Maybe you should be able to sue the NYT reporter. I think you can, in fact!
I just don't understand what we're trying to accomplish with the changes to how things are currently. Maybe it would help if you described the world you'd rather live in, and how it differs from this world.
Well it’s what we have now. Mass misinformation and lies constantly being spread around. The trade-off we made was that it was supposed to be an unfiltered cesspool because it wasn’t feasible to censor views to match the editorial decisions of the company.
However, AI has made if feasible to censor at scale and the companies want it both ways. They want editorial control and they still don’t want any responsibility for defamation.
> Maybe you should be able to sue the NYT reporter. I think you can, in fact!
That’s worse than being able to sue the NYT. It allows the NYT to hide behind pawns they would love to sacrifice in the name of spreading convenient lies.
And as the article makes clear, the idea that Facebook is not responsible for the content its users create has nothing to do with the problem of misinformation. To solve one would not even touch the other.
The suggestions I replied to seem focused on holding Twitter and Facebook accountable for what is displayed on their own website, regardless of provenance. It's not clear to me how that would enable anyone to safely create content that Facebook doesn't believe should be published on its platform.
Without the separation of the creator of the content and the organization displaying that content, Facebook would grow more strict, not less.
Fundamentally, you're trying to involve the government in deciding what "truth" is. That seems much worse than misinformation, yes?
We already have the courts involved in deciding what "truth" is. Has worked out pretty well in general, and certainly better than having private companies do it.
Honestly, it feels like a moot point anyway. The 1st Amendment makes all of this pointless to discuss. It will never happen, short of a literal collapse of the US Government and a reformation under a new Constitution that doesn't include the 1st Amendment.
The government will never be involved in deciding what people can and can't say to the extent that this would require. It's antithetical to our current legal system (not to mention our cultural mores).
Of course Twitter gets to decide what to publish on Twitter. There's literally no other way to operate, regardless of Section 230.
People will debate more or less police funding, but massively more judicial funding is on nobody’s radar.
What the modern age calls for is the ability to easily enjoin a class of defendants and sue them all for $5, with adjudication taking 1 minute. Now your mom just lost $5 because she retweeted a MLM health scare scam 2 minutes ago.
Any actual solution would have to target the creators of the disinformation, and maybe those who knowingly spread it. Even that is hard in a freedom of speech context though. Even lies are free speech.
When we're talking about Section 230, we're talking about torts, and when we're talking lawsuits, we're also talking torts.
But I still maintain the idea is bass-ackwards morally and legally problematic.
If mum believes the false Facebook meme she's a victim. Yes passing it on passes on the harm, but honestly I also think that doing detailed research into every meme before passing it on is an unrealistic expectation. Almost a decade ago I passed on the meme about Mr. Rogers being a sniper with x number of confirmed kills and always wearing sweaters to cover his sleeve tats. Exactly how much money should that cost me? In many way these memes are the natural evolution of "old wives tales" that have existed for centuries. Probably all of human existence.
And from a tort perspective I'm still not sure this applies. Part of the harm from tort comes from the fact it's repeated. If I tell people X bank is financially insolvent, it catches on and there's a run on the bank I'm certainly guilty of something, but I don't think the people who passed it on in good faith are. Rather the fact people were passing it around is evidence of the tort, not additional torts themselves (but IANAL of course).
And even if passing on a meme is a valid micro-tort in this scenario, now my mom has been materially harmed by whoever shared it with her. Does she now sue them in her own micro-tort lawsuit and the whole thing bubbles up like some kind of legal reverse ponzi scheme? It seems like all of these micro-suits floating around and sure to create the exact problem the original comment is trying to avoid.
Your “mom” in this context is actively spreading fear about topics and not knowing something is true for certain is all the more reason she shouldn’t be doing it.
We have the Internet now, we don’t need rumor mills and information spreading second hand.
Are you sure you never spread information that isn't true? Really, really sure? I'd say with high confidence you have false beliefs you unknowingly pass on. I know I have in the past and assume I still do.
People continue to pass on the whole "frog in a slowly boiling pot" anecdote over and over again even though there is no truth to it. It's simple common knowledge no one has thought to question. Should every person who does so from here on now be fined $5? How is this different than someone who is taken in by a meme shared by someone they trust?
And when it comes to Twitter or other sites, how do you sue one of its users who posts libel and defamation about your character, when said user is hiding behind a VPN anyway?
Twitter is hosting the content, and chooses not to take it down, so if that content breaks actual laws (libel, cyberstalking, etc), they should be held responsible for it.
Whereas if it falls within the purview of free speech, then they should have nothing to worry about.
I realize it's not a popular sentiment here because we want to build platforms and not worry about the legality, but giving websites blanket immunity to host law-breaking content because "it was posted by someone else" means that all of our laws become unenforcable on the internet.
Is that really practical, though? To spend thousands of dollars on legal fees to take down a single tweet from an anonymous account that will just repost it again and again? Meanwhile every time Twitter is completely immune to any consequences for hosting and distributing said content?
It's a sucky situation. A service like Twitter can't really function if they're responsible for the content on the site, but all our existing laws are effectively unenforceable on the web otherwise.
I think the hope people have for the removal of section 230 shielding is that Twitter and other content hosting providers will take existing laws more seriously. For instance, Cloudflare today says "there should be laws to handle this stuff, we don't want to enforce anything", and to date the CEO has only ever made two exceptions to that.
The contrarian side to that is going too far and Twitter et al becoming too censorious and taking down legitimate free speech content. None of these service providers can afford to have a legal team on standby to determine what constitutes fair use and free speech or not.
I don't have an answer, I'm just saying this isn't a one-sided issue. Right now the internet has a real problem with libel and cyberstalking. It's one of those things that one tends to not realize or think/care about until it happens to them.
There's nothing special about Twitter or any other Internet site. If someone libels you then you have recourse through the civil courts. And if you file pro se then it's very cheap.
In fact, we’d start talking about AI courts to scale with the flood of low severity cases.
Repealing 230 would not have any measurable benefit when it comes to controlling fake news or conspiracy theories.
Most people don't seem to see the problem because so far the power has only been used for things they agree with, but consider if it weren't.
Suppose Facebook was run by anti-vaxxers. They manipulate their algorithm so that posts that question the safety of vaccines are promoted and posts that say vaccines are safe and helpful get buried. If someone takes a strong pro-vaccine stance, Facebook bans them for spreading "dangerous misinformation".
Under the current system, this would be perfectly fine for Facebook to do, despite the fact that this could completely warp public perception because Facebook is where a lot of people get most of their information. After all, they are a private company, right? They have no obligation to host information they disagree with. Yet, Facebook could, if it decided to, dramatically shift public opinion in any way it wants to, just by manipulating how information is presented.
The world I would rather live in is one where social media companies are limited to removing information only if it is clearly illegal, by explicitly defined terms (such as child pornography) or spam. The rest should be left up to individuals to decide for themselves.