I Shouldn’t Have to Publish This in The New York Times

The way we regulated social media platforms didn’t end harassment, extremism or disinformation. It only gave them more power and made the problem worse.

I shouldn’t have to publish this in The New York Times.

Ten years ago, I could have published this on my personal website, or shared it on one of the big social media platforms. But that was before the United States government decided to regulate both the social media platforms and blogging sites as if they were newspapers, making them legally responsible for the content they published.

The move was spurred on by an unholy and unlikely coalition of media companies crying copyright; national security experts wringing their hands about terrorism; and people who were dismayed that our digital public squares had become infested by fascists, harassers and cybercriminals. Bit by bit, the legal immunity of the platforms was eroded — from the judges who put Facebook on the line for the platform’s inaction during the Provo Uprising to the lawmakers who amended section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in a bid to get Twitter to clean up its Nazi problem.

While the media in the United States remained protected by the First Amendment, members of the press in other countries were not so lucky. The rest of the world responded to the crisis by tightening rules on acceptable speech. But even the most prolific news service — a giant wire service like AP-AFP or Thomson-Reuters-TransCanada-Huawei — only publishes several thousand articles per day. And thanks to their armies of lawyers, editors and insurance underwriters, they are able to make the news available without falling afoul of new rules prohibiting certain kinds of speech — including everything from Saudi blasphemy rules to Austria’s ban on calling politicians “fascists” to Thailand’s stringent lèse-majesté rules. They can ensure that news in Singapore is not “out of bounds” and that op-eds in Britain don’t call for the abolition of the monarchy.

But not the platforms — they couldn’t hope to make a dent in their users’ personal expressions. From YouTube’s 2,000 hours of video uploaded every minute to Facebook-Weibo’s three billion daily updates, there was no scalable way to carefully examine the contributions of every user and assess whether they violated any of these new laws. So the platforms fixed this the Silicon Valley way: They automated it. Badly.

Read more:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/opinion/future-free-speech-social-media-platforms.html

Or read on TG:
https://t.me/BlackBox_Archiv/467

#Facebook #DeleteFacebook #USA #harassment #extremism #disinformation
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More CopperheadOS harassment proof

Wow, I'm late to this, but having a lawyer send a letter to a student's university to try to get them in trouble for open source contributions they made on their own time is very not ok.

https://nitter.nixnet.services/FiloSottile/status/1358231799458103297

#copperheadOS #harassment #proof #thinkabout
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📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

Take action to stop Chat Control now!

Chat control 2.0 is back on the agenda of EU governments. Ambassadors of EU governments are to express their position on the latest proposal on 9 October 2024, and EU Ministers of the Interior are to endorse Chat Control on 10 October. The latest proposal makes a minor concession but still provides for indiscriminate mass searching of private messages and destroying secure end-to-end encryption. Read more about this proposal here.

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/

#im #censorship #stalking #harassment #surveillance #eu #chatcontrol #why