The decentralized web and the future of Section 230

I'm sure that won't go wrong or impact certain groups at all.

There's a lot of content on the internet today that I just don't want to see. Coincidentally, while I had a conversation with people about the benefits of intersectionality a Robin DiAngelo follower joined. This person masked themselves as "just asking questions" and then proceeded to do the oddest form of theatrical racism and subsequent victim position seeking I've ever seen. As much as I'd love to "ostracize" this person and never hear of them again, as much as my day would've been far better without knowing people like this exist, I don't think it's right to ostracize people. That's how we got flat Earth to get so big. We mocked, ostracized, and argued them out of common spaces until they created their own. I'd rather flat Earthers and DiAngelo followers find their way back to rational society, not out from it forever.

Glad to see Washington DC has think-tanks who are al least literate in fediverse and P2P technology.

So all authenticate with Microsoft.

I create a user for them at my server which is still be needed to have the at least the timeline saved.

At which point I have decentralisation here?

And because I can’t handle the traffic on my raspberry I host this on a PaaS/SaaS provider like AWS.

That would assume all web servers are decentralised web3 technologies.

What is different about Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIN?

they all do social but Twitter has more abuse than the other two.

Is that due to the structure involved?

Or extend it further, is amplification bad because the ones doing the amplification are somewhat flawed in coping mechanisms?

What I mean is we keep looking at social platforms as the problem, instead of seeing that the are lenses into the society problems yet not solved and handled.

I.E. based on networks and economics the ones that can amplify the worst economic decisions coupled with the least coping skills cause the most harm on social networks. Caution, not a statement about individuals or politics just some deep way above things macro observations.

When I say decentralization I really mean that, not federated. It works very differently than surfing the web for content because this application, in addition to being fully decentralized, is privacy focused and never anonymous. The web is extremely opposite on all 3 points.

> The immediate impact of Section 230 was to halt the developing body of common law being forged through internet speech–related litigation.

Big mistake in my opinion.

> federated platforms—networking environments enabled by communally—agreed upon standards of computing and norms. These technologies can give users more control over their platform experience.

My server is not governed by any communally-agreed-upon norms, nor does it give users control. It's governed by _my_ norms, period (and users can either agree with me or find a different server). Incidentally these norms coincide well with communal norms because I'm a reasonably "well-adjusted" individual, but there's a reason I whitelist instead of using Fediblock: Fediblock is somebody else's list of servers that they personally find offensive. Looking at the list it seems to coincide well with what I find offensive, but I want to be the sole arbiter of who I give time to, and I think therein lies the real power of federated platforms: communities of consensus grow/split/merge/etc completely organically and in sync with the memetic evolution of the node administrators.

If you believe the earth is flat, go nuts. Or if you don't but you want to share the proof of why they're wrong, you can do that too. Or perhaps you don't want to have them in your life at all. You can have all of these experiences equally well on a federated platform. People can form the communities they want to be in and be responsible for the growth of those communities in ways that are impossible with a corporation calling the shots.

...or a centralized platform in general, regardless of commercialization. A friend and I were discussing the possibility of running a federated platform for our country. It sounded like a cool idea at first, but as I thought about it I realized: there are neo-Nazis in my country. I don't want to engage with them at all. But I do believe that if we ran a national platform that as citizens they would be entitled to participate, however stupid their views. Therefore I abandoned the project. I may believe they're entitled to public services as human beings and citizens, but I don't want to give them a platform to spread their message. As long as my server is governed purely by my personal norms, I can in good conscience refuse service to them with no other justification than I don't want to and it's my server.

Back to the the point of the article: AFAIK urbit (groups at least) still rely on central server in the sense that each group is hosted by a single server. Won't this server have the legal responsabilities of whichever jurisdiction they are hosted in?

Ie. If I host a group on an urbit server hosted on AWS and certain ilegal content is hosted on my server won't I have the responsability to take it down?

Who is this central agency that is hosting all our web pages?

>With this success came controversy. Critics of content moderation decisions came to view Section 230 liability protections as a de facto subsidy for censorious platforms to limit public speech or to be less than judicious in limiting speech

These "critics" are either ignorant or malicious or both. Free Speech is about keeping violence out of the search for truth. That's it. It's not some saccharine unicorn crap where all ideas are equally special and get a gold star, some ideas suck. But since we have no oracles it's dangerous to allow violence to solidify that in place, so instead the search is kept in the social and economic space. Saying something of course is free speech, but so necessarily is NOT saying something. Keeping things off your own soap box, not wanting to associate with people who say things you think are wrong enough, and so on are all themselves core free speech too. Those who you think are wrong and think you are wrong may put out their own soap boxes. There is no right to an audience or social approval or economic rewards, one must successfully argue and convince others for that. That's the whole point! "Censorous platforms" is pure propaganda. Moderation isn't censorship, it's free speech too.

And "platform" doesn't fucking mean anything either. Section 230 is as much about the tiniest sites as it is the largest.

>Now the internet is pushing towards decentralization that may make Section 230 and centralized content moderation moot.

No, that's completely backwards. Section 230 is a bedrock of decentralization! It's what means some rando individual or tiny startup or whatever can host something and allow anyone else to post. From comment sections in blogs to all those shiny new Mastodon services. Without it, only gigantic corporations could afford to carry the insurance and do the moderation to allow user content.

>Government agents must find and identify individuals involved with each incident.

Haha (on multiple grounds). First, the big threats are civil, not "government agents". It's anyone who feels like filing a defamation claim or whatever else. Suggesting that lots of tiny entities with zero in-house legal council or budget is hard to go after is like saying that the copyright cartels could never go after individual bittorrent users or sites back in the day, or patent trolls after tiny businesses. Ie., laughably at odds with observed actual reality. What would actually happen is what has, in fact, happened repeatedly: firms will come about that will send mass threat letters. Host some little fun forum for a niche tabletop game or ultralight planes or something? Somebody posts some comment that could maybe vaguely be construed as defamation. If your forum or channel or Mastodon or whatever is on a topic then you must be moderating which means you're not a common carrier, so without Section 230 you are liable. So you get a letter saying they'll take you to court or you can settle for a mere $2000-6000 or whatever it is (calibrated to what they think they can squeeze from you). Now what? There will be a profit incentive to develop ML systems to go hunting through whatever federated networks there are looking for anything that might be legally actionable. There will be profit motive for someone disgruntled at a given forum to call attention to anything actionable they can find. There will be a profit motive to try to post defamatory material from sock puppet accounts and then sue over it! Say goodbye to any sort of non-IRL ID verified accounts, except even that might not be good enough for small players given the stakes and how much even going to court at all costs when you have to go to discovery vs dealing with it via summary judgement at the earliest stage.

The growing drumbeat against one of the foundational parts of the net, which makes the very site here where all of us comment possible, is definitely worrying though.

    […] the political establishment’s hostility towards the idea of Twitter being purchased and run by new free speech–friendly management.

Only the „free-speech friendly management“ has been most notable for firing a bunch of people for criticizing him or making fun of his advertisers.

A lot of the extremism, radical political shifts, and domestic terrorism can be placed squarely on 230 and it's defenders. Big tech platforms aren't worth this much damage.