Truth be told, I’m not a huge fan of the sort of libertarian argument in the linked article (not sure how well “we don’t need regulations! the market will punish websites that host bad actors via advertisers leaving!” has borne out in practice – glances at Facebook’s half of the advertising duopoly), and smaller communities do notably have the property of being much easier to moderate and remove questionable things compared to billion-user social websites where the sheer scale makes things impractical. Given that, I feel like the fediverse model of “a bunch of little individually-moderated websites that can talk to each other” could actually benefit in such a regulatory environment.
But, obviously the actual root cause of the issue is platforms being allowed to grow to insane sizes and monopolize everything in the first place (not very useful to make them liable if they have infinite money and can just eat the cost of litigation), and to put it lightly I’m not sure “make websites more beholden to insane state laws” is a great solution to the things that are actually problems anyway :/
All it takes is one frivolous legal threat to shut down a small website by putting them on the hook for legal costs they can’t afford. Facebook gets away with awful shit not because of the law, but because they are stupidly rich. Change the law, and they will still be stupidly rich. Indeed, the “sunset Section 230” path will make it open season for Facebook’s lobbyists to pay for the replacement law that they want. I do not see that leading anywhere good.
Truth be told, I’m not a huge fan of the sort of libertarian argument in the linked article (not sure how well “we don’t need regulations! the market will punish websites that host bad actors via advertisers leaving!” has borne out in practice – glances at Facebook’s half of the advertising duopoly), and smaller communities do notably have the property of being much easier to moderate and remove questionable things compared to billion-user social websites where the sheer scale makes things impractical. Given that, I feel like the fediverse model of “a bunch of little individually-moderated websites that can talk to each other” could actually benefit in such a regulatory environment.
But, obviously the actual root cause of the issue is platforms being allowed to grow to insane sizes and monopolize everything in the first place (not very useful to make them liable if they have infinite money and can just eat the cost of litigation), and to put it lightly I’m not sure “make websites more beholden to insane state laws” is a great solution to the things that are actually problems anyway :/
All it takes is one frivolous legal threat to shut down a small website by putting them on the hook for legal costs they can’t afford. Facebook gets away with awful shit not because of the law, but because they are stupidly rich. Change the law, and they will still be stupidly rich. Indeed, the “sunset Section 230” path will make it open season for Facebook’s lobbyists to pay for the replacement law that they want. I do not see that leading anywhere good.
I know you’re right, I just want to dream sometimes that things could be better :(