Social-media ≠ News Organizations

The article Team Billionaire is Winning by Dean Baker (CounterPunch) writes,

“And, for two of our super-billionaires, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, we have Section 230 protection. This means that their Internet platforms are not subject to the same rules on defamation as print and broadcast outlets. Yeah, this is just the market, telling us to give special privileges to online platforms.”

I like me some Dean Baker. I disagree with him occasionally. This is one of those times because I wonder whether he’s not painting with too broad a brush here. It seems disingenuous to call social media “news organizations”. These platforms may disseminate information, but are structured completely differently than print.

There are billions of authors, as well as the real risk of censorship. We should probably make a distinction between web sites and large corporate portals, but the moderation burden is much higher in either case.

You could argue that the entire “official news” part should be separated from the social-media platform—but that would be … impossible. People would still repost “news” on the social-media side, anyway, while the “official” part would atrophy in its regulated silo.

You could try to outlaw people contributing to common portals entirely. Enforcing “moderation”—i.e., making companies legally liable for what is considered illegal content—will inevitably end up as an equivalent to outlawing certain viewpoints. There will always be something that gets taken too seriously, as we’ve seen millions of times in the existing social networks.

Baker derives no value from these social-media forums, so he almost certainly doesn’t care if they either disappear or become so neutered that they might as well not exist. The world no longer has a sense of humor because there is a huge incentive to be performatively offended on a lot of these sites. That’s the kind of thing that will eventually decide what gets to be published and what doesn’t.

I think this is pretty typical of the people pushing for increased moderation, legislation, and regulation. I agree that you shouldn’t be able to make money off of it, but I also agree that you shouldn’t get to moderate away everything that offends anyone.

I think especially that they will start by moderating away people calling other people “dirty jews” and “n-words” and posting swastikas into their comments. But they will inevitably end up by moderating away anything that they deem threatening to the company, its profits, or the ruling class to which it belongs and that allows it to prosper.

The problem, as usual, is that a lot of people want to reach as large an audience as possible—because they’re narcissists—but they want to continue to communicate as if they’re just talking to their intimate friends.

Hell, that “dirty jews” and swastika person might just be making a terrible joke that would be funny to their little in-group, in the context of other things going on. Who knows? Satire gets weird sometimes. Jonathan Swift wrote about cooking Irish children. Without context, no-one can tell that it’s just a harmless idiot, learning how to behave themselves properly.

With moderation and completely open channels, everyone has to already know how to behave from the get-go. Pushing the boundaries cannot be tolerated because speech is deemed too dangerous to abide.

It’s never been illegal to be an asshole, and we’ve seen how loud they can get in public forums. But we have to be extremely careful about splitting people into groups, depending on the ideas they have—those with free and open access to millions, if not billions of minds, and those without.

I'm sorry I called you an asshole. I thought you knew

As a coda: it’s not like this isn’t already happening all the time! Check out any of Matt Taibbi’s TwitterFiles reporting. The U.S. government has worked its censorious tentacles deep into the orifices of the public Internet and is already deciding what can and cannot be published.