A Conversation with I,Hypocrite about CDA Section 230 2020-10-12

0:00:01
Unknown_02: I'm going to start streaming in a couple seconds.

Unknown_02: Oh, it's auto starting. OK. Uh-oh.

Unknown_03: Alright, I'm live now on the channel. I am here with Josh aka Noel. We're going to talk about 230. We got into it a little bit on Twitter.

Unknown_03: What had happened was I retweeted a guy who was basically mad that he couldn't sue the Huffington Post because they hosted on their blog section like an article that he said was defaming him. But Section 230 protects Huffington Post from any liabilities from third-party content.

0:00:40
Unknown_03: So there's two points for the Section 230 convo. Maybe you disagree with this. Let me know. But there's the liabilities, like the slander aspect, which is what we were talking about on Twitter. And then there's the free speech public space sort of aspect of it with these big social media companies. I think those are the two main points. And personally, I care way more about the second part of it, the free speech part.

0:01:22
Unknown_03: than I do about the sort of slander part. But I do think when it comes to something like the HuffPost, I think there is an argument that can be made there that they should have some kind of accountability. Let me just correct that real quick.

Unknown_01: It is not the Huffington Post directly. that published an article. What happened is that the Huffington Post opened like a crowdsource news story alternative that would go parallel to their main editorialized articles. And what happened is that they very quickly had to shut that down because so much false information came in through that project they had set up that they just terminated it. And the article that accused that guy, I think his name was Jordan, of sex assault or something, That came from that side channel, which was not in any way editorialized by the Huffington Post, which is why that was protected by Section 230, as opposed to any other article on the Huffington Post or the Washington Post or whatever publication that's made by an agent of the company.

0:01:55
Unknown_01: Were they compensated for writing, the publication would have liability for that.

0:02:42
Unknown_03: Yeah, so let's get into this a little bit. Like, I get what you're saying. And it's like you said, parallel to the Huffington Post, which is kind of like, I think a part of my issue, like why I think there's an argument here is that a lot of people, if they were looking at that, they wouldn't know that they weren't reading just a Huffington Post article. You know what I mean? Like, there's a question of whether or not the average person looking at that knows even the difference between those two things.

Unknown_01: And I think that's a fair argument to be made in court even, that this is the Huffington Post taking their brand, their trusted name or whatever, and tacking it on to what is just random shit that they receive and don't vet at all and just publish if it conforms to what they want to be saying on their platform. I think that would actually be, I mean, I'm not a lawyer, but I think that that argument is actually pretty sound.

0:03:31
Unknown_03: Yeah, that's exactly where I was actually coming from on that. I don't want people to get sued for like something somebody wrote on their comment section of their blog or their forum or whatever necessarily. I think if somebody writes something really slanderous on a forum and you get sent a cease and desist, I know this is something you deal with a lot.

Unknown_03: There could be even there an argument, like if your site has a ton of reach,

Unknown_03: and it's hosting something like calling somebody a pedophile or something really defamatory, and there's no evidence that the claim is true, I do think that if you refuse to take that down, that maybe you should be liable for that as well. You probably disagree with that though, right?

0:04:21
Unknown_01: I do, because I believe that there's already a process to accomplish what you're saying without suing the Huffington Post.

Unknown_01: I think that you can sue a John Doe. You would have to try to service the person, but if you can't service them, if they choose to make themselves anonymous, you can go ahead and sue a John Doe, and then you'll get a default judgment against defamation. And you can use that to get an injunction against Huffington Post to take down that article for being unsubstantiated.

0:04:56
Unknown_03: Yeah, I see what you're saying. That could be like a costly process for people to deal with, though, right?

Unknown_01: Yeah, of course. When someone comes out and accuses you of sex offenses, it's never going to be a good day for you. Jordan's point was that he should be able to sue Huffington Post or Washington Post or whatever and receive...

Unknown_01: compensation from them for running the article and in that particular case maybe he should because again they put their brand on this project they had which I don't think was a smart idea because they do have an editorialized feature that goes along with it

0:05:35
Unknown_01: But I think it's a lot less costly than suing the Huffington Post themselves. It's just that it's a pure loss and it's not going to be very exciting. It's going to be eating shit the entire way.

Unknown_01: Maybe there is some argument to be made to having the Huffington Post receive direct liability in this case.

Unknown_01: But I wouldn't have a legislative answer to that. And I kind of just want to quickly clarify, whenever I talk about things like net neutrality and when I talk, and I tend to be very down on Trump when he talks about these things because it is so dangerous, I feel, towards the internet as it is. I tend to be very harsh when I talk about him and I want to make it clear that I don't, in most ways, I see eye to eye with Trump. and I would never want to say vote for Biden because of this issue because Biden also wants to repeal Section 230. So as a single-issue voter, I don't really have a choice. I would still vote for Trump even knowing this just because, I mean, there is no choice on this. They all want to repeal Section 230, and that's because I think it is in the interest of the big companies that you think it's going to hurt, and I disagree. I actually think it's going to help them secure monopoly on discussion online in the U.S.

0:07:05
Unknown_03: Yeah, okay. Well, let's talk about that. Because the hope from my perspective is that we're going to expand free speech, not restrict it. So let's see where we're not seeing the same thing on this. When it comes to what you said, though, about having to impose, I wanted to add that, and this relates to the free speech thing too, is that there's the argument about

Unknown_03: whether or not they're allowing everybody to publish there. Like if I went, I don't, I didn't know the project was actually shut down the whole blog thing, but if I had gone there and tried to write an article about why you should vote, you know, five reasons you should vote for Trump. And let's say it was really innocuous. Like you're going to have to pay less taxes and stuff like that. Not like he's going to keep the Brown people out or whatever, something that would actually give them like an excuse under their sort of like, like hate speech rules or whatever.

0:07:45
Unknown_03: Would they allow that? And if they don't allow it, then aren't they making a statement when they allow somebody else to go and slander you? You know what I'm saying? Well, as it stands right now, I'll give you... What doesn't get to stay, so they do have a sort of hand in...

0:08:21
Unknown_03: spreading that that's kind of the argument that a lot of people against section 230 have just to kind of eliminate between as it stands right now and what people want um editorialization comes from direct editing of content so and not supplementary information so when people try to um say that and i mean it's really it's really pushing it the shit that twitter is doing to like when trump tweets something they don't like they slap a bunch of stickers and warnings on it

Unknown_01: That's getting to the point where it almost feels like editorialization without actually touching it. But the case law right now is that it's only editorialization if they change the actual text or in one instance, or if what they're actually writing is itself defamatory. So for instance, there was a site I think called Home Wreckers or something where people could post stories, anecdotal stories about people, women who ruined their relationships and stuff. And what the site would do is editorialize that story down to a tagline and then publish the story on their site. And the issue is that that tagline is the original work of the site itself, and they were found liable even with Section 230 because they committed defamation in the tagline.

0:09:26
Unknown_01: What people want to change that to is if you change the context of a message, you're editorializing it even if you don't write anything original or if you don't change the text. And people like you want to go one step further and say,

Unknown_01: If you try and close off anything, any kind of post or any kind of idea, not allowing certain people to post, that is also editorialization. My counter to that is every website, no matter how pro-freedom of speech it is, has some sort of editorialization.

0:10:13
Unknown_01: My forum has content quality guidelines. 4chan boards have very different rules per board. In terms of not just who can post there, but what content you can post there. And I really can't think of any site that doesn't have any kind of moderation because even the most pro-free speech sites I can think of do remove commercial content like spam. So everyone under that definition could be considered editorialization by that logic. And I don't think most people want that. I don't think most people want a Twitter that is just inundated with spam. So you would have to go through and say, like, okay, you can...

0:10:46
Unknown_01: close this off to certain people if it's like commercial content or if your stated purpose is different from you know what if it makes it very clear who can post there or what sort of ideas are permitted you know maybe you could do carve outs like that but i i see the whole thing as um kind of needless Uh, my, what I would want people listening to take away from this is that the answer isn't really touching section two 30 and deciding what existing services can do on their service. It's more, why do we not have competition to these, uh, mega companies? And I think the, the greatest reason is the fact that are in the, in the U S especially, uh, The transfer of money from people to companies or people to people or companies to people is controlled entirely by a handful of companies, which are MasterCard, VisaCard, and Discover. I would much rather see regulations on the payment networks so that they cannot decide who is allowed to do business in the United States on the internet, rather than have them dictate how certain businesses have to operate, if that makes sense.

0:12:14
Unknown_03: Well, so I agree with what you're saying, that that's a more serious issue if the banks are cutting you off for ideological reasons. But I disagree that fixing that is going to let us build our own Twitter or whatever. Like we already have all that shit. You know what I mean? And to go back to the editorializing thing, because you said a lot there, the counter argument to this idea of like, well, everybody editorializes. is are they those rules that any website have are they applying them evenly are they enforcing them evenly or are they picking and choosing the targets and that's the issue that people have a problem with right i've experienced this on basically all the sites but like i'll use facebook for example because i used to have a really big facebook page i still have like 125 000 followers there on my but on

0:13:06
Unknown_03: I like to use Facebook because on my first page I had invested money. I had like a hundred dollars or something, not a crazy amount, but I had actually bought ads just to like experiment with it. And I think I spent like a hundred bucks. My actually, my reasoning was also like, if I buy ads, they're going to be less likely to ban me.

Unknown_03: But they do the same like fact-checking thing that Twitter is doing, but not only do they add the fact-checking onto your post if they find that it's disagreed, and they outsource this to third parties, by the way, basically a bunch of like activist orgs, they've given this like fact-checking power to. So not only do they like slap the like fake news label on you, but they throttle your reach, right? So it's really serious. And then this is getting applied just on like the, you know who it's getting hit on, the politically incorrect, the dissident, whoever. It's not getting put on people like Sean King and Occupy Democrats and shit like that. So if you're going to have these rules and then you're going to apply them in a one-sided way, and I think this is what Trump is trying to get at, whether he's doing it right or not, then you have a problem that needs to be fixed.

0:14:28
Unknown_02: There?

Unknown_02: What happened?

Unknown_02: Did I lose you, Josh?

Unknown_01: Sorry, no, I muted my mic. Just real quick, what I wanted to say was that the Discover card, which is one of the big ones that interjects and blocks people from banking. For some reason, Discover has like 5% of all payment network transactions, but at the same time, they're responsible for a ton of the platformings in terms of transactions.

0:15:00
Unknown_01: payment network dropping gateways and merchants and payments and stuff. They have a special relationship. Facebook has a special relationship. Twitter, they all have special relationships with the ADL.

Unknown_01: For some reason, the second the ADL gets into an organization, they start taking tips from them. That's when things go really terribly.

Unknown_01: But... Yeah, I mean, I know what you're... I know...

Unknown_01: that argument i'm sorry are you still there yeah i'm here yeah go ahead yeah just to make sure um is he he doesn't i mean i know that there is supposedly like an attack to this where he's like let's he's not going to come out and say let's edit section 230 in this way he's going to say revoke section 230 and then hopefully that brings people to a halfway point right

0:15:49
Unknown_03: Yeah. Yeah. I think like the repeal language is sort of not helpful. And that's just Trump being himself, like his kind of like provocative, like, you know, ham fisted self. But I think there's a really strong argument for reform here. I mean, you look at like the fair use laws. And they're very nuanced and they work as good as you can, I think, with something that says complicated as fair use. But it's like you have all these factors and then in any case, the judge would have to weigh all the factors and then just kind of make a judgment call based on all these things. I think there's a strong case that... internet censorship whatever you want to call it should be addressed in the same way where there's different factors that you can look at like how much market share like how much of a monopoly and traffic is your site getting in terms of like whether or not you're restricting somebody's First Amendment rights, if you're gonna kick them off that site, as well as, like I said, are they applying their rules the same across the board? Or if you look at the enforcement, can you see a pattern? Can you see an ideological pattern?

0:17:04
Unknown_01: Yeah, in general, just to get this out, it is very hard for a private company to restrict your freedom of speech. The First Amendment does not apply to private entities. The only instance of that being contradicted that I can think of is mining towns and situations where a private corporation owns a sidewalk or a street. They can't stop you from protesting there and that was important with the Church of Latter-day Saints because the gays were protesting the Mormons in Utah and Salt Lake City and they were doing it on sidewalks that the church owned because the church just literally owns the streets of Salt Lake City. and they tried to remove the protesters, but that was found to be a violation of the First Amendment rights. I've heard people try to compare this to that, and I kind of see that as well.

0:17:50
Unknown_01: You mentioned really early on that there are two parts to Section 230, and that is true. The first one is that a service provider is not the speaker of content posted to it by a third party. So if someone makes a post on Twitter saying, Um, Twitter is not considered the speaker or publisher of that. And the second part is, and this is the one that I can find fault with more easily is that, um,

0:18:33
Unknown_01: A service provider, specifically on the internet, is totally immune from any civil liability that arises from removing them from the service. And the way that it's written is it means basically for any reason or no reason at all, someone can kick you off their service and they're just completely immunized from it. any civil liability arising from that. And the problems come from how much of a monopoly certain companies have over them.

Unknown_01: Google and Facebook are the obvious ones. Google can right now de-index your company. Like for instance, if you run an online store, your business is mostly online. If Google decides they don't want to index you on Google, and I mean, that's going to be like almost all of your business overnight gone. If you do advertising on Facebook and 80% of your business comes from advertisements leading to your site and Facebook says, oh, well, you sell guns or hunting equipment. We don't want to do business with you. And they ban you from running ads on Facebook. That could be all of your business overnight in the way that the second part of Section 230 is written. It is an absolute defense. You cannot raise any kind of tort against them in civil law because Section 230 immunizes them from damages that arise from terminating their contract with you.

0:19:21
Unknown_01: That could be changed and not seriously damage...

Unknown_01: the internet it is specifically the first part regarding who is the speaker that i i don't think should be tampered with because i don't trust the legislative to write it in such a way to not do more harm than good and you mentioned uh copyright i don't know if you if you want to say anything i i want to touch on the copyright kind of illusion as well

0:20:24
Unknown_03: Okay, yeah. It seems like we have a fair bit of common ground here, but...

Unknown_03: I guess I'd like to hear you say that there is a problem with censorship on. So like you're aware of that. The reason I'm saying this is because in our Twitter exchange there towards the end, you kind of said that like what I'm advocating for will lead to the big guys having all the control as opposed to most of the control or something to that effect. But yeah, I think for people like me, I feel like we're already there. You know what I mean? I don't care if I can go and, say, scream into the void on Gab or whatever.

0:20:56
Unknown_03: Then this is like that idea of the public space, right? If all the relatively normal people are on Twitter, by contrast, and I'm not allowed to go on Twitter, then it's like I don't have the right to express myself.

0:21:28
Unknown_01: There is a massive problem with censorship, specifically between all the big companies, and it's gotten worse over time. You mentioned Gab. One of the major reasons why Gab is not a good alternative is that, number one, Andrew Torba is a fucking insane man-child. But number two, he's actually banned from all the payment processors. So I think if he was able to monetize his site more appropriately into an actual business model, he might have more opportunity to succeed. If other people could monetize attempts to make a social media network, that would also have a greater chance of creating real competition. I understand that most people are already on these services, but that's sort of why net neutrality was also important, was that as long as a computer can connect to another computer, it is possible to make alternatives to these services.

0:22:22
Unknown_01: The regulations that we needed were to keep the ISPs from interfering. Because without net neutrality, for instance, it is possible for ISPs to prohibit you from accessing certain alternatives. In a world where Gab was a real threat to Twitter, it is now possible for your home ISP, if you were in the US, from literally prohibiting you from connecting to Gab and destroying that company.

Unknown_01: And I guess the counterpart there would be that Section 230 would immunize them from any liability arising from that because they are allowed to terminate access to a computer service.

0:23:02
Unknown_01: But no, I do agree that there is a serious problem with censorship. But my point was is that in the same way that removing net neutrality hurts the Internet... Without Section 230, there is no chance for competition. You either have the money to have a legal staff that can handle all the civil liability arising from the content, or you just don't. People seem to think that there would be so many lawsuits so quickly that it would just completely crush Facebook overnight.

Unknown_01: And that's not how it would work. I hear people greatly underestimate or overestimate how many people are willing to sue Facebook overnight.

0:23:39
Unknown_01: It's like with Walmart. Walmart's really big. A lot of people could try and sue Walmart, but they don't because it's a very big, evil, scary company that can defend itself. What really hurts a company like a fake slip and fall claim is the mom and pop shop that can't defend itself because they don't have the financial resources and a dedicated legal team. You know what I mean?

0:24:17
Unknown_03: Yeah, like I agree with you that I don't think it would necessarily change things overnight, but at least people would have the recourse. And there are people, you know, people like Milo and Alex Jones and stuff like that who, you know, PragerU. Like there's people who would launch lawsuits. There might even be like a class action possibility. I don't know. But there could be things that would come from it. I wanted to ask you about the net neutrality thing because I'm not like a super – well-versed on that, but correct me if I'm wrong, but it did get repealed, right? And the sky didn't fall or anything like it. What's really changed?

0:24:54
Unknown_01: The issue was... Net neutrality is a concept that's been around since the telephone. It's basically a regulation. It's not an actual law. It's a FCC thing where they say that the operators of a telephone cannot...

Unknown_01: misdirect or prevent you from completing your call, if possible, even if it would go across a competitor's line. So it's an anti-monopoly regulation. And it passed into the modern era when we decided that a ISP, the people you pay to let you onto the internet, not prohibit you from connecting to a certain service unless it's damaging to their network somehow, like if you're using your connections. This is what you're saying, that now that net neutrality is gone, the ISP can block Gab if they want and not face repercussions?

0:25:35
Unknown_03: Yes.

Unknown_01: I'll give you a real world example of this. If anyone says that net neutrality is Obama era, it went through several forms because Verizon has been suing the government over net neutrality for literally decades now. And after Verizon lawyer Ajit Pai was put into the FCC's chairman position, he immediately removed it. So that's why we don't have net neutrality anymore. The sky did not fall, but that's because it's consumer protection. It'll take a couple years to get as bad as it's going to get. It will get bad, just not overnight, because people are still sore about it. In the real world, I've lived in the Philippines in the past, and I lived there for about seven months. And what I learned there was that there is a special pricing plan for mobile data.

0:26:13
Unknown_01: Most people in the Philippines are very poor. They don't have like a gaming rig, but they do have a telephone and they have the cheapest phone plan possible. There's a telecom monopoly there and they have a tiered package plan for their internet for five Filipino pesos a month. You can get the cheapest plan, which gives you access to nothing but Facebook.

0:26:49
Unknown_01: Which is why the Philippines is the number one consumer of social media in the world. It's just that they, per capita, can only afford that basic package that gives them a handful of sites. If you want to order food or anything in the Philippines, you have to go to Facebook and you have to find their Facebook page and send them a message on Facebook Messenger. And that's what is, it probably won't get that bad in the U S just because people wouldn't tolerate that. But, uh, and they have a choice not to tolerate that, but it will get sketchy as ISPs start strong arming certain competitors into giving them kickbacks for their, their networks and, and things like that. And it might result in, I mean, they theoretically could right now block access to gab, uh,

0:27:34
Unknown_01: So it's not really something I wanted to give Verizon and AT&T and Time Warner and the worst fucking companies in the entire world. I didn't want them to have those cards on their table. And now, without Section 230, not now, but in the future, possibly, if it were just to get repealed, like overnight, I would close up everything that I have because I just can't. accept the liability for all the terrible awful things posted on the shit that I run and a lot of people when I say that say well if we have to sacrifice the forum to get free speech back it's worth it and I would agree with them but that's not really the dichotomy it's I think it's everything would be like 4chan and 8chan all these sites that we think of as you know the wretched places of the internet they all host in the US specifically because Section 230 is not only so strong, but it's unique. There's not really any other country out there that has the safe harbor provisions that we have.

0:28:35
Unknown_03: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense what you're saying. I'm not convinced that the Section 230 can't be reformed still, but I do agree with what you're saying that a repeal probably sounds like it'd be a terrible idea.

Unknown_01: Yeah, I mean, it would be awful. I wouldn't fuck around with that. Have you read the executive document that Trump put out? I have read his document. I've read the FBI proposal, and I've read all five extant congressional proposals, which have all spawned as a result of this posturing towards repealing Section 230. There is a lot of cards on the table from a lot of special interests to amend this.

0:29:12
Unknown_03: And are you just against any attempt at reform, full stop?

Unknown_01: Not entirely.

0:29:48
Unknown_01: Very specifically, the thing about... The one that I would like to see change now that I've thought about it... I was against it entirely a couple months ago, but I've talked to people and I've looked through it.

Unknown_01: The thing about...

Unknown_01: um liability from arising from terminating service that has to be changed i think just because um that does disadvantage smaller companies i mean it disadvantages everyone and it really gives power to extant monopolies to retain their monopoly when uh they don't have to do business with with anybody else

Unknown_01: Okay.

Unknown_01: In terms of the speaker liability, and this is, I mean, that'll, reforming the other thing will maybe help businesses trying to get a leg up, but it doesn't impact the payment processor. So it's not like you would be able to make your own, you know, just to do your videos and your content and then accept donations, have like a Patreon style thing onto your website, right? I'm sure you'd get kicked off by Discover or whatever. So that doesn't really fix that.

0:30:41
Unknown_01: But it would help with certain political issues, like I mentioned, the gun stuff. I'm sure Facebook's going to start banning people from advertising who sell guns and other shit like that. That hurts real people who have real businesses, not just people trying to talk politics. The other part about the editorialization, that does have to be treated carefully because you mentioned...

0:31:21
Unknown_01: fair use and how nuanced copyright law is, and it is very complicated, copyright law is, but when Section 230 was created, which I think was 1996, there was an issue where, because of how strong the protections are, it basically legalized

Unknown_01: It legalized copyright infringement because service providers were not responsible for sharing of copyrighted content on their networks. And that led to the Copyright Act. And then that fucked everything up in the opposite direction. Suddenly, service providers were immediately liable for everything posted on their sites. And that...

Unknown_01: almost crashed the dot com bubble that was coming up at the time. So they amended the Copyright Act with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and that created the DMCA that we all know and love today. And you've seen how much that has impacted the Internet and in the last couple of years.

0:32:18
Unknown_03: Sure. But like I will say, I don't hate the DMCA or like YouTube's content ID system as much as other people. I think that

Unknown_03: There's gotta be some level of compromise when it comes to that kind of thing. And we have a more or less decent, I understand that there's loopholes where it can be abused and shit like that, but at least on YouTube, where it's mainly complained about, you can.

Unknown_03: usually just counter file and get your shit back in a couple of weeks or whatever. Like that's not perfect, but I feel like it's a, like a, I don't know what would be a better system basically. So.

0:32:54
Unknown_01: Well, the main issue with the DMCA is that it doesn't, um, It doesn't give explicit timelines of when stuff has to be done. It very generalizes. So it's better for platforms like YouTube to err on the side of caution and yank things as soon as the DMCA is received. And there really is no onus on the copyright provider to prove that they have that copyright. In order to file a copyright lawsuit, you have to register the content with the copyright office.

0:33:32
Unknown_01: To file a DMCA, you don't have to have a copyright ID. So just being able to prove who you are and a copyright ID would help with that. But what are the allegories for that and defamation and such? Because if the editorialization thing is edited in 230, then suddenly everything that's a civil tort becomes a DMCA. You know what I mean?

Unknown_02: No, I don't.

Unknown_01: So if platforms are suddenly liable for the damages of articles and things contributed by service users, it wouldn't immediately mean that

0:34:18
Unknown_01: Anyone could sue the Huffington Post for something that was posted on their service. It would be a process. You'd have to notify them. You'd have to allege infringement. It would go to their legal team. You'd have to have your lawyer contact them. And the issue is that that would all be left up in the air, and it would really chill freedom of speech. If anyone could email YouTube and say, you're infringing on my rights, you're defaming me with these videos, and I want them taken down. So suddenly, any sort of video becomes susceptible to a complaint like that. And what the DMCA did after the Copyright Act came in and made the liability factor of copyrighted content too strong on the service provider is provide a path for having copyrighted content removed. So every kind or a general DMCA style process would have to exist for basically everything, everything that you could claim to be damaging you civilly.

0:35:08
Unknown_03: Soraz, you lost me right at the end where you just made this leap to like everything would have to be DMCA. What do you mean everything would have to be DMCA-able?

Unknown_01: There would need to be a process by which anyone could have anything on any service taken down by alleging civil damages.

Unknown_03: Oh, so you mean if the Section 230 was repealed? Like, is that what you're saying? I'm trying to...

0:35:54
Unknown_01: If Section 230 was repealed or if there were certain changes to the speaker provision that would make Twitter more liable for what was posted to it.

Unknown_03: You're saying, so there would have to be this, and I didn't really understand in order for what, but yeah, it makes sense now. You're saying if those changes went through to Section 230, then providers would have to have a way for you to go and submit a form that says, this guy's defaming me or whatever and have a whole problem. Yeah, yeah.

0:36:26
Unknown_01: Before the DMCA, when the Copyright Act just passed, it shifted the liability for – and I'm trying to draw a parallel here to show you that this is kind of not the direction to go. When that was just done and services were suddenly just liable for copyrighted content without a really well-defined process, as would be the case if suddenly Twitter was treated as the publisher of everything posted onto Twitter –

Unknown_01: There was a big panic in the internet, just then budding internet, about what should be allowed to be posted on their networks. And it created a bunch of cases where big copyright holders were suing random service providers for infringing on their copyrighted content. So two years later, they passed the DMCA, which standardized this process for removing content without having undue liability on the service provider. immediately after this gets changed and service providers are suddenly more liable for things that are posted on their platforms, there will be a panic and there would have to be amended legislation for a DMCA-style takedown of anything that causes civil damages.

0:37:12
Unknown_03: Yeah, I hear what you're saying.

Unknown_03: Well, look, I think we've actually more or less covered...

Unknown_03: everything. I don't really have any strong disagreements with you because it does sound like you're open to

0:37:54
Unknown_03: That there could be some tweaking, which is essentially what I feel like. I don't pretend like I have all the answers. It's more that there's a problem and we have to find some way to fix it.

Unknown_03: I guess the main difference is you. Well, it's not even that big of a difference. You think that the banks are a bigger problem, which I actually agree with. That should be fixed sooner. then later.

Unknown_03: But I guess I'm not that confident that fixing the banking solution, although I do agree, it's a huge problem. I don't think that that's going to really fix the free speech issue or the censorship issue that we're talking about.

0:38:33
Unknown_03: But other than that, I think that more or less are in agreement on things.

Unknown_01: Well, I think that given time, they probably would in the same way that MySpace and Facebook duked it out and Facebook won. I think that we've seen like demographic shifts where people move from Facebook to Instagram, then Facebook bought up Instagram. I think that people would be willing to move to different platforms if they were more open.

Unknown_01: But those platforms have to be able to make money because right now you can make your own little corner of the Internet and nobody can say you can't go to that website.

0:39:11
Unknown_01: But without being able to make money by running that website or by making content for that site, a lot of people would not be incentivized to do it. And even people who just do things that are, you know, they put out things just because they enjoy making it, they would not be able to dedicate as much time to it if they couldn't recoup any of the time spent as income.

Unknown_01: So the banks and the payment networks especially are the biggest problem I think that the country faces. The fact that you and I as people cannot exchange goods and services online just because it happens to be online and we happen to have to use a credit card to do so. That is a fundamental flaw in our entire country, in our entire society, much more than the fact that Twitter can ban people. You know what I mean?

0:39:54
Unknown_03: Well, but isn't that flaw already addressed by crypto, essentially? No, it's going to be another like 10 to 15 years before people can like, like I use crypto aggressively.

Unknown_01: I show crypto aggressively.

Unknown_01: I make many, many times more by selling T-shirts and having a payment processor for two weeks before it gets banned. uh in in those two weeks i make more money doing that than i do for the rest of the year by accepting crypto donations you know what i mean crypto is great i love crypto i i i you know i buy groceries with crypto but it's not it's just not there yet and i think that it would be much better to address the payment network situation that and what's sad what's frustrating is I don't see anyone really pushing for it in government. Like, my congressman is Matt Gaetz. I'm very, very fortunate to have Matt Gaetz as my representative.

0:40:48
Unknown_01: But even him, he's very focused on repealing Section 230, and I've never seen him challenge the payment networks.

Unknown_03: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense what you're saying. It's also, if you can't make money off your site, then it's going to be harder to improve the features, which makes it harder to compete too, right? So I do get what you're saying. I don't know. Yeah, I think it makes sense as like a long-term solution.

0:41:21
Unknown_03: and uh maybe that i don't think that the 230 thing is necessarily faster i don't know i yeah i i find myself agreeing with what you're saying actually yeah well i'm glad because i didn't want to like get on and yell at you because i i felt like i was a little bit too yelly on twitter but which is uh doesn't make sense because it's typing but

Unknown_01: The whole reason why I wanted to talk to you is because I know you have a lot of people who follow you on social media and stuff. And I do want people to be more actively aware. I think people are passively aware that bangs are evil, which is true.

0:41:57
Unknown_01: But actively, there are so many people who, if you just ask around, have horror stories about how... Especially during COVID, their business was just sank because a bank decided for completely opaque reasons that they could not process credit cards anymore. And the really horrific thing about the banks is that they don't even have to tell you why. They don't have to give you any reason. They owe you nothing. You can't sue them. You can't sue them to find out why. Yeah, I saw Mark Colette post a letter he got that's just like...

0:42:30
Unknown_03: Yeah, it just doesn't say anything at all. I mean, it's not that much different when you get kicked off of social media, right? Like, I don't think somebody like Molly Meme knows why he got kicked off YouTube and Twitter any more than why some of these people got kicked off of their banks. But yeah, they don't tell you anything, which is... It's very sort of, uh, right.

Unknown_01: And what's worse is not only can they kick you off, but there's like three different parts to how a credit card transaction is done. There's the issuing bank, the receiving bank, then there's the payment network, the payment gateway and the payment processor. And if any of these functional parts decide that they don't like the sender, the receiver or the amount or anything else that's happening with that transaction, they kill it. They don't give you a notification. They don't tell you why they may suspend your, any of those parts may suspend you. And they then put you on secret blacklists that are not public, that you can't check to see if you're on, and which will prevent you from renewing any of those parts with a different provider. It's totally black. Everything on it is submerged, hidden secret. You can't figure out what it is. Again, you can't sue to figure out what it is. They owe you nothing. And it's many times worse and many times more affecting the average person than it is like Twitter. Like, you know, I'm super mega banned from everything and I still find a way by keeping a low profile and throwing up the good flag of Israel wherever I can to let people know that I'm kosher. So that works. That's sufficient for the purposes of me talking to the weirdos who like what I do.

0:43:49
Unknown_01: The banking issue does not have a workaround. Your channel has to be monetized though, right?

Unknown_03: Because I noticed you don't have the super chat thing on there anymore. That happened to me too.

Unknown_01: All my shit is original content that I've made myself, and when I try to renew it, try to get my delicious Super Chats back, they tell me that my content is unoriginal, and I therefore cannot monetize it. I don't know what that means.

0:44:31
Unknown_03: They told me I did hate speech. Oh, okay.

Unknown_03: I should have had an Israeli flag for Nikon, maybe. You should have.

Unknown_01: Behind the statue of David. I just wanted to really quickly say...

Unknown_03: The reason I wanted to talk to you is because I know you're really knowledgeable about this stuff. I've listened to a bunch of your streams. Well, there's one guy particularly in the chat who's just like, wow, this hypocrite guy's a retard. He doesn't know anything. He's getting crushed in the debate and this and that. This is why I want to talk to you because I know that you have thought about this more than the average person. If I wanted to talk to some retards so I could own them, I could do that too, and I do that on my other channel, but it's less interesting to me. So thanks for taking the time. I did want to say too, while I had you here, you made a video. I don't know if it's still even on YouTube, but I consider it to be like one of the greatest streams I've ever watched, which is...

0:45:06
Unknown_03: It was called like talking to Margaret stalker or something like that.

Unknown_01: The Kenny recorded a call with Kenny Jones about Margaret.

0:45:44
Unknown_03: That stream was amazing. It's like three hours long and it's, you just like peel this onion slowly over the hours. And if anybody wants to like, get insight into like somebody who is mentally ill. They need to watch that stream because the guy does such a good job of acting normal for the first hour or so. And it just keeps going and going. And it's like, whoa, this is getting dark.

Unknown_01: I love that stream.

Unknown_01: He still sends me messages every so often. I can't remember what he tries to say, but he's like a longtime viewer of Ethan Ralph, and he watches the Killstream. That's where people found him because he's one of Ralph's fans, and he's still around. He's still in these spheres, and he listens. Is your stream still on YouTube, or is there somewhere people can find it?

0:46:18
Unknown_01: Oh, God, it may be lost.

Unknown_03: Yeah, because I think I found it on your original, it was like the Kiwi Farms YouTube channel, which they took down, right?

Unknown_01: so I don't know if you'll find it it's just google Kenny Jones man at the internet and you'll find it it's the one with the black guy he's weird because he's like half black half Native American and he's like a professional snake enthusiast and he really wants to get up inside Margaret to the point where I think she specifically told him to stop contacting her I don't know it's a long time ago

0:47:18
Unknown_03: yeah the guy's a stalker if you want to understand like the mindset of like the sort of delusional like stalkers are really interesting because they they don't understand what they're doing kind of you know what i mean so it's it makes for pretty interesting watching to get inside the mind of that guy so if you google kenny jones mad at the internet you guys can find that uh was it was there anything else you wanted to touch on or go over

Unknown_01: No, and again, I wasn't trying to have some kind of really serious debate. I really thought I could convince you that repealing is probably not the way to go, and I do take every opportunity I can to get back at the banks.

Unknown_01: I can't really express my frustration at the fact that I can't, as an American citizen who has never broken any law, I've never been arrested, I can't have people send me fucking money because they want to. You know what I mean? It's like that picture, the meme, where it's like, isn't there someone you forgot to ask? I consent. I consent. And then you have JPMorgan Chase in the background saying, I don't.

0:48:16
Unknown_01: Who the fuck asked you?

Unknown_03: You know what's fucked up too? When YouTube takes your super chats away, any of the money that was sent to you just sits there in limbo. It's not even that they're stopping people from being able to send you money. It's like they're stealing the money literally that was sent to you.

Unknown_01: They don't refund it. They hold it in an escrow account so that if you do get remonetized, you'll get it the next month. I can only assume that there are...

0:48:48
Unknown_03: Do you know if you end up getting banned from YouTube, do they refund it at that point? I don't think anybody really knows the answer to this.

Unknown_01: Probably not. I'm sure there is a bean counter who knows exactly how much money is debted to certain accounts that's just in limbo forever. It's probably six or seven figures at this point.

Unknown_01: Someone in the chat said when Benjamin got his $30K back.

0:49:24
Unknown_03: I don't know about that.

Unknown_03: Yeah, you definitely make good points about the payment processing. I'm glad that I haven't had that happen to me. I haven't got kicked off PayPal yet or anything like that, but that's definitely a scary trend that needs to be curbed.

Unknown_01: Yeah, and really my thoughts on trying to make Twitter and Facebook more liable is just that Section 230 is such the wrong tool for that job. Because the question is, how do you regulate these platforms to an open discussion of people of different viewpoints and stuff? How do you get that platform to be that way? And then the, what Trump says, it almost feels like, you know, a threat, just like a way of hurting them for the sake of hurting them. Um, which would be fine. I have nothing, you know, I have no reason to stand up and say, no, don't hurt Facebook, the poor multi-billion dollar a year corporation, anything but that. It's just that it hurts everyone else too, which is why I totally don't get it. And that's where me and Trump part ways the most. It's just that, I really don't think he understands the internet too well. I think he understands social media really well and how to use that to his advantage. But how the underlying mechanics work, how the businesses work, how they all piece together and stuff, I don't think he has a very good understanding of that.

0:50:44
Unknown_03: yeah well hopefully he can figure it out and and actually do some some good work um but look i know it's late where you are and you didn't want to go too long so i i have uh some some uh stream labs to pound through and like that but i'm not gonna uh hold you hostage for that i will i'll let you go and thanks for your time and uh yeah man

0:51:22
Unknown_01: Is there like anything that was like a... Sorry, I was just going to say, if people want to follow Josh, his YouTube channel is called Mad at the Internet.

Unknown_03: He does funny lol cow streams that I highly recommend. And of course, Kiwi Farms is the website. Is there anything else you wanted to say?

Unknown_00: No, I was just going to ask if there was like a question, just email me at kiwifarms.net.

Unknown_01: I usually get back to most people who email me.

Unknown_03: All right, man.

Unknown_02: Thanks for coming on. Take it easy. Have a good night. Take it easy. Peace.

Unknown_02: Let's see. Is there like a funny video I can play to like end this out?

0:52:02
Unknown_02: Oh no.

Unknown_00: Um, I'm scanning. I'm scanning. Surely, surely there's a video. No, that's racist. I can't play that here.

Unknown_02: I might just do this.

Unknown_02: Oh, wait.

Unknown_00: Okay, fine. I'll trust you. This better be good. This better be excellent. All I gotta say.

0:52:33
Unknown_00: This is fucking... I should probably open... You know what?

Unknown_01: I'm not gonna open it.

Unknown_00: Hello, Germany and Europe. Uh-oh. My name is Mr. Panos. And this is a message from the Hellenic people around the world.

Unknown_02: It disappeared.

Unknown_02: Whatever. I didn't get to hear it. Hopefully it was excellent. I'll see you guys on Friday.