I respect the Facebook Oversight Board and wish them the best. but “sucked into the private power vortex” is a good description of what’s going on. Do we want to support and reinforce pseudo-governance with pseudo-rights protections designed by Facebook?
US lawmakers may be stuck accepting this kind of private governance (to go with our private prisons and private military contractors etc.) bc the 1st Am prevents Congress from setting the rules Internet users mostly want. Lawmakers’ hands are tied on this side of the Atlantic.
Europeans and many other non-US governments have a lot more flexibility to use *actual* public, democratically accountable, constitutionally constrained governance mechanisms. They don’t have to accept private simulacra.
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Probably I’m in that camp. If a few years pass and they prove super legit and useful I’d be open to the conversation. Bringing it up now is... Gauche? Gross? Creepy? Forfeiting credibility and goodwill? Something along those lines.
It’s also hard not to read this as policy advocacy. So many governments are looking for dispute resolution models that are cheaper than courts but more legitimate than platforms. And look who’s offering their services.
I am *really* excited about the Brazilian Supreme Court's Right to Be Forgotten case. I can't wait for Brazilian experts to weigh in and tell us more about the details, but the bottom line is that it's a constitutional rights-based rejection of RTBF claims. 1/
Brazil, like most countries, has cases where a personal privacy claim overrides the speaker's expression rights (or listeners' rights to access information). So I don't think the point is to say that can't happen. 2/
Rather, it's that the *process* for weighing privacy and expression rights matters. The Inter American Human Rights framework is particularly strong on this, and on expression rights generally. 3/
An easier example is a Googlebomb. When pranksters used SEO tactics to make the White House homepage be the first result for searches on "miserable failure" for example. searchengineland.com/google-kills-b… 2/
The problem isn't that the white house page was bad content or needed to be removed/demoted based on Google's disapproval of its message. It was that it wasn't the most relevant result, so changing ranking to move it down improved product functionality or search quality. 3/
I think of spam as different from illegal or TOS-prohibited content, because the problem is not necessarily that spam is bad content per se. It’s that spam is in the wrong place – showing up in the inbox, news feed, or search results of someone who’s not interested. 2/
Thus demotion -- rather than removal – might be the right platform response. Demotion fixes the problem by putting content back in the ranking position that best correlates to the likelihood that a user actually wants to see it. 3/
Assorted observations on the #DSA. These track my own interests, so if you want an overview, look elsewhere. (If I see one, I’ll add it to the thread though.) 1/
I’d like to see a chart showing which obligations apply to which platforms, particularly at the smaller end of the range. It looks to me like some very burdensome obligations are going to fall on some very small entities. 2/
I know there are some Commission slides showing the obligations at the giant (VLOP!) end of the range. But that small end needs some serious attention IMO. 3/
I'm seeing a lot of discussion of the rules for "very large" platforms. But if I'm understanding right, a lot of the DSA's major new process rules apply to any platform with more than 50 employees. That ought to entrench incumbents quite nicely.