As much as I admire the techlash, I have some serious reservations. I worry that there's some pretty useful tech babies that we are at risk of throwing away with the bathwater.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/23/resto-modding/#itch-scratchers-r-us
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so, as usual, it didn't tell me anything i didn't already know. hopefully i didn't just put a car fire's worth of co2 in the atmosphere to get there.
as penance, i'll buy some (audio)books that may have been used in the training to reach that conclusion. but i already have most of yours.
oh, and i'm a tinkerer at heart, which is why this post got my attention. when listening to the internet con, all i could think of as a part of the solution, is for people just to have a little bit of literacy around how computation works. computers used to start in basic, forcing the user to have some semblance of understanding of how a computer worked.
we've spent 40-50 years going from fascination with things computers could do that humans can't do, to essentially selling functionality based on how many humans it replaces. i'm sure the roman empire heard similar arguments to today, when slaves gradually replaced workers who paid taxes.
For starters, there's the idea of "intermediary liability," which is the degree to which online services are held liable for the harms their users inflict on each other. Lots of people want to make Meta, Google and other tech giants liable for their users' actions, such as harassment and disinformation. These people are doubtless well-intentioned, but boy have they failed to pay attention to what happens when we create these liability rules.
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Historically, the most important intermediary liability law is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Despite the fact that this law is only 27 words long, it is among the most badly understood aspects of tech policy, worldwide:
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CDA 230 says that platforms aren't required to police their users' speech. If a user libels another user, or harasses them, or threatens them, that's between the users, who can sue each other, but not the platform (CDA 230 only relates to civil liability; it has no bearing on the ability of platforms to be held criminally liable for their users' actions).
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Importantly, CDA 230 also says that if a platform does intervene to prevent one user from harming another, that doesn't mean they have to intervene in every such case. There's a good historical reason for this: back in the paleolithic era, Prodigy, a commercial online service, was sued after they stepped in to protect some users from other users' bad actions.
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The suit argued that once they'd set the precedent that they were going to police user conduct, they acquired an obligation to police every instance of bad user conduct. In response, Prodigy - and its competitors - stopped moderating altogether:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prodigy_Services_Co.
No one who's used big online services would say that the CDA 230 world is a great one - but it's provably a vastly better world than the world we get when we take away 230's protections.
Yes, provably.
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Cory, what about platforms that actively *promote* harmful content? My issue with 230D is that it's taken as a carte blanche by all social media sites.
If Xitter promotes a hateful (and false) post about someone to one million users just to get their "engagement" numbers up? Then the publisher is certainly liable. Create harmful AI slop for user engagement purposes? Boom, you're a publisher of original content and are liable.
This seems simple to me - what am I missing?
In 2018, Donald Trump signed SESTA/FOSTA into law. This is a (supposedly) narrow exception to CDA 230 that makes platforms civilly liable when they are used in connection with sex trafficking:
https://decriminalizesex.work/advocacy/sesta-fosta/what-is-sesta-fosta/
Obviously, sex trafficking is a terrible crime (and again, CDA 230 has never affected a platform's criminal liability for sex trafficking, only civil liability).
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For example, RSS and chronological feeds, no problem, fully shielded. But, as soon as you promote certain content, you become a "publisher" and can be held liable?
Section 230 reads "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher..." But, when Facebook and YouTube are trying to boost engagement by selecting the most rage-inducing content and forcing it into your feed, they do seem like publishers.
I'm sure the devil's in the details. Like, is a stickied forum post enough to make someone a publisher? But, generally this would draw a distinction between algorithmic platforms (big tech) and chronological platforms (traditional forums).
Are you not allowed to identify popular posts? Would every Mastodon host have to kill the "explore" tab?
But, yeah, the devil is in the details. Losing the option to block spam would be a problem.
If a law could be crafted by Tim Wu, Lina Khan, Elizabeth Warren etc. I think it could improve 230. But, this congress would do the exact wrong thing, especially once big tech got their FAANGs into it.
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