ISPs are to me like infrastructure. They are like roads or power lines. If you ask the ISPs to block malicious activity it’s like asking the electrical poweregrid to be responsible for stopping their electricity being used for illegal activity. Asking the ISPs to block malicious activity is like asking the road builders to be responsible for bankrobbers and murdere driving on the roads. It’s simply just ridiculous to put the responsibility like that.
Then ISPs should be public corporations, until that happens then they’re not equivalent to pubic infrastructures.
ISPs should definitely be owned by the public and regulated like a utility.
Well said. It’s really the endpoints where the burden is.
YouTube should not be policing copyright either.
Oof… Yeah this.
When you have a corporation that acts as a stand in for the law, something very wrong has happened.
Users need more control over the kind of content they want to see. The problem Lemmy has is very similar to the main problem with the internet as a whole: the current model is that of a “regulator” who controls the flow of information for us.
What I’d like to see is giving users the tools to filter for themselves, which means the internet as a whole. Not interested in sports, let me filter it all out by myself, instead of blocking individual parts piecemeal.
The problem is that no company has an incentive to work on something like that, and I wouldn’t even know where to start designing such interface tools on my own, but there is, for example, a keyword blocker for YouTube that prevents video that contain said terms from appearing on my timeline. I’ve used it to block everything “Trump”, for example. I’d like to see more of that.
The idea sounds nice in theory, but there is a reason people bring their car to a shop instead of changing their own oil. There are a lot of things we could/should take responsibility for directly but they are far too numerous for us to take responsibility for everyone of them. Sometimes we just have to place trust in groups we loosely vetted (if at all) and hope for the best. We all do it every day in all sorts of capacities.
To put it another way: do you think we should have the FDA? Or do you think everybody should have to test everything they eat and put on their skin?
To put it another way: do you think we should have the FDA? Or do you think everybody should have to test everything they eat and put on their skin?
There is a middle ground. The FDA shouldn’t have the power to ban a product from the market. They should be able to publish their recommendations, however, and people who trust them can choose to follow those recommendations. Others should be free to publish their own recommendations, and some people will choose to follow those instead.
Applied to online content: Rather than having no filter at all, or relying on a controversial, centralized content policy, users would subscribe to “reputation servers” which would score content based on where it comes from. Anyone could participate in moderation and their moderation actions (positive or negative) would be shared publicly; servers would weight each action according to their own policies to determine an overall score to present to their followers. Users could choose a third-party reputation server to suit their own preferences or run their own, either from scratch or blending recommendations from one or more other servers.
That isn’t a middle ground. You’re just saying the state can publish a recommendation, which it always has been able to. That’s absolutely in the “unregulated” / “no safety nets” camp. It’s caveat emptor as a status quo and takes us back to the gilded age.
To put it another way: The middle ground between “the state has no authority here” and “the state can regulate away a product” isn’t “the state can suggest we don’t buy it.” It still puts the burden on the consumer in an unreasonable way. We can’t assess literally everything we consume. If I go to a grocery store and buy apples, I can reasonably assume they won’t poison me. Without basic regulations this is not possible. You can’t feed 8 billion people without some rules.
Let me be clear, I agree with the EFF on this particular issue. ISP’s should not regulate speech and what sites I browse. But it’s not the same as having the FDA. For starters, ISP’s are private corporations.
You misunderstood. It’s not a middle ground between “can regulate” and “cannot regulate”. That would indeed be idiotic. It’s a middle ground between “must judge everything for yourself” and “someone else determines what you have access to”. Someone else does the evaluation and tells you whether they think it’s worthwhile, but you choose whose recommendations to listen to (or ignore, if you please).
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There is a middle ground. The FDA shouldn’t have the power to ban a product from the market. They should be able to publish their recommendations, however, and people who trust them can choose to follow those recommendations. Others should be free to publish their own recommendations, and some people will choose to follow those instead.
That’s putting too much responsibility on the average person, who doesn’t have the time to become educated enough in biology and pharmacology to understand what every potentially harmful product may do to them. What if they never even hear the FDA recommendation?
Also, though you’d like to think this would only harm the individual in question who purchases a harmful product, there are many ways innocent third parties could be harmed through this. Teratogens are just one example.
This kind of laissez-faire attitude just doesn’t work in the real world. There’s a reason we ban overtly harmful substances.
What if they never even hear the FDA recommendation?
Then the FDA isn’t doing a very good job, are they? Ensuring that people hear their recommendations (and trust them) would be among their core goals.
The rare fringe cases where someone is affected indirectly without personally having choosen to purchase the product can be dealt with through the courts. There is no need for preemptive bans.
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No, I am not okay with bans like that. You should be able to knowingly buy products with mercury in them. Obviously if someone is selling products containing mercury and not disclosing that fact, passing them off as safe to handle, that would be a problem and they would be liable for any harm that resulted from that. But it doesn’t justify a preemptive ban.
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It takes me several dozen hours every 6-12mo to keep up with the arms race that is privacy. I can’t imagine what it’s like for people who are less technically inclined. It must be a completely impenetrable problem.
4 years ago everybody told me to get on Brave. Look what happened lol
Arguably the most well known VPN is Nord. Yet you can find dozens of posts on HackerNews and other sites saying not to use it.
It’s one thing to diagnose and try to solve the problem, but then you need a bunch of technical knowledge and knowledge of where to find good answers to even know what solutions are viable or are just a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It’s a total minefield sometimes, it’s hard to not simply land with someone else who wants to take all your data and strip away your privacy.
We keep seeing Moral Guardians create more problems than they solve
Platforms should, like how we had to shut down our shit posting community for CSAM.
ISPs are a privatized infrastructure and should really be run as utilities. Like trains or water should be.
The world has been treated as a for-profit endeavor and this has many regrettable consequences.
exactly. switch my packets, and shut the fuck up.
the water company isnt trying to upsell me on premium water services, i would like the same from my isp thankyouverymuch.
I’d say “don’t give them ideas”, but they only have a few they like and that’s one of them already
Nestle: “Write that down, write that down!”
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If you ask me (and nobody ever does for good reason), one of the only times an ISP should be pulling the plug on online speech is when you start linking actual malicious links that have a good chance of your grandma losing her retirement funds or your tech illiterate uncle getting a crypto miner installed on his laptop or something equally destructive.
Your ISP should have no insight in to your traffic at all. Therefore unable to make any judgement on what traffic to block and what not to block. With the exception of volume of traffic and to where it is going.
Although I do agree they should have no insight, I’d rather the insight they currently have be used to actually block sites from bad actors than just spying on you to most likely sell your data.
I don’t know why people are disagreeing with you.
This is like someone setting up a fake stop on a public road to mug people.
You’re telling me that the state shouldn’t have the right to police the road to prevent that from happening?
Lemmy.people, are you high?
I’ll agree that ISPs should not be in the business of policing speech, buuuut
I really think it’s about time platforms and publishers be held responsible for content on their platforms, particularly if in their quest to monetize that content they promote antisocial outcomes like the promulgation of conspiracy theories and hate and straight-up crime
For example, Meta is not modding down outright advertising and sales of stolen credit cards at the moment Also meta selling information with which to target voters… to foreign entities
The issue with this is holding tech companies liable for every possible infraction will mean tjay platforms like Lemmy, and mastodon can’t exist cause they could be sued out of existance
The issue with this is holding tech companies liable for every possible infraction
That concern was the basis for section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which is in effect in the USA but is not the law in places like, say the EU. It made sense at the time, but today it is desperately out of date.
Today we understand that in absolving platforms like Meta of their duty of care to take reasonable steps to not cause harm to their customers, their profit motive would guide them to look the other way when their platform is used to disseminate disinformation about vaccines that gets people killed, that the money would have them protecting Nazis, that algorithms intended to promote engagement would become a tool not just to advertisers but to propagandists and information warfare people.
I’m not particularly persuaded that if in the US there is reform to section 230 of the Communications Decency act, that it would doom nonprofit social media like most of the fediverse- if you look around at all, most of it already follows a well-considered duty-of-care standard that provides its operators substantial legal protection from liability for what 3rd parties post to their platforms. Also if you consider even briefly, that is the standard in effect in much of Europe and social media still exists- it’s just less-profitable and has fewer nazis.
I feel like you can’t really change 230, you need to to instead legislatate differently. There is room for more criminal liability when things go wrong I think. But cival suits in the US can be really bogus. Like someone could likely sue a mastodon instance for turning their kid trans and win without section 230
I’m with you on the legislate differently part.
The background of Section 230©(2) is an unfortunate 1995 court ruling that held that if you moderate any content whatsoever, you should be regarded as its publisher (and therefore ought to be legally liable for whatever awful nonsense your users put on your platform). This perversely created incentive for web forum operators (and a then-fledgling social media industry) to not moderate content at all in order to gain immunity from liability- and that in turn transformed broad swathes of the social internet into an unmoderated cesspool full of Nazis and conspiracy theories and vaccine disinformation, all targeting people with inadequate critical thinking faculties to really process it responsibly.
The intent of 230©(2) was to encourage platform operators to feel safe to moderate harmful content, but it also protects them if they don’t. The result is a wild-west, if you will, in which it’s perfectly legal for social media operators in the USA to look the other way when known-unlawful use of their platforms (like advertising stolen goods, or sex trafficking, or coordinating a coup attempt, or making porn labeled ‘underage’ searchable) goes on.
It was probably done in good faith, but in hindsight it was naïve and carved out the American internet as a magical zone of no-responsibility.
This is not really what 230 does, sites still face criminal liability were needed, like if I made a site that had illegal content I could still be arrested and have my server seized, repealing 230 would legit just let Ken Paxton launch a multi state lawsuit suing a large list of queer mastodon instance for transing minors. Without 230 it would be lawsuit land and sites would censor anything that wasnt cat photos in an effort to avoid getting sued. Lawsuits are expensive even when you win. If you wanna make social media companies deal with something you gotta setup criminal liability not repeal 230. 230 just protect sites from cival suits not criminal ones.
I think generally we need to regulate how algrithums work of this is the case. We need actual legislation and not just law suit buttons. Also meta can slither its way out of any lawsuit, this would really only effect small mastodon instances.
publishers are held responsible.
Internet service providers, as defined in the 1996 cda, are not.
The problem is that your definitions are incredibly vague.
What is a “platform” and what is a “host”?
A host, in the definition of technology, could mean a hosting company where you would “host” a website from. If it’s a private website, how would the hosting company moderate that content?
And that’s putting aside the legality and ethics of one private company policing not only another private company, but also one that’s a client.
Fair point about hosts, I’m talking about platforms as if we held them to the standards we hold publishers to. Publishing is protected speech so long as it’s not libelous or slanderous, and the only reason we don’t hold social media platforms to that kind of standard is that they demanded (and received) complete unaccountability for what their users put on it. That seemed okay as a choice to let social media survive as a new form of online media, but the result is that for-profit social media, being the de facto public square, have all the influence they want over speech but have no responsibility to use that influence in ways that aren’t corrosive to democracy or to the public interest.
Big social media already censor content they don’t like, I’m not calling for censorship in an environment that has none. What I’m calling for is some sort of accountability to nudge them in the direction of maybe not looking the other way when offshore troll farms and botnets spread division and disinformation
ISPs are private, they can do whatever they want with their service. Create a state run ISP if you want to impose free speech on an ISP.
Also fuck USA’s definition of free speech that lets people share hate.
Bring in the downvotes!
Why wouldn’t you want free speech protection to be regulated to private companies as well
Free speech is guaranteed in public space, not private space.
Just because you get to a public park in a privately operated taxi doesn’t mean the park is suddenly private. It would also be absurd for the taxi to have a say in how you spend your time in the park.
I also refuse to trust that any private corporation would have my best interests at heart, or that they would not use the excuse of policing hate speech to also interfere with discussion against their corporate interests.
If you enter the taxi and the driver sees that you’ve got a shirt with a swastika the driver can tell you they’re not taking you for this reason.
I didn’t ask that, I asked why wouldn’t you want that?
When did I say I didn’t want it? Just stating a fact.
I’ve asked twice now, idk why you’re intentionally avoiding the question now
Because you’re asking a question that’s irrelevant.
it’s literally the whole topic of the thread you’re replying to, you just misread it
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No. It’s like expecting construction companies to enforce traffic laws because they build the roads.
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Host providers, like they already do
The owners of…the sites. How they do that, is up to them. But again, I’ll go back to my construction analogy: There’s a burgaler entering your house, who do you call and why? Not the people that built it.
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You don’t. Censorship is evil
The EFF is going to bat for fucking Kiwifarms? This is unconscionable.
If foundational human rights are for everybody, except those people. Then they’re for nobody.
You have to defend basic human rights for everyone, or they mean nothing
IMHO it only counts when you defend the rights of someone you disagree with.
Principles apply to everyone or no one.
People who harass other people to suicide don’t deserve to communicate freely. They have shown they are not responsible with that right.
I’m gonna respectfully disagree. Free speech is a big reason why our world is so fucked right now.
Whoa whoa whoa. Free speech is the reason the world you live in has advanced to this point…
Fucking psycho.
The issue is not free speech. The issue is people think free speech means discourse without consequences.
I’m a psycho because I don’t like how toxic the internet and society has become, and how easily people are manipulated by hate speech and hateful ideologies?
Society has always been toxic. Might I remind you of slavery? Might I remind you of the Holy Roman Catholic Church?
Free speech is what broke those cycles and is what will keep the internet out of the hands of other oppressors. Yes people are vile but we need to learn to manage those voices not wholesale silence them. If a motor is screaming you shouldn’t say, “let’s shove a plug in the muffler.” You fix the motor and maintain it.
Tell me that you didn’t read the article without telling me you didn’t read the article.
