Thread by @JebKinnison

While I do not specialize in social media law, I have been an Internetizen since about 1980, so I have worthwhile opinions on the topic. Much reasoning on censorship is motivated by wanting to stamp out what the Party perceives to be Wrongthink, disallowing dialogue. 1/n

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1477680341590548483

The Internet world began as an interconnection of disparate nets (hence the name.) Financed by DARPA, the first TCP/IP network bridged the differing software standards of IBM, Unix, TOPS-10/Multics, and other proprietary nets. Talk between academics and private R&D got easier 2/n

Down the hall from me at BBN, Ray Tomlinson had worked out the email system, chose the '@' convention for email addresses, and regretted that this minor and easy bit of contract work was his claim to fame. But email and Usenet fostered global discussion. 3/n

Usenet was a great waster of time in foolish argumentation and primitive porn, but diversified information, then private servers like Compuserve and then AOL democratized discussion and brought in the more literate masses. Widely viewed as a tragedy... 4/n

...because not only did the quality of contributions and discussions begin to decline, as it became a significant influencer of public opinion (1990s?), the urge to censor grew. Corporations, NGOs, and gov'ts technically owned the contents of social media... 5/n

...and generally had terms of service which allowed them to avoid any claims of copyright in taking user content and data as their own. Section 230 allowed services to present and censor user content without taking on liability for defamation. 6/n

I could ramble on for hours, but the "terms of service" argument for political censorship is weak. The major services today signed up customers based on initial promises of being good stewards of user data, and once a mass of users was locked in, changed TOSes. 7/n

Google got my email business because they promised they would protect my private data and use it for their ad targeting. Then they bought out other ad services and became a near-monopoly; everyone's ads now use my data. 8/n

Twitter told us it was the platform for free speech. Now it is a platform aligned closely with one side of the culture wars. MTG is not what I'd call a reliable source, but her voice is as important as others. I know to discount and check even "expert" opinion. 9/n

Twitter takes 1/3 of my ipad screen real estate for its groomed "What's Happening" topics - which have become a propaganda service. Along with clickbait celebrity crap, we get Coof-19 propaganda and "explainers" which display (for example) this NYTimes headline. 10/n

Like Google Snippets, you can patiently click through to the source, but these are intended to short-circuit any pushback and keep you corralled for more ads. It's insulting, of course, but works well. Removing accounts built up through long effort is burning books. 11/n

Proposed solutions (edit of Section 230, etc) don't address the real root of the problem: user-provided data should be presumed to be owned by the user. If I upload thousands of pictures to Instagram, they're still mine. I have a son and I wouldn't want him on Pornhub... 12/n

...but it's up to me to prevent that. I don't want people who are adults and sign up for content deemed offensive by some to be prevented from seeing it. Risks and rewards of freedom to choose were embedded in the US Constitution, and the US chose more freedom. 13/n (contd later)