It’s time to rein in social media services
If you run a social networking service then the one thing you don’t want to be considered to be is a publisher. As a publisher, you become responsible for whatever your users care to post which means when they post something that’s illegal in any way, you are as liable as the poster to be prosecuted. On the other hand, as a “platform”, where no editorial control is exercised, a social media service is only obliged to act on content when they received a court order or a DMCA takedown notice. Pixabay This distinction between being a publisher and a platform is crucial to the major social media services because the cost of vetting and policing user-generated content would be prohibitively expensive even if it were possible (every minute, Twitter generates 350,000 tweets while in the same window 510 comments are posted, 293,000 statuses are updated, and 136,000 photos are uploaded to Facebook).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here