrapolate from current conditions. Corporations are currently quite powerful - they control the main lever of politics, which is money. They are already using those levers to bend governments to their will, and utilizing pet governments to produce favorable tax conditions in certain countries to reduce their contribution to others. Eventually, there will be small governments that are almost entirely puppet states of large corporations. Eventually those corporate states will grow and consolidate and you'll live in a world where corporations have as much or more power than some small legitimate countries, then some medium ones, then eventually some large ones, and finally more power than anyone else.
Corporations like amazon and google might not be self-perpetuating due to the entropy concentration inherent in companies that get that large but imagine if you had a organization of that size controlled by an AI officer team. It'll happen, just a matter of how long it takes.
So I listed all the things a powerful government can do - control the media to enhance their worldview and threaten to take away private party, arrest and kill innocent people with immunity, take away freedom over petty crimes, etc.
And I should be more worried about corporations evading taxes?
I can tell you I’m much less worried about walking into any of the Big Tech companies and being treated unfairly than I am driving down the street and being harassed by instruments of the government.
As far as using AI to discriminate. Law enforcement and the government has been discriminating for hundreds of years. They don’t need AI to decide to harass me.
The easiest answer for all these problems is decentralization and choice. Google and other tech companies are effectively governments. They hold power and influence over billions, are insulated from competition by network effects, and also regularly act in monopolistic ways. They need to be broken up and regulated.
Can any of these companies arrest me because I “fit the description” or take away my life and liberty? It’s a fact that because of the way that the US is setup between the electoral college, two senators per state and gerrymandering it’s not “majority rule”. This isn’t political. It’s the Constitution as designed.
Until tech companies can take away property via imminent domain, money via civil forfeiture, or put me in jail, they are not anything like the government.
A. Private companies cannot force you to do a single thing! Governments have entire agencies and departments dedicated to keeping people they deem dangerous in line, using a list of powers up to and including the right to take their citizens lives, if they do choose. No private company has this kind of power! Not even close!
B. People are not empty vessels, free to be molded by wiley corporate villains. People possess values and opinions, and (much to the chagrin of both corporations and politicians) it is very difficult to change people's minds.
I’m a European so I’m usually one of the first to defend legislation of companies. But when it comes to censorship that should entirely be down to the platform. Some platforms might have a no nudity policy, some have a zero trolling rule. Others call fair game to all of the above. Different people like to engage on different levels: some are into high brow arts, others just want to trade stories about getting smashed on drugs. And there’s a whole plethora of interests in between from mums talking about the different shades of brown their kids have squeezed out this week to teenagers talking about nipple slips. None of them have any less right to talk in a safe space than the other. So why should there be a law disclosing what people can talk about?
Ok, I agree that Q Anon, anti-vax chat and so on and so forth causes more harm than good. But is it really the governments place to dictate that? What if the government was the one setting these narratives (not that hard to imagine given Trump and Johnson are two of the biggest serial liars in western political history)? Remember Trump threatened to shut Twitter down because Twitter fact checked Trumps post about election rigging.
For free speech to work, you absolutely need companies to be responsible for what they consider acceptable content rather than the government to dictate it.
" Some platforms might have a no nudity policy, some have a zero trolling rule. Others call fair game to all of the above. "
If this all came with a duty of interoperability, I would be fine with that. But walled gardens that do their utmost to make leaving them really unpleasant and possibly expensive to the users ... that sounds a lot like coercion. And European law usually recognizes that individuals coerced, even softly, by large businesses, need protection.
That’s a separate problem though and should be handled like so. Dictating in law what content independent platforms can and cannot disallow doesn’t solve the walled garden problem. It just places greater challenges on new entrants / would-be competitors while still allowing walled gardens to exist. Plus you also then lose the diversity of TOS that might attract new users to new platforms. It’s a lose/lose outcome that doesn’t even attempt to solve the problem you’re identifying.
The problem is that these companies are open and free until the point where they gain a significant network effect. Once they are in a position to aggressively eliminate competition they start appointing themselves as the arbiters of truth.
I agree that they should be able to change their policies but if they are going to edit content then they should be treated like any other publication that has editors and be held legally responsible for the content that they publish.
A better approach would be to give the user an option to select between filtered and unfiltered content on install with the default being unfiltered and the filtering being provided by the users preferred third party entity.
The great thing about the internet is if you don’t agree with Facebook, Twitter or Google’s TOS you can use another platform or even publish your own platform.
People might talk about FAANG as having “monopolies” but the web was built on independent Joes hosting personal websites and if the content is good then people will eventually find their way there. And we’ve seen the rise of other social platforms precisely because people have felt they wanted to communicate under differed TOS, so this isn’t even a theoretical point.
No, they should host everything until legally obligated otherwise. If CP was legal they should host it, and if you have moral qualms with that notion you should write your local representative and let them know what content should be regulated.
People join specific social groups because of conversational bias. It might be a mums group where the content is mainly baby related. Or a theatre group with talks about fine arts. Or a retro gaming group that talks about old computer games. They will have policies in place to ensure the content of their group stays focused. Some groups will be aimed at families or being safe for work so might have a no nudity rule. Some might have a no trolling rule because they want a friendly atmosphere. Some might have a no sales rule because they don’t want their group to turn into yet another market place. These are all TOS, censorship rules if you will, that are placed in specialist groups.
Your reasoning would say I could join a kids cartoon group and post extreme pornography because it’s legal and if any parents object then they should have the law changed to ban porn for everyone.
Quite obviously that’s a dumb way of managing online content. Let the platforms manage what content they deem appropriate for their specific audiences and if you really want a zero-censorship community then you personally should join one rather than forcing every man, woman and child into wading through the same content you personally enjoy.
The same way we regulate any business and mandate they abide by regulation. Or the same way we force phone companies to be regulated as common carriers. The same way your power utility cannot cut you off based on your political opinion. All it takes is political will.
I'm not entirely sure that's the best model for today, but that's the historic model for a private business that's compelled to allow all legal speech. That's why UPS and FedEx still have to deliver to the New Order (the current incarnation of the American Nazi party).
I partly agree with you. But who gets to make those decisions at Google and what happens to your data when they do? These massive corporations have found that they don't need to value customer support and that includes immediately blocking you from everything you have at their discretion.
Does it really matter who? The point is it is a corporate term of service and if anyone doesn’t like it then they’re free to use another platform (of which there are many).
> what happens to your data when they do?
That’s a more interesting question. In an ideal world everyone would have offline backups of anything posted online but clearly that’s an unrealistic expectation. I’d hope the platform would offer its users a path to migrate off, even if their account has been publicly banned. Sadly history has demonstrated that’s almost never the case.
Maybe that is where the government legislation needs to be? Stating that banned accounts have a grace period to back up their content?
> These massive corporations have found that they don't need to value customer support and that includes immediately blocking you from everything you have at their discretion.
I agree but that’s a tangential point and legislating that Google et al host any content and all legal content wouldn’t fix the customer service problem.
The thing is, people are never going to agree where the line is drawn. So I’d rather let individual companies decide where they draw the line and if that happens to be not where you’d agree, then you can go support an alternate, if this there are many, who draws the line elsewhere. And for those who don’t want a private entity owning the infrastructure, there is always solutions like IPFS.