Section 230 is in trouble -- at last !

Because no one else is doing it--not even the media.
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Daniel Brandt
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Section 230 is in trouble -- at last !

Post by Daniel Brandt » Sat Sep 26, 2020 6:13 pm

Wikipedia exists only because Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act means that the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs their servers, is immune from lawsuits from drive-by editors who make defamatory edits on Wikipedia. The famous Seigenthaler incident made it into the New York Times on 2005-12-11. I got my name in that article because I found the perp that created the Seigenthaler bio on Wikipedia. The perp said he thought Wikipedia was a joke! The joke was that Seigenthaler, who was a pall bearer for Robert Kennedy, and a former newspaper editor, hit the media with an anti-Wikipedia crusade, as well as on the university guest-speaker circuit.

Seigenthaler complained to the Wikimedia Foundation, but they don't mess with article content and brushed him off. Jimbo soon killed the article. It had already been up there for months.

Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump are strongly in favor of repealing Section 230. Right now there is a fair amount of activity regarding this in congressional committees. Naturally, Journalists are now recalling the Seigenthaler incident. I wonder if Wikipedia can survive if Section 230 is repealed.

We need more "deep research" concerning the Wikimedia Foundation, which does nothing useful and plays no role in monitoring defamatory content on Wikipedia. To this end I posted a copy of Form 990 from the 2015-2017 period on an unused domain of mine. It has names, salaries, and projects concerning Wikimedia Foundation.

http://wikipedia-sucks.org:83/wiki.pdf (5,293,495 bytes)

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Re: Section 230 is in trouble -- at last !

Post by ericbarbour » Sat Sep 26, 2020 7:44 pm

Thanks! Saving a copy.

It's an open question whether Sec 230 will be repealed. The cream of the Internet business will fight this like rabid animals--regardless of who is in the WH or Congress next year. For the first time in his miserable little petty life, Mark Zuckerberg will be forced to start pouring money on lobbyists and lawyers and Beltway people to keep it from happening. Because it will collapse HIS rotten little empire too.

All of "social media" exists because of 230. People defame and abuse each other on FB, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok etc. daily with near impunity. The #metoo and #blm movements found traction largely due to people using "Twitter-shaming" as a tool. The Trump campaign is heavily indebted to conservatives using Facebook, whether Facebook admits it or not. No corporation will expose itself to legal liability due to unpaid users screaming insults at each other. Everything will change overnight, everything will look far more dull and colorless. And I expect outfits like Facebook and Twitter will either disappear, or shrink to tiny little things. It would be a VERY different internet.

Did I not warn all of you TEN YEARS AGO that censorship, regulation and taxation of the internet would eventually happen? This is the beginning of the change.

Wikipedia would survive but I will bet you they will suddenly become the "encyclopedia only approved people can edit". Administrators have been quitting in droves since 2009, this will accelerate.

(Notice that the top management in 2015, listed on page 51, is very different today. Like Twitter, Wikimedia's management structure is completely unstable and unreliable. Tretikov, Moeller, Brigham and Sicore left shortly after that form was released. Imagine the backstabbing that goes on in that office daily.)

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Re: Section 230 is in trouble -- at last !

Post by Daniel Brandt » Sat Sep 26, 2020 10:22 pm

Assholes abound on the Internet, it's true. But a few of the boards you
mention are already finding it expedient to hire monitors, who can delete
contributions from low-life, brain-dead surfers. These monitors aren't
very smart, or very effective. Without the protection of Section 230,
these boards might have to occasionally justify their corporate policies
in a court of law. That's something, at least.

Over the last 24 years, Section 230 has spawned a generation of young
people who don't know much about history or society. But they know how
to have fun by acting irresponsibly online. In most other countries,
there are sanctions against such behavior.

My generation had U.S. policy in Vietnam and the draft, while the current
U.S. generation has online stupidity. I don't know which is worse, the
draft law and warmongering by elected officials, or stupidity-mongering
with young people encouraged by Section 230.

I also blame smartphones. Those have made the problem much worse because
they are more addictive than desktop computers, and hide the "big picture"
of social interaction because the screens are so small.

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Re: Section 230 is in trouble -- at last !

Post by ericbarbour » Wed Oct 07, 2020 9:51 am

any news on the Sec 230 repeal movement? Let's see:

https://deadline.com/2020/10/president- ... 234592385/

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54444633

https://reason.com/2020/10/06/donald-tr ... 0-twitter/
It's an ironic statement since, without the existence of Section 230, Trump very well might not be able to tweet it. If Congress were to remove social media platforms' liability protection, then companies like Twitter and Facebook would have no choice but to remove users' ability to post content at-will. Instead, moderators would have to vet and approve content to make sure that it wasn't potentially libelous.
Yeh, that's "inspiring". Lol.

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Re: Section 230 is in trouble -- at last !

Post by ericbarbour » Sat Oct 24, 2020 5:27 am

I thought this was HILARIOUS. What a hypocritical asshole. Google: hypocritical assholes telling everyone else "don't be evil". I'm in favor of jamming Section 230 up his keister--followed by a big fat antitrust suit.
“The context of social networks serving as amplifiers for idiots and crazy people is not what we intended.”
https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/21/215 ... ts-youtube

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Re: Section 230 is in trouble -- at last !

Post by ericbarbour » Tue Jan 12, 2021 9:30 pm

A further update thanks to an interview with a former Google counsel. Triggered by this week's demise of Parler, despite the mess having generally festered for 20+ years....

https://www.theverge.com/22225238/trump ... -interview
Obviously, we have a big debate in this country about net neutrality, even at that very bottom layer. But the examples that you just listed show that we need to have the same conversation about anyone who might be seen as essential infrastructure. If Cloudflare, for example, is protecting a service from hacking, and when Cloudflare boots you off the service, you effectively can’t be on the internet anymore. We should talk about what the rules should be for Cloudflare. And in that case, their CEO, Matthew Prince, wrote a great op-ed, saying, “I shouldn’t have this power. We should be a democracy, and decide how this happens, and it shouldn’t be that random tech CEOs become the arbiters of what speech can flow on the internet.”
lol she mentioned one of the internet's most disgusting online "services". Ask Brandt about them. How interesting that she tip-toed around Section 230 and the fact that both the outgoing AND incoming US administrations don't like it.
I think most people, realistically, do want them to kick out the Nazis. They do want them to weed out bullying, porn, pro-anorexia content, and just the tide of garbage that would otherwise inundate the internet.
FAIL. Services like Facebook and Twitter are slaves to controversy and abuse. Zucc made millions from both campaigns last year. Zucc made even more in 2016 from Trump's campaign, because they ran more than 5 million ads on Facebook. If FB was REALLY moderated effectively, it would die out very quickly. Abuse means clicks. Proper moderation is costly and requires hiring tens of thousands of underpaid wage slaves/contractors. It's the "McDonalds employment opportunity" of the 21st century. With the added misery of being underpaid to deal with pedophiles, torture porn, personal attacks, political extremists, and all the assorted worst of humanity.

No one who works in social media will ever openly admit it.
In the US, it’s conservatives who have been raising this question, but globally, people all across the political spectrum raise it. The question is: are the big platforms such de facto gatekeepers in controlling discourse and access to an audience that they ought to be subject to some other kind of rules? You hinted at it earlier. That’s kind of a competition question. There’s a nexus of competition and speech questions that we are not wrangling with well yet.
Thanks partly to people like Daphne Keller "interpreting" the law for us. And thereafter telling their corporate hegemonists where to spend lobbying money and such. You bet she doesn't want to go into THAT with any detail.

Oh, just a small btw. The Justice Department and numerous states are proceeding with their antitrust action against Google/Alphabet. I suspect this will continue under Biden.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/17/tech/goo ... index.html

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Re: Section 230 is in trouble -- at last !

Post by ericbarbour » Sat Feb 27, 2021 4:23 am

Next Monday! Wacky fun!

https://www.theverge.com/22302850/secti ... -platforms
On Monday, March 1st, we’re holding an event on Section 230 and the future of tech regulation. After a keynote from Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), I’ll be sitting down with Wikimedia Foundation general counsel Amanda Keton, Vimeo general counsel Michael Cheah, and writer and strategist Sydette Harry to discuss how changing Section 230 could change the web.
heh
If lawmakers did something like entirely repeal Section 230, how do you practically think the internet would change?

It would improve it.

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Re: Section 230 is in trouble -- at last !

Post by ericbarbour » Wed Mar 03, 2021 7:16 am

something something Utah something

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210 ... l-it.shtml

Yes I could easily picture Mormons trying to censor the entire internet. China already has a giant firewall around their "web" (that leaks like a sieve) and Australia has passed some laws attempting to control websites not hosted on Australian servers (to no real avail). The question should be: is it even possible to control all of it with laws? Governments have border limitations. Unless countries want to balkanize all of it into intra-national internets, it will fail.

Hands up, who wants to have an America-only web with only American-federally-approved content? Think they will get the support of giants like Google and Facebook? Doubtful. It will be a political hellstorm either way.

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Re: Section 230 is in trouble -- at last !

Post by ericbarbour » Wed Mar 03, 2021 9:17 pm

the result of the Verge Sec 230 "special event"
https://www.theverge.com/22309566/secti ... char-event
note:
There’s finally momentum in Congress to make serious changes to Section 230 — and not everyone’s happy about it. Last year’s antitrust hearings have given way to a full-court press on regulating big companies like Facebook and Google, and many in Congress see peeling back Section 230 as an easier way forward than GDPR-style privacy regulation or a full-scale antitrust breakup.
Personally I would like to see antitrust properly used against Google and FB, because they now have a near-death-grip on the web advertising business. 230 reform is an "optional feature". Watching Larry'n'Sergey and Little Lord Succ being forced to sign a federal consent decree would be great entertainment.

The ad business is so locked up that Twitter is going to introduce a PAID ACCOUNT program to make some extra revenue. That's desperation.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/25/2230 ... -followers

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Re: Section 230 is in trouble -- at last !

Post by ericbarbour » Fri Sep 17, 2021 10:52 pm

Not surprising that Google and Apple are now complying with demands from the Russian government....to make Alexi Navalny disappear.....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business ... pp-russia/
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/202 ... on-begins/
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/go ... 021-09-17/

Note: this only applies inside Russia. And a version is still available on the Microsoft store.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/naval ... verviewtab

We will see more of this and soon. Facebook's ongoing sleaze isn't helping.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... rch-harms/

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