Honestly this position is pretty backwards. Forums shouldn’t be policing content unless it’s illegal. Why is everyone so desperate for regulated discussion?
They should be allowed to have it both ways. If I run a video game forum, I should be allowed to ban trolls and remove off-topic posts without accepting legal responsibility for any illegal content that gets posted on my forum by third parties without my prior knowledge or consent. Forcing people to choose between being a publisher and being a utility would completely and instantly kill every single internet community dead in its tracks.
I don’t understand how people can post on a heavily moderated forum like HN while demanding that moderation be effectively made illegal. It’s like people hate Facebook and Google so much that they mindlessly get onboard with any form of retaliation against them regardless of the actual consequences.
It sounds like you are suggesting we make forum moderation illegal.
That's like the difference between saying who's allowed on the sidewalk vs. saying who's allowed in the bar.
EDIT: In case it's not clear, this comment is pro-net neutrality. I am pointing out the absurdity of disallowing site owners from curating their own content.
This is not what is currently up for debate. The current conflict is over control of private forums.
Its not a cut and dry issue either. If you were to own a site, anyone forcing you to post things to your site you don't believe is also an infringement of your rights. It cuts both ways.
In my eyes the major issue is the consolidation of discourse onto a few private forums, not whether or not those forums should be able to police themselves.
How can there be "self-regulation" on a platform that is "unstoppable, uncensorable, undeplatformable"?
I certainly agree that there are plenty of valuable forums that are not run by tech giants, but they function because they have dedicated moderation and censorship. The trouble is that the set of things I think people should be allowed to say is extremely large, but set of things I want to see in a forum or any sort of social media is much smaller. It doesn't have to be Jack Dorsey at the helm, but someone has to be sweeping up the filth to make a forum a place I want to interact with.
This law will be the death of topical forums. I mean, one man's off topic is another man's censorship. We saw that in usenet back in the 1ate 1990s/early 2000s.
If you can't remove posts for being offtopic, all forums are just a sea of unrelated, meaningless things.
The crux of the problem is that limiting moderation only to allowing content which is illegal and banning what is illegal still allows content many people may find objectionable, spam, trolling, racist and hateful speech and off topic content.
Not every online community wants to be a 4chan or Voat, which is what that sort of hands off moderation inevitably leads to.
So any Internet forum which has to moderate content (because there is illegal content for which the law doesn't provide immunity from) is a publisher now and has to be able to fully vet everything everyone posts?
My prefered analogy is an online forum. Online forums have existed for about 30-40 years without much regulation. And what people have figured out in that time is that in order to run a successful community forum you need strong moderation, otherwise it'll be destroyed by the spammers and the assholes. Determining who the spammers and the assholes are is somewhat of an artform, moderators need flexibility to guide the community towards civil discourse, you can't have strict moderation rules. Asking for the government to regulate online forums is ridiculous.
No, the problem is whether to moderate forums- it's not happening and when people try to come up with codes of conduct so they can moderate better, there's a huge outcry.
It would be fine if we had better moderation in more places, even without any laws. But even that's not happening.
You'd be surprised at what is "not illegal". Every community moderates.
You can make an argument that some sites have moderated too much, or been too overtly political.
But every community moderates, and has to. This can be demonstrated with a simple example. Guess what isn't illegal? Spam!
It should be obvious that FB and Twitter etc have to take spam down though.
Then there's abusive behaviour. Stalking, harassment, etc. Often not illegal, but hurts a platform. Better take that down.
What about propaganda? They should let it all go? That sure sounds like a....phone network. Actually wait, it sounds more like the news media, which has been regulated for decades. A zero moderation policy would likely have led to demands for regulation, too.
And then there's the massive category of topics which are not illegal, but horrifying. Have zero moderation, and you end up as 4chan or worse.
--------
I'm generally in favour of keeping politics out of things, but your "we take stuff down only for a court order" is a naive view. Literally every forum moderates, they have no choice.
Here's the thing: forums are not publications. Forums are discourse, so it's not a platform, and discourse cannot exist with muzzles, and must operate in tune with real world consequences.
That's how you know you're having a conversation. It's a conversation when there are no boundaries that render topics off limits.
Expressly forbidden subject matter with little justification other than personal desires to shift goal posts represents the destruction of personal agency, at which point the value of discourse and interaction becomes dubious.
You can see this emerge in many stifled areas, where self appointed referees march in and police activity down to a single word or punctuation mark. The interactions are sterilized and dead. To say they'd been rendered kid friendly might be charitable.
Reddit's no exception. Imgur as well. It's been obvious for years that the discourse is molded and extruded to fit into a sentiment of entertainment that strikes one's cognition as uncanny. There's curation beyond the natural "organic" crowdsourced voting that assists in ranking the value of participation.
Facebook, while moderated, and wrapped in the slimiest of user interfaces still demonstrably rings as augmented discourse, but true discourse among familiar peers, no less. Twitter as well.
Instagram and Snapchat are mostly channels for drug dealing and prostitution, by contrast. Something twitter chased away at one point, and Facebook has intimidated with seemingly unwitting blunders originating from all angles, such that teens and parents blow up their own ploys regularly, never mind other criminal elements.
Anyway, it's laughable that we worry about a word like nigger, uniquely American in its sensitivity, when there are many other ways individuals deliver serious and real harm beyond exclusion and hurt feelings, by way of discussion.
Feel free to regulate another platform to death, and watch people vote with their feet, until real laws completely ruin the internet and prevent natural discussion with honest consequences, but perhaps worthwhile risks.
I think here is where a potential misunderstanding is. I've said nothing about "people shouldn't be allowed to say certain things", I've been asking purely about whether or not there should be regulations or items removed from a site, including illegal material. If I'm understanding you correctly, you're looking at this purely as a censorship issue. There's a difference here, and one that's worth at least acknowledging. For example, if someone is posting something that is illegal, the appropriate authorities will both remove it from the post and attempt to go after the persons responsible for posting it, whether that's online or in the real world.
There's room for discussion, but first we have to figure out exactly what where' discussing, otherwise we're just taking past each other, and accomplishing nothing.
reply