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Revoke the 230

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LanDroid

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Re: Revoke the 230

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Interbane wrote:What still has me stumped is the danger of truth panels. If misinformation and fake news is so incredibly rampant, there has to be some equivalent of a truth panel.
Interesting except I expect for this to work one side needs to be defeated. I'm thinking of the South Africa Truth & Reconciliation Commission after apartheid was dismantled. Don't know much about how that worked or what it accomplished. However it suggests a truth panel process could not begin in the US until Trumpism is defeated, when craving for an authoritarian leader is in the dustbin, probably not for quite a long time!
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Re: Revoke the 230

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Here's the opposite way to look at Section 230: Should Amazon be REQUIRED to host Parler?
A judge just ruled NO!
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Re: Revoke the 230

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LanDroid wrote:Here's the opposite way to look at Section 230: Should Amazon be REQUIRED to host Parler?
A judge just ruled NO!
There are some precedents that might argue yes. One is "common carrier" law that says a functioning channel (originally the railroads) is required to offer the same price opportunities to everyone. Thus Amazon or Google would have to have a real policy that they really enforce before they could discriminate against a crazy.

The second is the Fairness Doctrine. Admittedly this was justified by limited broadcast bandwidth and thus a potential lack of competition, and abandoned when cable made bandwidth essentially unlimited, but it was a requirement that "both sides" or a spectrum of viewpoints be represented. I have trouble believing that promoting craziness qualifies as a viewpoint, but I admit it is not easy to design "truth panels" that are not as dangerous as the conspiracy theorists.
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Re: Revoke the 230

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This is a pretty strong argument against Section 230. People can spread terrible lies and deny they posted them, and the forums have no obligation to take them down.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/30/tech ... sults.html
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Re: Revoke the 230

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I don't see how the solution can be of the headhunting variety. There's no way a host like Facebook could prevent or eliminate every instance that they might possibly be sued for. The 230 shouldn't be entirely revoked.

The issue is that this is an excuse that is easy to hide behind. They can't catch everyone, so a rule holding them accountable for a single person's crime would be seen as draconian.

Any pressure on them shouldn't focus entirely on the banning of individual culprits or posts. It should be more focused on the trends that allow posts to spread and for disinformation sources to be hampered. It's all about the algorithms.

One idea is to categorize news content, and require all content to be given a tag based on a category matrix. News, memes, opinions, satire, and fiction could be columns. Politics, science, religion, society, and art could be rows. Pick 1-3 categories in a form that you have to fill out. Then at least there's an info gate that has information which can be sorted and analyzed by algorithms. Patterns can be found(not sure what they'd look like), and the best path forward could be figured out.

I heard another idea that's a little closer to truth panels, but it's worth exploring in concept. The idea would be to have a semi-hidden group of statistics for each and every account. It would have information on how often they share posts of various categories. How often they're shown to be factually incorrect in previous posts. It would be a "karma" system regarding information propagation.
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” - Douglas Adams
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Re: Revoke the 230

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This was in my in-box courtesy of "Persuasion", a group recommended by David Brooks for being open to both liberal and conservative issues. I don't agree with much of it, and it is long, but I think it is very relevant to this discussion, for taking on some of the "who gets to decide" issues.

The Insiders' Game
GameStop was a warning: Elites are weaponizing censorship to keep the outsiders out
David Sacks Feb 1

As the apex predators of capitalism, hedge funds are accustomed to raking in billions by driving companies into the ground and feasting on the carcasses. So there was widespread satisfaction last week when members of an online discussion group called WallStreetBets started beating the Wall Street bully boys at their own game. Ringleaders of the group noticed that hedge funds had taken a short position in the videogame retailer GameStop that far exceeded the number of shares available to trade. Motivated as much by revenge as by profit, these influencers in the group encouraged the 2.7 million members (since risen to around 8 million) to purchase the stock in order to drive the price higher and create a massive short squeeze. This quickly became a movement with a cause similar to that of Occupy Wall Street, except much more effective because it hit the intended target where they would feel it the most, in the wallet. “The only way to beat a rigged game,” one WallStreetBets leader said, “is to rig it even harder.”

GameStop stock, which closed at $17.69 a share on Jan. 8, shot up to $347.51 by the close last Wednesday. With combined losses of almost $20 billion, hedge funds were on the ropes and close to bleeding out, selling their longs in an increasingly futile effort to cover their shorts. One fund, Melvin Capital, lost over half its value and had to be bailed out by hedge fund sugar daddies Ken Griffin (Citadel) and Steve Cohen (Point 72). An even bigger fund, Citron, was teetering on the brink of collapse. All this outsider army needed to win was the continued ability to communicate with each other online, and their collective ability to keep piling into the “Buy” side of the trade. Within hours, they would be hobbled on the first front and crippled on the second.

The Empire Strikes Back

First, the digital distribution platform Discord banned the WallStreetBets account after the close Wednesday for “hate speech, glorifying violence, and spreading misinformation.” (For a moment, it looked like Reddit had also banned the group, but they resisted pressure to do so.) If the quoted justification sounds familiar, it’s nearly identical to the one given by Google, Apple, and Amazon for deplatforming Parler just three weeks earlier. Echoing Amazon, Discord said it had sent the group repeated warnings about objectionable content before deciding, on that day of all days, to shut them down.

Meanwhile, WallStreetBets investors were locked out of their trading accounts by online brokers such as Robinhood on Thursday morning. Based on new collateral requirements that it says were imposed by an industry consortium, Robinhood forbade its users from buying GameStop and other stocks that WallStreetBets had identified as short squeeze opportunities. Users were allowed only to “close their positions”—in other words, to sell to the shorts desperate to buy. When angry users registered their disapproval by leaving over 100,000 one-star reviews of the Robinhood app in the Google Play Store, Google deleted them.

Normal trading was allowed to resume Friday, but the hedge funds used their 24-hour sole ownership of the battlefield to fortify their positions, covering the most vulnerable shorts. Wall Street then sent in reinforcements, as new short positions were taken at these high price levels, virtually guaranteed to pay out when, inevitably, the air leaks out of the balloon. Faced with a game that, for once, they couldn’t rig in their favor, it appeared that the insiders tipped the board over and started a new game. As a massively decentralized online group of scrappy outsiders, the only tools at WallStreetBets’ disposal were online trading and social networking. Both were frozen at the crucial moment, and the hedge fund insiders were let off the hook. The weaponization of censorship is a big part of the reason why.

Down the Slippery Slope

Some of us warned of a slippery slope when Parler was taken down and a sitting president was systematically ghosted from every online speech platform. But we could not have foreseen how slippery the slope would be, or how fast we would slide down it. We were told that the curbs on speech of President Trump and his supporters were necessary to prevent further “insurrection” and protect the peaceful transition of power. However, much like the troops and barricades that still ring the Capitol, these speech restrictions remain in place well after the transition of power has occurred. The censorship power is always justified in response to a genuine outrage or crisis, but it is rarely relinquished once the threat passes. Rather it gets weaponized to protect powerful, connected insiders, as the GameStop fiasco illustrates.

How do we suppose Discord chose that moment to enforce its “Community Guidelines” against WallStreetBets? Almost certainly, one of the hedge funds whose ox was being gored combed through their message boards looking for anything that might violate the terms of service. And surely they found it, as these boards contain the same raunchy language you would hear if you visited any trading floor or boiler room on Wall Street. They presumably reported the content to Discord, which took the group down.

Did Discord warn WallStreetBets of content violations before last Wednesday? I’m sure they did. Amazon sent such a warning letter to Parler as well. Frankly, such a letter could be, and likely is, sent to every large message board on the web. The founder of a user-generated content site described it to me as “the One Percent Problem.” Every user-generated content site will have a small percentage of offensive material that gets through, no matter how many content moderators are hired. For example, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube allowed far more content advocating for and planning the Capitol riot than Parler. But instead of acknowledging this, they were eager to blame the upstart, which had recently taken over the top spot in the social networking category in the app store. Scapegoating Parler served the dual purpose of deflecting blame and squashing a competitor.

Critics of social networks insist that these sites simply need to double down on censorship in order to finally rid us of problematic speech. But that ignores how social media moderation actually works. Algorithms set to recognize keywords capture only a small fraction of problematic posts, leaving millions of posts for humans to review. The work is so voluminous that it’s outsourced to far-flung locales where English may not even be the first language. Low-level employees must decipher complicated guidelines while navigating our increasingly Byzantine world of political and cultural hot-buttons. Mistakes are inevitable, and the harder a company tightens the standards to get the One Percent Problem down to 0.1 or 0.01 percent, the more undeserving accounts—from Ron Paul to the Socialist Equality Party—will be swept up in the dragnet. With the Town Square now digitized, centralized, and privatized in the hands of a cartel of Big Tech companies, the protections of the First Amendment no longer apply.

Insiders Vs. Outsiders

Censorship is about who has the power to censor, and what checks are placed upon that power. Right now, tech companies have all the power, and they exercise it as a like-minded cartel. When we see Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ted Cruz voice similar concerns over what happened to WallStreetBets last week, we should realize that the politics of this issue in the post-Trump era will no longer divide along an axis of Left and Right, but of insider and outsider.

Elizabeth Warren, when she started landing blows against Wall Street after the 2008 financial crisis, met with President Obama’s economics adviser, the former treasury secretary and Harvard president Larry Summers. He presented her with a choice: “I could be an insider or I could be an outsider,” she recalled in her 2014 memoir, A Fighting Chance. “Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People—powerful people—listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.”

It’s precisely this insider-protection scheme that the internet and social media have most disrupted. Insiders are massively powerful but few in number. Outsiders have always been numerous but unorganized. Social networking and online organizing have given the outsiders real power to effect change, and finally register their disgust at the way incompetent elites protect each other. The elites of Big Business, Big Media, Wall Street, and Washington are terrified of this, and will leverage any censorship power to keep the outsiders at bay.

The Real “Big Lie”

After the storming of the Capitol building on Jan. 6, we heard a lot about the “Big Lie” perpetrated by Trump and his allies that the election was “stolen.” In reality, this narrative never got far. It was rejected by the media (including Fox News), thrown out by the courts, labeled by social networks as “disputed,” and dismissed by politicians, including Trump’s own vice president. Yes, some far-right groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers came to Washington to commit acts of violence, but they were roundly denounced. For a Big Lie to be successful, it has to have buy-in from the people in power, moneyed interests, the narrative-framers in the media generally, all of whom have to benefit from the lie and therefore repeat it.

But what issue could possibly unite all of these constituencies? For several years, elites in the media, government, and now finance have denounced social media as a tool for propaganda, disinformation and hate. Social media was to blame for the Russian disinformation that supposedly elected Trump in 2016. Social media was fingered as the main culprit in an “insurrection” that attempted to overthrow an election. And now, WallStreetBets is accused without evidence of spreading hate and misinformation. We’ve even been told that social media is worse than cigarettes.

What all of our elites have in common is a reason to fear social media. Legacy media hates social media for disrupting their business models and competing with them for influence. Wall Street has just learned that organized social networks can threaten their control of the Monopoly board. The party in power benefits from increased censorship and repression of political dissent by labeling it “hate speech” and “disinformation.” Ironically, the tech oligarchs benefit the least from the censorship they impose, but the threat of break-up keeps them in line.

If there is a Big Lie in American politics right now, it is the idea that censorship of social media is necessary to save democracy. In his book The Square and the Tower, the historian Niall Ferguson describes the age-old tension between hierarchies and networks—between the rulers in the Tower and the people in the Square. The last thing that the rulers want to see when they look down is a teeming throng in the Square. And nobody benefits more than the rulers from malleable censorship rules that are easily weaponized to restrict, disrupt, or disband the Square. What the insiders fear is not the end of democracy, but the end of their control over it, and the loss of the benefits they extract from it. Ultimately, the battle over speech is just one aspect of a broader war for power amid a growing political realignment that is not Left versus Right, but rather insider versus outsider. Thanks to social media, the outsiders are threatening to replace who’s in the Tower, and the insiders have never been more scared.

David Sacks, founding chief operating officer of PayPal and founder of Yammer, is founder and general partner at the venture capital firm Craft Ventures. He writes the Bottom Up newsletter and appears on The All In Pod.
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Re: Revoke the 230

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Interbane wrote:I don't see how the solution can be of the headhunting variety. There's no way a host like Facebook could prevent or eliminate every instance that they might possibly be sued for. The 230 shouldn't be entirely revoked.
I don't see how they can justify not taking down content that is actionable in the courts, baseless, and spread by a person with a history of smearing people. Blackmail becomes legal if the person can successfully hide behind VPNs or other dark tools. This is just a matter of the law catching up with the technology - there is no justification for leaving slander and defamation up on a public platform.
Interbane wrote:The issue is that this is an excuse that is easy to hide behind. They can't catch everyone, so a rule holding them accountable for a single person's crime would be seen as draconian.
It is more about tracing and removing than about catching every lie. The platforms have shown that they are quite capable of taking out QAnon content, for example. AI makes tracing quite within their powers. I am guessing that if we knew a tenth of what these platforms have done to help authoritarian governments catch opponents, "we can't do that" would become a joke overnight.
Interbane wrote:Any pressure on them shouldn't focus entirely on the banning of individual culprits or posts. It should be more focused on the trends that allow posts to spread and for disinformation sources to be hampered. It's all about the algorithms.
I agree. I posted the material about a serial character assassin to point out the stakes.
Interbane wrote:One idea is to categorize news content, and require all content to be given a tag based on a category matrix. News, memes, opinions, satire, and fiction could be columns. Politics, science, religion, society, and art could be rows. Pick 1-3 categories in a form that you have to fill out. Then at least there's an info gate that has information which can be sorted and analyzed by algorithms. Patterns can be found(not sure what they'd look like), and the best path forward could be figured out.
This looks promising, though maybe vulnerable to manipulation and to audience selection. Since this stuff mainly goes only to sympathizers, their incentive to rate honestly is pretty minimal.
Interbane wrote:I heard another idea that's a little closer to truth panels, but it's worth exploring in concept. The idea would be to have a semi-hidden group of statistics for each and every account. It would have information on how often they share posts of various categories. How often they're shown to be factually incorrect in previous posts. It would be a "karma" system regarding information propagation.
This sounds more like what I would like to see. Many posts have nothing to do with accuracy of claims, but for those which do, a Pinocchio rating would give a warning for people whose info can't be trusted. Even if there are a lot of "undecided" posts that can't be evaluated factually, a person who spreads those regularly could get a little feedback.
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Re: Revoke the 230

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Charlie Warzel had a good piece in the NY Times about the problem of competition for people's attention. First of all, it rings really true. But what is interesting is the implications, that those who are willing to be outrageous pull a bigger slice of the total attention pie, and the power that goes with that is enormous.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/opin ... ernet.html

Goldhaber, the heralded prophet of the internet according to Warzel, has no great recommendations. We need to focus on the stuff that matters, and cut out all the extraneous news blips. Well, seems like we already knew that. Can we do anything for those who feel so starved for attention that they get psyched up by anything that gives them the feeling of being on the inside of special knowledge?

That's certainly one good point for Interbane's patient sitting-down-to-go-through-the-issues approach. Time was when a cup of coffee and a game of checkers together would do the same thing. Sigh.
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Re: Revoke the 230

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LanDroid wrote: Sat Jan 09, 2021 7:19 am
Google suspends Parler app from Play Store over failure to moderate egregious content
Parler's failure to remove 'egregious content' related to the D.C. riots violates Google's longstanding policies, the company said

Google announced on Friday that it would suspend free speech social media platform Parler’s listing from its Play Store due to a failure to moderate "egregious content" posted by users related to the violent siege on Capitol Hill this week. A spokesperson for Google confirmed in a statement to Fox News that its "longstanding policies" require that apps with user-generated content have measures in place to remove certain obscene content – including posts that incite violence. Developers agree to those terms.

"We’re aware of continued posting in the Parler app that seeks to incite ongoing violence in the U.S.," a Google spokesperson wrote in a statement. "In light of this ongoing and urgent public safety threat, we are suspending the app’s listings from the Play Store until it addresses these issues."

1/8/2021
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/google ... parler-app
I think this just means new users can't download the app. Otherwise Parler continues to fester.
:offtopic:
Definitely, but removing the app from play store does not mean people will not use the apps. There are third party app stores, third party sites.
Removing an app/banning something provokes a subconscious thought of gaining that freedom back. and Since then, parler is still being used by many. the numbers continue to grow.
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This Supreme Court Case Could Decide The Future Of The Internet As We Know It
For the first time ever, the court will hear arguments over Section 230, the internet’s “Magna Carta.”

The Supreme Court will soon hear arguments in a case with major implications for the operation of the internet as we know it. In Gonzalez v. Google, set to be argued Feb. 21, the court will be asked to pass judgment on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act for the first time.

Since its enactment in 1996, Section 230 has been interpreted by courts to shield online platforms from liability for almost any offense committed by users. This protection for user behavior enabled the growth of the current online ecosystem of search engines, social media sites, blogs, message boards, user-generated encyclopedias and shopping sites. And so it has variously been dubbed the internet’s “Magna Carta,” its “First Amendment” and the “Twenty-Six Words That Created The Internet.”

But Section 230 has also produced negative effects. Online platforms have been used for harassment, death threats, defamation, discrimination, revenge porn, fraudulent product sales, the illegal purchase of weapons and drugs resulting in death, and other illicit behavior. In most cases, platforms have been absolved of any responsibility thanks to Section 230’s protections. Gonzalez v. Google brings the negative effects that come with Section 230 before the court for the first time.

2/19/23
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/section- ... e3fc88d2dd
This is all coming to a head! Or maybe not? SCOTUS sometimes focuses on one small side issue, rules on that, leaving larger questions unresolved. Stay tuned for a major earthquake or one broken dish...
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