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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

I remember the FCC well enough to be very, very wary of a government-regulated internet. I'd personally rather see the internet become ungovernable - if everybody ran Freenet, Tor and I2P, there'd be nothing to censor, but too many people prefer the illusion of selective censorability for me to believe that will ever happen. What the government _can_ do without nationalizing the internet infrastructure is provide legal support for entities that want to do so in an open way by indemnifying them from "harm". I'd like to see section 230 not repealed, but made more explicit - "no forum can be held legally liable in any way for any content hosted, only the original poster".

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idk, this is all appealing in an abstract way, but I don't think it results in a world most people want to live in.

we all draw the line in different places, but I think most would agree that some subset of user-submitted content is purely abusive. if the only recourse available to the victim requires identifying every individual poster, it's effectively impossible to stop.

imo some sort of safe harbor mechanism is a reasonable compromise. we can't expect the host to prevent every single instance of abusive content, but we should require them to make some kind of reasonable effort.

>imo some sort of safe harbor mechanism is a reasonable compromise. we can't expect the host to prevent every single instance of abusive content, but we should require them to make some kind of reasonable effort.

I'd say Kiwifarms has failed to make that kind of reasonable effort.

There is a good faith moderation clause in part of section 230, but I'm not sure how it has been enforced in the past or if it is similar to what you are thinking of.

The issue is, well, let me count the weasel words .. "most would agree", "some subset", "some sort of safe harbor", "some kind of reasonable effort".

You just hand wave all the difficult things away with the weasel words, but the majority of the population, in reality, in no way agree on the actual definition of any of the things you're referring to. Not what constitutes abusive content, nor what should be done with it, or whether anything even should be done with it.

I'm not writing a public policy proposal here. if you want a rough estimate of "most", you can take the percentage of libertarian- and anarchist-aligned people and subtract that from 100%.

yes, I'm being intentionally vague about "abusive content", because that's not really what I want to debate here. revenge porn might be a good example though. what fraction of people do you think would be okay with having their privately-shared nudes posted over and over with no practical recourse or mechanism for slowing it down? no one I know in real life would accept that.

Are you saying that because most people don’t agree on exactly what should be done then nothing should be done?

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