ISPs Should Not Police Online Speech—No Matter How Awful It Is.
ISPs Should Not Police Online Speech—No Matter How Awful It Is.
Entrusting our speech to multiple different corporate actors is always risky. Yet given how most of the internet is currently structured, our online expression largely depends on a set of private companies ranging from our direct Internet service providers and platforms, to upstream ISPs (sometimes....
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Users need more control over the kind of content they want to see. The problem Lemmy has is very similar to the main problem with the internet as a whole: the current model is that of a "regulator" who controls the flow of information for us.
What I'd like to see is giving users the tools to filter for themselves, which means the internet as a whole. Not interested in sports, let me filter it all out by myself, instead of blocking individual parts piecemeal.
The problem is that no company has an incentive to work on something like that, and I wouldn't even know where to start designing such interface tools on my own, but there is, for example, a keyword blocker for YouTube that prevents video that contain said terms from appearing on my timeline. I've used it to block everything "Trump", for example. I'd like to see more of that.
The idea sounds nice in theory, but there is a reason people bring their car to a shop instead of changing their own oil. There are a lot of things we could/should take responsibility for directly but they are far too numerous for us to take responsibility for everyone of them. Sometimes we just have to place trust in groups we loosely vetted (if at all) and hope for the best. We all do it every day in all sorts of capacities.
To put it another way: do you think we should have the FDA? Or do you think everybody should have to test everything they eat and put on their skin?
I'm talking about internet content. Maybe this is where personal assistants can come into play at some point.
To put it another way: do you think we should have the FDA? Or do you think everybody should have to test everything they eat and put on their skin?
There is a middle ground. The FDA shouldn't have the power to ban a product from the market. They should be able to publish their recommendations, however, and people who trust them can choose to follow those recommendations. Others should be free to publish their own recommendations, and some people will choose to follow those instead.
Applied to online content: Rather than having no filter at all, or relying on a controversial, centralized content policy, users would subscribe to "reputation servers" which would score content based on where it comes from. Anyone could participate in moderation and their moderation actions (positive or negative) would be shared publicly; servers would weight each action according to their own policies to determine an overall score to present to their followers. Users could choose a third-party reputation server to suit their own preferences or run their own, either from scratch or blending recommendations from one or more other servers.
That isn’t a middle ground. You’re just saying the state can publish a recommendation, which it always has been able to. That’s absolutely in the “unregulated” / “no safety nets” camp. It’s caveat emptor as a status quo and takes us back to the gilded age.
To put it another way: The middle ground between “the state has no authority here” and “the state can regulate away a product” isn’t “the state can suggest we don’t buy it.” It still puts the burden on the consumer in an unreasonable way. We can’t assess literally everything we consume. If I go to a grocery store and buy apples, I can reasonably assume they won’t poison me. Without basic regulations this is not possible. You can’t feed 8 billion people without some rules.
Let me be clear, I agree with the EFF on this particular issue. ISP’s should not regulate speech and what sites I browse. But it’s not the same as having the FDA. For starters, ISP’s are private corporations.
You misunderstood. It's not a middle ground between "can regulate" and "cannot regulate". That would indeed be idiotic. It's a middle ground between "must judge everything for yourself" and "someone else determines what you have access to". Someone else does the evaluation and tells you whether they think it's worthwhile, but you choose whose recommendations to listen to (or ignore, if you please).
There is a middle ground. The FDA shouldn't have the power to ban a product from the market. They should be able to publish their recommendations, however, and people who trust them can choose to follow those recommendations. Others should be free to publish their own recommendations, and some people will choose to follow those instead.
That's putting too much responsibility on the average person, who doesn't have the time to become educated enough in biology and pharmacology to understand what every potentially harmful product may do to them. What if they never even hear the FDA recommendation?
Also, though you'd like to think this would only harm the individual in question who purchases a harmful product, there are many ways innocent third parties could be harmed through this. Teratogens are just one example.
This kind of laissez-faire attitude just doesn't work in the real world. There's a reason we ban overtly harmful substances.
What if they never even hear the FDA recommendation?
Then the FDA isn't doing a very good job, are they? Ensuring that people hear their recommendations (and trust them) would be among their core goals.
The rare fringe cases where someone is affected indirectly without personally having choosen to purchase the product can be dealt with through the courts. There is no need for preemptive bans.