The problem with decentralized social networking is that there would also be no control; you NEED people with elevated access that can remove content, else it'll end up as a platform for hate speech and child pornography (I know, 'think of the children' is a tired argument, but if you cannot moderate, it will end up as a cesspool).
I'm not convinced we need a decentralized model. You provide very specific points as to why and I agree with each.
We need a provider that is willing to host content that abides by the laws of the host country. The provider needs to take a stance such that they are willing to host unsavory content assuming it is legal. The 1st Amendment IS important and we need businesses that are willing to say as such.
> We need a provider that is willing to host content that abides by the laws of the host country.
If the host country is China, and it blocks content critical of the government? What if the host country is Nigeria, and posting gay content gets you shipped to the gulag?
I suspect your opinion is going to change in these cases. And if it doesn't, sorry, but I trust myself to figure out what content I want to read more than any nanny state.
I always thought the 1st Amendment was about prohibiting "The Government" from curbing speech. I think a lot of us have gotten used to being able to say anything--things unbridled in scope and unlimited in quantity on (private company) Social Media, but such expectations are not guaranteed by Our Goverment's Constitution.
The 1st Amendment does not guarantee the right to say anything we want, anywhere we want. POTUS still has the absolute right to walk around the sidewalks of DC and spout whatever non-sense he so chooses.
If I go to Walmart and choose to shop in my underwear, they have the authority to make me leave and escalate to authorities if I deny their order. To me, our current laws put us in the same position with speech on Twitter. Our current laws allow private business to make up whatever rules, restrict whatever they want. It's their platform their rules.
I'm suggesting we need a company who makes it their business to allow content and protect their users using the actual law. US law shields content companies from liability because of what their users publish and upload. If someone uploads CP to Reddit then it's not Reddit that's punished (assuming they made good-faith attempts to remove the illegal material).
AFAIK, the users on Parler did not write anything illegal. Maybe they did - idk for sure. The messages on Parler were purely grotesquesand someone didn't like it.
Social media has given humans the once-unthinkable capacity to influence behavior and discourse across the world in real time. Our laws in the US have not yet caught up with this still relatively newfound tool.
You could argue e-mail is to some degree decentralized, anybody can run their own server and send and receive email. I'm sure people right now are using it for hate speech and illegal porn. If someone sends you via email dubious content, you are still allowed to block it and report it. If we follow your logic we would have 20 different companies with their email variations just like we have today with chat messages. In the case of social networks, a feature could be aggregation and sharing of ban lists (i.e. I have my ban list, other people that trust me can use mine and merge with theirs, servers can host 'centralized' ban lists that people are free to add or ignore, kinda like dns based ad-blocking).
> The problem with decentralized social networking is that there would also be no control
Decentralized social networking expects the user to control the user's own social input.
> else it'll end up as a platform for hate speech
A decentralized social networking user is not necessarily an anonymous social networking user. Such a user will still have contacts on computers and phones they own, still leave a connection trail on ISPs, and can still be held accountable. It's more difficult and less convenient for law enforcement--but privacy vs. law enforcement aceess and society's needs/interests thereof is a separate argument/topic.
I think these elevated users should be law enforcement in the respective jurisdictions.
In the US, hate speech is protected speech. In the UK, hate speech is defined differently than in China. Illegal pornography may include bestiality or drawings in some jurisdictions, not in others. Protection of copyright is enforced differently. There's also the distinction between reading, publishing and hosting potentially illegal material.
This is how the internet works already. It is federated. Established protocols exist for websites and email, but not for social media. Arguably, it's time to change that.
Is the intention to disallow certain content or to protect users from certain content? Because if it's the latter I think just having user friendly blocklists would be sufficient. If it's the former then obviously decentralization is totally antithetical to exercising control from a single point of control.
putting "think of the children" aside for a moment, I would be very concerned about the legal implications of participating in such a network. depending on the implementation, I would assume you could be exposed to similar risks as in hosting a tor exit node.
The internet itself is a decentralized network where anyone can just throw up their own server. How did we handle the policing of illegal content for the past 30 years? Simple, we just let the feds deal with it.
Email is a decentralized system with no moderation, and it isn't particularly a platform for child pornography or hate speech. (At least, my email box isn't.)
Imagine a social network where you have an identity based on a key pair. The key pair can rotate every month or so. When you meet someone, and you want to "friend" them on your social network, you scan a copy of their public key straight off their phone via a QR code. Now you can author encrypted and signed messages - you know they're only visible to the people you're interested in talking to, because you have their public keys, and they know the messages came from you, because they're signed with your public key.
If your friend Alice introduces you to their from Bob, they might forward you a copy of this Bob's public key, in classic web-of-trust fashion. Alice signs Bob's key, and sends it to you. So long as you trust Alice to not indiscriminately sign keys, you can be pretty sure you're really talking to Bob. You'd easily be able the check the provenance of a key - I have this key that was signed by Alice who claims she got it directly from Bob's phone, and it also signed by Sue, who claims she got it from an email.
When I post a message on my "wall", really I'm posting something encrypted with the public keys of everyone I want to share it with. My phone can reach out directly to those phones to pass on the message. If it can't reach all of them, that's ok, because Alice's phone can forward a copy to Bob's phone on my behalf, or we could have some kind of "dead drop" server online where my phone uploads stuff, and your phone checks for it.
How does this not devolve into your typical Internet cesspool? Precisely because it's not on Facebook.
First, if Bob starts posting crazy ideas about how women should never have gotten the right to vote, I can delete Bob's public key from my phone, and I'll never see anything he ever says, ever again.
Second, and maybe more importantly, this social network we've just imagined has no motivation to "drive engagement". It doesn't promote controversial stories to try to get people to click on more ads. In fact, it can't. There's no "service provider" here to profit from it in the first place, and even if there was, it couldn't read the contents of any of these encrypted communications so it wouldn't know which ones are the controversial ones it should try to drive. Twitter and Facebook need moderation mostly because they spend so much time promoting content from fringe crazy people in the first place.
Try to run a child pornography site on the internet and let us know how hard it was for you to be moderated out of existence (and into a small box with bars on the doors.)
That was my point, really. No one says there can’t be some level of moderation or hierarchy built in.
Decentralized != immutable != non-heirarchical.
And like sibling, it need not be entirely anonymous either.
The feds would allow it if they had some level of legal access to manipulate it, which would in turn be what most people who want decentralized social networking seem to want: to at least have a somewhat democratically elected body governing it, not an arbitrary private company.
That is also an issue. It probably can't be anonymous. If someone else hosts your content, they decide what you're allowed to post. If you host your own content, the authorities need to be able to find you.
Is it possible to achieve this level of control over the internet? Seems like hubris to me.
And if it were, is it even desirable?
It seems to me that we're headed for a land where data and ideas, once promulgated, become immutable, but that voluntary moderation regimes laid over those data can be utilized to keep the humans sane.
