Entrusting our speech to multiple different corporate actors is always risky. Yet given how most of the internet is currently structured, our online expression largely depends on a set of private companies ranging from our direct Internet service providers and platforms, to upstream ISPs (sometimes...
It shouldn’t be on the ISPs, it should be on the SERVICES that USE the ISPs.
I’ll give you a perfect example, the Uvalde shooter.
He had been using a French social media platform called Yubo where he posted animal abuse videos and threatened to rape and murder other users.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/buffalo-uvalde-suspected-shooters-allegedly-abused-animals/story?id=84970582
He was reported to Yubo, REPEATEDLY, and Yubo did nothing.
Maybe we need to make social media companies mandatory reporters in cases like this? Rather than just ban a user wholesale, increase monitoring of them and report the account to local authorities?
I think the question then becomes “what happens when the services refuse”. Because the next step up is getting their ISP to kick them off.
The next step should be law enforcement: they can contact the service, and escalate to the judicial system if it refuses to act, which can decide whether to order the ISP to block the service, or close the company completely, or even jail the people behind it.
The ISP does never need to listen to, or even hear about, a problem with a service.
This feels like shutting down road access to the local stripmall just because the bar there doesn’t properly handle it’s drunks. Oh and leaving that decision up to a private, not elected and not accountable citizen
It seems more like revoking the licenses of the bar owners necessary to operate a bar.
The only thing Yubo could/should have done is forward it to the police though (which is what the users that initially reported this content should have done as well, independently). I’m not sure why that hasn’t happened. I hate to say it but this is still not the company’s responsibility, the most they can do directly is ban his account which wouldn’t accomplish anything in this case. I’d say go straight to local authorities rather than expecting services to handle it.