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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