I think the goal here is to make regulation with the power of social media companies in mind, which might hypothetically make room for smaller players like SDMB to avoid being under the regulatory umbrella. I’m not a lawyer or legal expert, so I don’t know how you make that happen, but assuming there’s a way to do that, this is the route I’d like to take.
There are two main objections to regulating social media: one is the objection on the premise that it’s legally and constitutionally impossible to regulate social media without infringing on free speech and free press rights under the first amendment. I am not an expert on law, but I tend to think that this is not accurate. I think there’s a way to make social media more responsible corporate citizens. Whether we can do that under existing legislation and/or regulation is the question. We might need another legislative act that specifically spells out how social media can be regulated.
The other objection is that even if it’s legally possible, we shouldn’t do it because regulating social media would have a chilling effect on all speech; we have to accept and protect all speech, even the worst and most offensive kind, in order to protect all speech. I strongly, categorically reject this notion. In fact, I take the position that tolerating disinformation and hate speech is actually a destabilizing influence that is corrosive to a liberal democratic society and that limits on such expression are necessary if we are to protect the kinds of speech that we really need to protect.
Defamation suits drag on for years, and cost buttloads of money for all involved. I don’t think that it is reasonable to apply that to every tweet that someone things is counterfactual
And if they err on that side, the a whole lot of misinformation is going to get through, and we are back where we started. When my uncle sends me a facetweet that says that Biden is eating babies, how much needs to be invested into debunking that on the platform’s part?
We have a discussion going on now (or was going on recently) about possible misinformation in the QZ forum. How much fact checking do we expect the moderators to do?
Social media doesn’t have freedom of speech, its users, people like you and I, do. Social media is not saying anything.
That’s a bad analogy. It’s more like, if someone tells you a lie, you are free to repeat that lie to your other friends.
I don’t think that that is a reasonable expectation. Do you think that the mods on the SDMB should start fact checking posts?
We may have some sort of “moral” responsibility to not spread them, but we do have the right to. I don’t see how we can get rid of that right without severely trampling on your rights. What do you do when something that you believe to be true is deemed false, and you are not allowed to speak it?
And what if their opinion on what is false differs from yours?
Sure, I agree, we should fight it.
If you think that you will always be able to trust those you put in charge of determining what is true and what is harmful, sure. I don’t have that much trust in authority to always do what is my best interest.
I don’t disagree. I think that it is a good thing that they chose to do that. I just don’t want a govt agency in charge of making them do that.
It is good business for them to do some amount of this, agreed.
Long before twitter was a glimmer in a coder’s eye, my sister told me, “Well, it is my opinion that we didn’t go to the moon, and opinions can’t be wrong.”
Asimov remarked decades ago, “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
These are not new problems.
Sure pressure. Social and financial pressure from its users and its sponsors. That’s great. Pressure from the law, from the govt, that gets into pretty dangerous territory.
I disagree that “just like we did for courts” is a good example. You’ve seen ATMB threads where people didn’t feel that moderation was fair to them, right? Now, add in lawyers and judges to that.
You can’t sue someone for lying or spreading false information. There are only very specific times and places where you can do so. You can’t sue someone for saying that 5G causes covid and that the vaccine has a tracking chip in it. So, if you are saying, “just like we did for courts” then all of what you have said about fact checking is not valid.
I don’t think it is really possible to carve out exceptions that would last for any amount of time. If you do it based on users, then social media companies would simply limit the number of users they allow. And is that active users, or total registered? The SDMB has a couple orders of magnitude more registered users than active users.
It also has more lurkers and unregistered viewers than it has active posters. If I put a lie on the SDMB, it is just as visible as if I put it on twitter. I can even link to my lying SDMB post from my twitter account, directing all of my followers to see my lies on a messageboard that doesn’t require fact checking.
Right, because it is not actually social media that you are regulating, it is the users that you are regulating. You may be using social media as the intermediary, but it is still the govt imposing restrictions on what people may say.
Yes, by public pressure from its users and sponsors.
Whether we can do that without the govt imposing restrictions on what people are allowed to say is the actual question here. And by definition, it is exactly what you are asking for.
As well as a repeal of the First Amendment and the protections that it affords people’s right to freedom of speech and expression.
Then you categorically reject the entire notion of freedom of speech.
Now, as to the “we” here, it requires that you define who you are talking about.
If the “we” is the government of the people by the people, then yes, it is the govt’s job to accept and protect all speech, outside of a few narrowly defined categories.
If the “we” means you and I, then your objection is entirely a strawman. I don’t have to accept and protect all speech, I can object to what someone has said, I can shout them down, or if I have my own platform, I can ban someone for speaking in a way that I don’t like.
Once again, you have to define who it is that is tolerating this. If it is the govt, then yes, it should, as there may be a day that what you believe to be true may be legally defined as misinformation, and what you believe to be an obvious observation is labeled as hate speech.
If it is you or I, then no, we don’t have to tolerate it. We can push back against it, we can boycott the businesses of people who spout it, or the platforms that let them. We can tell them that they are wrong, that they are hateful, that what they are saying is corrosive to a liberal democratic society. We can tell others that what they say is all of these things.
Once the govt gets involved, though, you may not have that option. Can you prove that what that guy over there said is corrosive to society? No, then it is disinformation, and you are not allowed to say it.
It’s always easy to say, “They shouldn’t be allowed to say that.”, but you always have to remember that there are things that they don’t think that you should be allowed to say either.
Yes, and you were completely wrong when you suggested that. The cost and knowledge barrier to setting up a blog is not significantly higher than the cost and knowledge barrier of getting on Twitter in the first place.
Nobody has been called a moron for not knowing how to setup a webserver.
They’d probably take a number of criteria into account; registered users could be one metric. Screen time, engagement, and revenue could be others. But you’re saying that they’ll limit the number of users and cut their ad revenue? I doubt that – that’s quite a dichotomy you’re creating.
Seems to me that they’d find a way to improve moderation and then simply adhere to some standards more consistently. Many major websites have automated moderation that flag posts based on certain words and phrases. The flags can delete posts outright but they don’t have to; they just get kicked over to a human moderator. Over time, they can teach AI to improve moderation and they can streamline the ratio of AI and human moderation so that they can get the workflow right.
Maybe such restrictions are necessary, depending on what is said.
It doesn’t work. Advertisers don’t like Trump supporters’ politics but they like their money and are afraid to piss them off. I’d rather not wait until another “protesters” burn down the Capitol for corporate America to start having a conscience. Seems like we can put a stop to misinformation and hate speech before it gets to that point, but I don’t trust these companies to do that on their own or to respond to public pressure. The public put pressure on them for the better part of a decade and it’s only been in the last year that we’ve seen more consistent response to and engagement with social media’s critics.
Which isn’t going to happen, but here’s the deal: you don’t need to repeal the First Amendment in order to kill its protections. What keeps the freedom of speech alive isn’t the text of that amendment; it’s the values that people have in a liberal democratic society. And I am beyond certain that the FANG companies, with the possible exception of Apple, are creating not only corporate cultures but large-scale cultures outright all over the world that are hostile to liberal democratic values.
Step away from the debate over free speech for a moment: consider how much information they collect on you, how much they know about you, how little you’re able to know about how exactly that data is used, and whom they share it with, and for what purpose. Consider how they have essentially partnered with our national intelligence agencies to share details about your personal whereabouts, your personal activities, your deepest innermost thoughts. @k9bfriender, you live in a society where powerful companies and the government know - or can know - everything about you, and you know very little about what they know and what they do with what they know. That puts you, the individual, and we the liberal democratic society, at a complete disadvantage. Unless this balance of power is shifted away from big tech - and frankly also its clients, government - the Biden administration will not be able to stop liberal democracy’s decay, and it’s entirely possible that in some regards he unintentionally accelerates it. That is, unless we begin fighting back. And it starts with the data economy, and preventing from using your speech, your movement, your searches, your clicks, your browsing, as the 21st Century equivalent of oil. You cannot defend social media usage and talk about freedom in the same sentence, the same paragraph, or even in the same book - they’re antithetical to each other as social media currently exists. In the eyes of social media, you are a data generator, to be mined, exploited, and ultimately, abused if you step out of line.
Absolutely not - because free speech is dependent upon creating guardrails so that those with a disproportionately large stage and loud megaphone can’t drown out everyone else. I know you believe that the First Amendment and America’s extremist view of what qualifies as free speech is a useful paradigm to follow but almost every other society on earth rejects the American view on free speech as too extreme, and funny, they don’t seem to be the ones who need 20,000 troops to defend their capitol buildings against domestic terrorists who believe in easily-debunked conspiracy theories and repeatedly-discredited claims of election fraud.
I absolutely agree, and I’ll tell you something else: they don’t give a fuck about the first amendment one way or the other. That’s because they have been allowed to believe in false information. They have been allowed to live in a society that allows toxic information and ideas to become amplified. Moreover, by virtue of living in an information bubble, they believed that they had the right and the duty to act violently. You cannot allow that kind of information bubble to exist - it is like an invasive species that threatens to out-compete the other varieties that live in harmony with each other.
I don’t propose outlawing those ideas outright but I do propose doing anything that we can within reason that makes it harder for that kind of anti-democratic culture to fester and metastasize. I have a right not to have my Capitol burned to the ground by 8000 idiots who believe what an internet troll says. I have a right to vote without fear of being attacked by goons. I have a right to expect my vote to not by thrown out by goons who believe some cracked up conspiracy theory. Non-whites have a right to live without being fear of being the victim of toxic ideas and harassment.
And who makes these decisions? How are they weighted?
No, I’m saying that creating such artificially imposed thresholds would cause social media companies and messageboards like SDMB to limit the number of users, or whatever criteria that would put them into the regulated category.
It is a dichotomy, of that you are correct, but it is not a dichotomy that I am creating, it is one that you are calling for the creation of by legislative fiat.
This will ensure that no one ever competes with the current big companies, as they will not want to cross that arbitrary threshold and become beholden to the regulations that you want to impose. The existing large social media sites won’t cut their users to get under the regulations, but they will never need to worry about competition again, thanks to the regulations that have been imposed.
If you make your new blog, and it becomes insanely popular, when you see that you are approaching the metric that will put you under regulation, will you put some breaks on to limit your growth to stay under, or will you forge ahead and subject yourself to regulations and liabilities?
And the biggest social media companies that exist right now may do these things. I don’t think it is quite as easy as you imagine, but they may find a way.
Smaller ones won’t have the resources to do so, so will never become competition for the established ones.
Other than a few narrow categories that I have previously mentioned, I cannot agree with that. You once said that Republicans are vermin, isn’t that hate speech? Shouldn’t the AI have removed the post and sanctioned you for that?
It did work. Twitter was putting disclaimers on Trump’s tweets long before the insurrection. They are learning and growing too. They thought that because he was an important public figure, he should have more leeway. They are rethinking that decision.
They are doing all of this without being regulated by the govt.
Pressure from both advertisers and users, as I mentioned. If most everyone leaves because they disagree with twitter allowing certain types of speech, then the advertisers don’t matter either.
What I don’t trust is the government to regulate speech in a fair and unbiased fashion. I can leave twitter, I can boycott twitter and encourage others to do so. Not so much with the govt.
Now, that’s a scary thought. I do agree that it’s just words on paper, and it requires people to actually respect it to continue to protect our rights, but I certainly would not advocate for trying to circumvent it.
Yeah, values like freedom of speech and expression. If we don’t value those anymore, then I question that we have a liberal democratic society anymore.
Isn’t it great that you have the right to say that? Wouldn’t it be terrible if they actually did have control, and that they could say that what you just said was disinformation and hate speech?
Seems an even better reason to not enshrine their existence in law, prevent competition, and give them power over the rights of freedom of speech and expression.
That’s why I want the govt on my side, protecting my rights, not working with them on the best ways to restrict them “for the good of society.”
Can you prove any of what you just said? If not, then why would you not think that, under the rules that you propose, it would be deemed disinformation and hate speech by the AI moderators, deleted, and you sanctioned?
But yeah, you have stepped away from the debate about free speech, what this thread is about, to introduce an entirely different concern about corporatization and various fallouts that may come about. It’s not only a distraction from what we are discussing, it also only reinforces my point that getting these companies and the govt even closer together by the regulations that you wish to apply is a bad idea.
I am very aware of what info I share, and what is known about me. It amuses me to no end that people talk about tracking chips in vaccines, while doing so on a tracking device that they voluntarily carry with them.
Nothing that you have argued with respect to the issues in this thread would do anything to rein in the power that you are worried about these megacorporations exploiting, it is entirely about controlling the speech that is allowed on these platforms, restricting the users, not the social media company who profits off their information, not the advertisers that use that information to try to manipulate your activities and purchases.
Are your sure that the conspiracy doesn’t go one step deeper? That all of this is theater set up to get people like you to try to convince people like me that restricting some of our freedoms is in our best interest in creating a bit more security?
Free speech with guardrails set up by the govt is not free speech. It is allowed speech.
See, even that form of well poisoning I believe should be allowed.
Will we play the scotsman game here? Should the UK have not allowed discussion on Brexit? Should Poland not allow discussion about abortion? Should France not allow discussion about security bills? Should Germany ban discussion about COVID restrictions?
We know that Russia and China do pretty well with their restrictions, are those the models that we should follow?
We don’t really need 20,000 either. Just a few more police on the 6th with a more clear ROE would have been enough. And in that case, that was actually the sort of speech that does fall into those categories of illegal incitement, and hopefully will be prosecuted.
After the 2016 election, people were going around saying, “Not my president.” There was even a bit of violence involved in those protests. Should that speech have been banned? Should discussion as to Russian interference in the 2016 election have been banned, for fear that us liberals may decide to try to stop the election process and “take back” our country?
I heard people on my side make the claims that the Russians had actually hacked our elections, that they had changed the vote totals. This was offered with no proof, should such speech been sanctioned as an easily debunked conspiracy theory and repeatedly-discredited claim of election fraud?
I mean, neither do you, so…
And you are going to stop that by making them only use small messageboards that are harder to monitor, harder to hear what they are saying and to challenge it?
I don’t believe that your proposed remedies will pop that bubble, just make it even more insular.
I can challenge it, but I do not agree that we should outlaw it. What’s next, outlawing any religion that cannot prove that they aren’t praying to a non-existent being?
Great, challenge them in the public square when you see them. Anything else is a proposal to outlaw those ideas outright.
Sure, and like I said, what led up to that did cross the line into inciting violence, and is already illegal.
Sure, but those have been challenges that have existed for far far longer than social media companies have.
I agree with much of this. The kind of fact checking @BigT wants would be much worse than doing nothing at all, and it seems to be what we are getting.
Pressure from the government is most of what we are worried about.
Isn’t that what is happening? Section 230 allows for social media to improve their AI and human moderation. Facebook continues to work on their “Facebook Jail”. Twitter has been figuring out ways to deal with misinformation (including disclaimers). AI moderation is not that easy (it can be very overbroad).
Pre 230, those social media companies would have been held as a publisher for moderation of content and legally liable for what was posted. Obviously that would have a massive chilling effect (hence Section 230 - which allowed for social media companies to engage in good faith efforts at moderation).
Yes, I acknowledge that there has been more of an effort to do that within the past 6-12 months, but it’s a case of too little, too late, and only responding once a crisis has already happened. It has taken crisis after crisis, tragedy after tragedy, outrage after outrage to compel these companies to act. Social media companies will be fine with more regulation; they frequently have to adapt to the laws of the countries in which they operate anyway, so it’s not like their business model will die if they are more stringently regulated, and it won’t be the apocalypse for forums like SDMB either.
It depends on exactly those laws are written and enforced. Which has been the biggest pushback in this thread, it seems to me. In countries that have greater limits, social media adheres to what is legal in those countries (or is sometimes banned - like Twitter in China). The issue is that American law wouldn’t currently allow things like hate speech by itself to be illegal.
There have been some discussions of making social media liable for harassment, stalking, etc - but there is a question of how it would be enforced. How much does good faith enforcement matter? Iirc, most socal media companies already try to prevent those things. I will note that those changes to Sec 230 don’t have a lower limit of users or what not.
I honestly don’t have the time to respond to all of these “the bogeyman is hiding under the bed” arguments. I’ll leave you with these thoughts for now.
You talk about how you don’t trust government regulation of social media because it supposedly interferes with free speech. If you and I want to organize a peaceful protest, many municipalities require a permit first. So does that fact inevitably mean that we’re doomed to totalitarianism? Liberties don’t exist in a vacuum.
Also, “the government” is us. You don’t trust “the government.” I don’t trust the government blindly, either, but I trust the government when I am confident that the government is staffed with people who believe in values that support liberties and liberal democracy. You’re so busy defending the unfettered freedom of social media companies that are actually responsible for undermining the very values that make a liberal democracy successful.
Think about that.
A democratic society functions on, and even depends on, quality information so that its citizens can make sound decisions. It won’t be libertarian and democratic interminably if it permits misinformation to spread into every household to be consumed by more than half the adult population.
But going beyond the discussion of misinformation - what about how social media tilt the balance of power away from individuals and toward a handful of companies and the big, bad, scary government you’re so paranoid about? It can mine your information to build a psychological profile about you. Yet the government is increasingly operating in secret.
Protecting our system of self-governance and free speech and thought is the result of having the right values, and strengthening the institutions that preserve them; not by allowing the KKK to say the n-word on Facebook.
It seems to me that the biggest objections are to disinformation and hate speech. But it also seems these would be hardest to deal with. Even the proposed reforms (SAFE TECH) don’t touch that. Because who determines disinformation? Amending 230 would just subject it to court challenge, and I can easy see someone like Trump filling a lawsuit against Twitter for “disinformation” by putting disclaimers on him. Granted Twitter can just overly ban people, but I’d imagine that would be overbroad. And leaving social media liable to hate speech wouldn’t make much sense since hate speech isn’t illegal in the US.
Which makes it the hardest to deal with, as I noted. Which fact checkers should social media companies use? And what happens if they get something wrong? Defamation, slander, and liable all fall under the person deliberately said something they knew was wrong. It actually requires some really high hurdles to jump to prove it in a court of law (because merely lying is protected by the First Amendment). When should social media fact checkers be held liable? When they believe something is wrong?
Hate speech, similarly, is protected under the First Amendment. When should social media be liable for something the individual is Constitutionally allowed to do? And who decides what is hate speech?
If you want to tackle illegal things like harassment, then there is a decent framework to follow. But misinformation and hate speech are far harder to remedy and may lead to the absurdity of a social media company being held liable for something the individual making the statements would not be.
Serious question, because I don’t know the laws around it - does that argument for “monopoly” still hold when I can be a user of both Twitter and Facebook?
Monopoly definitions are concerned with dominance in a market. So the fact that you can be a user of both doesn’t particularly matter - if anything it may be helpful for Facebook’s argument that it does not have a dominant position in social media.
However it’s acquisitions of What’s App and Instagram could be seen as attempts to monopolize.
But I’m not the one implying some sort of global conspiracy with such a terrifying name as FANG.
Not supposedly, specifically. That is exactly what it would do, it is exactly what you want it to do.
Only if it’s a big crowd of people that requires stopping of traffic and police. If I want to go down and stand in from of city hall and hold up a sign, I don’t need a permit for that.
If I want to protest against my local Massey Energy company, I can go sit out there with my friends with “Shame On!” signs.
Not all protests need a permit. In fact, the vast majority do not.
No, because you were wrong on that fact. But liberties die when they are given up for a sense of security.
No, the govt is representative of the people that had the most votes(as then modified by EC and gerrymandering). For much of the last 4 years, that was not “us”.
Yeah, and what about when it is not? If Trump had been reelected, and we hadn’t won those nail biting races in Georgia, would you still be so confident?
I’m not defending the rights of social media companies, I’ve made that quite clear. I’m defending the rights of their users.
I have, in depth and in detail. Think about who it is that you are really restricting. Social media companies don’t care about moderation. If we pass a bunch of legislation that changes their TOS and enforces it, it won’t affect their business model in the least.
The only ones affected will be their users. They will be the ones who are told what they are allowed to say, what they are allowed to see and hear.
A democratic society depends on being allowed to have free transmission of information. Once you have made anyone the gatekeeper of what is true and what is disinformation, your democratic society will begin failing, quickly.
It cannot be libertarian and democratic if it restricts what information can be heard. That’s how you get things like “Russia Today.” I’m sure that everything that is said on that channel is thoroughly vetted by the appropriate state agencies to ensure that it is all “true”.
For not having time for “bogeyman is hiding under the bed” arguments, you certainly are making quite a number of them.
But, in any case, the issues of privacy, how a company uses my information, and who it shares it with are a completely different topic. If you’d like to start a thread on that, it may be an interesting discussion, but I don’t really see how it fits into this one.
And who exactly is going to determine what values are “right”?
How about allowing you to say “Republicans are vermin” on SDMB?
Mostly I think this thread has, a bit back already, reached a point where each side has expressed the bulk of their perspectives, and to some degree has even heard the perspective of others, with a tolerable level of disagreeable snark. For discussions on these subjects that is actually something.
I do have clarifying questions though, to make sure I get the positions being taken.
Agreed, I think, that corporate persons are, for the purposes of freedom of expression, persons, yes? Thus, the argument goes, protected for their expression and responsible for their expression (what is and is not allowed on their platforms), to similar degrees as other persons, yes? Whatever that balance is.
But here I do go a bit Animal Farm: when considering corporate persons vs real persons some persons should be more equal than others, I think people persons. And both have responsibility along with protection. I see corporate persons instead claiming the protection and abrogating themselves of the responsibility, relative to we actual people persons. Some are in fact more equal than others but the win goes to corporate persons not real people persons.
I am not one that subscribes to the “Corporations are people too, my friend.” line of thought. Legally, I suppose that is the case, at the moment, but I wouldn’t mind that changing.
However, I do not see this as a freedom of corporate persons, but a freedom of people persons.
If the govt tells the social media corporations what they may or must allow on their platforms, then that is telling their users, the people, what they must tolerate in their own communities, or what they may not say in any.
Well now I am confused (I know you thought I already was, don’t take the easy line). Are you saying that I, as a person, or as part of a group that is the majority POV in my community, should be able to declare what is tolerated for others to say in my community?