Nice to see a Mastodon shout-out on The Daily Show last night, thanks to @eff Executive Director Cindy Cohn!

It's a longer segment, with some interesting nuance around social media and censorship later in the conversation.

(disclosure: I am an EFF Member / sustaining donor)

YouTube link (I don't think there's a Peertube version) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkC1aK7jfLo

@andypiper @eff Great interview. I agree with Jon Stewart, there is no free speech on corporate social media platforms.

Using Facebook or X is like watching a film produced in North Korea. You just get whatever Zuckerberg or Musk wants you to see. They kick you out for any reason they choose, they throttle popular opinions and push extremist ones instead.

And for that reason, I don't buy the argument that regulating these businesses is censorship. Those platforms *are* censorship..

@andypiper @eff ..the EFF seems to have an American libertarian standpoint here, which seems kind of outdated. It doesn't work.

I can't sue an anonymous user in some random country because they posted something harmful on X. I can't sue Russian trolls. I can't realistically sue meta or x.

Moving to another platform like Mastodon is ok, but that's shifting the burden to users.

@andypiper @eff I'd like to see the EU ban foreign corporate social media platforms, period. We did it for television and print — there are laws against majority foreign ownership of media in some EU countries. We need to do the same to meta and x and TikTok.
@txtx @andypiper @eff I think you're wildly missing why the EFF has such a standpoint on these things, especially pertaining to speech.

First of all, lawsuits like that are extremely hard to enforce. They wouldn't do any good. We've already seen how that looks with the UK trying to put such fines on 4Chan and its owners. So unless you expect fucking extraditions for people posting bad words online, which is ridiculous, I don't know what your point in bringing up this inability is.

Secondly, regulating corporate social media almost always also means that the hobbyists and small site owners are hit in the crossfire as well. This would be incredibly difficult to navigate without censoring the internet as a whole even moreso than it is now, again demonstrated by the OSA alongside OS-level age verification laws. At least it shifts the burden away from the user though, right?

And lastly, as far as banning foreign ownership of social media companies, how would this be defined in your hypothetical here? Would my fediverse instance, being entirely U.S. based, get banned in the EU? If not, how are we defining "corporate" social media and what other types would be legally defined? How do we put things into this policy that prevent the misuse of it against small instance owners in the future? I don't see a realistic way to do this without making some serious compromises on the freedom to communicate with others on the internet. Also imagine if the US implemented a similar rule, or other countries for that matter. Everyone would be in their own walled-off silo, which is not what the internet was intended to be nor what it should become.

@thesofafox

Ummm...solving problems via lawsuits was the recommendation from the EFF. She's wearing an actual "sue the government" t-shirt in that interview.

I specifically said I *cannot* be expected to sue either these companies nor random internet people, so we need other solutions.

Redirect your rage please.

@andypiper @eff

@thesofafox On the topic of banning social media companies: are you a corporation with billions of dollars in revenue? If not, then your US-based Mastodon instance is fine.

That is the easiest part.