@louis @matthewstoller I think you are responsible for the algorithms you deploy and the forums you provide. I don’t want to see internet forums, particularly small ones, disappear, so I’d include some safe harbors, but they’d be narrow and tailored to smaller-scale operators, from which the scale and probability of potential harms is mechanically lower. For large forums, it’s like 80s network TV. You have to be careful about what you broadcast.
i really dislike it when my internet acquaintances die. please don’t.
@louis @matthewstoller Section 230 is and has long been a very polarized issue! @mmasnick is very much on one side of it. A bit more ambivalently perhaps, but I’m on the other side. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/trump-fighting-section-230-wrong-reason/617497/ 1/
@louis @matthewstoller @mmasnick When Section 230 was passed and the early caselaw turned it broad and impenetrable, the issue was mostly what you might call “negative moderation”. Refraining from distributing things you think bad shouldn’t make you responsible, as happened perversely to Prodigy. 2/
@louis @matthewstoller @mmasnick But I think we as a society are coming to a decision that so broad an immunity is untenable for “positive moderation”, for what you choose to amplify. We all agree that moderation choices, positive or negative, are themselves 1st Amendment protected expressive speech. We all agree that refusing to carry something you think bad shouldn’t recruit new liability for what you allow relative to not moderating at all. 3/
@louis @matthewstoller @mmasnick But for content you choose to highlight or amplify in ways that go beyond some “neutral” presentation, and certainly for things you are paid to amplify, I think it now exceedingly likely that liability will be clipped, to some degree. 4/
@louis @matthewstoller @mmasnick Whether that’s good or bad, in my view, will depend upon details. There are obviously terrible devils in details of what “neutral” might mean, or “positive vs negative moderation”. 5/
@louis @matthewstoller @mmasnick I don’t think the fully expansive Section 230 status quo is politically sustainable, for the good reason that it’s bad policy. Publisher and distributor liability exist in other contexts for good reasons, and reasons that apply to algorithmic mass-audience publishers at least as much as they do traditionally. 6/
@louis @matthewstoller @mmasnick The very expansive interpretation of Section 230 that has obtained since the 1990s was based on a supposition that internet experiments could be utopian, and we wanted to err on the side of protecting rather than disciplining and potentially discouraging them. The results of that interpretation are in, no longer an experiment, and not utopian. We as a public are revisiting our courts’ earlier choices. /fin
The blanket liability courts have interpreted onto Section 230 is growing threadbare. cf @matthewstoller https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judges-rule-big-techs-free-ride-on
@sqrtminusone@emacs.ch @GuerillaOntologist My understanding is he has plaintext access to nearly everything that goes across Telegram if he wants it. In that circumstance, there’s arguably no country and no security service and no amount of money that can protect you. You are too valuable for a state actor not to own. If that’s right, the question before you isn’t how to protect yourself from state actors, but which state actor to be protected (and owned) by.
@GuerillaOntologist I think that’s a fair view! I do see others expressing the more cloak and dagger view! I honestly don’t have a view, but I was curious what others thought.
@_dm right back atcha, agreed!
@GuerillaOntologist yeah, “defection” is a funny word in this case, but it refers to the idea he intentionally traveled to France and placed himself publicly in the care of the French state as a negotiated means of self-protection. i agree it’s weird to talk about “defecting” to a country where you hold citizenship, but i think it is the word widely used by people who think Durov’s arrest to be a prearranged cover.
@_dm Again, I think we’ll have something of a test if Trump craters in the polls. If it’s about an appearance of independence, their weird stretches towards legitimating Trumpish ideas and not holding him to ordinary standards of scrutiny will continue. If it’s about hedging their bets against a possible new political environment, and then likelihood of that environment collapses, we should see them suddenly raise their standards and call out the nonsequiturs, lies, and cruelty.
@_dm I guess where appearing to be independent requires defying standards of accuracy and clarity that a news organization should and otherwise would sustain, I think “be friendly”, is a fairer description. It’s not just pushing the edge of an Overton Window, choosing to take seriously ideological perspectives that might previously have been out of bounds. I think if you look at, say, the New York Times, you’ll find they are really stretching standards in the name of “fairness”.
Durov and France:
77.8%
Surprise arrest
(21 votes)
22.2%
Cover for defection
(6 votes)
@_dm I don’t think it’s so binary, independent vs not. I think newsrooms do strive for independence, but imperfectly. Sponsorship does color a general procorporate slant, I think. They are better about guarding against bias towards particular advertisers, because frankly they have a diversity of potential advertisers, so they can afford it. They can’t diversify across political regime though, re both risk of harrassment and to access, so that does color coverage.
@_dm I really do think so. If the polling breaks hard towards Kamala, we’ll have something of a test to distinguish the hypotheses.
journalistic organization are vulnerable, risk-averse, profit-seeking corporations.
as long as there’s a roughly 50% chance a Trump Administration controls the regulators, controls DOJ, has a sympathetic Court, there will be a lot of coverage that in retrospect could demonstrate “fairness” where fairness means nothing more or less than sympathetic coverage of Donald Trump.
media orgs are “triangulating”.
coverage will become less sympathetic and more accurate only if/when he’s clearly losing.
what if it really is all that goat’s fault?
“Almost all ‘contrarianism’ is like that, nobly and courageously supporting the status quo and existing power, while presenting yourself as bravely swimming upstream.” @Atrios https://www.eschatonblog.com/2024/08/contrarianism.html
@mimsical no this is wrong.
“Given the Supreme Court's observations that platforms engage in protected first-party speech under the First Amendment when they curate compilations of others' content via their expressive algorithms, id. at 2409, it follows that doing so amounts to first-party speech under § 230, too.” via #MikeSacks https://x.com/mikesacksesq/status/1828795866590896599 ht @matthewstoller
// Wow.
What audiences mostly reward in writers is not new insights or ideas, but eloquence in expressing what an audience already thinks and believes.
Readers seek champions of their prejudices, advocates who in theory might persuade people with contrary views to also see the light, if people with contrary views weren’t too busy reading and rewarding their own champions to ever be persuaded.