alt Hacker NewsI am conflicted. On the one hand getting governments to wade into what is fair speech is absolutely a slippery slope. Yet, platform firms are not correctly incenvitived arbiters of speech either.
Square this circle:
1) Big Social Media firms have to make decisions on speech.
2) The ideals of free speech that everyone espouses are from an era where publishing and control of publishing was nascent.
3) As businesses, it is their job to ensure they take care of their shareholders, and thus this means driving engagement.
4) As humans, we respond and engage with certain stimului more actively than others.
5) As of 2026, moderation is still value driven. Private entities must now what is fair speech and moderate according to their values.
6) Platforms, following the incentives that are set out for them, create environments that are as addictive as possible for its users. This is what their job is.
You can make small enclaves for long form content. However, the majority of the voting population is drugged to the gills with enrapturing content.
This is not a recipie for a healthy information economy, this is the opium wars being waged by our own business structures on our own people - a druggie information economy.
Giving governments more power is ... oof... a bad idea. We need more genuine efforts to ensure a healthier content environment that works for society.
Do note, that while US based commenters are concerned, the situation is even worse in other nations, given that Authoritarianism is on an upswing. Figuring this out is not a trivial philosophical issue.
Replies
No need to square the circle when it’s already a hexagon. Commies can’t stand hexagons.
This bill is about enhancing the protections of lawful free-speech under the US constitution.
Generally speaking, we deem various kinds of speech that harms people as NOT protected under the first amendment, and that kind of speech would not be protected here.
Yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater, libel and slander, speech calling for violence, and fraudulent advertising are some typical examples of speech not protected by the first amendment.
It would be tricky, but we could reasonably categorize engagement algorithms with certain properties as harmful to people and not subject to first amendment protections. This would be consumer protection, like laws against fraudulent advertising and other misleading claims.
> Big Social Media firms have to make decisions on speech.
The fiction underlying their section 230 liability shield is that they don’t have to make those decisions. They’re just “dumb pipes” for user generated content. The Supreme Court punted on this issue in Twitter v. Taamneh but it’s going to get resolved eventually.