App stores and Web hosts have every right to decide what platforms they want to associate with, but I worry about what happens to encrypted messaging apps—which can’t moderate user content because they can’t see it—as bad actors move their discussions to closed group chats.
Of course, nobody really “moderates” or expects anyone to moderate unencrypted private messaging either. Every e-mail server in the country probably contains stuff as bad or worse than what was on Parler; we have different expectations about public fora.
But a public/private binary is somewhat artificial when nominally closed discussion groups can have hundreds of participants.
As a practical matter, acceptable use policies just aren’t really applied to non-public content, and nobody really expects them to be. But inevitably we’re going to see large but “private” channels hosting vile speech some member eventually converts to vile action.
At which point it seems plausible there will be demand for platforms to engage in (and app stores & hosts to enforce) moderation of comms in that liminal “private but so big it feels kinda public” space.
Problem 1: Not really possible prospectively if the group chat is encrypted. Problem 2: No principled line between regular private comms & “so big it feels quasi-public”

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More from @normative

13 Jan
One of many, many problems with the 230 discourse is that a lot of it seems to assume there’s some obvious bright line for what speech is either criminal or tortious, such that (for instance) it’s unproblematic to hold platforms liable once “notified” of this fact.
But that’s very clearly not the case. Whether speech is protected or prosecutable (or subject to civil liability) very often depends on things like the speaker’s knowledge & intent.
Courts—via mechanisms like discovery obligations & compelled testimony—can sometimes ferret out details of knowledge & intent. Did the speaker know their claims were false? Did they foresee & intend the consequences of their speech? At trial, maybe you can prove those things.
Read 6 tweets
13 Jan
This is willfully myopic. Even assuming Trump’s speech doesn’t clear the Brandenburg bar, which seems like a close call to me, Congress isn’t limited to impeaching only for offenses the state may prohibit “on pain of criminal punishment,” where the bar should rightly be higher.
Understand that under the Brandenburg Test, Trump could have been tweeting daily that every legislator who doesn’t vote to install him for another term deserves to be murdered, and that’d at least arguably count as protected speech.
There’s good reason to set the bar that high when the question is whether the state can deprive you of life or liberty. But the idea that such speech wouldn’t be impeachable just seems obviously insane to me.
Read 4 tweets
23 Dec 20
Here’s the thing: It just doesn’t “follow,” and the whole rationale for passing 230 in the first place was that it doesn’t follow. This gets said so much that I think people have lost sight of what an irrational non-sequitur it is.
“Platforms aren’t responsible for speech by their users. But if they choose to take down pornography, they should be liable for defamatory speech by their users.” What? Why? That’s moon logic. Those things have nothing to do with each other.
Also there’s no universe in which getting rid of 230 yields “accountability” for “disinformation,” because disinformation as such isn’t actionable, and you really, really wouldn’t want it to be.
Read 6 tweets
9 Dec 20
This SOUNDS like a libertarian-friendly approach to achieving conservative aims via a truth-in-advertising approach. But in practice this would be a disaster, requiring the government to judge which expressive acts are politically “biased.”
I’m a bit of a broken record on this point but: There just isn’t any way to disentangle the concept of “bias” from one’s own political perspective. “Bias” is only meaningful relative to accuracy, objectivity, or truth. What you think is biased depends on what you think is true.
Is YouTube biased if they remove videos alleging massive electoral fraud? They don’t think so; they think they’re countering objectively false disinformation, and that lies about elections or (say) medical treatments are more important to police than flat earth videos.
Read 6 tweets
8 Dec 20
Hoo boy. I finally took a look at the affidavit from “Spyder”—supposedly a pseudonym for a white hat hacker with a military intelligence background—from Sidney Powell’s “Kraken” lawsuits, and it is absolutely crazier than a bag of cats. courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…
It reads like gibberish composed by an AI to scam people with no technical background into thinking something very technical has been said. It’s a bunch of screenshots of DNS lookups and SpiderFoot scans connected by pure non-sequitur dream logic.
TL;DR: “I am a top-secret 1337 haxx0r. I did a whois lookup of Domion Voting. LinkedIn says they have employees in Serbia. Banana Cream Lobster Monkey. Therefore: ILLUMINATI CONFIRMED.”
Read 35 tweets
8 Dec 20
This is embarrassing. It’s worth bearing in mind that Texas AG Ken Paxton, who filed the suit, is under criminal investigation by the FBI after his own entire senior staff turned him in for corruption. Maybe he thinks disgracing himself further will win a pardon.
Paxton fired or got resignations from the seven senior attorneys who accused him of assorted felonies. He plans to run for reelection in two years. kvue.com/article/news/l…
Just, you know, in case you were wondering: Deputy Attorneys General do not typically accuse their bosses of committing crimes frivolously.
Read 6 tweets

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