I've noticed much more right wing stuff being promoted in my stream on here of late.

— شنشون (@humanprovince) December 4, 2022

Why is a "platform" promoting anything? Does T-Mobile send me calls from people based on algorithms? And if it did would it be forwarding calls to me from Nazis? Does blogger scan my posts and tell me what to read? I don't have ads; google makes money off me in other ways.

Nazis have cell phones and websites; that's their right. 

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First time the USA leaves a Middle Eastern country so quickly

— Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) December 3, 2022

Just for funhttps://t.co/0TdzUrp8cI

— Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) December 3, 2022

"just for fun" Click the link. 

If twitter goes down the text of the quoted tweets will vanish. That's why I double it up or post a pic.

The importance of twitter is crossed lanes and discoveries, but algorithms made for data mining don't encourage curiosity, and the various twitter substitutes pride themselves on making those accidents less likely. Credit to Sunstein for the obvious.

The people screaming about "free speech" or "content moderation" agree in taking it as a given that a few sites have near monopolies, only disagreeing on whether forced deletion of speech by monopolies describes state censorship. It does.

Dean Baker's account was suspended (and now it's back) a few days after he published this.

His reference to the Sulzberger family is comical and he pushes his creative vouchers again, though he seems to have changed the focus a bit. And then this

Even if it proves to be possible to advance a tax credit system to support alternatives to the billionaires’ media, we still have the problem of massive platforms like Facebook and Twitter being owned by rich people, who can essentially do what they want in accordance with their whims. The big problem here is the issue of network effects.

The idea of network effects is that people benefit from being part of a massive network since they want to be able to see what a large number of other people are posting, and they may hope that a large number of people will see what they post. These effects can be exaggerated. For example, the overwhelming majority of users will never have their Facebook pages or Twitter posts viewed by more than a small number of people. Nonetheless, they are real. This makes it hard to dislodge a Facebook or Twitter, once it has become dominant.  

One route to go is to make the playing field less hospitable to large platforms. This can be done by removing Section 230 protections for websites that either sell advertising or personal information. This means that the big platforms could be held liable for defamatory material that they circulated over their platform.

In this scenario, if election deniers wrote posts on Twitter saying that Dominion voting machines had switched votes from Trump to Biden, Elon Musk could be sued by Dominion for defamation, just as Fox News is now being sued. The same would apply to the vaccine deniers claiming that Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have killed huge numbers of people.

"This makes it hard to dislodge a Facebook or Twitter, once it has become dominant."  

He can't use the word "monopoly". Facebook and Google dominate online advertising, and their algorithms control what people read. They're publishers not platforms. Yes, change the fucking law.

 

47 U.S. Code § 230

(c) Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material

(1) Treatment of publisher or speaker

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.**

(2) Civil liability
     No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—

(A) 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; or

(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph.

*interactive computer service. 

The term “interactive computer service” means any information service, system, or access software provider that provides or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server, including specifically a service or system that provides access to the Internet and such systems operated or services offered by libraries or educational institutions.

**information content provider

The term “information content provider” means any person or entity that is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of information provided through the Internet or any other interactive computer service.

Facebook and Google are information content providers, as much as CBS, Fox and the NYT. And they're too big. Fox has been too big for a long time.