“Hello, my name is Ethan and I would like the US Government to compel platforms to write/maintain code providing an immutable, unchanging API that my friends can use to inefficiently and in a failure prone manner, run half-assed badly written tools to fuck up their friendships and group subscriptions while choking the performance of backend servers. This is of course much more sensible than simply demanding the same functionality of platforms up front, or suggesting that the user should simply delete their account.”

Bonkers – and it is also muddying the discussion of Section 230 at a time when we really don’t need that kind of mud thrown into the mix.

https://knightcolumbia.org/cases/zuckerman-v-meta-platforms-inc

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Update

For the benefit of people who will argue:

We are not demanding an API, we are demanding that people can use a tool in their browser to perform the desired functions…

…you need to understand that using a browser is using an API, at one remove, and the nature of the APIs which are being used will be intentionally rate limited in order to prevent bad actors doing bad things, and if that rate limiting went away then bad things would happen.

If folk want a “nuke all my shit” button, demand one, rather than automating the process of hitting a delete button 5,000 times and creating a whole new battlefield of trying to undermine user safety in the name of user empowerment.