The amount of people trying to assign social media companies the role of "publisher", responsible for everything that happens on their platform, is absurd. It's how we get websites that are "legally required" to look over EVERYTHING that you do, at all times, and have robots judge if you are being too mean or not, just so that they can say they are putting in an effort. Social media companies should not be responsible for anything their users post, or it will be the complete death of any sort of online privacy.
>The amount of people trying to assign social media companies the role of "publisher", responsible for everything that happens on their platform, is absurd.
It’s simple. Either users have absolute control over the content that they see, or the social media companies are publishers.
Go to YouTube. Log out. What do you see? It’s not nothing. They’ve decided what to show you.
Tech and social media companies are algorithmically dictating what you see and hiding behind the fact that it’s not “their content.” Why is this considered different from a news site which exclusively hosts opinion pieces from independent journalists?
This is before we even get into editorializing, which is now common on every major social media platform. Not only are social media platforms dictating what you see but also they are editorializing that content before you see. And yet somehow they aren’t publishers, because reasons.
> Tech and social media companies are algorithmically dictating what you see and hiding behind the fact that it’s not “their content.” Why is this considered different from a news site which exclusively hosts opinion pieces from independent journalists?
They're considered different because the news site doesn’t have an “upload article”-button that lets anyone host an article of their choice on the news site in question.
neither does editorials that news sites approve and publish. Are we suggesting (on a site with point based sorting nonetheless) that curation is an inherently manipulative strategy on the internet with terabytes of content created per day?
>They're considered different because the news site doesn’t have an “upload article”-button that lets anyone host an article of their choice on the news site in question.
Social media companies don’t let anyone post about anything they want, either. They’ll ban you for not following their rules.
Not only are social media platforms dictating what you see but also they are editorializing that content before you see. And yet somehow they aren’t publishers, because reasons.
You are forced to go to their site everyday because reasons
It's how we get websites that are "legally required" to look over EVERYTHING that you do, at all times, and have robots judge if you are being too mean or not, just so that they can say they are putting in an effort.
That sounds ridiculous until you realise that they already do it. They decide what to show in your timeline by looking over every post and matching what they think you'll engage with most. They know exactly when you're being a dick, what posts to show you to encourage or discourage that behavior, who to show your posts to, and so on. Adding a box to say "this post looks pretty bad, maybe take a break now" wouldn't be difficult. They don't want to do it because negative shitposts make them money.
TikTok in fact shows you a video of a man saying “woah you’ve been scrolling for a while. Maybe you should take a break” after like an hour. So it’s totally a doable thing for them to interject and suggest a break.
Like you said, they review every post already. The tools are there they’re just being used for the wrong goals.
Now you just propagate propaganda of social networks. The non-legal definition of a publisher is entity which collects, selects and packs content. You see, the very moment social networks, forums and other platforms choose to moderate the content by removing "inappropriate" content they effectively become publishers due to selectivity. You just cannot have your cake and eat it too.
Either you do not filter the content and shift responsibility to actual content creators (I have no idea how it would be possible to implement that without ditching the very concept of "feed") or you select the content and take on full legal responsibility for what you selected.
I don't think this is about content at all. We are not asking them to do more, we are asking them to do less. Less dark UX patterns, less addictive habit forming UI, less AI to maximize engagement.
