I don't think there's any lack of fundamental problems. We're still primarily using a protocol that wasn't designed to be resistant to bad behavior, with address starvation, with assignments carried out by conflicted organizations, with name services likewise, with apparent disinterest from government organizations happy to write speeding tickets in anything like enforcement of existing laws about conduct on telecommunications networks, which themselves occasionally make a lunge towards censorship and all of which are somehow complicit in unconstitutional citizen spying programs. All of these problems are also international. When you want to discuss problems with the internet, the first problem is where do you start, and the last is where do you stop?

But on the flip side, at some point even the phone company is allowed to cut you off, and not only for reasons of nonpayment. It may have to involve legal action, but if you are problematic enough, you can be denied non-emergency phone services. Or, you know, imprisoned. Then you wind up with really terrible access to telecommunications. How much are we expecting to change society in the course of this conversation?

Slashdot, Reddit, and other atypical social media sites have their own benefits and pitfalls unique to their particular community and moderation designs. Aspects of Slashdot's specific mod system are beneficial and user-friendly, including the descriptive moderation and ability to assign scores based on it. I give bonuses for flamebait, troll, and offtopic on the assumption that much of that moderation is intentionally abusive, but I also don't want to wade in the muck of every single comment in busy discussions.

Sometimes I click around and eventually do read every comment, especially in discussions with few comments, but I'm not about to make that my default because I sure don't want to. But I still wish that metamoderation had any perceptible effects, or that you could comment in discussions where you've moderated — just not in the same thread — as the people most qualified to comment are also the people most qualified to moderate.

Now do Israel oppressing Palestinians.

Apparently you did, because equally apparently you don't understand as much as you think you do. You also seem to think you're the only descendant of Jews around here.

The CEOs aren't spending their own money. If they somehow don't win the arms race, they can always look back and say they needed to spend more. If they can declare themselves winners, they will look brilliant and be able to demand huge pay raises from their companies. Even if they nearly drive their companies to bankruptcy on the matter, they'll have other execs from other companies to point to as examples of people who either did worse, or won by spending more.

It was a good time to be a CEO in January of this year. It's an even better time now.

It will be here. The sunlight is just on back order.

I didn't have you being a little bitch on my bingo card for today.

It's extremely antisemitic to conflate all Jews with Zionists, as Zionism is antisemitic. But...

...most of the Zionists' ancestors weren't even semites, unlike the people they're genociding. Tell me again about how it's 100% about race. You're focused on this incident, I'm talking about the bigger picture, of which this incident is only one piece. Was it anti-semitic? Yes. Is Israel's genocide promoting anti-semitism? Also yes. Does that justify attacking all Jews? No it does not, not any more than being opposed to actions of some Muslims or middle easterners or any other group justifies attacking all of them. But since I never said so, it is you who may fuck all the way off. If I had meant that, I would have said it, because I am not a mealy-mouthed little fuck who can't say what he means. I don't have to make points through weaselly implication because I am not afraid to simply say what I mean, despite the accusations of cowardly clown fucks.

A significant number of Jews insist that their ethnicity and their faith cannot be separated, which is only true to the extent that some of their sects refuse to consider you to be a Jew unless your mother is a certified Jew — another practice which both limits the growth of their faith, and alienates them from everyone else. It's not universal, but it's universally harmful, because the people who do this insist with their fundamentalist fervor that it's the only valid way to be a Jew. So while I would say that for individuals it's entirely possible for those things to be separate, it's not reasonable to expect people to believe that it is.

Every person is an individual, whether it's the shooters in Australia, or their victims, or the Muslim who took the shotgun away from the shooter and got shot twice in the process. Everyone's potentially got their own narrative about every other person, none of which will fully capture who or what they are. All we can do is look honestly at situations, causes, actions, and results, and look for solutions. None of them come from being willfully ignorant as you are demonstrating here, nor from a jerking knee.

Do better.

You're pushing a stupid agenda and seem to expect that everyone reading this is illiterate, which is also stupid.

Section 230 isn't about protecting them for the sake of protecting them, it's about protecting them for the sake of our rights. You might hate feceboot with good reason, but a lot of people have a lot of serious conversations there amidst the stacks of shit.

Every platform has to decide what to show users. Even Bsky has a "Discover" feed which is algorithmically generated.

It is.

They can contact my provider and have my page taken down if the law is being broken. They do not need to contact me. They especially do not need to charge me money. The fee is a large percentage of my yearly hosting cost, so it significantly increases my costs. In protest, I am not paying it, and disabled comments instead so I am not prosecuted for the actions of trolls. This has reduced free speech on the internet. Now multiply that by the number of hobby sites affected.

Do you see the Catholic Court that's replaced the Supreme Court?

It is the fee which amounts to suppression, and you do not understand correctly. You do not get safe harbor protections if you do not register with the feds and pay a fee. Educate yourself before you "try" again.

Why? You've offered absolutely no evidence to support this assertion.

You said section 230 needs tweaking, but you then proposed its complete elimination. Reconcile your statements.

alter: change or cause to change in character or composition, typically in a comparatively small but significant way. Yes, adding context or community notes is absolutely, positively, literally, and in every other way an alteration. For the purpose of determining whether there has been alteration, it is irrelevant whether the change occurs at the beginning, in the middle, or the end of the content.

The purpose of Section 230 is to protect free speech for individuals, which will be lost if the operators of platforms can be held accountable for what they say there. That's why the ability of the operators of the platforms to ban or not ban users both is and should be completely irrelevant to whether those platforms receive section 230 protections, and you are therefore demonstrating a fundamental ignorance of the purpose and function of section 230.

Further, your demonstration of ignorance is only magnified by your insistence that social networks differ from ISPs in being able to refuse to do business with specific customers. In fact, ISPs can terminate their relationship with paying customers for a variety of reasons, including not being profitable or even simply being objectionable to do business with.

FTFY.

Good luck going after the authors of content rather than the carriers when whole organizations of ransom-ware organizations can hide behind the skirt of Mommy Putin. I'm not against actions against Venezuelan speedboats. But if Trump wants to demonstrate his resolve, sink a few of Russia's shadow oil fleet as payback for shitposting.

I'd say it's more, because it's some significant percentage of nonvoters as well.

Completely wrong.

As long as they control the supreme court, yes it absolutely would. You are 100% incorrect in a way that implies not only abject but also willful ignorance.

Section 230 protects people and organizations who run websites which allow the public to post content to them without approval from prosecution, so long as they comply with certain legal requirements like declaring your point of contact for having material which remains unlawful removed, which in turn requires that you pay a yearly fee. (This requirement is not part of section 230, it was instituted later.) This registration and fee is itself a restraint on free speech, but that's not what we're here to talk about and I mention it only in passing. What's relevant is that Section 230 doesn't apply to reporting what the president says at all so no, you are just completely wrong on every level, and everything you said in your comment except your characterization of Trump's speech is utterly false.

In the USA, fact is an absolute defense against libel. Reporting what Trump said is utterly legal, so long as you're reporting it as a quote and not as fact. This is not true in some other nations, e.g. the UK, where even facts can be slanderous if they are expressed with the intent of harming someone's reputation or causing them other damages. Perhaps this is the root of your confusion, you're thinking about some other country where speech is less free?