Goof,
You know very little about how X is doing. You have not looked at all.
Read these points.
My comment people like to rubberneck at an accident. X is nothing but accidents.
I suspect legislation can be crafted in such a way as to protect democracy from the worst of social media while allowing most of the benefits.
In social media we appear to be trying to create a platform for speech with no accountability, where anything can be said without consequence. That strikes me as a recipe for disaster as accountability is the primary regulator of human behavior.
Sure. But every society that I know of have still felt the need to protect individuals from bad actors abusing free speech. Even the most open societies have laws against libel, defamation, pornography, using speech to threaten and intimidate, etc. For those laws to work, someone needs to be held accountable.
That’s the question at hand, on social media who is accountable for the content posted? If you are being defamed as a meth user on X, who should you go after?
That would seem to require eliminating anonymity and holding the social media provider accountable for providing enough information to identify (as examples) foreign governments or extremist groups fronting as news agencies.
Those would be my suggestions for legislation. Eliminate anonymity and only allow streaming of news sources that provide sufficient documentation to identify themselves as legitimate while holding the platform responsible for that assessment.
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There might be a carefully crafted legislative solution, but if there is its unlikely to be based on an accountability mechanism. Every publisher that’s accountable for publishing works created by other people responds to that by pre-approving everything before publication. It’s the only way to manage the liability.
BTW, social media doesn’t have “no accountability” - the speakers are accountable for what they say. Witness Alex Jones. What you don’t have is accountability for the platforms - they’re treated as simple transmission mechanisms (like a phone line or your cable company) rather than “publishers” of the content. That’s what allows them to provide access without having to screen the content beforehand.
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I think social media is more akin to anarchy. Sure, you may be able to hold a well known figure like Alex Jones accountable, but how do you hold accountable thousands of individuals who try to remain anonymous (for example, like calling themself AlphaWolf) or are fake accounts or even foreign actors.
Personally, I limit myself to news organizations I trust across the political spectrum. I consider Boards like MF as entertainment although there are certain posters I consider more reliable than others. Never spent time on a platform like X and never will. Doesn’t sound appealing to this cantankerous curmudgeon.
Hey! Get off my lawn!
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So people who are already too lazy to find out if something is true before re-tweeting it are suddenly going to find this “objective rating system” and pay attention to it instead of just grabbing any random factoid that suits their fancy and passing it along? This sounds like fantasy, which is exactly what it is.
Getting your “news” from Twitter is like stopping every 3rd person in Times Square and saying “tell me about the Presidential race.” You will get a lot of opinions and at the end you will know little more than you did before the exercise.
There is a reason for gatekeepers. We found that when you let anybody sell medicine you get snake oil and heroin headache remedies. If you let anybody fly a plane you get a lot of airplane crashes. When there is no regulator financial markets turn into dark corners and free-for-alls and panics and crashes are as frequent as daisies in Spring.
Requiring social media to vet every post is impossible, holding them responsible for everything some deranged idiot says is fraught. The best system yet devised is to have trusted gatekeepers (we call them editors and publishers) and keep the riff raff to a minimum. Before “on-line” that meant a few “Letters to the Editor” and now it means “comments after the story”. Those advocating “comments before the story, and in fact no story at all” are fools, and bragging about ignoring traditional media - even with all its faults (and there are many) - is just stupid.
Although, and I will admit, I have a fabulous system in mind to cure all this, but until I figure out how to monetize it I’m going to keep quiet. 
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I suspect that the reason traditional media has trusted gatekeepers is because editors and publishers are held accountable.
That may very well be, but the question at hand is should it be? An admittedly extreme example, but I think a social media platform being used to facilitate human trafficking or child pornography should be held accountable. It is just a matter of where one draws the line.
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Sure, but you can’t “draw the line” clearly when the subject matter isn’t actually illegal. Note that even with the things you mention above, if someone were to successfully evade a platform’s screening tools to post criminalized content, the platform wouldn’t be responsible the way a conventional publisher would - only if they refused to take it down would they get in trouble.
But for more generalized content? If they’re “accountable,” they won’t let anyone post anything without prior review - which basically would eliminate the platforms. Because the liability for that isn’t immediately clear from the content of the post. Slander, libel, misinformation that leads to direct harm (“Tide pods are tasty!”) - those are things where the liability determination is usually determined after the fact. Publishers would have a duty to investigate all content in a way that simply can’t work with what a social media platform does.
It would probably be legal to do that, but I don’t think you can have both social media platforms and “accountability” for things other than criminalized speech.
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Again, twitter is simply a platform or conduit for information. It’s up to organizations that use the platform to set their own standards or for consumers to discern for themselves. Beyond that, gatekeepers that would go beyond 1A, current libel, slander, and decency laws is an unnecessary restriction. We don’t need babysitters and those that think we do, can’t answer whom should be the babysitter and what should be the rules of play.
We regulate things like flying airplanes and drug manufacturing because there are objective standards that can be applied and standards serve the greater public good.
Presumably, the greatest public good of freedom of speech is the ability of individuals to freely express themselves particularly in criticism of authority but also in the quest for truth.
Longer term, if X becomes the main platform for information news, it will find a hierarchy. Likely, the most credible and objective providers will gather the largest audiences. Those that only want to hear that with which they agree will tune out the alternatives. In the end, it’s no different than decisions being made about print, television and radio media news today.
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Anon678 on TMF: The cure for cancer is Forsythia! A study put out by WeMakeMoneySellingForsythia.com has shown that 78% of all people who take Forsythia are cured in 8 weeks!
Should there be an objective standard to such a claim? Should we leave it up to individuals to make up their own mind, in their search for truth, as to the efficacy of Forsythia?
Except it doesn’t work that way on social media, including twitter, due to the algorithms.
Hawkwin
Who doesn’t claim to know the answer, but can still identify the problem.
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Yes, it’s called the FTC under the competent and reliable scientific standards. There is no protection against stupid.
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How would the FTC remove such a claim from TMF?
Are you suggesting that if I made such a claim, an outside agency would proactive alert TMF and force its removal?
There are thousands of false claims made daily on thousands of different mediums. There is no way the FTC could even keep up with such.
Here is just one example:
It took the wronged parties to sue to stop the following. There was nothing the FTC did to stop this:
Or, how about the supplements peddled by Alex Jones:
he sells products such as “Super Male Vitality” drops, “Lung Cleanse Plus Spray” and “Prostaguard” pills.
Absent a complaint, the FTC doesn’t do anything about such nonsense.
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No, it covers the original claim if unsubstantiated. 1A gives broad latitude for private individuals to lie and exaggerate, again it’s the price of admission. If it wasn’t, no politician would have a job.
In the Ramsey matter, there are limitations in claims that can be made for commercial purposes. Presumably, the case meets the standards for fraud which is a different litmus test than just for private citizens.
Again, people have for centuries and will continue to misuse free speech. As Ben Franklin said, those that would trade even a little liberty for security, deserve neither in the end.
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Of course. And they are dealing with emloyees who are given a rule book which must be followed under penalty of losing your job. Even the “Letters to the Editor” are vetted by those same people.
This is unlike a social media platform, where every person with a keyboard or microphone has the same access as everyone else. There is no “editor”, nor could there be. Facebook gets 3 billion new posts a day, around 45,000 every second. If you want to slow that down so it can be read, accepted or rejected, then you don’t have a “social media” platform.
It’s easy to “edit” and take responsibility for content when you are publishing a few dozens of things a day. Not so easy at a million times that rate.
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It is not stupid. It is scary if you need help. People are very worried about themselves.
Most of us here have read about accounts of 1890 political rhetoric. Democracy is mob rule. As is a republic. The words are the same Greek to Latin. We do organize throughout the crappola.
Then start at where the line can be drawn and work your way up from there. And again, I’m not discussing “what is” as much as “what should be”.
Sure you can, in the same way we have radio and broadcast television. If you want to run a social media platform then you should have to get a license from the government. The government will then determine if the platform is doing a sufficient job at blocking harmful content.
I seem to have misunderstood your post as I thought you brought up editors as a means for social media to moderate content. My main comment was that companies are probably not going to voluntarily make that effort and so accountability is probably necessary to be a motivator.
But look, we live in an era where photoshop can make it seem like something happened that really didn’t, where AI can successfully mimic human conversation, and when bots can inundate a platform with content 24/7. We have convincing evidence that foreign governments are actively using social media to spread discord and influence elections. This is not a time for unregulated mass communication platforms. Americans have a constitutional right to free speech but there is no similar right to unfettered access to a national or global audience.
I do believe that this represents an existential threat to democracy so if it means significantly altering social media as we know it, so be it. Regulate the sucker.
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Could this be a use case for AI? Train it on what the platform does and doesn’t want to allow, then let it highlight questionable posts for human review, using the results to continuously refine the training.
—Peter
Isn’t this what Facebook and others already do?
Mike
I don’t know. But AI has only really been useful for a year or two at best. So if they are using it, it’s fairly new.
I suspect they have mostly been doing a simple flag for troublesome words or phrases, combined with some user reporting. But I’d be interested to know what the current state of affairs is.
–Peter
The recent big break throughs have been what most people see as LLM and generative AI. But FB has been doing face recognition and p*rn detection for more than a decade and AI for flagging text is pretty old. (i.e. trying to understand words in context in a string – think about how things like Siri have been around).
Mike
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Supposedly but with massive unending failures in between.
FB’s plan is not to train based on user comments but on FB’s staff’s responses to feedback from users.
FB is a mess.
Workable AI has very few top programmers. The class issues in programming are too problematic. Not the only issue but the biggest issue. To expect FB staff to report properly is a time consuming mess. It is too complex for many well functioning high IQ people to work with or manage. The specialty of AI does not mean it works.
Throughout communications in corporate American AI keeps being relegated to the position of receptionist. At the end of any problem solving a human to human interaction has to happen. There are very few things the receptionist can do.
The AI larger language model has a misnomer. We know now in the human mind language is a tool for communication. It is not the thought process or more aptly put the problem solving process. It is conflated as such but is not. The AI larger language model can not do much problem solving. Later it might but that is awkward because speech centers or communication centers do less thought and problem solving. Having a communication center do problem solving is too messy.
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