United States Politics Thread 46

[Torco]

I hear there's a court case in the us that's about whether or not social media websites are liable for what their users post in there... I'm of two minds about the notion: on the one hand, yeah, sure, if I say like something horrible in here like [redacted] or [redacted], or even [redacted] all the damned [redacted] until there's not a single [redacted] to [redacted], well, that's not zomp's fault. But then again, that's just posting: making an algo that decides what people see and what they don't see is a lot more... editorial. And anyway, fuck it, the internet used to be cool before it was all walled gardens and multi-billion dollar companies getting all the traffic, maybe killing them is good! and anyway, if they're gonna get all the cash from the content, they should get all the risk for it as well. I don't like this "right, so the internet is just these three websites, and they're not responsible for anything in there, but they get all of the ad money and all of the control and get to silence and amplify whoever and whatever they want, and set whatever TOS they want, but no, they take on none of the risk". it feels sufficiently technofeudalist <to use varoufakis' term> to make me long for the days of capitalism.

[Raphael]

Is that, perhaps, Section 230-related?

https://www.verduria.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=786

[Raphael]

Unrelated, I have a new blog post about one aspect of recent US political history:

https://guessishouldputthisupsomewhere. ... g-in-2008/

[zompist]

I hear there's a court case in the us that's about whether or not social media websites are liable for what their users post in there... I'm of two minds about the notion: on the one hand, yeah, sure, if I say like something horrible in here like [redacted] or [redacted], or even [redacted] all the damned [redacted] until there's not a single [redacted] to [redacted], well, that's not zomp's fault. But then again, that's just posting: making an algo that decides what people see and what they don't see is a lot more... editorial. And anyway, fuck it, the internet used to be cool before it was all walled gardens and multi-billion dollar companies getting all the traffic, maybe killing them is good!

Yeah, this is about Section 230. It's basically the same as the telephone: you can't sue the telephone company because you don't like the last phone call you got, they're only providing a platform.

A lot of people, left and right, are against Section 230, but I have to say-- be careful what you ask for, 'cos you might get it. It would basically mean that most of the web would disappear. You think "oh good Twitter would go away!" but also Wikipedia and the Internet Archive and Mastodon and Wordpress. And this site, and every other personal site.

Why? Because there's no end to the litigiousness and stalking and harassment that people are willing to unleash, and no company is going to allow any sort of open access-- and that includes merely hosting websites-- where someone can post something that gets them sued. (Note that smart lawyers go after, not the most guilty party, but the associated party that has the most money.) The "fun Internet" you yearn for is the one created by Section 230 back in 1996.

There are a lot of reasons to be mad at the major social media sites, but I don't know that it's so clear what to do about them. I mean, The Algorithm is absolutely shitty... it's almost beyond parody that Elon Musk just changed Twitter so the default feed shows his crappy tweets to everyone. (I don't see them because I use Tweetdeck... never use the default feed!) But I sure as hell don't want Ron DeSantis, the fascist governor of Florida, deciding what social media should look like. And if social media is simply so bad it should be eliminated, why is it that it's right-wing dictators who agree with that idea and ban them in their countries?

[bradrn]

I hear there's a court case in the us that's about whether or not social media websites are liable for what their users post in there... I'm of two minds about the notion: on the one hand, yeah, sure, if I say like something horrible in here like [redacted] or [redacted], or even [redacted] all the damned [redacted] until there's not a single [redacted] to [redacted], well, that's not zomp's fault. But then again, that's just posting: making an algo that decides what people see and what they don't see is a lot more... editorial. And anyway, fuck it, the internet used to be cool before it was all walled gardens and multi-billion dollar companies getting all the traffic, maybe killing them is good!

… A lot of people, left and right, are against Section 230, but I have to say-- be careful what you ask for, 'cos you might get it. It would basically mean that most of the web would disappear. You think "oh good Twitter would go away!" but also Wikipedia and the Internet Archive and Mastodon and Wordpress. And this site, and every other personal site.

One intermediate suggestion I’ve seen is to eliminate Section 230 protections for ‘large’ social networks (Twitter- and Facebook-scale, say), but keep it in place for everything else. Not sure if I agree with it or not, but it might achieve Torco’s aims without the associated problems.

Ron DeSantis, the fascist governor of Florida

Maybe it’s just that I’m out of touch here on another continent, but how is he fascist now? Deeply conservative, yes, but not fascist.

[zompist]

One intermediate suggestion I’ve seen is to eliminate Section 230 protections for ‘large’ social networks (Twitter- and Facebook-scale, say), but keep it in place for everything else. Not sure if I agree with it or not, but it might achieve Torco’s aims without the associated problems.

Torco did talk about "risk", but as I said, the potential for litigation here is infinite. You can't just assume that, oh, people will only be just a little bit, very nicely totalitarian. They will go all the way, until all speech they object to is gone.

Ron DeSantis, the fascist governor of Florida

Maybe it’s just that I’m out of touch here on another continent, but how is he fascist now? Deeply conservative, yes, but not fascist.

When he is forbidding teachers to have books in their classrooms, forbidding all discussion of LGBT topics in schools, forbidding universities from discussing race, and criminalizing trans treatment, he's not just conservative, he's a fascist.

[bradrn]

One intermediate suggestion I’ve seen is to eliminate Section 230 protections for ‘large’ social networks (Twitter- and Facebook-scale, say), but keep it in place for everything else. Not sure if I agree with it or not, but it might achieve Torco’s aims without the associated problems.

Torco did talk about "risk", but as I said, the potential for litigation here is infinite. You can't just assume that, oh, people will only be just a little bit, very nicely totalitarian. They will go all the way, until all speech they object to is gone.

I’m not talking about totalitarianism in any way. I’m talking about the suggestion to make large social networks liable for not removing harmful content posted on them, where ‘harmful’ remains as otherwise defined under American law. Obviously ‘large’ would have to be carefully defined, but then again careful definitions should be a prerequisite for any lawmaking in any case.

[zompist]

One intermediate suggestion I’ve seen is to eliminate Section 230 protections for ‘large’ social networks (Twitter- and Facebook-scale, say), but keep it in place for everything else. Not sure if I agree with it or not, but it might achieve Torco’s aims without the associated problems.

Torco did talk about "risk", but as I said, the potential for litigation here is infinite. You can't just assume that, oh, people will only be just a little bit, very nicely totalitarian. They will go all the way, until all speech they object to is gone.

I’m not talking about totalitarianism in any way. I’m talking about the suggestion to make large social networks liable for not removing harmful content posted on them, where ‘harmful’ remains as otherwise defined under American law. Obviously ‘large’ would have to be carefully defined, but then again careful definitions should be a prerequisite for any lawmaking in any case.

You are not thinking about totalitarianism, but you're not thinking about totalitarians will abuse your proposed law.

I already gave you an example. The GOP wants to maintain that any reference to homosexuality is harmful. They already have passed laws to that effect, and hope to apply them to social media.

[bradrn]

Torco did talk about "risk", but as I said, the potential for litigation here is infinite. You can't just assume that, oh, people will only be just a little bit, very nicely totalitarian. They will go all the way, until all speech they object to is gone.

I’m not talking about totalitarianism in any way. I’m talking about the suggestion to make large social networks liable for not removing harmful content posted on them, where ‘harmful’ remains as otherwise defined under American law. Obviously ‘large’ would have to be carefully defined, but then again careful definitions should be a prerequisite for any lawmaking in any case.

You are not thinking about totalitarianism, but you're not thinking about totalitarians will abuse your proposed law.

I already gave you an example. The GOP wants to maintain that any reference to homosexuality is harmful. They already have passed laws to that effect, and hope to apply them to social media.

Yeah, and that’s been restricted to schools and maybe universities, because those are the only places over which they have the power to pass these kinds of laws. If it was happening in Australia I’d be more worried because we have no formal freedom of speech protections, but you guys do. I feel pretty sure that a law attempting to restrict the speech of private corporations would be ruled unconstitutional.

(Though let’s hope it never even gets tested! As I said, I don’t even know if I’d support this law. It was just an idea I saw and thought interesting. And the interesting bit was precisely its limited scope, in the hope it would avoid some of these problems.)

[Ares Land]

Here in France (and I think more generally in the UE) it's all handled by pretty unclear bits of case law. The owner of a social media platform could be sued for something said there. I don't think it has any negative or positive effect. About the one sure thing is that you can't talk positively about tobacco -- anti-tobacco association and pressure groups are willing to sue, and the law is really clear on that one.

On those things we'd be glad to be rid of on the Internet, it's astonishingly inefficient. Racism is technically illegal here , so in theory I guess Twitter could be sued for racist tweets. It's pretty difficult and uncommon to get someone condemned for hate speech though, and on top of that there's no law against dog-whistling.

Back in the 2000s a friend of mine ran an online forum for political conservatives/libertarians. He was paranoid, as these people often are, about The Fascist State persecuting him, but he quickly found a solution: he just hosted everything in Switzerland. (It was an unnecessary precaution IMO.)

[bradrn]

Here in France (and I think more generally in the UE) it's all handled by pretty unclear bits of case law. The owner of a social media platform could be sued for something said there. I don't think it has any negative or positive effect. About the one sure thing is that you can't talk positively about tobacco -- anti-tobacco association and pressure groups are willing to sue, and the law is really clear on that one.

Over here it’s even worse — websites are liable for anything users post, since they are considered publishers. In practice, IIRC the impact seems to have been restricted to a few controversial defamation cases on Facebook, and that probably has more to do with our strict defamation laws than anything else. (See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230#Australia and https://theconversation.com/this-is-why ... ent-169826; those articles strike me as being somewhat light on details, but they give some impression of what the system is like.)

[Torco]

be careful what you ask for, 'cos you might get it. It would basically mean that most of the web would disappear.

Yeah, that's why I'm of two minds. But I of course don't think hosting is publishing, that'd be weird. but curating, choosing what gets shown to people and what doesn't, picking the next video in the autoplay thing... that does seem to be publishing, no?

Also, can the united states supreme court legislate the entire world? like, you guys are the empire and have the biggest aircraft carriers and keep invading/couping everyone else, but like... if you were to ban the internet, it's unlikely *every other country* would follow, no? wouldn't, I don't know, France keep hosting normal websites normally? or the UK?. and this brings me to an issue that hopefully won't be relevant... can the internet keep functioning if the us says it doesn't? like... is the internet still under the control of the CIA/DARPA/DoD/etc ? or are the series of tubes more like railroad tracks, where you can lay them but can't stop me from using them (unless you invade or something). Man, I really don't know a lot about the hardware of the web, do I.

And if social media is simply so bad it should be eliminated, why is it that it's right-wing dictators who agree with that idea and ban them in their countries?

do right wing dictators want to ban social media tho? I think it's more that governments (and the classes they represent) don't like people consuming all day everyday media they have no control over. Didn't the US enact some limited ban on TikTok ?

One intermediate suggestion I’ve seen is to eliminate Section 230 protections for ‘large’ social networks (Twitter- and Facebook-scale, say), but keep it in place for everything else.

There's the problem of who is big, tho. Better if you just enshrine a different between hosting and like... managing? like, my relationship with, say, facebook is very different from my relationship with pastebin, innit ? are those not two very different things?

You are not thinking about totalitarianism, but you're not thinking about totalitarians will abuse your proposed law.

But if we didn't have any laws which totalitarians could abuse, seems like we couldn't have laws. Still, yeah, making everyone liable for everything they host is wack.

Over here it’s even worse — websites are liable for anything users post, since they are considered publishers. In practice, IIRC the impact seems to have been restricted to a few controversial defamation cases on Facebook, and that probably has more to do with our strict defamation laws than anything else.

Also could be cultural... I understand stralians don't have this culture of everyone suing everyone all of the time over everything, right?

[Ares Land]

be careful what you ask for, 'cos you might get it. It would basically mean that most of the web would disappear.

Yeah, that's why I'm of two minds. But I of course don't think hosting is publishing, that'd be weird. but curating, choosing what gets shown to people and what doesn't, picking the next video in the autoplay thing... that does seem to be publishing, no?

Also, can the united states supreme court legislate the entire world? like, you guys are the empire and have the biggest aircraft carriers and keep invading/couping everyone else, but like... if you were to ban the internet, it's unlikely *every other country* would follow, no? wouldn't, I don't know, France keep hosting normal websites normally? or the UK?. and this brings me to an issue that hopefully won't be relevant... can the internet keep functioning if the us says it doesn't? like... is the internet still under the control of the CIA/DARPA/DoD/etc ? or are the series of tubes more like railroad tracks, where you can lay them but can't stop me from using them (unless you invade or something). Man, I really don't know a lot about the hardware of the web, do I.

It's not under US government control as far as I know of. It all belongs to huge telecom megacorps. Of course a significant part of traffic is routed through the US so while a worst-case scenario, totalitarian America couldn't shut down the Internet, I suppose it could be a serious inconvenience.
(Then again the US going full totalitarian would take months or years, lots of time for contingency plans.)

These days it's trivially use to host your stuff wherever you like and especially to have it hosted in a place with legal requirements that suits you.
AWS provides such a service and it's like their #1 sales argument. The purpose isn't really to evade restrictive legislature -- it's because legal requirements are a big factor in e-commerce.

Sometimes, though, if a country / region is big enough, it can be a lot easier to follow along with their requirements. GRDP is a legal requirement of the European Union, but the EU is big enough that most US websites find it convenient to be GRDP compliant (in fact, they actually are a lot more stringent about it than EU businesses typically are.)
So if the US decided, I don't know, to ban trans people from the Internet forever... It's entirely possible other countries would follow US ruling just to keep access to the US market. Just to be clear, US legislation has no bearing on what is hosted in other countries, but they could definitely ask US ISPs to block the offending websites. The US market is big enough for this to have huge consequences.

[Ares Land]

Also could be cultural... I understand stralians don't have this culture of everyone suing everyone all of the time over everything, right?

Probably, but I think the US litigiousness is kind of positive. In Europe we put laws in place with the full understanding they'll be randomly applied, if at all. I mention the GDPR again: US websites are strict about it because they expect people to sue. We Europeans don't really expect that to happen (and if someone does sue, maybe they'll get a verdict in ten years and maybe it'll be in their favor, so, well, whatever.) That's why the GDPR feels nasty and bureaucratic to Americans: it's basically throwing a lot of regulation at the wall and hoping something will stick.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I actually work with law offices, and most of the cases I encounter don't seem frivolous.

[hwhatting]

Besides the point that Ares mentioned, that it's often more convenient and cost-effective for a business to apply the regulations of a big market everywhere, even if regulations are less strict in some smaller markets, there's also the point that every business that is somehow involved with the US market is exposed to prosecution and litigation there, which can be very expensive. About a decade ago there was a wave of European banks stopping any business with American citizens and residents, for fear that they could expose themselves to prosecution and litigation due to compliance issues. You see the same now with Russian sanctions - banks in many countries, even those who otherwise are friendly to Russia, like China or CIS countries, cut off Russian clients and financial institutions and payment systems, because presence in the US market and access to the American financial system is more important to them than business with Russia.
On litigation: besides cultural issues, there are legal differences that explain the lower litigiousness in European countries. Many are like Germany, where:
- Class action suits are much more limited and more difficult to start (in Germany, they became a real thing only a couple of years back, as a reaction to the car exhaust scandals)
- Lawyers get fixed fees; success fees are not allowed and waving fees when the suit is unsuccessful is, if not prohibited, at least not usually done
- Pay-outs for damages are much lower than in the US; the concept of punitive damages is not part of the system; damages are determined generally by judges, not by juries who are more likely to want to make examples of big corporations.
So ambulance-chasing does not happen, and corporations have an easier life. Whether that's good or bad, is a question for debate - higher litigiousness makes corporations more careful, but that increases the cost of doing business, which in the end is borne by all consumers. So in the end, like most things, it's a question of finding the right balance.

[Torco]

Also could be cultural... I understand stralians don't have this culture of everyone suing everyone all of the time over everything, right?

Probably, but I think the US litigiousness is kind of positive...

maybe! I myself recently got the justice system to... well, get justice <i was owed wages by a scoundrel of an employer, and got them via initiating a trial and then accepting a settlement, which would have never happened otherwise>, so I can understand that.

- Lawyers get fixed fees; success fees are not allowed and waving fees when the suit is unsuccessful is, if not prohibited, at least not usually done

right, this I find bad: poor people ought to have access to lawyers, if only in cases that are clearly unwinnable for the other part.

another good thing about litigiousness, I suppose, is that it increases the amount of jurisprudence, and makes sure it's up to date.

[Ares Land]

On litigation: besides cultural issues, there are legal differences that explain the lower litigiousness in European countries. Many are like Germany (...)

About the same here. One issue I have with that system is that enforcements of regulations is ultimately up to the executive. If it so happens the government is pro-business or a bit short on money, enforcement can be random.

We have a fairly heavy body of workplace regulations and labour laws. Enforcement is up to the inspection du travail or other state entities. As it happens the inspection du travail is underfunded, because for the last twenty years or so governments have been both short on cash and pro-business.
In practice there's not much you can do if your employer is dishonest.

(That said of course workplace conditions are generally a lot better than they are in the US, I believe.)

[Raphael]

- Class action suits are much more limited and more difficult to start (in Germany, they became a real thing only a couple of years back, as a reaction to the car exhaust scandals)

Oh, they did? Interesting. Thank you for telling me. (Living in a kind of "internal emigration" can kind of cut you off from recent cultural developments.)

[Moose-tache]

About the one sure thing is that you can't talk positively about tobacco -- anti-tobacco association and pressure groups are willing to sue, and the law is really clear on that one.

"French anti-tobacco advocate" is the most depressing, Sisyphean job title I can think of.
EDIT: for context, the rate of smoking in France has gone down 2% in the last ten years, although during that time the average smoker has gone from a pack every two days to a pack every three days, so I guess there has been some progress.
EDIT EDIT: OK, apparently French consumption is only 1% higher than the global average, mostly due to the fact that the average Russian is 43% tobacco by volume.

As for online freedom of speech. I agree with the CW that the Swartz/Ohanian model of "anything goes" failed definitively in the 2010s. But as we scramble to replace the Wild West with something better, and fail, I think some of the stain has worn off of that otherwise terrible idea. I mean, if every time somebody builds a barber shop it fills up with racists chatting about skull shape, the problem is us, not the person who built the barbershop. If your population wants to do racism, you can't have both free and open public fora for the uncensored exchange of ideas, and safety. You probably could if your population was less shit, but that would require generational investment in human resources like education, housing, health care, and employment, which most voters seem to legitimately find revolting.