Parler confirmed Saturday that it had referred dozens of violent posts to America's Federal Bureau of Investigation, reports Newsweek. But even after a blog post explaining its reasons, "some of the platform's users were less than impressed." Parler, which faced significant backlash in the wake of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by former President Donald Trump's supporters, referred violent content to the FBI at least 50 times prior to the pro-Trump riot, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. The social media site shared a link to the article, drawing backlash from some members of the online platform. Parler has built its platform by positioning itself as being opposed to censorship and staunchly in favor of free speech.

"In reaction to yesterday's news stories, some users have raised questions about the practice of referring violent or inciting content to law enforcement. The First Amendment does not protect violence inciting speech, nor the planning of violent acts. Such content violates Parler's TOS. Any violent content shared with law enforcement was posted publicly and brought to our attention primarily via user reporting. And, as it is posted publicly, it can properly be referred to law enforcement by anyone. Parler remains steadfast in protecting your right to free speech," Parler posted on Saturday in response to criticism.

But some users of the site were still unhappy with Parler's decision.

"I don't like snitches," user MelodySuarez wrote in response to the explanation.
Users "vented their fury at the site's apparent willingness to report its users despite its pitch of protecting free speech," Newsweek reported in an earlier article.

"Parler is a fraud," one user had complained.

Two software engineers with injuries or chronic pain conditions have both started voice-coding platforms, reports IEEE Spectrum. "Programmers utter commands to manipulate code and create custom commands that cater to and automate their workflows." The voice-coding app Serenade, for instance, has a speech-to-text engine developed specifically for code, unlike Google's speech-to-text API, which is designed for conversational speech. Once a software engineer speaks the code, Serenade's engine feeds that into its natural-language processing layer, whose machine-learning models are trained to identify and translate common programming constructs to syntactically valid code...

Talon has several components to it: speech recognition, eye tracking, and noise recognition. Talon's speech-recognition engine is based on Facebook's Wav2letter automatic speech-recognition system, which [founder Ryan] Hileman extended to accommodate commands for voice coding. Meanwhile, Talon's eye tracking and noise-recognition capabilities simulate navigating with a mouse, moving a cursor around the screen based on eye movements and making clicks based on mouth pops. "That sound is easy to make. It's low effort and takes low latency to recognize, so it's a much faster, nonverbal way of clicking the mouse that doesn't cause vocal strain," Hileman says...

Open-source voice-coding platforms such as Aenea and Caster are free, but both rely on the Dragon speech-recognition engine, which users will have to purchase themselves. That said, Caster offers support for Kaldi, an open-source speech-recognition tool kit, and Windows Speech Recognition, which comes preinstalled in Windows.

A law professor serving on the EFF's board of directors (and advisory boards for the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Democracy and Technology) offers this analysis of "the push for stricter rules for internet platforms," reviewing proposed changes to the liability-limiting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — and speculating about what the changes would accomplish: Short of repeal, several initiatives aim to change section 230. Eleven bills have been introduced in the Senate and nine in the House of Representatives to amend section 230 in various ways.... Some would widen the categories of harmful conduct for which section 230 immunity is unavailable. At present, section 230 does not apply to user-posted content that violates federal criminal law, infringes intellectual property rights, or facilitates sex trafficking. One proposal would add to this list violations of federal civil laws.

Some bills would condition section 230 immunity on compliance with certain conditions or make it unavailable if the platforms engage in behavioral advertising. Others would require platforms to spell out their content moderation policies with particularity in their terms of service (TOS) and would limit section 230 immunity to TOS violations. Still others would allow users whose content was taken down in "bad faith" to bring a lawsuit to challenge this and be awarded $5,000 if the challenge was successful. Some bills would impose due process requirements on platforms concerning removal of user-posted content. Other bills seek to regulate platform algorithms in the hope of stopping the spread of extremist content or in the hope of eliminating biases...

Neither legislation nor an FCC rule-making may be necessary to significantly curtail section 230 as a shield from liability. Conservative Justice Thomas has recently suggested a reinterpretation of section 230 that would support imposing liability on Internet platforms as "distributors" of harmful content... Section 230, after all, shields these services from liability as "speakers" and "publishers," but is silent about possible "distributor" liability. Endorsing this interpretation would be akin to adopting the notice-and-takedown rules that apply when platforms host user-uploaded files that infringe copyrights.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Beeftopia for sharing the article, which ultimately concludes: - Notice-and-takedown regimes have long been problematic because false or mistaken notices are common and platforms often quickly take-down challenged content, even if it is lawful, to avoid liability...

- For the most part, these platforms promote free speech interests of their users in a responsible way. Startup and small nonprofit platforms would be adversely affected by some of the proposed changes insofar as the changes would enable more lawsuits against platforms for third-party content. Fighting lawsuits is costly, even if one wins on the merits.

- Much of the fuel for the proposed changes to section 230 has come from conservative politicians who are no longer in control of the Senate.

- The next Congress will have a lot of work to do. Section 230 reform is unlikely to be a high priority in the near term. Yet, some adjustments to that law seem quite likely over time because platforms are widely viewed as having too much power over users' speech and are not transparent or consistent about their policies and practices.

Twitter on Monday filed a lawsuit against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), saying that his office launched an investigation into the social media giant because it banned former President Trump from its platform. From a report: Twitter is seeking to halt an investigation launched by Paxton into moderation practices by Big Tech firms including Twitter for what he called "the seemingly coordinated de-platforming of the President," days after they banned him following the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. In the suit, filed in a Northern California court, Twitter said "Paxton made clear that he will use the full weight of his office, including his expansive investigatory powers, to retaliate against Twitter for having made editorial decisions with which he disagrees." Twitter said it has rights under the First Amendment "to make decisions about what content to disseminate through its platform," including "the discretion to remove or otherwise restrict access to Tweets, profiles, or other content posted to Twitter." The company added in an emailed statement that in this case, "the Texas Attorney General is misusing the powers of his office to infringe on Twitter's First Amendment rights and attempt to silence free speech."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Over the weekend, word emerged that a hacker breached far-right social media website Gab and downloaded 70 gigabytes of data by exploiting a garden-variety security flaw known as an SQL injection. A quick review of Gab's open source code shows that the critical vulnerability -- or at least one very much like it -- was introduced by the company's chief technology officer. The change, which in the parlance of software development is known as a "git commit," was made sometime in February from the account of Fosco Marotto, a former Facebook software engineer who in November became Gab's CTO. On Monday, Gab removed the git commit from its website. Below is an image showing the February software change, as shown from a site that provides saved commit snapshots.

The commit shows a software developer using the name Fosco Marotto introducing precisely the type of rookie mistake that could lead to the kind of breach reported this weekend. Specifically, line 23 strips the code of "reject" and "filter," which are API functions that implement a programming idiom that protects against SQL injection attacks. This idiom allows programmers to compose an SQL query in a safe way that "sanitizes" the inputs that website visitors enter into search boxes and other web fields to ensure that any malicious commands are stripped out before the text is passed to backend servers. In their place, the developer added a call to the Rails function that contains the "find_by_sql" method, which accepts unsanitized inputs directly in a query string. Rails is a widely used website development toolkit.

"Sadly Rails documentation doesn't warn you about this pitfall, but if you know anything at all about using SQL databases in web applications, you'd have heard of SQL injection, and it's not hard to come across warnings that find_by_sql method is not safe," Dmitry Borodaenko, a former production engineer at Facebook who brought the commit to my attention wrote in an email. "It is not 100% confirmed that this is the vulnerability that was used in the Gab data breach, but it definitely could have been, and this code change is reverted in the most recent commit that was present in their GitLab repository before they took it offline." Ironically, Fosco in 2012 warned fellow programmers to use parameterized queries to prevent SQL injection vulnerabilities.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares this report from ProPublica: As Turkey launched a military offensive against Kurdish minorities in neighboring Syria in early 2018, Facebook's top executives faced a political dilemma. Turkey was demanding the social media giant block Facebook posts from the People's Protection Units, a mostly Kurdish militia group the Turkish government had targeted.

Should Facebook ignore the request, as it has done elsewhere, and risk losing access to tens of millions of users in Turkey? Or should it silence the group, known as the YPG, even if doing so added to the perception that the company too often bends to the wishes of authoritarian governments?

It wasn't a particularly close call for the company's leadership, newly disclosed emails show. "I am fine with this," wrote Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's No. 2 executive, in a one-sentence message to a team that reviewed the page. Three years later, YPG's photos and updates about the Turkish military's brutal attacks on the Kurdish minority in Syria still can't be viewed by Facebook users inside Turkey. The conversations, among other internal emails obtained by ProPublica, provide an unusually direct look into how tech giants like Facebook handle censorship requests made by governments that routinely limit what can be said publicly...

Publicly, Facebook has underscored that it cherishes free speech: "We believe freedom of expression is a fundamental human right, and we work hard to protect and defend these values around the world," the company wrote in a blog post last month about a new Turkish law requiring that social media firms have a legal presence in the country. "More than half of the people in Turkey rely on Facebook to stay in touch with their friends and family, to express their opinions and grow their businesses." But behind the scenes in 2018, amid Turkey's military campaign, Facebook ultimately sided with the government's demands. Deliberations, the emails show, were centered on keeping the platform operational, not on human rights. "The page caused us a few PR fires in the past," one Facebook manager warned of the YPG material...
"Facebook confirmed to ProPublica that it made the decision to restrict the page in Turkey following a legal order from the Turkish government — and after it became clear that failing to do so would have led to its services in the country being completely shut down."

Before anyone outside her hometown knew her name, Disha Ravi spent four years raising awareness among young people in Bangalore about the effects of climate change. Now the 21-year-old activist is jailed in New Delhi. The allegation: She distributed a "tool kit" in the form of a Google Doc containing talking points and contact information for influential groups to drum up support for farmers who have been protesting against the Indian government for months. The New York Times: The document -- which the police say she shared with Greta Thunberg, the 18-year-old Swedish climate activist -- resembles the kind that grass-roots organizations around the world have used for years to campaign for their causes. But Ms. Ravi, the police contend, was using it to "spread disaffection against the Indian State." The arrest, the latest in a series of broader crackdown on activists, has triggered anger and disbelief among opposition politicians, student groups and lawyers, who say the government is using its law enforcement agencies to increasingly stifle dissent, in line with a broader deterioration of free speech in India. Ms. Ravi's arrest, they said, has raised the crackdown to a new level.

"There is a method to this madness," said Manshi Asher, a researcher with the nonprofit group Environmental Justice, "and a pattern that is so clearly telling us that those asking critical questions would be silenced." Ms. Ravi is being held under a stringent sedition law that has been used to criminalize everything from leading rallies to posting political messages on social media. Although she has not been formally charged, she is to spend five days in police custody. In its response to other contentious policies -- including citizenship laws that worked against Muslims, a clampdown on the disputed Kashmir region and the farmers' protests -- Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government has resorted to arrests, stifling dissenting voices and blocking access to the internet. Groups that track internet freedom say India's has declined for a third consecutive year. For months, thousands of farmers, many of them Sikhs from the agricultural heartland state of Punjab, have camped out on the outskirts of New Delhi, protesting a slate of new laws that will dismantle a subsidy system that has for decades protected them from the vagaries of the free market.

Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said social-media services like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube need clearer laws and rules to govern whether controversial accounts, like former U.S. President Donald Trump's, have a place on their services, rather than being asked to make free-speech decisions themselves. From a report: "Unilateral action by individual companies in democracies like ours is just not long-term stable -- we do need to be able to have a framework of laws and norms," Nadella said in a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg Television's Emily Chang. "Depending on any one individual CEO in any one of these companies to make calls that are going to really help us maintain something as sacred and as important as our democracy in the long run is just no way that at least I, as a citizen, would advocate for."

[...] In the past several years, antitrust regulators have ramped up investigations into the market power of large technology companies, just as Microsoft fell under government scrutiny and faced a U.S. antitrust lawsuit more than two decades ago, when Nadella was a rising manager. It's better for the younger technology companies to face robust competition and handle negative consequences of growing too big ahead of time, rather than waiting until their size leads to problems for consumers and rivals, the CEO said. "Big by itself is not bad, but competition is good," he said. "And more importantly, you need to have a business model that really is aligned with the world doing well. There are certain categories of products where the unintended consequences of the growth on that category or lack of competition creates issues." The need for competition includes rivalry from China, Nadella said, although national security concerns must be reckoned with by each government, Nadella said. "There is no God-given right for U.S. tech companies to take for granted that there cannot be other tech powers," he said. "All of us in the West Coast of the United States need to be more grounded, because sometimes I think we celebrate our own advances far too much." Instead, companies should look at what's happening in the world and how relevant their technology is, he said.

Twitter held firm when the Indian government demanded last week that the social media platform take down hundreds of accounts that criticized the government for its conduct during protests by angry farmers. On Wednesday, under threat of prison for its local employees, Twitter relented. From a report: The company, based in San Francisco, said it had permanently blocked over 500 accounts and moved an unspecified number of others from view within India after the government accused them of making inflammatory remarks about Narendra Modi, the country's prime minister. Twitter said it acted after the government issued a notice of noncompliance, a move that experts said could put the company's local employees in danger of spending up to seven years in custody. In a blog post published on Wednesday, Twitter said it was not taking any action on the accounts that belonged to media organizations, journalists, activists or politicians, saying it did not believe the orders to block them "are consistent with Indian law." It also said it was exploring its options under local laws and had requested a meeting with a senior government official. "We remain committed to safeguarding the health of the conversation occurring on Twitter," it said, "and strongly believe that the tweets should flow."

The brewing conflict in India offers a particularly stark example of Twitter's challenge in hewing to its self-proclaimed principles supporting free speech. The platform has been caught in an intensifying debate over the outsize role of social media in politics, and growing demand in many countries to tame that influence. In the United States, Twitter was thrust into the center of the clash last month after it permanently suspended the account of Donald J. Trump, the former president, for encouraging protests in Washington, D.C., that turned violent. In that case, it exercised its right under U.S. laws that give social platforms the ability to police speech on their services. But in India, Twitter is blocking accounts at the government's demand. Controlled by Mr. Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party, the Indian government has become increasingly aggressive at stifling dissent. It has arrested activists and journalists, and pressured media organizations to hew to its line. It has also cut off mobile internet access in troubled areas.

John Matze, CEO and co-founder of far-right friendly social media platform Parler, said on LinkedIn Wednesday that he has been terminated. Axios reports: Parler has been at the center of controversy since Amazon Web Services, Apple and Google unplugged the network last month for its lack of content moderation related to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. In a memo obtained by Fox News, Matze said that the company's board of directors, controlled by Republican political donor Rebekah Mercer, terminated him last Friday. He did not participate in the decision, and the reason for the firing remains unknown.

"Over the past few months, I've met constant resistance to my product vision, my strong belief in free speech and my view of how the Parler site should be managed," Matze wrote. "For example, I advocated for more product stability and what I believe is a more effective approach to content moderation." "I have worked endless hours and fought constant battles to get the Parler site running but at this point, the future of Parler is no longer in my hands." Matze will take a few weeks off before looking for new opportunities, he told Parler colleagues.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Krebs On Security: Parler, the beleaguered social network advertised as a "free speech" alternative to Facebook and Twitter, has had a tough month. Apple and Google removed the Parler app from their stores, and Amazon blocked the platform from using its hosting services. Parler has since found a home in DDoS-Guard, a Russian digital infrastructure company. But now it appears DDoS-Guard is about to be relieved of more than two-thirds of the Internet address space the company leases to clients -- including the Internet addresses currently occupied by Parler. The pending disruption for DDoS-Guard and Parler comes compliments of Ron Guilmette, a researcher who has made it something of a personal mission to de-platform conspiracy theorist and far-right groups.

Charlotte Web shares a report from CNN: Apple, along with Amazon and Google, effectively kicked Parler off the internet in the wake of the January 6 US Capitol siege. Despite criticism that Big Tech wields too much power over speech, Apple CEO Tim Cook defended his decision. "We looked at the incitement to violence that was on there," Apple CEO Tim Cook said on Sunday. "We don't consider that free speech and incitement to violence has an intersection..."

Cook disputed that it's Apple's job to host every service, regardless of its content. He noted that Apple has terms of service for the 2 million apps its hosts, and apps that refuse to play by the rules aren't allowed to access Apple's massive audience. "We obviously don't control what's on the internet, but we've never viewed that our platform should be a simple replication of what's on the internet," Cook said.Apple will welcome back Parler -- provided Parler finds a new cloud provider to host the social network -- if the app effectively moderates users' speech, said the Apple CEO. "We've only suspended them," Cook noted. "If they get their moderation together they would be back on there." With regard to the Capitol siege, Cook said: "It was one of the saddest moments of my life -- seeing an attack on our Capitol and an attack on our democracy. I felt like I was in some sort of alternate reality, to be honest with you. This could not be happening."

Right-wing social media platform Parler, which has been offline since Amazon Web Services dropped it like a hot potato last week, has reappeared on the Web with a promise to return as a fully functional service "soon." Ars Technica reports: Although the platform's Android and iOS apps are still defunct, this weekend its URL once again began to resolve to an actual website, instead of an error notice. The site at the moment consists solely of the homepage, which has a message from company CEO John Matze. "Now seems like the right time to remind you all -- both lovers and haters -- why we started this platform," the message reads. "We believe privacy is paramount and free speech essential, especially on social media. Our aim has always been to provide a nonpartisan public square where individuals can enjoy and exercise their rights to both. We will resolve any challenge before us and plan to welcome all of you back soon. We will not let civil discourse perish!"

Parler, however, was deplatformed in the first place explicitly because the content it allowed to flourish was anything but "civil," and as multiple reports have made clear, the service backend was designed with basically no thought given to privacy. Meanwhile, the path Parler appears to be taking to rejoin the Internet is a shady one paved for it by other explicitly extremist, white nationalist platforms that lost access to more mainstream services after being tied to terrorism. [...] Parler has apparently secured hosting from Epik to bring itself back online. Epik is best known for helping far-right extremist platform Gab to come back online a short time after a Gab user committed a mass murder at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018; it has also provided services to other white nationalist, anti-Semitic, and neo-Nazi platforms including 8chan (now known as 8kun) and The Daily Stormer. Multiple security researchers have also pointed out that Parler appears to have secured the services of DDos-Guard, a cloud services company based in Russia. UPDATE: According to Krebs On Security, "DDoS-Guard is about to be relieved of more than two-thirds of the Internet address space the company leases to clients -- including the Internet addresses currently occupied by Parler."

Hungarian Justice Minister Judit Varga on Monday raised the prospect of sanctioning social media firms over what she called "systematic abuses" of free speech. From a report: The minister said she would meet the Hungarian competition watchdog this week to discuss possible penalties for what she described as unfair commercial practices as well as convening a meeting of the country's digital freedom committee. In a growing wave of criticism, some government officials are complaining about what they have described as efforts by social media companies, including Facebook, to limit conservative views on their platforms. Prime Minister Viktor Orban has turned Hungary's public media into an obedient mouthpiece and allies control large parts of the private media, allowing his agenda to be aired prominently. But the right-wing premier faces the toughest challenge to his decade-long rule at a parliamentary election next year, as he tackles a protracted recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and a united opposition, with polls showing a neck-and-neck race.

After Twitter banned President Trump's account last week, the site and its executives, including Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, were largely silent in justifying their decision. That changed last night when Dorsey, in a series of tweets, explained that he felt banning Trump's account was the right move for the social network. The Verge reports: "Offline harm as a result of online speech is demonstrably real, and what drives our policy and enforcement above all," he wrote. Dorsey blamed Twitter's failure "to promote healthy conversation," acknowledged that Twitter needs to "look critically at inconsistencies of our policy and enforcement," and said that social platforms needed more transparency around moderation. Then, Dorsey plugged an effort to build a decentralized standard for social media he began in 2019 when he sought to hire five engineers to work on it. That's how, eight tweets into a thread on why his company banned Donald Trump, the CEO of Twitter managed to change the subject to his passion for bitcoin.

Banning the RealDonaldTrump Twitter account had "real and significant ramifications," Dorsey wrote. Dorsey said that the widespread suspension of the president by many platforms challenged the notion that if people didn't like Twitter's rules, they could simply go somewhere else. And though the president can issue a press release or call a press conference whenever he wishes -- or simply go on television -- Dorsey expressed concern that the enforcement actions might "erode a free and open global internet."

And that was when bitcoin came up. Dorsey is also CEO of Square, an internet payment company, that bought $50 million of bitcoin as part of a bet on cryptocurrency. Square has accepted bitcoin since 2014. According to Dorsey, bitcoin provides a model for a decentralized model for social media. Dorsey did not elaborate on how such a network might address Twitter's failures in moderation, creating healthy conversations, or provide for more consistent policy enforcment. "It's important that we acknowledge this is a time of great uncertainty and struggle for so many around the world," Dorsey wrote on Twitter. "Our goal in this moment is to disarm as much as we can, and ensure we are all building towards a greater common understanding, and a more peaceful existence on earth. I believe the internet and global public conversation is our best and most relevant method of achieving this."

Polish government officials have denounced the deactivation of Donald Trump's social media accounts, and said a draft law being readied in Poland will make it illegal for tech companies to take similar actions there. From a report: "Algorithms or the owners of corporate giants should not decide which views are right and which are not," wrote the prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, on Facebook earlier this week, without directly mentioning Trump. "There can be no consent to censorship." Morawiecki indirectly compared social media companies taking decisions to remove accounts with Poland's experience during the communist era. "Censorship of free speech, which is the domain of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, is now returning in the form of a new, commercial mechanism to combat those who think differently," he wrote. Poland's ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, which is ideologically aligned with Trump on many issues, has itself been accused of trying to limit freedom of speech in recent years.

Donald Trump received unexpected backing from Germany and France after the U.S. president was shut off social media platforms including Twitter and Facebook, extending Europe's battle with big tech. From a report: German Chancellor Angela Merkel objected to the decisions, saying on Monday that lawmakers should set the rules governing free speech and not private tech companies. "The chancellor sees the complete closing down of the account of an elected president as problematic," Steffen Seibert, her chief spokesman, said at a regular news conference in Berlin. Rights like the freedom of speech "can be interfered with, but by law and within the framework defined by the legislature -- not according to a corporate decision." The German leader's stance was echoed by French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire, who said that the state and not "the digital oligarchy" is responsible for regulations, calling big tech "one of the threats" to democracy.

Twitter shares fell 7% in pre-market trading after the social media platform permanently banned outgoing President Donald Trump. From a report: The company confirmed its decision in a blog post on Friday, saying Trump's tweets breached policies by risking incitement to violence. It cited his posts on the riots in the U.S. capital last week. It's a watershed moment for technology platforms that have faced conflicting pressures on one hand to restrict misinformation and hate speech, and defend free speech on the other. Twitter was Trump's preferred channel for amplifying attacks on his rivals, spreading conspiracies and provoking other nations during his four years in power.

Writing in the Atlantic, programmer/economics commentator Steve Randy Waldman explains "Why I changed my mind" about the Communication Decency Act's Section 230: In the United States, you are free to speak, but you are not free of responsibility for what you say. If your speech is defamatory, you can be sued. If you are a publisher, you can be sued for the speech you pass along. But online services such as Facebook and Twitter can pass along almost anything, with almost no legal accountability, thanks to a law known as Section 230.

President Donald Trump has been pressuring Congress to repeal the law, which he blames for allowing Twitter to put warning labels on his tweets. But the real problem with Section 230, which I used to strongly support, is the kind of internet it has enabled. The law lets large sites benefit from network effects (I'm on Facebook because my friends are on Facebook) while shifting the costs of scale, like shoddy moderation and homogenized communities, to users and society at large. That's a bad deal. Congress should revise Section 230 — just not for the reasons the president and his supporters have identified.

When the law was enacted in 1996, the possibility that monopolies could emerge on the internet seemed ludicrous. But the facts have changed, and now so must our minds... By creating the conditions under which we are all herded into the same virtual space, Section 230 helped turn the internet into a conformity machine. We regulate one another's speech through shame or abuse, but we have nowhere to go where our own expression might be more tolerable. And while Section 230 immunizes providers from legal liability, it turns those providers into agents of such concentrated influence that they are objects of constant political concern. When the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and the Twitter founder Jack Dorsey are routinely (and justifiably!) browbeaten before Congress, it's hard to claim that Section 230 has insulated the public sphere from government interference...

If made liable for posts flagged as defamatory or unlawful, mass-market platforms including Facebook and Twitter would likely switch to a policy of taking down those posts automatically.... Vigorous argument and provocative content would migrate to sites where people take responsibility for their own speech, or to forums whose operators devote attention and judgment to the conversations they host. The result would be a higher-quality, less consolidated, and ultimately freer public square.

Last July, GitHub prevented users in Iran and several other nations from accessing portions of the service due to U.S. sanction laws. Today, the world's largest host of source code announced that it has secured a license from the U.S. government to operate in Iran. It's also working to secure similar licenses for developers in Crimea and Syria as well. MSPoweruser reports: "Over the course of two years, we were able to demonstrate how developer use of GitHub advances human progress, international communication, and the enduring U.S. foreign policy of promoting free speech and the free flow of information. We are grateful to OFAC for the engagement which has led to this great result for developers. We are in the process of rolling back all restrictions on developers in Iran, and reinstating full access to affected accounts," wrote Nat Friedman, CEO of GitHub. GitHub is also working with the U.S. government to secure similar licenses for developers in Crimea and Syria as well.