No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
Those 26 words enabled all the forums and social media we have today and ensured they’d all eventually end up full of garbage. At this point I’m not sure how we’d throw out the bath water and keep the baby.
When those words were written there was no concept of "algorithmic" feed.
Those words make sense and indeed worked well when "information content providers" remained more or less neutral with regards to what content they provided beyond some common-sense rules.
The problems really started when algorithmic feeds appeared, where the provider now assumes an editorial role and is able to tailor the content to each user individually, with no oversight nor accountability.
This is a very good point - if the content seen on a feed is curated and tailored to a specific user based on some unseen algorithm, that uses tons of opaque metrics about that person, it feels more and more like these companies take an editorial role.
A news outlet understands that there’s tons of stories daily they could report on, and they have to selectively choose those based on their target markets. I don’t see how social media sites are any different other than being able to be _more_ specific.
At this point, we've moved well past baby and bathwater metaphors. If we want to call socials something, let's at least admit it is the opiate for the masses. The people have become addicted to it. It is the number one way of keeping the masses cowed. The original opiate quote as used for religions, but it hasn't been that for quite some time even before socials came along. I know I'm channeling Neil Gaiman a bit.
It seems a bit weird, I can see how the platforms might not want to aggressively police bots as like a first-order thing (they are highly engaged “users”), but you’d think actual users would be annoyed enough with them, and advertisers would be aware enough of the fact that they are essentially a skew on the stats, that the market would align against them.
Why would we keep the baby? Is it just because the baby is providing employment, or is the baby providing an essential service that can't be provided by anyone else?
At the risk of stating the obvious: people actually like social media. Yes, it’s actively harmful for society but that doesn’t mean people aren’t addicted. If a politician proposed disabling FB, Instagram, Twitter and all the rest tomorrow they’d probably not get re-elected.
