Biden wants to get rid of law that shields companies like Facebook from liability for what their users post

Yeeesh I didn't realize Backpage's behavior was so bad. I generally am pro-legalizing (and heavily regulating) prostitution, so I was generally sympathetic to the idea that they were providing a safe platform for it. I kind of just assumed they knew they were on thin ice and would have taken some basic care to try and keep the non-victimless (is there a word that's like "victimfull"?) variants, like child abuse and sex-trafficking, under control.

That said, I think there is a trend in law enforcement now where expansive powers are being given to curtail "sex trafficking" but this is basically resulting in them defining the term overly-broadly to catch lots of stuff that probably doesn't deserve that level of enforcement. It's kind of like how anti-terrorism powers are largely just used to wage the drug war now.

Sex trafficking is already exempted from being covered by Section 230 by a newish law called FOSTA (Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act). So Backpage is no longer an good argument for abolishing Section 230.

You can find a lot of articles about FOSTA and Section 230 on the blog of Eric Goldman: https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2019/06/latest-linkwrap-on-fostas-aftermath.htm (lots of related links in the bottom).

I wonder at times if this might actually produce some good in the end. Many of us of enjoy commenting and linking online, but is it an inherent good?

I think there is a basic difference in how platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and even Tildes work vs. how the socialization used to work in the pre-social media internet through Usegroups, bulletin boards, IRC chats, and blogs with commentariats. I suspect the former model is inherently flawed but I'm not really sure what to do about it since there is no putting the genie back in the bottle.

I talked about what I think of as the basic flaw in social media here. After rereading that post I find I still agree with the argument a year later. The 1-to-many paradigm might just be fundamentally broken because it creates no incentive to treat people like people, instead the primary thing I interact with is atomized bits of "content" bereft of all context and humanity.

If you'll allow me a bit of a digression, there is a neurological disorder called "Capgras Syndrome" where after a traumatic brain injury, one becomes convinced that a person they see and know is actually an imposter. One of the theories about what's happening is that the brain actually recognizes people on two levels. One level is the straight up facial recognition, but on an emotional level that facial recognition is accompanied by a memory trigger that "reminds" you of your general emotional orientation towards that person. So I see my wife and I know she's my wife not just because this human has my wife's face but because I associate that face with all the memories and feelings and things I know about her. The face is anchored to a whole suite or emotions and thoughts.

Some traumatic brain injuries manage to retain the part of your brain that has a memory of the person's face, but it breaks your brain's ability to pull in all the associated resources it expects upon detection of the face. You brain expects this bevy of anchored thoughts and feelings to come rushing in and when they don't come your brain assumes this is not the person you know. The fact that they have the same face and claim to be this person means they are an imposter!

All of that is a roundabout way of saying there is more to human interpersonal reaction that merely knowing you're talking to a person. You can interact with someone on an intellectual level, but you can't really trust or be open with them unless you can anchor this to an emotional connection built on shared memories and experiences and background knowledge about them. The Twitter paradigm that strips all that context out of the posts you interact with might be hampering your brain's ability to interact with people as humans.

I suppose part of me being on Tildes is the hope that a clever enough tech wizard could solve the problem since I do trust Deimos, but we're also perhaps pinning too much hope now on tech wizards to solve the problems they have collectively created.

It is all a matter of scale. When human communities are small-scale, they can self-police. When communities grow too large, the economic incentives for moderation break-down. If moderation becomes onerous, people give up and stop doing it, unless the platform steps in and incentivizes it. And the platform operators’ motives are unlikely to align with the community when the community grows too large and attracts interests of the wider world.

Such a law could create a significantly more fragmented internet where small social groups police themselves with one or a few leaders, which would more resemble how our real life social networks are.

In a way, this is what's already happening with Mastodon instances and platforms which use ActivityPub in general. Most are geared towards specific interests and have more stringent moderation (in practice as well as policy) than large sites like Twitter, and since users are able to migrate to different instances, they're able to collectively exert more pressure over admins' decisions. However, on the flip side, moderation isn't really democratized per se, so it's effectively replacing the corporate hierarchy of traditional social media with benevolent despots who control smaller fiefdoms. Due to the ability to defederate with other instances, most users are protected from places rife with bad actors and nonexistent moderation such as Gab, but this ability can also be overused due to spats with another instance's admin. Overall, the power structures are very different.

If I yell fire in a movie theater, should I be prosecuted for my action? Or should the theater be prosecuted because they allowed me on the premises without ensure that I would not yell fire first.

If the theater is aware of the existence of groups dedicated to wreaking havoc in movie theaters by provoking stampedes, and the theater then takes active measures to monetize these peoples' activities despite the harm to their patrons overall I'd say yeah you should probably bear some blame for it. At that point it's negligence on the part of the venue.