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Comment by waheoo | Hacker News Reader

Id say the stance on platforms is stifiling free speech.

Private companies should not be able to moderate speech and claim to be a platform.

You're either a publisher or your not. If you're a public platform, your users should be protected by public laws.

For rhe most part the current state of affairs has worked so far but i would suggest it hasnt for some and is starting to show its weaknesses in a more polarized environment.

For the downvoters, this isnt some new opinion of mine because of the talking points from trump, ive had this view since the torrent debates of the early 2000s and other similar situations with people like snowden.

If you disagree because with what i have to say, please explain.

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This issue has come up a lot but I think a lot of people don't quite know the history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...

In particular, this either-or positioning was potentially the law prior to 1996 (following court decisions at that time). But legislators were concerned about what I've just heard Berin Szoka call "the Moderator's Dilemma", so they wanted to remove that obligation in order to avoid creating an incentive to never moderate anything.

At the time, it seems that they felt that we could have a wide range of platforms and forums with a wide range of moderation and editorial positions. Or even a wide range of forums within a platform with different moderation and editorial positions, like Reddit and the subreddits. It doesn't seem like that's held up super-duper well in various ways, but it doesn't seem like an unreasonable expectation or aspiration to me.

I would particularly like to push back on the idea that it's somehow obvious that everyone should once again experience this Moderator's Dilemma and have to choose between absolute neutrality and content liability, or that recreating this dilemma in its pre-1996 form is a good way to deal with editorial bias or with the impact of activist pressures on popular platforms.

Thanks for the background, i think its invaluable.

I dont think its obvious.

Reverting back to the Moderators dilemma would put the onus of liability back on police and the law where these things csn be dealt with properly and fairly (so far as the legal system is our definition of fair.)

Since we can both submit to the fact that neither the moderators dilemma nor what we have today is very ideal, what would you suggest?

Fwiw my contention is likely that I simply think that falling back on the extreme that is the dilemma is the only option that actually has some consistency to it. I do not however ignore the fact that it comes at great cost. I guess im just willing to bear those costs more than the next guy.

Further disclosure, i think information wants to be free and that anything that prevents me from sharing 1's and 0's (whatever they form) along the pipes i pay for is problematic.

> Since we can both submit to the fact that neither the moderators dilemma nor what we have today is very ideal, what would you suggest?

That's a great question, and I'm not sure I have a good answer to it.

> Fwiw my contention is likely that I simply think that falling back on the extreme that is the dilemma is the only option that actually has some consistency to it. I do not however ignore the fact that it comes at great cost. I guess im just willing to bear those costs more than the next guy.

I can appreciate that too.

I have a sort of answer to this.

The issue seems to be generally framed as "FULL CENSORSHIP" or "FULL ANARCHY NO MODERATION", with little middle ground considered.

The US already have a sort of line as to what it as a culture generally accepts as far as content goes, usually on sexuality (largely due to children). Here, the issue is then where to draw that line.

The key here, as far as I'm concerned is to allow for effective moderation of a community such that it maintains it's identity, but prevent the silencing of ideas and concepts. As such, a whitelist of moderation criteria for platforms may serve as a viable alternative. Said (non-exhaustive) whitelist for things that can be moderated upon would include: - Spam - Tone - Illegal content - Topic

Selective moderation would remain an issue, of course, but that's a fundamental issue as long as human moderators exist. Of course you also run into the issue of deliberate mismoderation, but then you can use the bat of loss of section 230 protection to hammer them then.

That's interesting, thanks.

> The issue seems to be generally framed as "FULL CENSORSHIP" or "FULL ANARCHY NO MODERATION", with little middle ground considered.

With just a few exceptions, most platforms already seem to be somewhere in between now -- but it seems like the most popular ones also coming under more pressure to change some of the substance of their moderation.

> Topic

From what I've seen recently, I think this would be one of the most contentious to get people to agree on (including in particular the interpretation of what is "on topic" or "off topic"). I just recently read a thread about how hard this is where people were talking about the tendency of politics to creep into forums about hobbies, which some of the people involved wanted to find a way to avoid.

But that posed a lot of thorny questions... like

* what if some people feel like a certain political or social topic is obviously very relevant to a certain hobby or interest, but other people don't?

* what if some people want to make a critique of the hobby or interest or its associated community, but other people think the critique is mistaken or off topic, or don't agree with its premises?

* what if some people want to coordinate a defense of the hobby or interest or its associated community against a political or cultural attack? (e.g. we should fight this legislation that would be bad for our community, or we should coordinate a response to so-and-so who is badmouthing our community)

* what if some people feel that something is so important that it's inherently always on topic everywhere?

* what if some people mention their other views or affiliations in passing in a way that feels genuinely innocent to them, but that upsets other people? (e.g. they use an avatar that expresses some kind of political, social, or religious identity or some negative implication toward other people's identity; or they just tell a story that's like "while I was doing off-topic thing X, I had this on-topic thought Y")

* what if people within the community get in a fight that somehow seems to tie in to a larger social conflict?

* what if people want to have a meta-conversation about the best way of handling these issues?

* what if people feel frustrated because some off-topic posts (that are less controversial in some way) get treated more gently or indulgently than others (that are more controversial)? (e.g. Bob doesn't get in trouble for writing a 100-word anecdote on the cat fancy forum about his cooking, but Sarah does get in trouble for her 100-word anecdote about her political organizing)

* what if people disagree about whether historical or philosophical aspects of a primarily practical subject matter are on-topic or not? (what if some people feel that some of the historical or philosophical commentary is "really" thinly-disguised political commentary, because it implies that probably someone was awesome or terrible in some way connection with the practical topic?)

I don't mean to say that all ways of handling these issues are just as good as all other ways, but more that it's not always clear whether there's a meaningful way to define topicality -- or at least not that people would be able to agree on them easily.

I once had a personal experience of this that doesn't really relate to current events. :-) When Dmitry Sklyarov (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd.) was arrested in August 2001, I ran an e-mail discussion list for people who were trying to free him. So far so good -- it seems like all of the subscribers were there because they wanted to free Dmitry and just wanted to talk about the best way of doing that.

But just a few weeks later, the September 11 attack happened, and immediately people on the mailing list wanted to talk about it, because it was such an intense and raw thing, and almost immediately they got into a fight about their views about the U.S. government! I was very anguished to have to be in the position of trying to force them to stop in order to get back to talking about the core concern of freeing Dmitry.

But of course the attacks were also on everyone's mind, and in principle they did have a lot of practical consequences for our goals, e.g. because it would be drastically harder to get press coverage, because relations between the U.S. and Russia might change as a result of the war in Afghanistan, because Dmitry himself might be alarmed to suddenly be surrounded by so much upheaval, because people's availability to protest about the DMCA might be reduced by their desire to deal with consequences of the attacks, because officials like Robert Mueller whom we were trying to influence might become preoccupied with a whole new set of concerns, etc.

I'm really not sure exactly what would have been either most fair or most useful in terms of what aspects of the September 11 attacks I should or should not have let people talk about on the mailing list.

Also right now there is a thread about LAEDA and EARN IT on another mailing list that I'm on, where people started talking about the legality of buying body armor, and about gun politics, and some other stuff. The moderator got annoyed and tried to get people to stop, but on the other hand these analogies aren't entirely irrelevant -- for example, some of the politicians who are going to vote on legislation about encryption might be influenced by lobbying and advocacy that tries to draw analogies or distinctions between encryption and body armor. Even though the list members may not be very good at discussing it constructively, it's not like there is no relevance at all of U.S. gun politics for U.S. encryption policy.

I was also in a thread just a few weeks ago here on Hacker News about "what topics are within the purview of public health?", and we found it very hard to agree about that. If Hacker News were about public health, we might have a huge ballooning disagreement about that scope question -- breaking out into public view pretty regularly.

I wrote a pile before I realised it was largely irrelevant, especially since the largest platforms are also the easiest to handle.

The easiest one to handle first would be the topic-agnostic platforms. Those also tend to be the biggest ones. Facebook and Reddit as the bigger examples. For these, the answer is simple: Let users create whatever they want and apply rules however they want, but allow the rise of new communities. Perhaps a community forking system can serve as a countermeasure to network effects.

However, the key thing here for these platforms is that the platforms themselves are barred from impeding speech. The individual subcommunities and their respective leaders are not. As such, there's a clear line between the platform and it's community and subsequently the roles and responsibilities of each. After all, the key difference here is that between publisher and platform.

> Perhaps a community forking system can serve as a countermeasure to network effects.

This type of innovation is exactly why i dont buy into the idea that some reasonable middle ground can be had by industry self moderation and that that is the best we can do.

Its not. There is a better way to do this, weve been lazy. Force facebook to allow free speech, they will figure out a new way to keep people happy. Forking communities along issues is a great idea, not without bubbling problems but it solves the "i dont want loke seeing this" problem.

Its still could be construed as censorship but only if its not optoutable for the consumers.

See SLAPP

Reverting to the law doesn't really change anything.

Laws are almost as arbitrary as moderation guidelines. And while they are democratically legitimised in principle, they are rather static by nature and absurdly unchanging due to current political dysfunction. The chaotic system of the current "court of public opinion" probably leads to an outcome that is far closer to the actual desires of a plurality of people.

The law also tend to divide content into sharp legal/illegal categories, whereas the more chaotic practice of differing moderation policies allows for a gray area. And that area is where some meaningful discourse could possibly happen.

Logically, moderational discretion happens only within the space of legal content. It is therefore, indeed, smaller than the maximum allowed by law.

But that is no different from any other group we participate in offline. At work, Thanksgiving with the family, or in some random store, we do not insist on being allowed to use the full spectrum of what's legal. If someone starts screaming obscenities in the theatre row behind you, they'll hopefully be escorted out.

Right, but those are private spaces.

Social media is what i would consider a public space.

Your analogy would be analogous to police locking up lawful protestors.

> Social media is what i would consider a public space.

This is where the true disagreement is. We can both believe in the constitution, in the first amendment, and in section 230, but I don't believe social media is a public space, because the person paying for the server is not the government. To me, these are very explicitly private organizations running web applications. For it to be a public space, it would necessarily not be limited in existence to the ability of a private organization to keep it running profitably.

Madison Square Garden is a private space, because someone owns it; it cost money to build, it costs money to maintain, there are finite seats, etc. The organization paying for the thing to exist has authority over the thing. If you want a public space, you can either create one explicitly, or petition the government to create a social media platform bound by the first amendment. It isn't Reddit or Twitter. Those are someone else's property.

No, it's a more fundamental disagreement than what constitutes a public vs private space, it's a disagreement about who gets to choose. If a private corporation gets to decide by virtue of ownership - property rights granted by societal contract to begin with - then they have unilateral, unaccountable power over society. We are in the process of deciding the nature of corporate personhood and how applicable the Bill of Rights is to organizations so what is "public" and "private" is still an open question.

> If a private corporation gets to decide by virtue of ownership - property rights granted by societal contract to begin with - then they have unilateral, unaccountable power over society.

Again, I have the opposite interpretation. If the government gives a private organization property rights, the government is the holder of power over society. The organization has authority over what the government gave it the rights to, and the government gave them the right (with section 230) to moderate their property in the way they are now.

> The organization has authority over what the government gave it the rights to, and the government gave them the right (with section 230) to moderate their property in the way they are now.

I think we're in agreement.

Laws are not immutable which is what I'm getting at. We're past the "public" vs "private" debate, we're now debating whether to change laws and adjust which rights private organizations have - whether to adjust or repeal 230 entirely.

This entirely fictional platform/publisher distinction makes absolutely no sense. Why should someone's attempt to remedy a specific ill they happen to notice (say, delete illegal porn your users posted) create an obligation to assume all liability for all content?

If I help an accident victim once, am I responsible for helping every accident victim? Why?

No it doesnt create an obligation. The obligation is coming from acting as a platform, a nuetral ground where people can share information. The second you step in and curate or moderate you cross the line into being a publisher.

There is more discussion about the moderators dillema above.

That doesn't mean anything.

Facebook doesn't claim to be neither "platform" or "neutral ground" or "publisher", anywhere. There is no law making that distinction. It's entirely in your head!

It's a website. You may post. They may delete. You may leave.

If just one of their billions of users writes something bad about billionaire <y>, who then sues in a UK court and gets a Gawker-like verdict, Facebook suddenly owes them a a few million of whatever the local currency is.

Repeat for every single mistake of their team of moderators, and they are done for within 20 minutes. And so are Youtube, HN, and Google.

No moderation would lead to 4chan. Or, really, worse. Because even the chans all moderate to some degree, as far as I can tell. This would also be the end of any platform as we know it, obviously.

Therefore, you either don't even understand what you are arguing for. Or you somehow enjoy the idea of every single online community degrading to a constant stream of snuff videos and swastikas.

I've done some moderation in the past. Of the posts actually written by humans maybe 1% got removed for not following the stated rules. Does removing 1% of posts that somebody else makes, make me a "publisher"? Seems a bit rediculous to me.

Are you implying that if I stand up a small public forum or message board for some niche interest using my own assets that I am unable to boot people off it or moderate in any way without being deemed a publisher and being liable for content?

I think it is about scale. If you stand up a public forum and you have 100 users, do your moderation choices actually sway a large percentage of public opinion? Consider instead a social media platform with a billion users and its moderation choices. It is time for us to use some common sense and not just dissolve everything down to that simplistic binary terms. Having a forum doesn't make you a publisher. Moderation isn't always bad. There are many other nuances like reach, scale, trust, etc. For instance, there is a huge difference between me posting disinformation of my private blog, and me publishing disinformation is a newspaper read by hundreds of thousands daily. My responsibility and influence over the public increases with the reach I have. We need to think the same way about social media.

> I think it is about scale. If you stand up a public forum and you have 100 users, do your moderation choices actually sway a large percentage of public opinion? Consider instead a social media platform with a billion users and its moderation choices

Where's the line (aka "Sorites paradox")? And who is making the decision?

Yes. If you create an open space, you are not allowed to moderate free speech.

You are allowed to moderare harmful illegal content, you are allowed to moderate spam, and other service breaking content. But kicking someone off because you dont like what they say is censorship.

Are you saying it is not censorship somehow?

Note, im perfectly fine with you moderating a private forum, e.g. behind a login wall.

But if you use the term "public" for visibility there is probably something wrong with censoring speech.

And yes, if you want to curate you are a publisher and are liable for the content.

If the laws around what liable means are a problem for the tech world maybe they need cleaning up a bit but i think some form of liability should be placed there anyway.

You dont get to shape modern discourse and then get to get off scotfree when everything goes pearshaped.

If your stance is that people should need to log in to see content in order to have moderation, that's fine.

Moderation is absolutely censorship, and I should have every right to censor on a physical or digital platform that I own. If people behave in a manner I don't like in my physical business or on my private property, then I should have the right to remove them. If people behave in a way I don't like on my digital asset, I should have the right to remove them. Their use of my asset is predicated on my consent baring any other contractual details. If they don't like it, they are free to set up their own private enterprises with their own rules of conduct. Saying I am somehow liable for the content that remains is not reasonable. I shouldn't be liable for someone talking shit in my physical business, for a friend saying inflammatory things while in my private residence, for inflammatory conduct on a forum, or any other speech that is not my own unless I myself explicitly endorse that speech (with the exception of illegality that I know about). Me booting off person X while leaving person Y doesn't mean I inherently endorse person Y or agree with them.

I agree with that stance. And this is where i think the laws might need changing to protect those who are merely providing a private space but do still have to deal with reality.

I think potentially we need a third classification to indemnify private spaces of liability.

I still believe that public spaces should remain open, nuetral and unmoderated.

The world is a scary place, the laws dont line up between countries and weird scary shit will be posted online.

Im ok with this. Im ok with the internet being a place to explore our human psychy in its entirety.

I dont want it to be a nanny stated corporate friendly chopshop for ideas.

> Private companies should not be able to moderate speech and claim to be a platform.

Basically any site with user generated content exists because the sites have been able to moderate their own content without having to assume liability for the content they do allow.

Several places have tried the full unmoderated thing and it seems to always devolve into shit as 'trolls' and edgy humor degrades into plain bigotry as People who don't like the edgy/extreme content leave and the remaining group becomes more and more extreme.

There's no way real to do forums, social media, or sites like medium or blogs without companies being able to host content without being liable for the content they're hosting that doesn't break the law.

Right, and as we have seen there is no way for sites like medium or facebook to operate without falling down to censorship of expression.

Maybe they shouldnt be allowed to operate?

Maybe this is why we cant have nice things.

Maybe, we need to come up with some other platform type where moderation is by the people for the people.

Regarding what we have now, its a dictatorship.

GAB, Parler and Diaspora - all still exist.

You're not going to see me there, though. Because "by the people" is always a complete shitshow.

Moderation by the people for the people is exactly what we have now. You think Medium or Facebook want to put so much effort into moderation? Their moderation is merely a reflection of what most people want, and when it strays, they are punished and shamed by the masses. Journalists, advertisers, and users start yelling at you for allowing [insert unpopular group here] to mingle with the rest of them.

Ironically you'd likely need a more dictatorial platform to avoid censorship. You'd need a strong dictator to resist the censorship demands of the people. What we have now is a tyranny of the majority.

>There's no way real to do forums, social media, or sites like medium or blogs without companies being able to host content without being liable for the content they're hosting that doesn't break the law

That doesn't seem true or tragic at all. By your own admission it works it just fine in the literal sense, you just don't seem to like that it would cut into platforms you want to indulge in.

What becomes undesirable is things like front page recommendation systems and popularity lists that might now include inflammatory bubbles. I say boohoo, Medium won't get to actively leverage its sea of garbage authors as easily and reddit will have to let the sub-reddits market themselves, nothing of societal value is lost here. Discord style insulated communities become the norm and things move on. And the only casualties end up being shills for left leaning ideology like twitter and tech sector pets like forums that have little relevance to the mainstream.

The only reason the tech sector cares about handling this issue with finesse is because no one wants to admit that the industry actually does pander to one side of America's polarized system. That's a feature we as a community built for ourselves It's not a mystery why tech products and beliefs have ended up so homogenous, the industry increasingly homogenized as it congregated in a heavily political region. But if anyone calls that it they get labeled a bigot because that's SF and California culture in a nutshell and most professionals don't have time to deal with that shit so the dissenters just toss the line and collect they're pay.

It's no less evident when you notice that enthusiasm and support for whistle blowers only gained broad support in tech once they started targeting the American right. We as an industry are the problem but we've already allowed ourselves to become so polarized that no one is pushing back anymore because at best you get fired but manage to still find work. Most heavy criticism, such as whenever Google gets called out again and again, comes from outside the industry at this point. We built the rails while pretending to be cyber anarchists with no affiliations and then took our chance to ban the trains we didn't like because society couldn't see the implications of what was happening yet, we're the techno-authoritarians and we're no longer the ones qualified to talk about solutions for precisely that reason.

Apologies for the typos, I proofread where I could but I'm on mobile so some slipped through and due to the post length I can't edit them away.

Much like you can stand in a public park and say whatever you want, you can host your own website and post whatever you want.

You can't however, walk into say a Burger King and not expect to get thrown out if you start making extreme statements.

The problem you've identified is social media platforms having power over public discourse. However I disagree that forcing website owners to host whatever their users want to say is a way to solve that. The real solution in my mind is for people to turn away from social media.

In other words, social media itself is the problem. Not the fact that social media inhibits free speech.

While this is about free speech, its more specifically about whether you can class social media as a platform or a publisher.

Publishers are liable. Platforms are not.

I simply want social media to get off the fence.

Because right now they sre misleading the public, telling them they can post whatever they want, and then flipping on them when it suits.

Nobody will turn away from social media until this is clear and understood.

If you defined facebook as a publisher, you will see a replacement valuing openness rise up within days.

Which would win is hard to say. Maybe people like being sheep. But at least this way they know what they are.

This is legally speaking, nonsense. Us law doesn't differentiate between publishers and platforms with regard to content liability.

Everyone is liable for first party content, but not for third party content.

The point of messing with section 230 is to undo that. Basically, it's the first party starts curating the third party, they're now "publishing" that

> Id say the stance on platforms is stifiling free speech.

This was a point I tried to make when censoring extreme views / hate speech first started being a thing. While I’m vehemently opposed to said content, it’s a slippery slope once you start censoring. Everyone has their own opinions on what’s “bad content”, and while there is a lot of overlap in society, it doesn’t stay constant over time. I wish instead we’d form together as an industry and appropriately tag so you can then filter the web to your preferences. Sadly doubtful that approach would work in reality though.

An ML approach and autotagging might actually work: Let the user decide!

I don't think that forcing these platforms to choose to be publishers or not publishers will have the desired effect.

Some will choose to be publishers, increase moderation, and also increase censorship and bias. If we introduce liability, they will be forced to remove even more content. Platforms would gain even more control over the content that users see.

Some will choose not to be publishers. We all know how bad the internet can get without moderation. I don't see how this would even be feasible with spam and illegal files/content.

Neither of these distinctions address the true source of power and influence for these platforms: the visibility algorithm. This is what has the power to decide elections. A platform might agree to never delete a Biden or Trump tweet/post, but what really matters is the number of users that actually see it, the relative placement in the almighty feed. And that is 100% up to the platform.

The First Amendment doesn't apply to private companies, that's about my objection to your point.

Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right.

That amendment did not envision state level sized companies taking control of public discourse entirely.

Im weary of claiming the constitution needs a fix but at the same time it does have some fixes so its not infallible.

Who has taken over the entirety of public discourse? Where?!?!

Facebook advertising essentially stole 2016. You csn try and pull apart the argument on a technicality or you can read it with honest intent and go from there.

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