This is a broken framing of the problem. There are deeper principles that undergird our common articulations of "American founding principles". The "freedom of speech" as generally conceived and understood is couched in many assumptions about the memetic environment.
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Replying to @pwang @Ruminorang
Jack & Zuck have created platforms which really exacerbate the problems and highlight just how broken those assumptions are. If you're going to start policing content policies of Twitter, why not then also Fox News & Brietbart?
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Replying to @pwang @Ruminorang
Remember: It was Republicans that got rid of the "equal time" policy on the public airwaves. At least then, we understood that there was finite bandwidth & public attention, and journalism had to adhere to basic standards in order to have a right to the spectrum.
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Replying to @pwang @Ruminorang
Modern tech has aggregated and sliced up the ENTIRE AGGREGATE attention space of society, and pro-business, anti-regulation, VC bubble mentality means that it's somehow un-American to ask if that mere act of technology is a good and proper thing to do to a society.
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Replying to @pwang @Ruminorang
BTW
@webdevMason this is what I meant by "attention is a commons". Any individual's attention surely belongs to themselves. But if tech can aggregate the bulk of the collective attention span of most people, then that system - an attention market, a broadcast tool - is a commons.1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
If we don't treat it as a commons, then we have no business sniping individual players of that attention economy and saying, "Jack you are an asshole for censoring right-wing shitposts", while ignoring Brietbart & Rush Limbaugh.
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If we treat it as a commons, then we have the basis for holistically tackling the whole enchilada. We might even conclude that massively scaled reach is *intrinsically* problematic, and disallow such technology (e.g. by rendering it liable to libel lawsuits, etc.).
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The only reason the platforms can grow the way they did is because of certain legal safe harbor (e.g. CDA 230) and a lack of case law that held them liable for the things they facilitated. A couple of cyberbullying lawsuits with hefty fines could really change things.
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Replying to @pwang @Ruminorang
Brietbart & Rush Limbaugh are indeed liable for the content they serve in a way that e.g. email service providers are not. Taking an increasingly active role in shaping the discussion likely does push them toward the legal territory of the former & thus seems dumb ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Replying to @webdevMason @Ruminorang
Under normal circumstances, Email doesn’t amplify without attribution (ie the emails come from *someone*), and the exploitation of SMTP to achieve amplification/reach without accountability has a name: spam.
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“Spam” isn’t about amplification/reach without accountability, it’s about amplification/reach without consent. You don’t have to know who a listserv belongs to in order to consent to receipt
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Replying to @webdevMason @Ruminorang
You’re right, lack of consent is a critical design failure of email (and Twitter, too). But open relays were also a failure of the original design. Either of {accountability of origin, consent of receipt} would have been sufficient to nip the spam problem.
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