A New Bill Threatens Speech on NikeTalk and other Internet Platforms - SESTA is the new SOPA.

[ninjahood]

bill's sponsors are determined to get this past...why isn't da powers that be making a bigger PR push?

 

[storm2006]

I wouldn't give Twitter or Facebook more credit than they deserve in terms of quality control. They've long stated their intentions of combating the toxicity that has become ubiquitous on their platforms, and we all know how that's gone.

Facebook's screening procedures seem particularly one-sided.

According to ProPublica reports, Facebook's internal documents reveal that it considers "White men" a protected category from hate speech, but not "Black children": https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-hate-speech-censorship-internal-documents-algorithms

It's not that they necessarily lack the means to identify certain forms of hate speech, however. You can buy ads from Facebook specifically targeting anti-Semites: https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-enabled-advertisers-to-reach-jew-haters

It's pretty clear, from this, what their priorities are. They're an advertising company.

They're protected less by their moderation technology and innovation than by their wealth, connections, and clout. Simply stated, Facebook et al. will have all the resources they need to settle any cases that do crop up in the way that some big companies calculate in wrongful death suits as another cost of doing business. The tech giants will be fine.


The issue, to me, is that the bill is not tailored precisely enough to target only "bad actors," and instead seems a classic example of shooting the messenger. If you're not a service provider, perhaps you'd think the existence of offending content on a service to be the product of negligence, contempt, or apathy. That's not so. A great deal of spam these days is automated, adaptive, and unyielding. It's virtually impossible to read every single post that goes up on a site permitting user generated content - and that's to say nothing of private messaging services.

What happens if someone abuses the PM service on our site to facilitate a criminal act? What happens if someone abuses an email service or a text message? Do we hold Whatsapp to this standard? Do we hold ISPs to this standard? Where is the line drawn?

You don't want to change the incentive structure so that ISPs, email providers, and other service providers need to literally read your mail to protect themselves against liability for those who abuse their services.

With all due respect to Nicholas Kristof (Half the Sky is required reading and he's shed a great deal of light on otherwise under-reported issues of vital importance), he wouldn't be able to write for the NY Times if not for the actual malice standard established in NY Times v. Sullivan. I see no reason why a law targeting the likes of Backpage can't be more precisely tailored, to protect those who make a reasonable effort and are not knowingly or deliberately facilitating sex trafficking.

That the law "only" relates to sex trafficking is beside the point. If we have to pro-actively screen for only one type of violation, we still have to pro-actively screen everything.

He argues that we make the sacrifice for copyright, so why not sex trafficking? That example actually proves SESTA critics' point: we didn't need SOPA to protect copyrights when we had the DMCA. The DMCA gives publishers the opportunity - and the responsibility - to react to copyright violations once reported. This permits reactive, rather than proactive, moderation, which is what allows real time posting. Personally, I'd be all in favor of something that adapts a similar standard for sex trafficking and other offenses.

All reasonable people want to target the bad actors here - so it's a false dichotomy to paint this issue as "selfish, entitled tech bros and sex traffickers vs. concerned citizens."

The righteousness of that cause makes this all the more baffling. A precisely tailored law doesn't need to use these PATRIOT Act "you will accept this surveillance or else you have something to hide and you hate freedom" steamrolling tactics. It would have universal support.

Every reasonable person wants to stop sex trafficking. We can do so without threatening the legitimate platforms we use to communicate online, so let's drop this pretense that we need to choose one or the other. Online service providers bear some responsibility and should behave ethically, but forcing those providers to adopt perfect, proactive screening systems will do a lot more harm to the general public than it will to sex traffickers.


There's a bit of a generation/technology gap embedded in SESTA advocates' arguments.

If a terrorist sends a letter bomb via UPS, UPS has, traditionally, not been held liable. Unless they know the package contains a bomb, they're considered innocent agents. If you change that standard, then all our mail is opened and screened.

The same is true for telephone companies. How many crimes have, over the course of history, been organized through phone calls? Yet we have not, to this point, held telecommunications companies liable for the abuses of their customers. Changing that standard requires censorship and surveillance on the part of the communications provider.

We did not take that step for traditional communications providers and we should not take that step for the Internet.

We all share a moral imperative to stop sex trafficking. We should all work together to find a smarter, more effective way of doing so than by championing this rushed, ham-handed legislation.

Great post. I really liked your analogies and insights.

 

[dachosen1]

This is huge. If this bill is passed, everything online will be restricted just like how it is in China and North Korea.

 

[ninjahood]

This is huge. If this bill is passed, everything online will be restricted just like how it is in China and North Korea.

yup.

and now da public is gonna be distracted with this latest round of healthcare political jousting and da Rican hurricane....

hopefully da google/Facebook lobbying kill this ish.

 

[AZwildcats]

Oracle and 21st Century Fox support the bill

 

[ninjahood]

Oracle and 21st Century Fox support the bill

im sure they're lookin at it as another way to hook in da ish they wanted in da SOPA & pipa bill.

 

[Belgium]

How do these people live with themselves trying to push a nonsense bill like this
As if that's gonna have any significant impact on sex trafficking.

 

[a blinkin]

Independent sites that have large amount of members and user generated content (ie NT) would probably end up going offline if this were to pass. Imagine the manpower that would be required to review every post before it's made public on Niketalk. I'd imagine that would drive many people away from the platform. That happens and it's curtains.

Contact your representatives fams.

 

[lovehateself]

How do these people live with themselves trying to push a nonsense bill like this
As if that's gonna have any significant impact on sex trafficking.

same way they think theyre winning the war on drugs

 

[ninjahood]

what needs to be addressed is da regulation of prostitution, getting at Backpage doesn't solve da problem, it just "shoots da messenger" like meth said.

 

[getback]

About to say f___ it and go live in the woods like Bob Lee Swagger.

 

[Narcissist]

How do these people live with themselves trying to push a nonsense bill like this
As if that's gonna have any significant impact on sex trafficking.

Agendas and money

 

[Brownstone]

Wrote emails to all my reps!

 

[Deleted member 42060]

Exactly

Attack the source, wherever it comes from
Have to go after the trafficking thugs. It existed long before the net

 

[wayniac211]

Who was the rappers though?

 

[nawghtyhare]

Soooo
I'm in cali
I went to the link
And filled it out
This what I got back in my email today

 

[Nawzlew]

Methodical Management

 

[Chiron]

Surely the shape-shifting reptilian global elites that need children for their bohemian grove rituals wont actually let this pass.... nothing to worry about

 

[DCAllAfrican]

Nt gonna be like:

"* comment is pending mod approval "