this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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There is a middle ground. The FDA shouldn't have the power to ban a product from the market. They should be able to publish their recommendations, however, and people who trust them can choose to follow those recommendations. Others should be free to publish their own recommendations, and some people will choose to follow those instead.
Applied to online content: Rather than having no filter at all, or relying on a controversial, centralized content policy, users would subscribe to "reputation servers" which would score content based on where it comes from. Anyone could participate in moderation and their moderation actions (positive or negative) would be shared publicly; servers would weight each action according to their own policies to determine an overall score to present to their followers. Users could choose a third-party reputation server to suit their own preferences or run their own, either from scratch or blending recommendations from one or more other servers.
That isn’t a middle ground. You’re just saying the state can publish a recommendation, which it always has been able to. That’s absolutely in the “unregulated” / “no safety nets” camp. It’s caveat emptor as a status quo and takes us back to the gilded age.
To put it another way: The middle ground between “the state has no authority here” and “the state can regulate away a product” isn’t “the state can suggest we don’t buy it.” It still puts the burden on the consumer in an unreasonable way. We can’t assess literally everything we consume. If I go to a grocery store and buy apples, I can reasonably assume they won’t poison me. Without basic regulations this is not possible. You can’t feed 8 billion people without some rules.
Let me be clear, I agree with the EFF on this particular issue. ISP’s should not regulate speech and what sites I browse. But it’s not the same as having the FDA. For starters, ISP’s are private corporations.
You misunderstood. It's not a middle ground between "can regulate" and "cannot regulate". That would indeed be idiotic. It's a middle ground between "must judge everything for yourself" and "someone else determines what you have access to". Someone else does the evaluation and tells you whether they think it's worthwhile, but you choose whose recommendations to listen to (or ignore, if you please).
That's putting too much responsibility on the average person, who doesn't have the time to become educated enough in biology and pharmacology to understand what every potentially harmful product may do to them. What if they never even hear the FDA recommendation?
Also, though you'd like to think this would only harm the individual in question who purchases a harmful product, there are many ways innocent third parties could be harmed through this. Teratogens are just one example.
This kind of laissez-faire attitude just doesn't work in the real world. There's a reason we ban overtly harmful substances.
Then the FDA isn't doing a very good job, are they? Ensuring that people hear their recommendations (and trust them) would be among their core goals.
The rare fringe cases where someone is affected indirectly without personally having choosen to purchase the product can be dealt with through the courts. There is no need for preemptive bans.
No, I am not okay with bans like that. You should be able to knowingly buy products with mercury in them. Obviously if someone is selling products containing mercury and not disclosing that fact, passing them off as safe to handle, that would be a problem and they would be liable for any harm that resulted from that. But it doesn't justify a preemptive ban.
Liability would be decided by the courts or another form of binding arbitration. Obviously. Harming someone through action or negligence is a tort, and torts are addressed by the judicial branch. Both sides would present their arguments, including any scientific evidence in their favor—the FDA or similar organizations could weigh in here as expert witnesses, if they have something to offer—and the court will decide whether the vendor acted reasonably or has liability toward the defendant.
If you knew that the engine was about to fail and didn't disclose that fact, or specifically indicate that the vehicle was being sold "as-is" with no guarantees, then you certainly should be accountable for that. Your contract with the buyer was based on the premise that they were getting a vehicle in a certain condition. An unknown fault would be one thing, but if you knew about the issue and the buyer did not then there was no "meeting of the minds", which means that the contract is void and you are a thief for taking their payment under false pretenses.
Anyway, you continue to miss the point. I'm not saying that everyone should become an expert in every domain. I'm saying that people should be able to choose their own experts (reputation sources) rather than have one particular organization like the FDA (instance/community moderators) pre-filtering the options for everyone. I wasn't even the one who brought up the FDA—this thread was originally about online content moderation. If you insist on continuing the thread please try to limit yourself to relevant points.