
Platforms Are Not Publishers - raleighm
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/08/the-messy-democratizing-beauty-of-the-internet/567194/?single_page=true
======
charlesism

        > The internet connects more than 3 billion people 
        > and enables a grand diversity among them to speak,
        > if not yet to be heard. “Republics,” said the late
        > Columbia University professor James Carey, “require
        > conversation, often cacophonous conversation, for 
        > they should be noisy places.” That sound you hear,
        > which sometimes grates, is the racket of society
        > negotiating its norms and standards, its future.
        > It is the messy sound of democracy.
    

Nope, you have trolls and extremist groups gleefully spraying toxic garbage
over everything, until decent, mature people abandon the site. Sane people
don't post on Youtube. Some sane people post on Twitter, etc... but they
eventually give up. If graffiti on a toilet stall is the standard for online
"democracy," we'll never solve any problems, and only the worst people among
us will actually benefit from freedom of expression.

Any site today that doesn't have iron-clad moderation (like this one!)
devolves into an inhumane freak show.

~~~
aokiji
(disclaimer: this is not an ad-hominem)

charlesism, you are blatantly promoting an agenda of censorship. One should
not behave well due to the threat of punishment but by virtue of virtue.

You appear to stand against everything of value in the West. There are
corporations and special interest groups trying to influence the narrative in
reddit and even here in order to further reduce online freedoms and to
establish the official list of forbidden thoughts.

Furthermore, The Atlantic has a long number of articles promoting globalism
and the destruction of nation-states. A true free market of ideas requires
anonymity. Who is going to help you when rampant corruption emerges in
organizations such as the United Nations (a known harbor for individuals
involved in child traffic scandals)? Remember the gamergate fiasco?

People all over the world are angry, and it is not their fault entirely -
overpopulation and resource depletion need to be dealt with. But why doesn't
anyone seem care about raising the bar on education, not just in terms of
skill sets but also morality and long-term thinking?

~~~
charlesism

       > you are blatantly promoting an agenda of censorship.
    

Private censorship? You bet!

    
    
       > You appear to stand against everything of value in the West
    

Come back to earth, please.

    
    
       > The Atlantic has a long number of articles promoting globalism
       > and the destruction of nation-states.
    

Good, I support that.

    
    
       > People all over the world are angry, and it is not their fault entirely
    

I've lived long enough to see how all this came to pass. People are angry at
the wrong people and the wrong things.

~~~
kraken_cult
I'm curious, how does globalism benefit everyone, at all scales economically,
equally?

~~~
charlesism
Each state of the USA is large enough to be its own country. It doesn't work
equally well for all states, but there is a high degree of freedom of
movement, and free trade between states. If every state were indeed its own
country, it seems unlikely there would only have been one war between them
since 1861.

------
snowwrestler
I agree with the headline, but the hard part is defining what a platform is. I
don't think we should just accept anyone who raises their hand and says "hey
I'm a platform, guys!"

Maybe one distinguishing feature of a platform vs a publisher is curation.
Verizon does not choose which phone calls I get--it routes them all. My DNS
provider does not choose which requests to resolve; it resolves them all.
Heck, the interstate highway carries any vehicle that meets standard specs for
safety. Those are platforms.

If Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc simply and directly routed content without
curation, they would have a stronger claim on being a platform. Instead, they
use filtered timelines and "suggested content" to make decisions about what
people see. That's more akin to what the Washington Post does, than Verizon.

Social media platforms will claim they use algorithms instead of human
judgment to route content, so it's unbiased. Does anybody still buy that?? The
many ways in which "smart" algorithms can be biased have been well covered. If
nothing else, they are biased in favor of content that generates the fiercest
emotions, in the name of "engagement."

And why do they do that?

I would suggest another distinguishing feature of a platform vs a publisher is
the business model. Platforms are fee-for-service. You pay your ISP a fee, and
it delivers the service. You pay a gas tax, and the government provides your
roads.

Publishers have an advertising business model. This creates an incentive for
them to manipulate you in ways that increase advertising. Your ISP does not
care if you use their service... in fact, they get better profit margins if
you don't! But Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube do care, and they take active
steps (see: curation) to manipulate you into doing so.

------
shiburizu
I don't think you get to make the "internet is a public square" argument while
also advocating for banning opinions from the same. I can stand in Times
Square saying Romaine Lettuce is the best lettuce of all time and people might
think I'm stupid (or might not) but I get to say that all I want provided I'm
not being a nuisance. Disclaimer: this is NOT a defense for incitement to
violence.

Let's roll with the physical-digital analogy for a second here: When I go to
the convenience store to buy a muffin in the morning, right next to the
register the clerk usually has the daily paper sitting on the countertop and I
can buy a copy if I think the headline it's worth reading. Or perhaps I can
hear the news playing overhead on some TV in a store as I walk around looking
for items. Social media currently works like if my muffin was sitting between
a copy of the Times and a coupon catalog when I went to the store to go look
for it. I am able to look at what I want in pieces when I go to the store, and
the cluttered mess of content in the timeline is a conscious choice to keep
people looking at ads and reading sensational headlines.

But here's where I keep doubting myself from playing the defense of absolute
free speech in this situation: I read an article here on HN recently and
commented that these situations always seem to play out through media orgs.
Infowars, CNN, even The Atlantic are all companies vying to get some of that
sweet sweet user interaction through gaming the platforms. They are frequently
condensing their content into auto-playing videos on user timelines,
publishing sensational titles in the post text linking to their articles, etc.
I can hardly name instances where this was about a user with no media
presence. It's almost like media orgs leverage their huge presence to push
their own survival.

------
criddell
I've never understood why people try to classify Google, Facebook, and Twitter
as publishers xor platforms. It seems to me that they do both in varying
degrees (especially Google).

~~~
vetinari
Publishers have editorial control, platforms do not.

That's why you can be one or the other, but not both.

~~~
criddell
But Google, for example, produces original content on YouTube and YouTube is
also a platform for other people doing the same. They are both.

~~~
vetinari
Editorial control is about capability of checking and filtering others'
content, not your own.

Platforms can also use their own products (ISPs themselves use internet or
Amazon also uses AWS).

Platforms are shielded by CDA exactly because they do not care about the
content that goes through it. The moment you demonstrate that you have the
capability and intent to filter, you will get responsible for doing so.

So no, they still are not both. By editorializing others' content, the CDA
protections are void.

~~~
criddell
With their YouTube Originals channel and all the other channels they fund,
Google is clearly a publisher. You wouldn't claim they have no editorial
control over YouTube Originals, right?

~~~
vetinari
Editorial control over Youtube, not just Youtube Originals. Again, similarly
just because some ISPs uses their own internet connection and can manage
filter the traffic for internal use, does not mean they are responsible for
filtering every connection they provide to customers. Or telcos, they also run
some phone subscriptions, but are not responsible for every phone subscription
in their network. Because they are platform, even as a user of their own
platform they have certain control over their own use.

~~~
criddell
So I think we are back to where we started. Sometimes Google is a publisher
and sometimes Google is a platform.

~~~
vetinari
We are back to where we started only in the sense, that some people still do
not understand that these two are mutually exclusive. Once you cross the
Rubicon from the platform to the publisher, there is no way back and CDA no
longer applies.

------
dragonwriter
> To call these platforms publishers—as The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance
> recently did—is to presume that their task is merely to produce content.

No, publishers don't, as an essential feature, produce (in an original sense)
content, they distribute it (which involves reproducing it, but that's
different than producing it.) Some publishers do also control content
creation, though many primarily it entirely acquire content from third-party
creators.

The entire article and it's rejection of the idea that internet platforms are
publishers rests on this bizarre error (it's not bizarre as a misunderstanding
in the public, but it is bizarre how it can get published in a professionally
edited media outlet, where presumably before publication at least one person
basically aware of what publishers are had to have read and signed off on it.)

------
yifanl
If you're making a profit off of the content you're hosting, then as far as
I'm concerned, you should be held responsible for that content.

