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>Explain to the Court what a hash is
>"Don't worry anon, it's a good decision"
>Decision released
>It's a hash
I think new technologies made a hash of free speech standards and we can't reach consensus about the solution, or even what the problem is. I would start with: Are social media sites public, or private? Both, neither.
I think a happy resolution would admit some (large) websites with everything-legal free speech, and some (large) websites with censorship and moderation. I can't imagine this would please everybody, but it would please me.
A website with everything-legal free speech would be unusable with the amount of porn and advertising spammed everywhere.
Commercial and pornographic speech are well-established under Supreme Court precedent to enjoy less protection than other forms. Indeed, the government already regulates unsolicited online porn and advertising. A website that enforces similar rules locally would be completely in keeping with the spirit of 1st Amendment jurisprudence, even if more strict in specific details than existing statute.
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4chan is one of the closest things we've gotten to that in the open web, and back when I used to use 4chan with any regularity over a decade ago, I recall thinking that it was not only usable, it was far more usable than any other "social media"-type websites, along with having an overall better social ecosystem (the enforced anonymity might have been the key to that one, though). Seeing how social media websites have evolved in the time since, I get the sense that the comparative advantage of 4chan has only gotten greater (though it seems 4chan itself may have changed in that time to become worse, so who knows).
4chan was massively toxic but the anonymity and completely ephemeral nature of the threads meant you could just... walk away and nothing would follow you.
No long-term social consequences. No need to worry that someone would e-mail your boss (well, minimal, if they captured your personal info it could be merciless). You could get trolled into an incandescent rage and then the thread would fall off the board and that was that.
The current version of social media is putting your personal identity next to every opinion you ever uttered and storing it for years on end, often making it trivial to search it up later.
Which lends itself to people policing themselves and each other more heavily, and empowers targeted, relentless bullying.
This is the main reason that I am happy beyond belief that the majority of my internet posting as a younger man was on 4chan. The quality of the conversations and content that came up was the main motivating factor at the time, but not having all of my stupid opinions and mistaken beliefs from when I was younger and dumber irrevocably attached to my name is such an incredible benefit that it makes me appreciate my time there even more.
Same.
I never had a truly 'edgy' phase but I tried out a lot of ideas and argued a lot of stupid points of view, some of which I believed and some of which I didn't, and finally got really good at just ignoring trolling and shallow critiques in favor of just making an argument and sticking with it until someone actually counters your point directly.
Which I still try to employ in forums like this.
And reddit did you the favor of suspending your account lol.
Going on two years, and it's the best thing that could have happened to me.
I can still access my old comments, though.
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Twitter doesn't allow everything, but it's the closest of any major website, and it's demonstrably not unusable.
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To me I think the solution is let them pick whether they want to be editors or infrastructure.
Under the first amendment you can sue for libel but social media is protected from that. You can either say edit (like Reddit on anything trans) or you can’t edit and you are protected like your the mailman.
It does get more difficult since preventing trolling behavior etc is necessary.
And then you probably need a scale/size test. Places like the motte, the moderators of a sub, someone’s personal blog (marginal Revolution) gets protection. Reddit itself couldn’t do content moderation. The moderators could. And if I liked the subject of a sub but not the moderation I could create TheMotte2, or Chicago2 etc.
The problem with your model is that the moderators would themselves be subject to liability for anyone who posts on their sub. Since mods are generally working for free, it's a pretty tough sell to take on that amount of risk. At some point, any moderated forum (and I use that term loosely to include things like talk radio) is going to have someone who is on the hook for libel by sole virtue of their moderation duties. At that point, the only way you'd get to have any kind of discussion online would be through ultra-moderated forums hosted by outfits like The New York Times who screen every comment and only post stuff that meets a certain standard, much like with letters to the editor. It may make for a more interesting discussion, but good luck getting your views across. Having a discussion like we have on here would be hell if we had to wait for some paid employee to preapprove everything we wrote, and good luck posting on nights and weekends.
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