12
votes
There should be ‘consequences’ for platforms that don’t remove people like Alex Jones, US Senator Ron Wyden says
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- Authors
- Eric Johnson
- Published
- Aug 22 2018
- Word count
- 3069 words
This is such a stupid debate. Allow companies to remove who they want. Allow them to keep who they want. Users will either deal with the company's choice, or they'll go to another platform, where people like him are/aren't allowed. Social media companies and publishing platforms aren't common carriers.
If Twitter wants to keep Alex Jones, let it! If Facebook wants to ban Alex Jones, let it!
Wow so hard.
Excuse me, but do you realize that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) pretty much makes social media and community sites as we know them possible, right? You're also aware that Ron Wyden is one of the architects of the CDA, right?
For one of the people behind the Communications Decency Act to even hint that he might change his mind about a Section 230 of the CDA is a huge deal.
Yes, I do know. I'm referring to the debate, and his position in the debate, not the article itself. Hence the word "debate."
It's obviously newsworthy that Wyden had an anti-free speech position; however, Section 230 doesn't really apply here; S230 protects companies that unknowingly host illegal content from civil/criminal liability.
I'm familiar with Section 230, and if you remember it was already changed earlier this year in a move that ended with sex workers, site owners and freedom-of-expression activists screaming at the tops of their lungs to undo it. (FOSTA/SESTA)
The debate is about legality.
"Should companies be forced to remove people from their platforms?"
The 'pure,' or 'extreme' version of one side, the one presented by Wyden, says "Yes, absolutely; companies should be liable for hosting content from people like Jones."
The other 'pure' or 'extreme' side says "No, they shouldn't be able to remove people at all! They're common carriers."
I was presenting a position somewhere closer to the middle of that, and one I thought to be fairly sensible.
Warning, I edited the text of this a bit. You might want to reread if you've typed a comment or similar.
Yes, I did hear something about that.
Really, I find it a bit sad that S230's more or less nullified in most cases. There probably should be a stronger replacement at this point.
We have one. It's called the World Wide Web. It would be nice if normies learned how to use it instead of jumping from one walled garden to another. And it would be really nice if there was decent money in making it easy for normies to have their own websites and secure, self-hosted network services.
There are decentralised alternatives to all social media platforms, and fantastically viable ones at that. There are ActivityPub instances with more than a hundred thousand users on them actively. That's a lot, especially considering that's multiple groups of hundreds of thousands over the protocol.
Freedom of speech is useless if you can't have a platform.
As it stands if the ruling class doesn't like what you are saying, it just takes a few private companies refusing you any sort of platform and your "free speech" is limited to shitty sites that barely anyone visits.
And while the likes of Alex Jones are unfortunately horrible examples of free speech, the measures used to censor him have and will be used to censor leftists as well.
I'm not left-leaning, so I really don't care if it's used to remove leftists, centrists, socialists, or fascist anarchists!
The ActivityPub protocol has hundreds of thousands of users, and is by design uncensorable. There are an infinite amount of ways to get your voice heard.
Not to mention, when the first amendment was written, the web didn't exist. Was their speech useless? There are likely more people on Mastodon alone than there were people in the United States when the Constitution was written.
No one should be forced to pay to have content they don't like on their own sites. That violates their freedom of speech, and the only reason the big players aren't "shitty sites that barely anyone visits" is because they keep people they don't want off their platform.
They can censor anything they don't like, if you happen to align with them you just won't notice it. But censoring leftist ideas is censoring progress in general, and that's been happening for a while now.
That's definitely more than I expected, but how many of those are active users compared to curious people who made an account, but haven't been active since? Either way even hundreds of thousands is relatively small compared to sites like Facebook, Twitter, and even reddit.
It was as useful as it could be, although arguably newspapers had a similar kind of censorship power to that which modern media (social or otherwise) companies have today.
That is very wrong, as you said there are hundreds of thousands on Mastodon (around 200k from what I can find), the 1790 Census had the US population at 3,929,214.
It costs them virtually nothing to host any specific content.
"Not letting them oppress us oppresses them."
They've been getting along just fine with Alex Jones on their sites.
It was a reference to something; you missed it.
That's active. Mastodon.Social alone has over a ~mil registered accounts.~
Both then and now protest is still completely doable by any group of people in the United States.
There are far more than 200k people on Mastodon. Again, a single Mastodon instance, Mastodon.Social, has 200k active users, ~and a million accounts signed up~. Mastodon.Social is one of literally thousands of Mastodon instances.
You obviously haven't seen how obscene AWS rates are, esp at scale.
"I should be able to force you to keep thousands of Hitler gifs on your site, even though it breaks your ToS and storage and bandwidth both have costs. We get to take away your freedom not to speak."
Twitter bans millions of accounts, and Facebook does similar. Just because Jones specifically wasn't until he incited violence doesn't mean they don't ban people frequently.
EDIT:
Lines:
Have been changed, as I can't source the 1mm, but they periodically purge inactive users and am looking for the blog post by @Eugen I saw saying it. Will restore if I find that.