My take on Musk's trajectory over the last four weeks. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/elon-musk-and-the-narcissism-radicalization-maelstrom/sharetoken/Zs4zc5BXA9Et

@joshtpm You know what matters much more than the psyche of Elon Musk is the fact that we allow one forum to be so large that it really matters than an Elon Musk can buy it. To my view, we have to downsize Twitter (my route is repealing Section 230 https://cepr.net/repealing-section-230-giving-mark-zuckerberg-what-he-wants/) but the fact a single platform can have such importance is the real problem.

@DeanBaker13 @joshtpm I do think that Musk's ability to buy Twitter in the first place demonstrates a huge problem with having centralized sites like Twitter being run by publicly traded companies, but repealing Section 230 is a terrible idea that would have serious knock-on effects and would probably lead to huge swathes of the modern Internet closing simply due to legal liability, including a huge number of Mastodon instances, blogs, comment sections...

@mmasnick has written extensively on techdirt.com on why Section 230 repeal would cause huge issues.

@mathlover @joshtpm @mmasnick FWIW, as I proposed it, only sites that sold advertising or personal information would lose Section 230 protection https://cepr.net/repealing-section-230-giving-mark-zuckerberg-what-he-wants/ I didn't realize Mastodon did either of these things.

@DeanBaker13 @joshtpm @mmasnick Reading your blog entry, you are correct in that Mastodon doesn't do those things and thus *might* not be as badly affected were your proposal to be implemented. You are not correct, however, in assuming that getting rid of Section 230 would bring larger social media to heel.

If anything, it would affect smaller commercial sites more than big ones, the latter of which have the money and the lawyers to defend against the (completely frivolous but harder to dismiss) lawsuits that would inevitably follow from such a repeal. Which reminds me: how is filling the courts with frivolous, but expensive-to-resolve lawsuits a good solution at all?

There's another issue I spotted in your entry:

> ... I proposed a notification and takedown rule similar to what now exists with material alleged to be infringing on copyrights. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a website ... can be subject to penalties for copyright infringement if they have been notified by the copyright holder and fail to take down the infringing material in a timely manner.

First, there are numerous problems with the DMCA takedown system as is that make it easy to abuse; I don't think you want to copy-paste that system for another thing. Second, how would such a takedown system even work for civil law issues? Would it be "if you don't take down this content according to this notice, I can sue you for what some other person posted, even if said content is 1A protected"?

@mathlover @joshtpm @mmasnick What sort of sites are you thinking of? I'm sure it would lead to a restructuring with many sites taking steps to protect themselves. For example, Airbnb would probably ask people to wave their right to sue as a condition of using it, but I gather you have other types of sites in mind.