I like, Matt. Hope you are familiar with an idea of the earliest internet idea: connect every post everywhere with the IP address it originated from. Charge two-cents to five-cents for each post to any online website or app. This money goes to government to increase internet access to all.
As Mark Stahlman taught me to say, freedom disconnected from healthy, right, duties and obligations is immature and childish.
"To put it differently, if a newspaper regularly trumpeted the need to shoot someone, it would be shut down under common law unless it stopped doing that." And if you did it over the phone the phone company would not be, because common carrier. Section 230 is the only way you have anything but giant megacorps throwing third-worlders into the content moderation trauma woodchipper. Terrible, as they say, take, OP. Stick with what you know, cause this ain't it, chief.
"Clarence Thomas, for instance, recently realized that common carrier rules should apply to tech platforms."
Based on the presumption that the tech platforms are run by censorious liberals. Thomas et al. would have no scruples "distinguishing" a Musk-led Twitter and protecting it from attempts at regulation.
How does it benefit consumers to take away their voice online? Because that is what 230 is about, the users. Twitter would just immediately take down anything any time someone complained. USA would become a libel tourism hotspot.
The Fairness Doctrine worked. For 50 years, radio news and comment AND ENTERTAINMENT had to be nonpartisan. If a comedian made a joke about Republicans, he had to make a similar joke about Democrats. Comedians were thus forced to make FACTUAL jokes treating ALL POLITICIANS with contempt. These jokes were genuinely funny.
Section 230 is a pre-requisite for any entity to host a website that facilitates content discussion.
If it was repealed, and I was to say spam this comment section with illegal content, you would be liable to remove that. The cost and expense of mitigating or removing that content is much higher than the cost of me spamming your website.
Corporate/political/interested parties would just use illegal content as a way to attack each other, as the infrastructure for spam (Adds, links etc) already exists it would be trivial to run a take down for hire service, The internet would be become unusable for all but the most well resourced technology monopolies who can afford to pay mitigation, or collude to create a detente to stop it.
Love your work Matt. I read it religously. I have no issue with your left leaning politics because you usually leave them out save a couple jabs at the right here and there. However, you've started showing it more and more lately. The theme that everything bad is because of the right and some left is bad but no specifics or blame. This one takes the cake though. There was never an issue with Section 230 when all social media was a leftist tool to silence the right. Now that someone from the conservative side owns one of them, and it's time to scream section 230. I hope you can keep this urge in check as to not taint or dilute the amazing work you are doing against the devastating monopolies in the world (of which this has nothing to do with...)
Matt, Why aren't you worried from a concentration, threat to democracy perspective that the richest guy in the world who runs an EV company, a rocket company with government contracts, and a tunnel company with government contracts, now wants to be a private social medial platform mogul?
Maybe the government should just make surveillance capitalism illegal. If these social media companies have a product that people want we can pay for it just like we do with the other utilities and/or entertainment we use.
Section 230 is certainly problematic but I also worry how much more censorship would happen if it were repealed. Something has to happen though, our damn government seems to make policy decisions based on Twitter outrage so that is a huge problem.
All of these fanboys don’t get it. Having the world’s richest man take private what has become a major social network, especially for those who read actual journalism, is the kind of dystopian move one might read about in a history book 20 years from now. This is an erratic individual who flaunts SEC regulations and moved to Texas, which has one of the most Ameristan governments in the nation. I worry about our future.
Finally someone articulates the correct approach to Section 230. If a user is paying a platform, the that user can say whatever they want (eventually suffering consequences), it is like hosting a server at AWS or using a phone line; if a user does not pay, then the platform is *buying* (or paying for) content from that user with free hosting so it can sell ads against that content (or tracking data or something else), like a newspaper, then the platform is responsible for the content the users post (eventually suffering consequences). I'd argue that repealing Section 230 is not even necessary, what's necessary is to correctly interpret and apply the laws that are already in place. This applies to Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, etc everything that is "free" to use.
If Twitter goes private and starts charging for hosting tweets then it is a platform according to Section 230, if it does not then it is behaving like an online newspaper or publication of some kind (which is the case right now).
I like, Matt. Hope you are familiar with an idea of the earliest internet idea: connect every post everywhere with the IP address it originated from. Charge two-cents to five-cents for each post to any online website or app. This money goes to government to increase internet access to all.
As Mark Stahlman taught me to say, freedom disconnected from healthy, right, duties and obligations is immature and childish.
"To put it differently, if a newspaper regularly trumpeted the need to shoot someone, it would be shut down under common law unless it stopped doing that." And if you did it over the phone the phone company would not be, because common carrier. Section 230 is the only way you have anything but giant megacorps throwing third-worlders into the content moderation trauma woodchipper. Terrible, as they say, take, OP. Stick with what you know, cause this ain't it, chief.
"Clarence Thomas, for instance, recently realized that common carrier rules should apply to tech platforms."
Based on the presumption that the tech platforms are run by censorious liberals. Thomas et al. would have no scruples "distinguishing" a Musk-led Twitter and protecting it from attempts at regulation.
How does it benefit consumers to take away their voice online? Because that is what 230 is about, the users. Twitter would just immediately take down anything any time someone complained. USA would become a libel tourism hotspot.
The Fairness Doctrine worked. For 50 years, radio news and comment AND ENTERTAINMENT had to be nonpartisan. If a comedian made a joke about Republicans, he had to make a similar joke about Democrats. Comedians were thus forced to make FACTUAL jokes treating ALL POLITICIANS with contempt. These jokes were genuinely funny.
I respectfully disagree
Section 230 is a pre-requisite for any entity to host a website that facilitates content discussion.
If it was repealed, and I was to say spam this comment section with illegal content, you would be liable to remove that. The cost and expense of mitigating or removing that content is much higher than the cost of me spamming your website.
Corporate/political/interested parties would just use illegal content as a way to attack each other, as the infrastructure for spam (Adds, links etc) already exists it would be trivial to run a take down for hire service, The internet would be become unusable for all but the most well resourced technology monopolies who can afford to pay mitigation, or collude to create a detente to stop it.
Love your work Matt. I read it religously. I have no issue with your left leaning politics because you usually leave them out save a couple jabs at the right here and there. However, you've started showing it more and more lately. The theme that everything bad is because of the right and some left is bad but no specifics or blame. This one takes the cake though. There was never an issue with Section 230 when all social media was a leftist tool to silence the right. Now that someone from the conservative side owns one of them, and it's time to scream section 230. I hope you can keep this urge in check as to not taint or dilute the amazing work you are doing against the devastating monopolies in the world (of which this has nothing to do with...)
Matt, Why aren't you worried from a concentration, threat to democracy perspective that the richest guy in the world who runs an EV company, a rocket company with government contracts, and a tunnel company with government contracts, now wants to be a private social medial platform mogul?
Maybe the government should just make surveillance capitalism illegal. If these social media companies have a product that people want we can pay for it just like we do with the other utilities and/or entertainment we use.
Section 230 is certainly problematic but I also worry how much more censorship would happen if it were repealed. Something has to happen though, our damn government seems to make policy decisions based on Twitter outrage so that is a huge problem.
All of these fanboys don’t get it. Having the world’s richest man take private what has become a major social network, especially for those who read actual journalism, is the kind of dystopian move one might read about in a history book 20 years from now. This is an erratic individual who flaunts SEC regulations and moved to Texas, which has one of the most Ameristan governments in the nation. I worry about our future.
Finally someone articulates the correct approach to Section 230. If a user is paying a platform, the that user can say whatever they want (eventually suffering consequences), it is like hosting a server at AWS or using a phone line; if a user does not pay, then the platform is *buying* (or paying for) content from that user with free hosting so it can sell ads against that content (or tracking data or something else), like a newspaper, then the platform is responsible for the content the users post (eventually suffering consequences). I'd argue that repealing Section 230 is not even necessary, what's necessary is to correctly interpret and apply the laws that are already in place. This applies to Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, etc everything that is "free" to use.
If Twitter goes private and starts charging for hosting tweets then it is a platform according to Section 230, if it does not then it is behaving like an online newspaper or publication of some kind (which is the case right now).