I like this idea.
Twitter was supposed to be the “online town hall”. And online public spaces are not publicly owned, they’re run by private companies that can ban you at their own whims.
With each country having their own federated platforms, they can truly act as online public spaces where the usual laws apply as they would do offline.
You’d need to employ thousands of moderators though if everyone was online but honestly I think it’s worth it.
But don’t be handing out prison sentences for posting stupid shit. Online harassment and calls for violence can still be legally handled the same way they are offline, but jailing people for offensive jokes and stupid hot takes is just idiotic.
Best way is temporary bans increasing exponentially in length, then small percentage of income fines again increasing exponentially.
Also, and I’d argue we already need this, a court system for online crimes. This means the regular court system doesn’t get more workload added on to it and specialist judges and lawyers can be appointed.
Agreed. Perhaps the best implementation is a highly integrated mix of Mastodon and Lemmy where Mastodon is used for general discussion and news and Lemmy is used for organising communities around subjects like politics and religion.