Twitter 'troll' to pay six-figure sum
> The individual admitted running a campaign which "involved the systematic dissemination of false and defamatory allegations" against Mr Nolan.<p>I think that it is good that someone got to own up for the turdslinging they do online, but why are we ok with platforms that aren’t held accountable for the “systematic dissemination of false and defamatory allegations” they enable? What if you don’t have BBC lawyers and resources behind you when you or your little company is targeted?<p>I know this may be a little too Scandinavian for some HN users, but I simply don’t get why we don’t hold the social media platforms accountable for the content that gets posted to them. We have laws and bureaucracies in place to govern traditional media, exactly because the two world and the Cold War showed us what propaganda is capable of, and yet, we let these new platforms do whatever they want?<p>Maybe that would break Social Media, because their automatic moderation wouldn’t be up to the task, but so what? The way things are moving forward, the platforms claim to have upped their moderation, but as long as they aren’t actually held accountable by any democratic institution, they will still mainly be moderated by the advertising industry and that’s just not not what’s in public interest.<p>I know Donald Trump is a touchy subject to bring up. But why was he banned when he was? Shouldn’t he either have been de-platformed long ago, or not at all? Sure was convenient for the companies to do so when they did, wasn’t it? I’m personally happy that I haven’t heard a single thing about American republicans in 2021, but I still think it’s a democratic issue that it is a select few tech-billionaires that can remove someone like Donald Trump from my life and not any form of public institution.<p>It all goes back to the lack of moderation and the lack of consequences for these Social Media platforms. Yeah, one “ systematic dissemination campaign” was stopped because the BBC protects its journalists, but how many go unpunished?