I’m actually coming around to thinking that maybe section 230 really should just be repealed entirely. Somehow we’ve come to believe that everyone being able to post anything anywhere anytime is an unfettered good and is entirely simpatico with the 1st amendment. I’m not so sure. Any idiot can yell anything on a street corner, and repealing 230 isn’t going to change that. But if you’re giving that idiot a platform to reach millions, because that’s your business model? Well maybe your business model sucks and destroying society isn’t exactly worth the shareholder value you’ve created. I get the irony of having this conversation in a forum where any idiot can post anything and reach…tens of people?, but it’s long past time that Congress considers the issue more fully (to the extent they consider literally anything these days).
It's tough because in the transition from web 1 to web 2 our public spaces shifted from protocols to companies. Email is a protocol, but so is a sidewalk. I have sympathy for your view (shared it to some degree) but I'm becoming increasingly reticent to gatekeep our company-owned digital sidewalks until we figure out how to build them as protocols first.
That's pretty wise perspective. It's very possible that what we're experiencing is, as you term it, a lack of protocol. Our protocols dictate that companies can't dump chemical waste into the environment, but the Cuhayoga river had to be set ablaze several times in order for that to take place. I thought that the election of Trump would be our digital Cuyahoga moment, but 2016 seems quaint by comparison to today.
I think the problem is that if you legally mandated moderation to a relatively strict standard, social media companies could never afford to meet the standard and still turn a profit. Nor will people ever agree to publicly fund the state to attempt the fair enforcement of popular consensus moderation. It'll always be "unfair" to conservatives, for example. Ho boy are the next 15 years gonna be fun!
But isn't that their problem, not ours? Chemical and other industrial companies made the same basic argument about the Clean Water and Clean Air acts. If your business model is predicated on polluting, then you have a bad business model and it's you, not the public, who need to adapt....social media companies could never afford to meet the standard and still turn a profit.
Whether or not we might be living through the latter part of a finite age of online social media is an interesting question. Surely not, is my guess, but if we knew for sure the next form it'd assume, we'd probably be busy working on it already, right? (not you and I, necessarily, the proverbial "we")
The profit motive simply needs to be rebalanced. Right now, "engagement" wins everything because online advertising is preposterously mispriced. Like, it is more cost-effective for me to put a $70k jumbotron on a busy street corner than it is for me to pay for online advertising within the same demographic reach. Engagement from the Jumbotron? 3x as effective as online advertising. I got eight years of data like this and so does every single advertiser out there but just like the early days of television and the early days of radio, the networks are blowing smoke up everyone's asses. As soon as advertisers accept that Google ads are worth about a tenth what they're paid for, the costs-benefits analysis of provocative online forums go waaaay the fuck down. Frankly, Apple reefing down on their adblocker would probably go a long way towards making things more civil. They basically slaughtered Facebook with a few lines of code.
Yeah, I'm not sure it'd be a bad thing either. It would certainly radically alter the landscape, but it might end up settling into some hellscape of open-source, anonymous, encrypted posting boards where moderation is impossible, and only criminals can stomach using the most powerful communication tool we've ever invented. I'll also point out that I haven't seen a single "free speech absolutist" online who didn't fall somewhere on the spectrum of "I'm an idiot!" to "Let me do hate speech!". They must all be some level of stupid, because those are the same people overwhelmingly pushing for repealing 230, which would eventually strip them of the very platforms boosting their hate speech via rage-farming algos. I also thought it was pretty savvy the way that Trump wielded the threat of repealing Section 230, because if he managed to coax the legislature into doing it or somehow wrangled up an executive order effectively repealing it, one of big tech's biggest issues would be... content posted by Donald Trump. It's hard to imagine the world's most litigious man ever wasn't aware of that.
I know, and that's shitty. I don't know how to not throw out the baby with the bathwater. There's so much good on the internet, but the gravity of all the shit is making it collapse in on itself. Obviously it would be pretty easy to write exemptions for inherently private services like email, but I suppose it could be done too for places with, say, fewer than 100,000 daily active users. The status quo just doesn't work as it's written.