I’m just a simple unfrozen caveman academic/non-lawyer, but I get confused by demands for “transparency” (on nebulous 1st Amendment grounds) that never take the analysis to its logical extent:

demanding transparency from private firms to which key civil and political discourse has shifted, while never questioning whether walled for-profit gardens are the right place for that discourse, whether a public good/interest model is worthy of thought...

or what role Section 230 has played in developing the opacity being railed against, and how various moves to reformulate or offer alternatives that would push against private speech monopolies might come into play.

From the cheap seats, it looks like bids for transparency with little other reform is just wanting a seat at the table behind the closed doors. Remind me how that helps the public.

Full disclosure: I’ve been on the closed side of those doors enough to know what I’m talking about. And to see how far the transparency demands go, or don’t go, as the case may be.

For example, when academics focused in the 10,000 foot view make the centrality of their demands solely on policy, there is frequently no regard for operational implementation, no other critique of business model or implementation practice.

Stories of commercial content moderation are not simply sordid, sensationalistic tales designed to elicit shock. They’re a place to begin an analysis, a reverse-engineering of the entirety of the costs of these enterprises and their profit-driven setups.

If the demand is for accountability and transparency as a function of the First Amendment, then why not take the analysis to the logical extent and demand platforms be accountable to it by actually being of the public sphere?

There is some serious unexamined possessive investment here, as far as I can tell. But what do I know...

Most recently, a claim that there is not enough “transparency” to Twitter’s QAnon ban. Okay, let’s walk that through. Twitter announced and publicized its ban. The ban represents a policy change that a private company has made. What further accountability is owed, under the law?

If the complaint is that there isn’t enough accountability to the public, then why isn’t this entire model the site of the critique?

That math seems to not fully check out.