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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: 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.