I don't know why people think repealing this will help things. From the right-wing perspective, where they feverishly imagine they are being censored, it would obviously make twitter/facebook/etc... completely clamp down on anything even vaguely libelous/slanderous/dangerous. It would increase, not decrease, censorship.
From the left wing, they may be happy with less disinformation and "harassment", but they will be sad when their own disinformation and harassment is also blocked.
It's just bizarre to me as an old fogey remembering in the 90's when nerds were 100% scared to death of the govt stepping in to regulate things, now because of politics people on both sides are begging for them to do it.
It's not bizarre at all. If regulation has to be had, you want it to be sensible. I don't LIKE paying taxes, but if I have to, I want it done in an intelligent way. I don't LIKE social distancing laws, but if I have to wear a mask and can't travel to other states during this spike, I want it enforced intelligently so I'm not wasting my time. The tech companies realize that self-regulation is not cutting it, so it's better to write regulations they can live with rather than letting the idiots in congress
Obviously you didn't use Usenet in the 90's. It didn't take all that much to set up a newsgroup (although getting others to propagate it wasn't always automatic) and there were newsgroup for a LOT of crazy things. Usenet wasn't as easy for fringe groups to use as Facebook is but it was still a rather strange place if you lurked around its fringes.
...usenet was pretty niche/fringe. Sure, you can write whatever you want there, but there was no algorithm actively promoting your nonsense. Only people recently reading your posts would ever see them and it was a tiny audience of tech savvy folks who were much more intelligent than the average facebook users.
I could have typed out a manifesto and mailed it to every mailbox I could afford a stamp to back before the internet...it just didn't scale. I go back to that idiot woman, Justine Sacco, a 30yo in the PR industry. In an hour, her dumb joke cost her career and she became worldwide news. She only had 170 followers. She was far from famous, she just crafted a tweet so stupid and viral that the world shared it. If this was usenet, her friends would have called her an asshole and maybe stopped talking to her. I would not know her name. She would not be in the NYT.
CDA 230.. (Score:2)
I don't know why people think repealing this will help things. From the right-wing perspective, where they feverishly imagine they are being censored, it would obviously make twitter/facebook/etc... completely clamp down on anything even vaguely libelous/slanderous/dangerous. It would increase, not decrease, censorship.
From the left wing, they may be happy with less disinformation and "harassment", but they will be sad when their own disinformation and harassment is also blocked.
It also raises a constitutio
We want the right regulation (Score:5, Insightful)
It's just bizarre to me as an old fogey remembering in the 90's when nerds were 100% scared to death of the govt stepping in to regulate things, now because of politics people on both sides are begging for them to do it.
It's not bizarre at all. If regulation has to be had, you want it to be sensible. I don't LIKE paying taxes, but if I have to, I want it done in an intelligent way. I don't LIKE social distancing laws, but if I have to wear a mask and can't travel to other states during this spike, I want it enforced intelligently so I'm not wasting my time. The tech companies realize that self-regulation is not cutting it, so it's better to write regulations they can live with rather than letting the idiots in congress
Re: (Score:2)
Obviously you didn't use Usenet in the 90's. It didn't take all that much to set up a newsgroup (although getting others to propagate it wasn't always automatic) and there were newsgroup for a LOT of crazy things. Usenet wasn't as easy for fringe groups to use as Facebook is but it was still a rather strange place if you lurked around its fringes.
You prove my point (Score:2)
Obviously you didn't use Usenet in the 90's.
...usenet was pretty niche/fringe. Sure, you can write whatever you want there, but there was no algorithm actively promoting your nonsense. Only people recently reading your posts would ever see them and it was a tiny audience of tech savvy folks who were much more intelligent than the average facebook users.
I could have typed out a manifesto and mailed it to every mailbox I could afford a stamp to back before the internet...it just didn't scale. I go back to that idiot woman, Justine Sacco, a 30yo in the PR industry. In an hour, her dumb joke cost her career and she became worldwide news. She only had 170 followers. She was far from famous, she just crafted a tweet so stupid and viral that the world shared it. If this was usenet, her friends would have called her an asshole and maybe stopped talking to her. I would not know her name. She would not be in the NYT.