Comment by alex1138
3 days ago
I do think about this in the context of other tech companies, the "bidirectionality of enforcement", or whatever you want to call it
Let's say you have Facebook, which is notorious for banning people yet never seems to ban the things people report that should be banned. That's a real life example, but take any hypothetical company
If someone posts x bad thing and doesn't get banned, do we immediately take our torches and storm the premeses to protest? Maybe, maybe not; "look, scale is hard" (and sometimes calls to remove things outright get politicized, as seen in the last few years, so sometimes it's a tricky line)
That would be... not fine, but more fine than it is now. The lack of fairness in the bidirectionality ensures that you, Joe Schmoe, get a month ban for calling someone a jerk while the most egregious hate or racism or... anything... gets a quick check followed by This Does Not Violate Our Community Guidelines
(And of course because these services are monopolies, well, too bad, you just have to suffer. Hope you don't need the information from that Facebook page, because Facebook will tend to make it borderline impossible to view something public without an account)
I think companies like Google dont even try like they are "Too Big to be Regulated".
Facebook is much worse because everyghing on there is user gemerated. Any small company would be just crushed by governments if they would have similar issues.
I think they are similar to FedEx. FedEx knows that millions of packages per day are transporting illegal goods, any bad enough accident shows it. However, FedEx would absolutely go bankrupt if they tried to open every package and make sure the contents were good. At the end of the day, that's the government's job.
If the DEA and ATF wants to staff every shipping hub with people checking every package, that's fine by them (though admittedly it would hurt revenues).
For Google and Facebook and all the other user-content sites, it's just impossible to actually, fully uphold the law themselves, so their best bet is just to try to make it a pleasant experience for the users and leave upholding the law to the upholders of the law.