US Politics Feedback Thread - Page 306

On September 24 2020 00:20 Danglars wrote:
I mean, you did see the nice conclusion making the comparison between making abortions illegal and removing voting rights from black people and literal slavery? Hyperbole dull roar anyone?

On September 24 2020 00:49 tofucake wrote:

Every time I bring this up people get upset

On September 30 2020 02:23 Mohdoo wrote:
I'd like to point out that the "rule" that analysis comes before the subject is still really stupid and has no reason to ever be enforced. I can understand moderating quality of a post, but saying "make sure you place this part of your post in this specific place" is amazingly silly.

On September 30 2020 02:32 micronesia wrote:

The logic is that people should know what the source is that they are being presented before they read it. Putting the discussion afterwards is not as "low-quality" as posting only to paste an article, but TL considers the discussion better when the poster explains what they are pasting and why before pasting it. Putting the burden on the poster rather than the reader to figure out the purpose of the source is warranted.

edit: note: analysis can also go after the source... what's above the source should be written as though the reader has not read the source yet... what's below the source should be written as though the reader has read the source; the former is required, the latter is situational.

On September 30 2020 00:45 Mohdoo wrote:
https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/28/new-poll-biden-leads-trump-in-tight-florida-race-trump-ahead-with-hispanics/



Reminder: It is completely and totally ridiculous to lump "Hispanic" voters into a single group. We are not remotely cohesive. Tons of racism within south america directed inwards. Cubans in particular are extremely distinct and the least "connected".

User was warned for this post.

Internet companies, websites and web applications have a kind of legal immunity that they say makes the internet as we know it possible. First, they’re generally immune from legal liability if a Facebook or Twitter user posts something illegal. They’re also immune from liability if they take down a post they find objectionable. Users generally can’t legally challenge that.

There’s a concerted campaign underway in Congress to roll back some of that immunity. “Marketplace Morning Report” host Sabri Ben-Achour spoke about that effort with Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Sabri Ben-Achour: Just how big is this effort to weaken these types of legal immunity the internet companies enjoy?

Daphne Keller: It is very big. It has support on both sides of the aisle, although you find that often what Republicans want out of it and what Democrats want out of it are inconsistent goals. But I think we should expect to see changes to this law in the near future. And if we’re lucky, there will be smart changes. And if we are unlucky, they will be not very smart changes.

Ben-Achour: Well, what is first the argument in favor of limiting these types of immunity?

Keller: People have a lot of different goals in proposing changes to this law. Some people want platforms to take down more harmful and offensive content. I think that’s actually very widespread. Lots of people want to see more content taken down from from platforms like Facebook or Twitter. Part of the issue is that a lot of that is what we call “lawful but awful” speech. It’s protected by the First Amendment. And so changing an immunity like CDA 230 wouldn’t necessarily change the appearance of that content anyway. But we also see people who want to change the immunity in order to get platforms to leave up more of this lawful but awful speech, and compel them to carry things like, maybe racist diatribes or anti-vaccine scientific theories, or even potentially electoral misinformation, and not give them the leeway to take that stuff down.

Ben-Achour: What’s the downside to having tech platforms, internet sites, be held liable for the content that their users post? Like promoting terrorism or child exploitation or something?

Keller: To be clear, they already face liability for a number of those things. Anything that is a federal crime, like supporting terrorism and child exploitation, doesn’t have a special immunity in the first place. But, broadly, the issue with putting liability on platforms for their users’ speech is that it gives them powerful incentives to err on the side of taking things down, just in case it’s illegal, because they don’t want to get in trouble. And you can imagine what that would have done to the Me Too movement, for example. If a platform felt like it had to take down any allegation that could possibly prove to be defamatory later on, obviously, that has a consequence for speech.

It’s also a problem for competition. If we changed the laws and platforms had to assume more risk for user speech or put in place expensive processes, that’s something that Facebook and Google could probably deal with, but their smaller competitors could not. And then, finally, if we have new obligations on platforms to police their users’ speech, that gives them reasons to adopt clumsy tools like automated speech filters. And we know that those have disparate impact, for example, on speakers of African American English. So there’s this mess of speech issues, competition issues, equality issues, and there are ways to respond to them. It’s not that regulation is impossible here. But almost none of the bills we’re seeing in Congress now really even try to grapple with them in intelligent ways.

Ben-Achour: Let’s turn to the question of whether you can sue Instagram [if it] takes down your post. What’s the downside of seeking to erode that immunity?

Keller: It means that platforms will have to worry more about lawsuits from really extreme speakers, like Alex Jones would be an example, saying, you have to carry my speech. Even if you don’t want to carry Holocaust denial, you have to. Even if you don’t want to carry organization for a white supremacist rally, like the one in Charlottesville, you have to. And we’ve seen a number of those lawsuits and the platforms ultimately win them all. And even without 230, they would ultimately win them all, but it would be much more expensive without 230. The nuisance cost of dealing with these lawsuits trying to compel platforms to carry speech that violates their policies would be significant. It would give them reason to just give up and carry it, rather than face that burden. And again, in particular, the smaller platforms who might be competitors to today’s incumbents are particularly unable to bear the burden of those kinds of nuisance suits that these changes would enable.

Ben-Achour: Under the Department of Justice proposal, a company would be protected from legal liability for taking down something that promotes terrorism or is unlawful, but they would be open to getting sued for taking down something racist or false about coronavirus — something just generally objectionable. What do you make of that?

Keller: I think this is one of a hundred cases where the gloves have come off in American politics, really in the past few months. And this one hasn’t had that much attention because people see this as regulation about platforms and technology. But the proposal from [Sen.] Lindsey Graham, the proposal from Attorney General Barr, and several other proposals, are just remarkably naked in their speech preferences, in the rules that they want platforms to uphold. And so they’re saying platforms should be encouraged and protected to take down some content, like pornography, but we should take away protection when they take down these “lawful but awful” categories, including hate speech, and white supremacist speech, and misogynist speech, and racist speech, and disinformation. The other thing that we see in the grant proposal, and then the DOJ proposal, the Justice Department proposal, is that they say to platforms, if you do fact-checking, and you put labels on people’s posts or tweets saying this is false or this is very debatable, you risk liability for that. You can’t even leave the speech up and put a label on it without getting in trouble.

Ben-Achour: Are we talking about this simply because the president is angry that Twitter moderates his tweets and Facebook takes down some of his political advertisements? I mean, is that what this is about, ultimately?

Keller: No, I don’t think it is. I mean, I think the specific proposals we’ve seen recently, in particular from the Justice Department, those were absolutely prompted by President Trump’s executive order. And that seems to have been triggered by Twitter putting a label on his tweets. But overall, the sense of a need to regulate platforms is bipartisan. It’s global. It transcends politics. And the sense that platforms are acting as gatekeepers of discourse, that they’re the new public square, and that it’s kind of crazy that private companies are setting the speech rules, that’s global, too.

In the U.S., it’s very much a conservative talking point. But I think in the U.S. and all over the world, everyone has concerns. It’s one of the biggest policy questions of our age. And that means that we should do the work to make smart laws. And if instead Congress just passes some hastily drafted, politically motivated law, that’ll be kind of a dereliction of duty, in my opinion. And we will all have to live with the result for years.

On September 30 2020 03:26 Seeker wrote:
We made this rule because people were constantly posting sources to try to defend and backup their claims, only to find out later on that they had never even bothered to read the sources they posted.

This way, with your supporting statement, you give an introduction to what the source is about and prove to everyone that you read the source and know what you’re taking about.

It was basically a polite way of saying: Stop being lazy. Do the work. If you want people to understand you, you need to understand yourself and what you’re trying to say first.

On September 30 2020 04:24 Simberto wrote:


And i totally understand that part. Sources should require you to also post your own thoughts. I don't think anyone ever argued against that. I just don't see why they need to be in exactly the order prescribed.

But i only have a minor dislike to that ordering rule. And on the other hand, the mod team seems to think that order is very important. It seems pointless to me, but hey, it is your forum.

On September 30 2020 04:35 farvacola wrote:
I for one enjoyed Stealthblue’s comment-less posting of articles, but I also understand why they were prohibited.

On September 30 2020 03:12 Simberto wrote:
To me, the intuitive ordering is

"source"
"important part of source"
"This is what i think about source, and why it is relevant"

I find

"This is what i think about source"
"Source"

weird, because it means talking about something the other person hasn't read yet. So as a reader, i have to go to the source, read it, and then jump back to the top of the post to see what the other person has to say about the source. If the text is long enough, it might even be confusing because i don't even realize that a source is involved.

I get your idea that you should introduce a source, but in practice that is usually merged with the opinions and commentary on the source to one text written by the person posting the source. And that one text is better situated after the source.

I absolutely agree that sources without individual commentary shouldn't be allowed, because otherwise the thread just becomes a source spamfeast. And i see that there aren't any real consequences so far, but i still don't see why we even have a rule like that. Why not let people post source and their commentary on it in whatever order they please?