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.
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.
The law always lags behind what might defame a company(FB is the most recent example), hence the company ends up being proactive.
Edit: I don't have strong opinions - just sharing a rational argument for being proactive.
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.
Even for the things that are illegal, it can be illegal to publish something but legal to provide connectivity services to the offender.
Net neutrality is not a delicate balance.
Or what’s a tricky edge case you have in mind?
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.
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?
I don't have strong opinions on solutions here, and don't mind the status quo.
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.
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.
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?
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.
That’s one version of the story. The other version is that teachers under direction from their union (NEA) are teaching unfactual revisionist history (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-proje...), mixed with a near-religious activist ideology (https://areomagazine.com/2019/01/25/the-theory-of-white-frag...), and corrupting education by converting schools into political indoctrination centers.
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.
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.
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.
Yet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.