Please help me understand: why shouldn't online sites be held accountable

[BarackTheVote]

62. Better options:

1) Civics classes to teach people how the government actually works and how to be responsible and discerning members of a democratic society; propaganda-awareness.
2) Poster anonymity should probably become a thing of the past; all accounts should be verified. Would combat bot farms, and create more transparency regarding who you’re talking to online, while also giving people an easier path to legal resource if they feel threatened by a poster. And for that matter—
3) Government agencies should be far more involved in monitoring social media, and they should take threats seriously. Maybe there should be a new agency that does nothing but coordinate with social media platforms. There should be rules for social media companies where they are required not just to delete flagged posts, but to report them to the relevant agencies—that said, such power should not be in the hands of automation; if a post is flagged with the right key words, it should be manually-reviewed by a human being.

Essentially, they need to start treating social media like... the real world... and take the threats that appear on these platforms seriously. The correct course, however, is not to overreact and destroy the internet as we know it.

Social media platforms are like big coffee shops. Different groups sit at different tables, talk among themselves, sometimes mingle, sometimes invite others to join them. And there’s a back room where shady people do shady shit; that back room is bugged, but for some reason, there’s rarely any pre-emptive action and authorities rely almost entirely on someone at the bar—a waitress, or another patron—reporting the shady shit to a manager, who usually just kicks out the person who was caught saying something offensive or violent. Essentially, we’re letting the free market police, basically all by its lonesome, the largest agora in human history.

Edit: One thing I will say is that the algorithms need to be re-tuned. Right now, they’re dumb bots that favor “engaging content”—which, more often than not, boils down to “controversial” content. Falling down a rabbit hold with conspiracy theories leads to a lot of viewer retention, which is all the algorithm wants. Algorithms should be required to function in a more responsible way, that much is 100% true.