SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Justice Clarence Thomas suggests US should regulate Twitter and Facebook:
Justice Clarence Thomas suggested on Monday that Congress should consider whether laws should be updated to better regulate social media platforms that, he said, have come to have "unbridled control" over "unprecedented" amounts of speech.
The provocative and controversial opinion comes as Twitter banned former President Donald Trump from its platform for violating its rules on incitement of violence and some conservatives have called on more regulations in the tech world to combat what they view as political bias on social media.
"If part of the problem is private, concentrated control over online content and platforms available to the public, then part of the solution may be found in doctrines that limit the right of a private company to exclude, " Thomas wrote in a 12-page concurring opinion Monday.
Thomas's stance will raise concerns from critics who point out that social media platforms have not historically been subject to such content regulation, but instead have been left to devise their policies on their own.
[...] Today's digital platforms, Thomas argued, "provide avenues for historically unprecedented amounts of speech," but he said it also concentrates control "of so much speech in the hands of a few private parties."
[...] "The extent to which that power matters for purposes of the First Amendment and the extent to which that power could lawfully be modified raise interesting and important questions," he added.
[...] The conservative justice said that the court will soon have "no choice" but to address how legal doctrines apply to "privately owned information infrastructure such as digital platforms."
Katie Fallow, a First Amendment expert at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University said that the group actually shares Thomas concern about the power over speech being concentrated in the hands of so few. "But we think that concentrating that same power in the hands of government regulators will not necessarily solve the problems associated with social media companies." Instead, she worried it might exacerbate the issue.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 08 2021, @12:15AM (1 child)
True... until such a moment it is no longer true.
Up to you to demonstrate that "a cost of effectively zero relative to their scale" is maintained no matter how the market outside them evolve. Especially when you operate under the assumption of a Freebook entity for which the Facebook data is just a subset.
Before raiding your stock of straw, I suggest it's better to state your assumptions and check them - an exercise of extrapolating your argument beyond those assumption will be a wise thing too.
Strawman with a whiff of "attack to person" which doesn't even get used in the argumentation. Are you sure you needed it?
Taking it at face value, as a question: no, I'm not against regulations. I'm just against simple, neat and wrong solutions to complex problems.
And I used that as an example to put into evidence the "cost" factor, which will need to be addressed in the design for a better solution (other factors to be considered may exist).
Because "externalizing the cost and plundering the benefits" is wrong no matter if it used by greedy capitalists, authoritarian commies or anyone in between the two extremes. Reality imposes consequences, you don't get free card in the responsibility matter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by Socrastotle on Thursday April 08 2021, @03:57PM
I think you are misunderstanding the scale. Each and every message on Facebook is delivered to a multitude of other individuals through a wide array of methods, largely based on dynamic analysis factoring in whatever motives Facebook has at the moment as well.
This suggestion has a worst case scenario of a *static* delivery of *n* additional messages, where *n* is the number of services genuinely reposting content posted to Facebook. Simple laws could require content grabbed be used only when actively posted, and no content may be requested (by the same actor) more than once. The scale of this, even when huge, is completely negligible to the normal day-to-day business of Facebook - or any company that such a regulation could affect.
And you misunderstood my comment. I know you do not oppose all regulations. It was rhetorical, emphasizing that probably did not consider the implications of your own statement. You are, I would assume, ideologically opposed to this idea - and so you need to formulate some reason for that opposition ad hoc. Many people do this and it just as often ends up resulting in the same scenario of where the new improvo rationale ends up undermining their own other more thoughtfully considered views and values.