I agree that the statutory solution is probably the better one; I'm hesitant to create fundamental rights (and all the inevitable, confusing legal development that follows), plus I have some doubts about the likelihood of convincing a panel of judges to create a general right to internet autonomy, especially where we still can't figure out whether the collection of 3rd party cell-site location data is a seizure...

Regarding the disclosure proposal we both spoke about re: censorship. I think something along those lines is the right move. But I wonder if it’s really a treatment at all…in a sense it might just be more ‘diagnosis’: ‘here’s the problem (in case you missed it somehow!), but now that we all definitely know, what are we really going to do about it?’ I wonder to how many people this censorship problem is news to anymore? I listed a bunch of examples of pretty high-profile censorship (with a lot of media coverage)–how many people haven’t seen one of those examples on their own time? We have data for how many people use social media as a news source, but we’re missing perhaps the more important data: how many people are aware that Facebook (and social media) censors the thoughts they display…and maybe more important than that, how many people are aware that Facebook (and social media) censors the thoughts they display without any real set of transparent regulations/conditions governing the censorship. To that extent, getting a set of 100 or so instances of censorship is helpful, but I don’t know if it really solves the problem–it might just make people more aware of it. But that’s the first half of the battle, at least…

But maybe it’s the only half? Proposing an actual set of fairness regulations/legislation seems like it would be a major political challenge for a gridlocked Congress and any agency-based approach would have, call me a critic, its own political agenda (subject to be switched the opposite way every 4 years). And so it looks like I end where I started…maybe the best treatment is actually a judicial approach, which I know you mentioned. The law can always be shaped as needed, if needed, and so it’s more malleable than the other approaches (but again, its got all the negative things I spoke about in the first paragraph). Ultimately, maybe the treatment is something outside legislation, regulation, or the law entirely. Maybe it’s people recognizing the problem and wanting to do something about it. Here, the government is on much more familiar ground (creating new competition via antitrust regulations, for example) and your proposal about citizen-activism, moderating, etc. fits in well to that scheme. And at least psychologically it makes it less a problem of ‘[insert censored group here] v. the machine’ and more of a ‘[insert censored group here] v. the human censor’ which puts a human face on the problem, to the extent Zuckerberg hasn’t already taken that place…

Regarding the ‘as a distributor problem’, I think the transparency based-solutions you outline above are really good/important. In contrast with the censorship problem, where I think there’s a lot of public awareness already, I think distributor problem is not yet so known. Before Cambridge Analytica this was, for the most part, a non-issue in the public eye. And unlike the censorship problem (where we at least had the Facebook Files leak + many high-profile instances), the criteria used by the distributors are even less transparent. Bringing those to light–in a way palatable to the average person–is an important first-step. And for the second-step, whatever that may be, I think you again run into the problems listed above.

-- ArgiriosNickas - 04 May 2018