super-secret-anon-blog

[super-secret-anon-blog]

I don’t do public forum and I haven’t for years, but I know some exceedingly good public forum-ers and we sometimes brainstorm arguments together. The other day we had a very, very loose mock debate where we essentially just pitched arguments against each other and tried to break them down.

Is that important? No. Is that relevant? I guess a little, but I just thought it was a fun story, mostly. What I’m trying to get at is that I came up with a quite strong point for getting rid of section 230, and that is that we can technologically recover very well.

(I’m writing this based on memory, and I’m always at least a bit afraid that I’ll get something really wrong, so I will fact-check this in due time, but not right now, I’m tired. Also, feel free to take from this anything you need)

Section 230 came about because the new-fangled forums that people had made were being regulated as paper media, which was a problem because they weren’t. Because of this, at the time you had two options: regulate everything or regulate nothing. This was a big problem because it’s not always feasible to regulate everything, so section 230 was written. It made it so that internet publishers were not held liable as long as they did reasonable moderation. This is what allows big platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr to work. But it also leads to harms, blah blah blah, you’ve heard this before.

A very strong argument against section 230, however, is that we’ve essentially moved past a broad need for it. Federated platforms like Mastodon can easily handle the moderation of all content due to their inherent encapsulation; ideally, a moderator might only have to manage a dozen or so accounts. This would allow discourse to still happen at scale, while still allowing people to sue over improper moderation.

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What about blog comments? I don’t visit many blogs, but I personally doubt that blog comments are helpful on a scale beyond that which is easily able to be moderated.

Can federated platforms scale to the same degree as current ones? This is a purely technical problem; if they can’t now, they could be made able to with enough manpower and weird optimizations.

What about user privacy? Improved, the federated platforms that I’m familiar with allow you to easily move if your admin is acting wrongfully.

What about forums? I’d have to look into this one. It’s not immediately obvious that they would be incompatible with federation, but I’m not sure if it’s yet been done.

What about echo chambers? This is a tricky one. From what I kind of remember, a big thing that tries to break echo chambers is how social media algorithms try to incite engagement. I don’t know how much federated platforms tend to do this, so here’s a fun time for a statistic if you want it, but whether this is good or bad is up for debate.

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Places to draw statistics from: growth of federated social media, lawsuits blocked by section 230, effects of social media algorithms on mental health, etc

Guys does anyone know what to do for the new PF topic. I’m actually struggling so hard wtf are we supposed to do for statistics.

I spent like 2 hours trying to find any amount of statistics on how it could maybe impact those who work for social media companies but I couldn’t find anything.

Resolution: The United States federal government should repeal section 230(or something like that)