Comment by kingnight
5 years ago
The valley being an echo chamber doesn’t necessarily mean those implementing this have their heads in the sand.
It can’t be all perfectly achieved, but to do nothing, as they were before, could be now determined to be a worse case than providing these annotations to flagrant misuse by the highest impact profile that they can’t do away with entirely.
The legal issue is that their legal protection from defamation and libel under section 230 requires them to moderate "in good faith". If they only selective moderate accounts, then that protection may not survive in court.
...but I think a greater concern we can all agree on, is that for the type of communications that Twitter does - Twitter is effectively a monopoly. The people being censored here can't even themselves go to any alternative platform, because there's really no other platform at that scale for that content format.
...that's a bigger problem, because it gives Twitter the power to shape global communications unilaterally. Something no corporation should have the power to do.
I think, broadly, that censorship should be regulated by democratically elected bodies - not corporations.
There is no requirement under section 230 to moderate content in good faith. Selective moderation does not affect their liability. This law was passed democratically, for exactly this purpose.
>"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." This federal law preempts any state laws to the contrary: "[n]o cause of action may be brought and no liability may be imposed under any State or local law that is inconsistent with this section."
It's literally written into the law in section 230 (c)(2)(A)...
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of — any action voluntarily taken in __good faith__ to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected
...and that specific requirement has been specifically referenced in Trump's recent executive order.
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This is absurd. Twitter is a corporation and can choose to present their product as they see fit. And nothing about them is essential. Twitter could go bankrupt and the world would not hurt at all. There are absolutely plenty of ways to disseminate information.
Twitter only has about 150 million daily active users. That's 1/3 of the population of the USA. There is no way in hell Twitter could ever be considered a monopoly when less than 2% of the world's population even uses their platform actively.
>The people being censored here can't even themselves go to any alternative platform, because there's really no other platform at that scale for that content format.
What about setting up a blog on whitehouse.com? Most normal people can't get the same audience, but Trump's not normal.
>If they only selective moderate accounts, then that protection may not survive in court.
Even assuming there was a service moderating by purely political guidelines, I don't see how 230 would stop applying. Otherwise, a lot of websites will be screwed. For instance, any website run by a political party that allows comments.
>that's a bigger problem, because it gives Twitter the power to shape global communications unilaterally. Something no corporation should have the power to do.
The solution to a monopoly abusing its power isn't to write piecemeal law curtailing things as they come up. The solution is to get rid of the monopoly (breaking it up, making it so competitors join the market, etc).
But this order isn't about monopolies. It's a party plank and rallying cry.
The issue is that the rules are being enforced selectively. Just this week Twitter fact checked Trump's opinion on mail voter fraud by linking to other experts' opinions. It seems more like a move to influence the election rather than enforcing the rules.
Let’s entertain the possibility that Twitter is doing this to influence the election.
So what?
There’s no law prohibiting these types of businesses from supporting a political candidate. They could plaster a huge “Vote For X” banner at the top of every person’s profile. Don’t like it? Don’t use it.
It’s not like Twitter is tax-exempt which would prohibit it from endorsing candidates like Churches.
By the same argument, Google could exclude a political candidate from their search results entirely, or bolster a fabricated news story claiming the candidate was a child-molsting satanist to the top of their results. Would you also consider that acceptable?
These companies have become, for many, infrastructural. For these companies (who also sell advertising) to take these kinds of actions would essentially be them bypassing campaign finance rules to give MASSIVE contributions of free advertising to candidates. I think its fair to argue that that would be unacceptable interference.
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> It’s not like Twitter is tax-exempt which would prohibit it from endorsing candidates like Churches.
Twitter is not tax-exempt but is certainly lawsuit-exempt to a large degree. The entire reason twitter has not be sued into oblivion for the actions of it's users is because of the protections Section 230[1] grants them.
But here is the pinch. Section 230 protection applies only as long as you act as platforms for 3rd party speech. But when they start plastering "Vote for X" banners on their websites of their own violations, they go from being platforms for 3rd party speech to 1st party publishers. That effectively removes the Section 230 protections twitter enjoys.
I much as I hate to say it, Trump might be right this once. Twitter has stopped being a neutral platform enforcing consistent policies for quite some time now.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
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> The issue is that the rules are being enforced selectively.
It's not only acceptable but actually ethically correct to hold those with more power to higher standards of responsibility.
It's therefore not only acceptable but actually ethically correct to enforce these rules more proactively against the President of the United States than some Russian bot account.
There is no objective "ethically correct" anything.
You'll say one thing is "ethically correct", and someone else will say the exact opposite thing is "ethically correct".
Neither of you is right, and neither of you is wrong.
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Ok, but that argument applies to Twitter which itself is a powerful actor.
But you have to remember, they are going to pay more attention to people that have a lot of followers vs the person with 3. Limited resources trying to deal with the people that have the most impact makes sense to me
Personally I think they are just trying to call out a moron. But so what if you are trying to "interfere" with the election. Corporations are allowed to interject their own beliefs and politics too
Selective enforcement happens everywhere in the internet. For example if you go to T_D in Reddit, they will absolutely delete any anti-Trump posts. Does this mean Reddit is influencing elections ?
Opinions that particular subreddit and its moderators aside, that's not really about a site enforcing a policy selectively. Moderators are usually volunteers, and as far as I know, Reddit doesn't have a policy saying they should be neutral. As long as they do stuff that is within the bounds of Reddit's policies, moderators can be pretty arbitrary or capricious.
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They are finally stepping up and enforcing their ToS. I can see this response as a followup to the EIO signed yesterday as an example of what they might have to do if the interpretation of existing law is changed and platforms become liable for content they host. Like, that would induce harsher restrictions on posting and modding content though it would be complicated if that also made twitter a publisher. Their model may no longer be viable at that point as they could be sued for leaving up violent or misleading content AND sued as a publisher for what they take down.
It's within their rights to do take these actions, fact checks and hiding/deleting tweets, to protect their ecosystem. If it is questionably legal because it may influence the election, then I haven't seen the law it is breaking. I see a better argument for showing Twitter promoting Trump's feed to drive clicks as an in kind donation which could quickly break legal campaign donation limits.
Twitter has taken a stand here and I do think they should apply their policies evenly. Will they effectively apply this to everything or even have the capacity built out now to do so? I doubt it. They are a business who needs user engagement to drive profit from ads. If they constrain their most clicked tweets it could lower their revenue even if initially those tweets get attention for being removed.
This is a policy they enacted last year. Can you cite any other examples of them using it?