Cory Doctorow
π€ SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
They said, oh, well, we'll still internally bid against one another within our divisions for the most premium material, and that we'll be exposed to discipline that way.
And I love what Stephen King had to say about this when he testified.
He said, that's like me and my wife promising to both bid against each other on the next house we move into.
The thing we really want to be asking before we ask any of these other questions is how often are you going to have to answer this question?
So lots of people are like, oh, we should just ban hate speech and harassment on platforms.
Well, that's hard, not because we shouldn't do it, but because agreeing what hate speech is, agreeing whether a given act is hate speech, agreeing whether the platform took sufficient technical countermeasures to prevent it is the kind of thing you might spend five years on, and hate speech happens 100 times a minute on platforms.
Meanwhile, if we said...
We're going to have a bright line rule that platforms must allow people to leave but continue to communicate with the people they want to hear from.
Then people who are subjected to hate speech who are currently there because the only thing worse than being a member of a disfavored and abused minority is being a member of a disfavored abused minority who is isolated from your community.
Those people could leave and go somewhere else.
And it's not that we shouldn't continue to work on hate speech in parallel, but if you think that a rule that takes three years to answer a question is going to solve a problem that happens 100 times a second, you're implicitly committing to full employment for every lawyer in the world to just answer this question.
Sure.
One would be getting rid of this anti-circumvention law in America, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and saying that it should be legal to modify things you own to do things that are legal, and that it shouldn't be the purview of the manufacturer to stop you from doing it.
Another one would be to create a muscular federal privacy right with a private right of action so that impact litigators like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as aggrieved individuals, could bring cases when their privacy laws were violated.
And I guess the third would be an interoperability mandate specifically for social media.
So it would be a rule β and we've had versions of this.
The Access Act was introduced, I think, three times, various versions.
They're all pretty good.
Mark Warner, I think, was the main senator behind them.
But a thing that just says that β