Joey Barton found guilty of sending offensive posts

[domalino]

I think so, yes. Musk could be held responsible for wider matters, I guess, matters of corporate policy, or a failure to act after the event, but on a platform such as X individual posts have got to be down to the person who posted it, at least as the law stands as I understand it.

I think social media should be regulated far more stringently, but that is a separate point.

There's a pretty easy conclusion here. Twitter started as a "micro-blogging" site. Tweets were just short blog posts.

If Barton had posted these comments to his personal blog at www.joeybarton.com no one would question his own liability for his words.

 

[PinkFinal]

Barton and his ilk are like witch hunters riling up the mob. Mostly against people whose ability to fight back is limited.
They're actually becoming a serious menace. If he was clever he could have severely rubbished his victims and still got away with it, but he isn't. So effectively people have no real protection against this sinister conspiracy. Which is often very politically motivated. There is a general trend to intimidate and isolate certain communities and bodies of political belief the goal of which IMHO is serious physical violence.

There's gonna be suicides and mental breakdowns.
If there haven't been already.

 

[Dicko69]

So street justice rather than through the courts?

Probably a larger deterrent

 

[Alan Harper's Tash]

Probably a larger deterrent

One could describe the social media posts that lead to social justice as inciting a hatred of the person who originally posted.

 

[Alan Harper's Tash]

 

[Earlyriser]

When reading the replies to his post you really understand how thick his followers are.

 

[abu13]

Im guilty of watching all types if shit on Youtube, even i wouldnt go anywhere near his channel.

 

[I'm With Stupid]

There's a pretty easy conclusion here. Twitter started as a "micro-blogging" site. Tweets were just short blog posts.

If Barton had posted these comments to his personal blog at www.joeybarton.com no one would question his own liability for his words.

But equally, if it was published in a national newspaper, no-one would question the newspaper's liability. What we have with social media is a platform where anyone can post whatever they want, but also a platform that engages in editorial decisions about that content. It selects content to show you based on that it thinks you would like, so by definition, the social media company have curated Joey Barton's post and chosen to put it in front of certain people.

The fact that all of this happens automatically based on some algorithm is neither here nor there, in my opinion. If the Daily Mail had published something libellous, they would not be allowed to point out that everything was checked by some AI lawyer, and 'taken down as soon as we were notified,' as a defence. But somehow, these social media companies have successfully convinced everyone that it's somehow impractical to properly moderate their platforms. The biggest companies the world has ever seen, yet we're led to believe that they couldn't afford to employ more people than a single Volkswagen factory. They could moderate things properly, but it would eat into their shareholder profits. The stupidest thing every government did with social media is to allow them to this legal status of basically being the paper the newspaper is printed on, rather than the actual publisher. I get that you've got to have a certain amount of leeway and a slightly different legal structure when it's user-generated content, but that doesn't mean that we can't mandate things, for example, certain numbers of real human moderators, and timely takedowns of illegal/libellous content, with real penalties for failing to do so.