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From: Techdirt
Content moderation is a can of worms. For Internet infrastructure intermediaries, it’s a can of worms that they are particularly poorly positioned to tackle. And yet Internet infrastructure elements are increasingly being called on to moderate content—content they may have very little insight into as it passes through their systems.
The vast majority of all content moderation happens on the “top” layer of the internet—such as social media and websites, places online that are the most visible to an average user. If a post violates a platform’s terms of service, the post is usually blocked or taken down. If a user continues to post content that violates a platform’s terms, then the user’s account is often suspended. These types of content moderation practices are increasingly understood by average Internet users.
Less often discussed or understood are the types of services facilitated via actors in the Internet ecosystem that both support and exist under the upper content layers of the Internet.
Many of these companies host content, supply cloud services, register domain names, provide web security, and many more features of what could be described as the plumbing services of the Internet. But instead of water and sewage, the Internet deals in digital information. In theory, these “infrastructure intermediaries” could moderate content, but for reasons of convention, legitimacy, and practicality they don’t usually do it on purpose.
However, some notable recent exemptions may be setting precedent.
Amazon Web Services removed Wikileaks from their system in 2010. Cloudflare kicked off the Daily Stormer. An Italian court ordered Cloudflare to remove a copyright infringing site. Amazon suspended hosting for Parler.
What does all this mean? Infrastructure may have the means to perform “content moderation,” but it is critical to consider the effects of this trend to prevent harming the Internet’s underlying architecture. In principle, Internet service providers, registries, cloud providers and other infrastructure intermediaries should be agnostic to the content which passes over their systems.
[...] Policymakers must consider the unintended impacts of content moderation proposals on infrastructure intermediaries. Legislating without due diligence to understand the impact on the unique role of these intermediaries could be detrimental to the success of the Internet, and an increasing portion of the global economy that relies on Internet infrastructure for daily life and work.
[...] Conducting impact assessments prior to regulation is one way to mitigate the risks. The Internet Society created the Internet Impact Assessment Toolkit to help policymakers and communities assess the implications of change—whether those are policy interventions or new technologies.
Policy changes that impact the different layers of the Internet are inevitable. But we must all ensure that these policies are well crafted and properly scoped to keep the Internet working and successful for everyone.
Austin Ruckstuhl is a Project & Policy Advisor at the Internet Society where he works on Internet impact assessments, defending encryption and supporting Community Networks as access solutions.
Should online content be controlled ? If yes, Is there a better way to censor online content and who should have the authority to do so ??
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday September 29 2021, @02:59PM (47 children)
There will be nuance to this regulation.
Big Tech sites cannot be allowed to censor dangerous misinformation unsupported by facts or science. In the interest of free speech.
Sites like Parler, Gab, FrankSpeech, Conseervapedia, etc must be allowed to censor radical left wing reality and facts. In the interest of free speech.
Sites that have theme parks in Florida must be exempt from regulation.
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 29 2021, @04:03PM (33 children)
Same poster as
by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 29, @03:03PM (#1182756)
Democrats want to completely force everyone to censor anything they don't like (just like any socialist/communist country).
Republicans want to force everyone to allow anyone to express republican speech.
I disagree with both positions.
Section 230 of the CDA is good as originally written and shouldn't be modified. You make your own platform you should be able to moderate it however you like. I should be able to choose whatever platform I like or easily start my own platform without huge barriers to entry (especially artificial barriers to entry).
However, I do think that banks (that benefit from FDIC insurance which is a government function) and payment processors should not be allowed to discriminate against where my money goes. If someone starts their own conservative platform that has speech that democrats politically disagree with no left wing bank or payment processing service should lawfully be allowed to prevent me from sending MY money to them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 29 2021, @04:14PM
Cable (and broadcast T.V.) is a perfect example of exactly what we don't want. There are way too many artificial barriers to start a cable T.V. station and cable companies simply won't allow conservative viewpoints over their cable networks (other than fox news, an over the air station they would drop if it wouldn't lose them a huge chunk of their remaining subscribers).
(Score: 5, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday September 29 2021, @04:21PM (30 children)
Democrats are fine with Parler doing Parler.
We just find it hilarious that they go on about how they're a super FREE SPEECH platform then immediately ban all the liberals.
(Score: 4, Touché) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday September 29 2021, @04:54PM (28 children)
Are they? My recollection is it wasn't my republican friends that called on Amazon and Cloudflare to block Parler and Gab.
It also wasn't my republican friends that banned any mention of the "misinformation" bombshell news story of our President's son selling access and influence to his then-VP father. "Misinformation" is in air quotes here because the allegation has recently been independently confirmed by a separate source.
For decades people warned about the dangers of media consolidation in print and broadcast allowing censorship. We were blind to the risk of that when we built the internet, and it is well on its way to fulfilling the dangers whose warnings we so long dismissed. Oops.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday September 29 2021, @05:01PM (13 children)
... 'blind' to it up until it started looking obvious which way the election was going.
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday September 29 2021, @06:03PM (12 children)
I think you're looking at a different time period than the GP. Over the longer time period, he is definitely correct...and no election had anything to do with it. I'd pin the time when we (in general) started noticing it as about the time Microsoft escaped being broken up by the DoJ. And stated doing LOTS of campaign donations. There clearly wasn't a simultaneous awakening at that point, but large numbers of tech folk started noticing the impact of politics, and the mechanisms. (Not that we are really good at doing anything about it.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday September 29 2021, @06:09PM (11 children)
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 29 2021, @07:05PM (8 children)
You're the one that mentioned that context. We're not debating it within that context, you are the one arbitrarily mentioning the context and bringing it up.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Tork on Wednesday September 29 2021, @07:07PM (7 children)
Bullshit.
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 29 2021, @10:37PM (2 children)
Why even argue with these deplorable idiots? They still support trump! How thick and or evil can someone be??
(Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday September 29 2021, @11:14PM (1 child)
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 30 2021, @08:48AM
I would be very happy if they would discuss problems, but as we've seen discussions have two rules. Only maintaining the status quo is allowed, and partisan topics are not subject to facts and reason.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 30 2021, @05:08AM (3 children)
Not bullshit at all. People have been bitching about the liberal leanings of the media, and of Big Tech for 20 years, and more. "People" isn't restricted to either conservatives, or to liberals. These people are just those who have enough imagination to extrapolate current events into the future. The liberal leanings have taken on a definite list to port in more recent years, and if it continues, the whole thing could capsize.
But, left-leaning people seem to think this is a "good thing".
It doesn't much matter what "context" you choose to frame the discussion in. Censorship is almost always a bad thing. I would be saying the same if Big Tech were conservative, thanks for asking.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Thursday September 30 2021, @06:34AM
Okay, so if that's so plentiful and obvious then there really isn't a need then to whine about how a political party is being silenced when really the issue was that a small subset of that group had acted very badly. It's like a liberal bringing up drone strikes in an Obama vs. Trump debate. Pointlessly risky.
Bullshit. There's a massive flipping of values coming from the conservatives, here. It's not nuance either, the right is still struggling to find the solution they actually want implemented, currently it's mainly just "poor us victims". "BuT NoBuDdiEs CaN BuiLd WeBSerVers!"
I've yet to hear you admonish Parler for punting 'libruls'. Funny thing about that, the likely reason they were doing it was that those 'libruls' were trolls intent on ruining the fun for everybody there. Heck maybe you have criticized Parler for that reason before and we actually agree on something, but if it only comes out when we're talking about consequences from conservative untowards behaviour...
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: -1, Troll) by Mockingbird on Thursday September 30 2021, @08:13AM (1 child)
Well, you know, that is because those people are stupid. Really fucking stupid. In fact, Runaway levels of stupid. So are you saying we should give them what they want, more stupid, like Fox News? Would that not be cruel and unusual punishment, as prohibited by the US Constitution? But, oh, I forgot the Conservatives do not follow the US Constitution any longer, since they are morons and traitors! Death to traitors, Runaway! And if you are one of them, who has renounced the oath your took when you enlisted in the United States Navy, . . . We will be coming for you, traitor.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Thursday September 30 2021, @04:11PM
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 2) by JustNiz on Friday October 01 2021, @12:33AM (1 child)
Your "attempted insurrection" is their "fight for freedom, truth and justice". It's all just semantics.
... and don't forget how the US even got started. It would be hypocritical to label insurrection as an inherently bad thing.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Friday October 01 2021, @02:47AM
That's academic cos this one was a "bad thing". ;)
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 3, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday September 29 2021, @06:04PM (13 children)
It's not my fault they're too dumb to run their own servers.
If you want to use somebody else's servers then you need to follow somebody else's rules.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 29 2021, @07:31PM (7 children)
Riddle me this?
How many startups run their own infrastructure down to the fibers?
You are making an impossible demand.
To date only ONE of the dissident entities has managed to achieve full independence, Gab.com. They now have their own ASN, own physical hardware and Internet infrastructure. But they will still eventually be attacked again by the forces of tolerance and inclusion.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday September 29 2021, @08:33PM
I thought Epik hosting was the GOTO place for sites wanting to host misinformation and lies.
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday September 30 2021, @03:06AM (5 children)
Several organizations I've worked for have run their own infrastructure from the monopolistic ISP connection on back to the servers and racks and wiring. And the ISP is under common carrier-like regulations, so they shouldn't be able to legally stop you based solely on the content you're putting out there (and based on some of the stuff these companies were hosting, I can assure you they really don't care unless they have a very very good reason). If you have a good locally-located data center who is willing to work with you, or enough capital to build a data center of your own, that certainly helps, but for small-scale startups you can not-totally-infrequently find what amount to glorified closets somewhere in their office space with a rack of servers and a front-facing router / firewall that also handles the usual office traffic.
Is it harder? Yes - you'll need a bit more in-house admin skill to run it since your admins will have to handle physical layouts and network topography in a way they didn't really have to when the cloud provider was doing that for them. Is it more expensive? Probably yes, at least up-front, but that may be offset by lower ongoing costs since you're getting fewer services from an outsourced provider, and it's definitely not so much of a cost that you can't do it for something like $25K to get started.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 30 2021, @05:11AM (2 children)
Thanks for the encouragement. But, what we need is not a set of tin cans with strings, we need a monster public address system that can broadcast as loudly as the progressives.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday September 30 2021, @01:51PM (1 child)
So what you're saying is: "I don't want to do the work to build my own monster public address system, so instead I want to force other people to let me use theirs." Got it. Never mind that conservative viewpoints also already have a bunch of public address systems already, from Fox to OAN to Sinclair Broadcast Group to many other outlets.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 30 2021, @08:07PM
I said no such thing. I've pointed out that the bar for entry is high. I might even say that it is astronomically high. Maybe I should ask over on Gab how many dollars has changed hands to get where they are now. A billionaire might not miss that money, but regular people won't accumulate that kind of money in 10 lifetimes.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 30 2021, @05:13AM (1 child)
So, more than 25k is the price of free speech in a modern context?
Just step back and think about this. Really hard. Think really, really hard.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 03 2021, @07:37AM
You'll be shocked to know how expensive a printing press was in 1776.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday September 29 2021, @08:04PM (2 children)
Even with your own server, you still need a contract to connect. That company will decide what you can and can't put online. The service provider is the real ball and chain. From them we should be demanding a simple dumb pipe. Content must remain off limits to any regulation. You do all the filtering at your end.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 30 2021, @05:13AM (1 child)
Whatever happend to dumb pipes? And internet neutrality? No, my ISP shouldn't decide what I can put online.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday September 30 2021, @05:18AM
Same as always, insufficient demand from the market collective
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday September 29 2021, @08:30PM (1 child)
I am smart enough to run my own servers. You can reach it by driving to 35.702846, -86.299802 (Yes, the rock quarry), pull over on the side of the road, connect to the wifi network named FREESPEECH, and open https://freespeech, [freespeech,] and verify the SSL certificate thumbprint is f6f5da963bad37651c8e5e7488871d38266f0c1b.
What, that's not scalable? You want some kind of network you can connect to that from anywhere in the world? Lacking Elon Musk's money/ability/infrastructure to build your own globe spanning network you'll have to buy that from someone, and you should be able to do that. Core services like IP transport, DNS registration/resolution, and arguably DOS prevention services should not be denied on a whim. You have a serious issue when providers are empowered to silence you because they disagree with your politics (Gab), religion (church of Satan), disregard for intellectual property (piratebay), or anything else.
You might make a compelling argument against e.g. Child Pornography but that's a long way from shutting down a social media site because of pictures of Sad Pepe frog saying "Left can't Meme".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 29 2021, @08:37PM
Themightybuzzard was one of the early founders/admins of Soylentnews and he was relatively conservative also. The claim that Republicans won't start their own servers because they don't have the skills or expertise is a nonsensical red herring.
(Score: 2) by JustNiz on Friday October 01 2021, @12:36AM
ahh you mean exactly like how facebook et al automatically ban anyone that dares to not march lock-step with the left wing propaganda?
(Score: 2) by slinches on Wednesday September 29 2021, @09:30PM
I agree that you should be able to moderate your site as you see fit. However, you should be liable for any content that is published there unless you adhere to common carrier standards (i.e. content agnostic except to comply with takedowns of illegal content). If you want to control the messages on your site, then own the liability for that. If you want to provide a space for open discussion that isn't controlled by the site, then you should be protected from liability for the messages of others who happen to use the site.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 29 2021, @06:06PM (11 children)
As defined by who?
By the government, as in Russia and China?
By The Party, as in USSR and now in USA?
By the billionaires controlling largest Internet monopolies maybe?
An interesting Newspeak renaming of rants and invective.
The common leftie drones with their total lack of hard sciences education, cannot notice reality and facts even when those are biting their arses hard. And you know that perfectly well, now don't you?
Have you absolutely no shame, dude? None at all?
If censoring something can be conductive to free speech, that something is uncivil speech. The very thing I expect the left will defend to the last, as 99% of their propaganda force have literally nothing else to say.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Wednesday September 29 2021, @07:26PM (10 children)
Facts. Like, you know:
* Does the sun rise in the East or in the West?
* Is 2 + 2 equal to four or to five?
Science. Like, you know:
* how electromagnetism works
* how physics works
* how evolution works
* how chemistry works
* how biochemistry works
* how microorganisms work
* how biology works
* how medicine works
* how contagious diseases work
Not Newspeak. Crazy people who deny reality and facts.
* covid is not real
* covid is a hoax
* covid is no worse than the flu
* I don't have covid
* I will get better
* I'm not dying
* I do not have covid (said with last dying breath)
Crazy is the correct word. Based on their craziness, then they turn science and medicine into a political issue. It should not be political. But a group of people with a certain political leaning are open to conspiracy theories and misinformation which they embrace as absolute truth.
Now anyone can be wrong or mistaken about something. But I'm talking about a cult like embrace of obvious misinformation in the face of cold hard facts.
And you call it Newspeak.
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday September 29 2021, @08:53PM (3 children)
Here is an example of a fact for you.
Fact: vaccines do not contain microchips.
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 29 2021, @11:25PM (2 children)
Dead wrong, exactly as expected.
Here are two examples of a fact for you.
Fact: I know of no reports where a vaccine were demonstrated to contain microchips.
Fact: I know official reports where a COVID vaccine was demonstrated to contain things it should not.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/COVID-vaccines/1.6m-Moderna-doses-withdrawn-in-Japan-over-contamination [nikkei.com]
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/08/28/national/japan-moderna-vaccine-deaths/ [japantimes.co.jp]
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/08/29/national/moderna-contaminants-vaccines-okinawa/ [japantimes.co.jp]
Do observe the difference between fact and belief, and try to internalize it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 30 2021, @01:53AM (1 child)
If you are going to claim someone is "dead wrong" it helps to show they are wrong.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 30 2021, @10:04PM
When stating a general negative about a class of objects, like "fishes do not fly", you are stating a belief. Unless you have directly studied all the objects in that class, you have no such fact.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 29 2021, @11:02PM (3 children)
I know it only appears to "rise" as the Sun does not rotate around the Earth. Do you?
I know in modulo-3 arithmetics it is equal to neither. Do you?
Religion. Got it.
Especially hilarious is "how physics works", "how biochemistry works", and "how biology works". While scientists are groping in the dark, a common leftle already Knows Everything!
All that after studying nothing, I must add. The Total Knowledge™ is imparted from The Party.
Meanwhile we lowly engineers and scientists, have to do with observations, error margins, statistical correlations, unexplained exceptions, empirical relationships, and all that mundane rightwing stuff.
Reality: I observed none of the people I know, who got diagnosed with COVID, suffered anything worse than in a bad flu season.
Fact, now?
Totally correct. Science and medicine should not be political.
However when politicians use select studies to justify spending $trillions subsidizing select businesses or types thereof, and select medicines or types thereof, how can science or medicine not be political?
A scientist or a doctor is a paying job like any other. They can and do get fired for telling things that are not politically correct. How are the results produced by those who chose not to get fired, not political?
Isn't that the same group that very recently pocketed some heavy $trillions? https://inequality.org/great-divide/global-billionaire-pandemic-wealth-surges/ [inequality.org]
Or is the money flow being purely coincidental?
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday September 30 2021, @03:27AM (2 children)
Knows everything? No. Knows enough to draw useful conclusions? Yes.
Let's look at physics: Are the scientists groping in the dark about what happens inside black holes? Absolutely. Are they groping in the dark about downward acceleration of human-scale objects as a result of Earth's gravity? Absolutely not.
By contrast, many of the official conservative positions, often voiced by prominent politicians or on major news networks, ignore well-established scientific theories and observations like:
- Evolution.
- Viruses.
- Antibodies.
- How human fertilization works.
- Climate change.
- Changes in and effects of ocean acidity.
We're not talking cutting-edge controversial stuff, we're talking about the stuff that's been well established and well supported by ongoing research for 40+ years in the fields in question, where the non-crackpot scientists who study them are arguing over the minutia and trying to shrink the error bars and statistical ranges, not fighting over whether the main point is right. And if you really are a scientist, which I'm going to question since you state neither your field nor your credentials, then I'm quite certain there's a large body of work you don't call into question because none of your observations have given you any reason to do so (e.g. if you're a physicist, I doubt you're spending valuable time and resources re-measuring the speed of light just to make sure that all those other measurements that many other labs and teams made weren't wrong).
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 30 2021, @10:48PM (1 child)
"In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not." -- Dr. Albert Einstein
You can firmly believe you "know enough to draw useful conclusions", and still be totally, completely, utterly wrong. Some detail not included in your "enough" can easily be crucial to the case you try to analyze. Being aware of this, and being wary of it, is THE foundation of all good science and engineering.
Good example. Is a human under a parachute a "human-scale object"? Is a human that reached the terminal velocity a "human-scale object"?
See how talking in generalities leads you to laughably wrong answers?
Those who ignore the demonstrable parts of our knowledge about those things, do have a problem (and yes, evolution is demonstrable, due to evolutionary algorithms). But those who take a shallow kindergarten-oriented overview of those subjects and then believe they "know" them, have a worse problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect [wikipedia.org]
And those are a separate kettle of Elder Things. Here we have the left willfully ignoring a lot of easily demonstrable observed facts, while waving about some heavily doctored graphs. Such a behavior is antithetical to science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refractive_index [wikipedia.org]
Seems the question of whether YOU are a scientist, has serendipitously resolved itself. ;)
Do learn some more of physics before diving into such discussions again.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday October 01 2021, @03:07AM
Yes and yes. And in both cases, the acceleration due to Earth's gravity is effectively a constant. What's going to change is the countering force of wind resistance, which is still something we can calculate well enough to design parachutes that lead to survivable skydiving.
I'm not a professional scientist. Unlike you, I never claimed to be. I also can do enough of the basics to do some useful stuff. Just like I wouldn't describe myself as a professional carpenter, at all, but I can fix stuff around my house that looks decent enough.
The way you're talking, you seem to think I'd need to be a professional astronomer to know what phrase the moon is in and understand how said moon phase comes about.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 30 2021, @05:17AM (1 child)
It's not like the left would attack a sitting president for suggesting we look into medicines that seem to have beneficial effects against an illness.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 30 2021, @05:44PM
Correct!
(Score: 2) by JustNiz on Friday October 01 2021, @12:21AM
> Big Tech sites cannot be allowed to censor dangerous misinformation unsupported by facts or science. In the interest of free speech.
There's already no such thing as free speech.
The mass media and all the big sites (google, facebook etc)are promoting the left/woke agenda hard, and anybody that dares to question their statements (given as self-evidently right) is silenced one way or another, even if that person is simply quoting hard data and science.