Bad Takes!

[writerkit]

And the INEVITABLE bad follow-up take from the Baen Books thing: "There oughta be a law!"

Specifically, that maybe it's time to reconsider Safe Harbor laws and make companies legally liable for speech on their platforms.

This is what the DMCA does. I know of NO ONE who thinks that has worked out well, and malicious DMCA takedown notices are quite common. Do you really want to expand that to the entire internet?

Like, yes, Baen is absolutely being bad here. I am in favor of them losing customers and reputation over this, and for anyone making actionable speech to get gone after, particularly the death threats crowd.

But no, Baen should not be liable for the speech; there are way too many knock-on effects from that which we don't want. Ye Gods, people, think about all the ways a law can be weaponized against the most powerless groups you like and how you will build in systemic blocks that are not "But it's not meant to be applied that way!" before you start agitating for it.

(There's also the usual ranting about how we should expand hate speech laws, but I've been over why that's a bad idea here before; I don't need to do it again.)

Comments

[elf]

There are plenty of relevant laws already. Knowingly hosting content directly advocating violence is illegal. They've now been notified; there's no figleaf of "eh we just allow the forums to do what they want and look into things if someone complains."

It is possible, even likely, that the violence called for on the forums doesn't meet the legal criteria of "incitement" of any particular crime. The original post wasn't saying "Baen's Bar is breaking the law and should be shut down." It was saying, "BB is full of hate, and the rest of the SciFi community should be aware of that, and to the extent that they were, they should be aware that it's taken a sharp downturn recently."

I'm not surprised that some of the reactions are "isn't that illegal?" Er. No. "Well, it should be illegal; it's vile."

It is vile; it should not be illegal to create or host vile content. And most of the people discussing it, don't think it should be. "Hold Baen accountable" doesn't mean "arrest anyone"; it means "stop treating them like a neutral contributor to the community. They're not neutral. A number of Baen authors, fans, and possibly staff, are actively working to destroy other parts of the community."

Social problem, not legal problem.

(It IS time to look at safe harbor laws and how they work. Because there's "we just host a forum" and then there's Twitter & Facebook's & YouTube's "we host content, AND we promote it to create echo chambers where people only see content they love and content they hate so they'll post more in reaction to the stuff they hate, and also, we won't remove content unless a white guy gets offended by it..." But those aren't what's going on with Baen.) (Except maybe the "won't remove content unless..." part. So. Maybe we need a legal review of enforcement policies. But Baen is very, very low on the list of online places that need better accountability for that.)

[writerkit]

Hi, and welcome to the blog!

Usually if something has "Bad Takes" in the subject line I am vagueblogging about a conversation I was too infuriated to continue elsewhere on the internet; "This proves America needs European-style speech laws" was the root premise of this one. (If it's a very large site like Twitter or Tumblr I will often specify where I stumbled across it; with smaller sites I wish not to appear to be calling them out over things their commenters said.)

And yes, "the algorithms are destroying the culture" is absolutely a thing I would support someone looking into; I just want the end result to be nuanced enough that it can't be used as a club to hit smaller websites with while ignoring the malefactors it was intended to prevent... which European speech laws are really, really not. "Legal review of enforcement policies" is something the entire country needs, across many, many sectors.

[elf]

Yeah, it didn't sound like you were saying "it's totally okay to openly advocate for the destruction of marginalized communities." Just that "more laws about what you can't say online" is not the way to approach the problem, because, among other reasons, those laws are always aimed at marginalized communities first.