Nope, none of that's true. Section 230 came as a response to rampant market manipulation. Folks were weaponizing false claims in order to effect stock prices and the platforms kept letting it happen. The platforms were sued and they realized that law didn't actually allow big tech to own platforms that promoted and profited from criminality.

Section 230 defends platform owners that promote fraud at the expense of the users who end up being the victims. Before Section 230 we had a vibrant and growing community of independent communities. After section 230 we have an internet dominated by unmoderated social media hellscapes filled with spam, fraud and groomers. And if anyone tries to create anything knew it's bought out or circumvented by one of the sectors leading monopolists.

If Section 230 was repealed Slashdot might have to hire moderators but that's far from a death sentence. The company is claiming about $6 million in revenue. They can afford to hire moderators. At the same time, it would absolutely decimate the massive social media platforms that are clearly doing the most damage.

Section 230 gives small platforms like Slashdot a suit of armor, but it gives Facebook, Google and Microsoft nuclear weapons. The tradeoff isn't worth it.

Can you actually make any kind of ethical or intellectual argument that can justify a law that allows people to openly invest in and promote crime? That's what we're talking about here. Slashdot doesn't have an undercurrent of criminality but a lot of the internet does.

When you log into modern dating apps it starts warning you about the rampant pig-butchering scams that are plaguing their platforms. Section 230 is the reason they can sit back and monetize those scammers while they feed on the userbase.

Yep. Removing liability from platform owners has created a system where monetizing fraud is the dominant business model.

YouTube pays kids to assault people. Twitter is mostly just market manipulation. Instagram is a transnational pig-butchering scam, etc...

Profitability without liability always leads to people getting hurt. Removal of Section 230 is the only chance the internet has of surviving.

China cannot get access to me as an American user without an American tech/telecom company allowing them access to me, either knowingly or unknowingly. But it's hard to argue that they don't know it's happening. America's tech cartels have all demonstrated a willingness to harvest and exfiltrate their users' data via data sales or breaches. Then they hide behind absurdist liability shielding that allows them to monetize outright criminality. If China has my data it means an American company helped them get it. We can't control China but we can control the American companies. So why are we choosing not to? Why are we choosing to frame the problem from the perspective of the unsolvable issue instead of the easy solve?

Corporate death penalties for recidivist corporate offenders would result in a greater increase in cyber security then any other possible solution.

Microsoft's espionage narrative makes no sense given their current engineering goals. Windows Recall is a national security threat. It extends a users threat surface into the 4th dimension and offers almost no meaningful functionality to users. Microsoft is the threat facing American users, not China. Microsoft is the monopolistic tyrant stealing our data.

Microsoft has paid over $1.5 BILLION in penalties for 23 violations. Their crimes include everything you'd expect like price-fixing, employment discrimination and wage theft. But they also have been found to be violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, stealing data from children and illegally selling tech to sanctioned Russians.

China isn't the problem here. Microsoft is the problem.

There isn't even the slightest attempt to make this ad seem like an article. This is just spam.

The internet is an environment and spam is pollution. Don't be a polluter.

You may not have realized but Reddit now has a program for paying users to post. It's overly complicated and requires a few steps but that's the outcome.

Reddit has an award system where other users can pay to apply an award to a comment or post, making it more visible. This isn't knew. It's been around for probably a decade but in 2023 they changed that and started paying people for getting a certain number of awards on their post. Thus creating a financial incentive to say things that reddit wants to hear instead of stuff that people actually feel they need to express. They are paying people to post and if they're verifying the users identity they could be paying a child, which amounts to a very creepy child labor violation.

Reddit has been an anonymous chat platform that promotes porn for over a decade. It's regulatory issues are brand new so I don't think it's going out on a limb to say that the payment aspect is likely a driving force behind the regulatory actions. Financial transactions drive the adoption of KYC and Reddit recently started paying people. Seems reasonable to me.

Facebook, by their own admission, deletes BILLIONS of fake accounts every few months (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcybernews.com%2Feditorial%2Ffacebook-deleted-billions-fake-users%2F).

Reddit's current CEO admitted to filling their platform with fake users and fake content from the very beginning(https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Feconomictimes.indiatimes.com%2Fmagazines%2Fpanache%2Freddit-faked-its-first-users-resurfaced-video-shows-co-founder-alexis-ohanian-admitting-99-of-early-submissions-were-fabricated%2Farticleshow%2F119263428.cms%3Ffrom%3Dmdr).

Anyone trying to defend the veracity of social media platforms is far out on a limb that it lacks plausibility.

Social media and web 2.0 were just a regulatory arbitrage and it's been regulated out of existence...at least in the UK. For a couple decades you could call your business a tech company because they were unregulated compared to the existing alternative. Uber was less regulated than taxis. Paypal was less regulated than a bank. Crypto was less regulated than securities. But regulations caught up and now we have these massive monolithic monopolists dominating the internet with business models that no longer seem to be legal.

If KYC breaks a platform, then it means that platform was crooked. Full stop. If your platform involves transferring money between accounts, then KYC is obviously needed. If any of these platforms actually stuck to their purported business model, communication between users, then this would be an insane invasion of privacy but these platforms decided to financialize themselves and pay users to post.

Reddit turned itself into a transnational payment systems by choice. Of course they need KYC.

Why are you pretending to discuss this issue without actually discussing the issue?

NEARLY ALL SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS ARE FAKE AND EVERY PLATFORM IS KNOWINGLY CATERING TO SCAMMERS AND SPAMMERS OPERATING SWARMS OF ACCOUNTS IN ORDER TO MANUFACTURE FAKE USER METRICS.

Reddit is an ongoing criminal conspiracy and we all know it and we also know that KYC does actually stop that kind of criminal conspiracy. Every single crypto or sales platform that adds KYC, fails as a result. That absolutely means that the accounts were doing something illegal.

Tech companies shouldn't be allowed to pay people without knowing who they are. Doing so creates a massive opportunity for fraud. It's completely implausible that a large number of honest internet users are willing to argue about this. This will cut down on every form of fraud that occurs on Reddit. You seem to be viewing this from the perspective of the spammers and scammers that KYC will destroy. That's weird.

California is also the first state where an energy company confessed to killing 80 people and was allowed to continue operating. So this actually makes sense. (source: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fapnews.com%2Farticle%2F678...)

The internet is an environment. Spam is a form of pollution. Native advertising like this "article" is the forever-chemical of internet.

If you own a bar and you own a CD, you are allowed to play your CD in your bar. The article is pure idiocy. Bars don't need to pay licensing fees.

The feature that no one wanted turned out to be bad for the exact reason everyone said it would turn out to be bad. Someone can just give you the elevator pitch for "Liquid Glass" as a feature and the very first thing any of us would say is "I dunno man, kinda sounds like it might make it harder to read". It was one of the most common sentiment I saw at the time. But these guys do this for a living, they're professionals and yet every idea they come up with is just lighting piles of money on fire. A VR device that made people nauseated, a phone marketed with AI functionality that doesn't actually exist and a UI redesign that makes it harder to read. These are not plausible business initiatives. At this point there are only two possible explanations for Apple's recent product offerings and designs: fraud or incompetence.

Personally I think fraud is way more likely. People seem quick to forget that Apple is a recidivist violator. They've been found guilty of 28 violations for over $1.4 BILLION in fines. Price fixing, device throttling, selling unsafe products, discrimination, polluting...Apple's done it all! This is a group of people who can longer plausibly be given the benefit of the doubt. (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fviolationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org%2Fparent%2Fapple-inc)

Or anime is very very cheap to produce compared to traditional animation so their platform has been flooded with anime over the past few years and netflix users are stuck watching whatever is on netflix.

They're trying to make the case that viewers chose anime but the reality is that the genre is becoming more popular because cost-cutting has gotten more popular.

And just in general Netflix can shove their numbers up their crooked asses. If they want us to take their numbers seriously, they need to be transparent about what they are, where they're coming from and when they're generated. While the rest of the internet was designed to share view counts in real time, they designed a platform that didn't. As a result, no one actually has to take any of their metrics seriously. If they want us to believe them, we're going need data, not marketing like this bullshit-ass article written by a bot.

The data doesn't support the claim.