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Wow, that is such a clear analysis that someone should transcribe it. Here's the main part of what Naval says: "If Google, Facebook, and Twitter had been smart

Wow, that is such a clear analysis that someone should transcribe it. Here's the main part of what Naval says: "If Google, Facebook, and Twitter had been smart about this, they would not have picked sides. They would have said "We're publishers. Whatever goes through our pipes goes through our pipes. If it's illegal, we'll take it down. Give us a court order. Otherwise we don't touch it." It's like the phone company. If I call you up and I say something horrible to you on the phone, the phone company doesn't get in trouble. But the moment they started taking stuff down that wasn't illegal because somebody screamed, they basically lost their right to be viewed as a carrier. And now all of a sudden they've taken on a liability. They're sliding down this slippery slope into ruin, where the left wants them to take down the right, the right wants them to take down the left, and now they have no more friends, they have no allies. Traditionally the libertarian-leaning Republicans and Democrats would have stood up in principle for the common carriers, but now they won't. So my guess is, as soon as Congress (this day is coming if not already here...)... the day is coming when the politicians realize that these social media platforms are picking the next president, the next congressman. They're literally picking, and they have the power to pick, so they will be controlled by the government."

padraic7a 7y ago
Being a publisher might get you off in the States, but in a lot of countries publishers are held to be legally culpable for material they publish. So publishing nazis, online abuse, illegal content etc is a legal issue.
- weberc2 7y ago
  > If it's illegal, we'll take it down. Give us a court order. Otherwise we don't touch it.
  - kelnos 7y ago
    What about jurisdictions where the act of allowing something to be published will trigger a fine or other bad consequences? Doesn't it make sense to pro-actively remove things then?
- mch82 7y ago
  This is also true in the US. See my reply to the parent. The Naval quote is wrong.
  - anm89 7y ago
    He's exactly right on it. Facebook is not a court. If certain speech is illegal, how would they even decide? If certain speech is illegal, have a court label it illegal and send them an order to remove. That concept exists within our system.
    - mch82 7y ago
      Naval is exactly wrong. Facebook must choose between being a “platform” like a phone company and being a “publisher” like a newspaper or broadcaster. The rules are different and the accountability is different, which is why Fb lawyers spent years and millions arguing for “platform” status. Edit: my main goal for posting my comment is to prevent some startup on HN from reading the parent & deciding to classify itself as a “publisher” only to find later that was a huge mistake. I’m not a lawyer & they shouldn’t take my advice, but hopefully they’ll at least double check with someone who is.
      - prepend 7y ago
        Facebook certainly wants to be a platform based on their lobbying. But they are clearly a publisher by setting editorial guidelines and sponsoring and removing content.
TulliusCicero 7y ago
The phone company analogy doesn't really work, because phone calls are by default private, between exactly two parties, usually just two people. If you look at the tech company equivalent of that, like FB messenger, or Hangouts, or other messaging systems, they behave more similarly to the phone company. It'd be difficult to get in trouble for something you said in a private message. If you want the analogy to make sense, you'd have to use something that's more of a broadcasting platform, like TV or radio, or a magazine.
- anm89 7y ago
  Disagree with this. First off, in the world of VOIP and conference calls this isn't true anymore, and we still don't censor VOIP providers. The point is you can choose to be a carrier or you can chose to be a service.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
  We don’t need analogies. It’s fairly clear how these organisations and their internet powered machination work. So let’s talk about them in that context.
- seamyb88 7y ago
  The phone analogy is terrible because the vitriol doesn't prevail. You aren't bombarded with 100 people's bigotry every time you pick up the phone.
  - gd1 7y ago
    What about the postal service then? That is a common carrier. Never mind being bombarded with bigotry, people can bombard you with literal bombs using the postal service, but hey if some kids are shitposting memes on 8chan... well we have to shut down that service altogether.
    - Fnoord 7y ago
      Radio, TV, and newspaper are each a better analogy. Postal service is more akin to the infrastructure of radio/TV/newspaper (which differs, and is rather not one but various, e.g. cable, FM, and paperboys). The analogy with Internet would be transit providers. The undersea cables between US and EU, for example. These are heavily logged, e.g. by UK. Imagine all your post be scanned, that'd be GDR-esque.
Mvandenbergh 7y ago
The problem with at least Facebook and Twitter (and possibly Google) in this analysis is that their attention-grabbing model requires them to analyse and interfere with the data which is coming through their systems. The only way not to do that would be for FB timelines and Twitter feeds to be strictly sequential feeds which at some point in the past they may have been but they are not now. Once you start basing your business model on selectively making some content more visible, you have already crossed a rubicon between a strictly neutral common carrier and a publisher. (There is an error in the quote where they use publisher when they mean common carrier, a publisher is precisely an organisation that does have full editorial control of what they put out which is the opposite of what they intend from the rest of the quote.
- chr1 7y ago
  They could make the algorithm customizable and let the user to control it. That would be much better than the current blackbox where you get uninteresting stories promoted because of misclicking once, and have no way to tell the algorithm about its mistakes.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    > They could make the algorithm customizable and let the user to control it. It often gets it wrong, but that's the general idea, isn't it? You don't customize it by checking some boxes or adding some keywords, you customize it by giving attention to some results more than to others. Obviously, there's the added layer that they aren't optimizing for your satisfaction but for your business value to them.
- jyrkesh 7y ago
  Exactly. At face value, I'm firmly in favor of what Ravikant was saying, but even the simple example of a spam filter proves how it's impossible in practice: without basic spam filtering, something like Twitter would be absolutely unusable in the face of endless crypto and malware spam. At some level, Twitter/FB/et al have to do SOMETHING to shape/filter the volume of traffic they receive.
TheOperator 7y ago
It's inevitable these platforms will have government mandated restrictions on speech, as well as government mandates to NOT restrict speech. There's no other way to really manage the issue. Whinging of the poorly informed that free speech protections can only apply to the government aside.
spamizbad 7y ago
Doesn’t make sense: a phone conversation is more akin to a gchat or messenger convo. A Facebook page or wall is more akin to publishing... and historically publishers have used considerable discretion about what gets published.
pas 7y ago
They fucked up when money entered the picture. Naturally some companies don't want their ads next to ISIL/ISIS beheading/recruitment videos for some reason... and it's allegedly bad for growing the audience too. The bottom line is, that G/FB/Tw did not remain neutral, because that hurt the aforementioned bottom line. Now, of course - as you said/transcribed - the problem is that if fascism becomes profitable then what?
namirez 7y ago
> If it's illegal, we'll take it down. Give us a court order. Otherwise we don't touch it. Interestingly the underlying assumptions in most analyses like this is that everyone lives in US and obeys US laws. What if China goes after a political dissident through Facebook? Even worse, what if Facebook propaganda is used to incite genocide by the government of Myanmar? Where do you get the court order to take it down? Unfortunately the business model of Silicon Valley is at odds with this simplistic first-amendment/court-order sort of argument.
- legostormtroopr 7y ago
  > Interestingly the underlying assumptions in most analyses like this is that everyone lives in US and obeys US laws. Even better! Stop trying to act like global companies, and pick a jurisdiction to work out of. If Facebook is an American company (which they are), they are held to and follow US laws. Maybe this means that Facebook doesn't remove Nazi propaganda because of the US 1st Amendment. What follows is actual proper competition, perhaps Germany bans Facebook, which means either a new German company GesichtBuch, can compete by being based in Germany and following german laws. Or, people enjoy Facebook and then rally their government for laws to be changed. What we have now is companies trying to exist in every country, which means they have to follow the worst laws of every country.
  - wolco 7y ago
    So give up Germany (lost: billions in revenue) or give up Nazi propaganda (lost:thousands in revenue). Companies are trying to make money. That's the purpose of a company.
    - prepend 7y ago
      So give up China (lost billions) or give up democratic propaganda. It’s not the size of the market that should determine right or wrong. Having free speech laws means you get democracy and nazi stuff and spend time on more important stuff as to what’s too nazi or too democratic. Just rely on the rule of law.
arrrg 7y ago
Public-facing communication has always been trickier and much more muddied. Twitter is not like telephone (except direct messages I suppose). A more apt comparison would be newspapers (which have publishers and editorial staff) or radio/TV (with similar structures). So the analogy only really works if you claim something like “Twitter should have been like paper mills“, but I’m not sure whether that’s the right analogy or useful way of thinking about Twitter. Sometimes things are just complex and I do actually think it’s wrong for Twitter to run away from this responsibility. They are the ones who want to run this public-facing way of communicating as a capitalist enterprise, they should be beholden to doing it right (whatever that means – but that’s the hard part and it’s ok that it’s hard).
kelnos 7y ago
The telephone analogy is terrible. Phone calls are usually between two people, or a small number of people. At the very least, they're bounded to some relatively small number. When you post something on Twitter, unless your account is private, you've broadcasted your speech to anyone in the world who cares to see it. Not moderating any speech at all is a quick way to allow a community to turn into a cesspit of spam and trolling. Look at any web board or forum over the past several decades for inspiration. They either have moderation, or they get overrun.
- ericdykstra 7y ago
  Twitter isn’t a phone call, but it also isn’t a message board. You only see the tweets of the people you personally choose to follow; it doesn’t matter if there are 100 billion spam accounts posting ads to nobody. There are millions of Twitter accounts in Japanese, but if you don’t follow any of them, and nobody you follow retweets them, you’d never know they exist. You can also block or mute specific accounts, mute keywords, etc for even finer control.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > You only see the tweets of the people you personally choose to follow That's not at all true by default; you also see tweets from people that have paid for involuntary reach for the tweet (promoted tweets), tweets that people you follow have interacted with, tweets that respond to or mention people you follow, and probably others that I'm forgetting.
    - ericdykstra 7y ago
      So Twitter broke their platform, and they show ads. This is vastly different from a message board that shows all messages to all users.
  - deleted 7y ago
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  - fouc 7y ago
mch82 7y ago
Edit: I see the Naval quote is from the Joe Rogan podcast (which I often enjoy). I haven’t listened to the episode, so don’t have full context but Naval seems to have the timeline, “publisher”, and “platform” confused. Facebook, Google (YouTube), and Twitter have historically claimed to be “neutral tech platforms” like phone utilities or internet service providers. They maintained that claim so that responsibility for content would be on the user/sharer and so they could avoid regulation. More recently, at least Facebook has claimed (2018) it is a “publisher”. They updated their claim in order to justify the right to editorialize & choose what content people see on Facebook. The shift to “publisher” aligns with the reality that the news feed algorithm is a form of editorializing. The algorithm decides what you see. It doesn’t matter if a human or a computer is making the decision.
- manfredo 7y ago
  The news feed does not editorialize. It doesn't edit the content itself. It's automated curation. Furthermore this whole "publisher" vs "platform" argument is not nearly as relevant as people make it seem. Contrary to popular belief, tech companies describing themselves as publishers instead of platforms does not affect the fact that they are not held liable for user generated content (so long as they meet reasonable standards for taking it down when notified). The New York Times is afforded the same protection for user generated content that they host (e.g. their comments section).
  - deleted 7y ago
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  - mch82 7y ago
    “Facebook, [company attorneys] repeatedly argued, is a publisher, and a company that makes editorial decisions, which are protected by the first amendment.” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/02/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-platform-publisher-lawsuit https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/02/facebook-...
    - manfredo 7y ago
viraptor 7y ago
> We're publishers. Whatever goes through our pipes goes through our pipes. If it's illegal, we'll take it down. That's a great way to lose users though. They need to provide some limit for abuse. That means either good moderation tools for end-user (which I don't see how they could scale without also providing bad-people-lists) or moderation on their side. Otherwise you end up with /b/ or worse. If they want their users (and advertisers) to stay, they need to filter content. They're social networks, not limited-scope opt-in party lines.
johnzhou 7y ago
That's a great way to lose advertisers. Case in point: Youtube's demonetization policy.
- drak0n1c 7y ago
  Advertisers didn't care for over a decade until partisan agitators such as Media Matters and Vox methodically cherry picked screenshots of brands next to maligned youtube channels, and then contacted brands threatening to publish names and shame if they didn't pull their advertising. The result of this short-sighted crusade was Youtube becoming unprofitable for millions of small creators around the world, and people of all sides of politics suffering including non-political LGBT creators.
  - lackbeard 7y ago
    This is the first I’ve heard this hypothesis. Do you have links to any data?
- hnuser54 7y ago
  Any particular advertiser needs Youtube more than Youtube needs the advertiser. Youtube has a critical hold on the young adult market in particular. If Youtube just said, "if you don't like it, Pepsi, someone else can enjoy this ad space instead", what recourse would they have? In conclusion Youtube demonetizes because they want to and need an excuse.
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    If you look at the data, the "adpocalypse" cost alphabet over 70 billion dollars on their market cap.
- flukus 7y ago
  It's also a great way to whitewash history. Want to educate the next generation about Hitlers atrocities? No money for you. Basically anything war seems to be getting demonetized these days. Advertisers only want to appear next to cats on roombas.
jacquesm 7y ago
'we're publishers' is exactly the wrong thing to say. Publishers have some responsibility over what they publish. The smart thing to say would have been 'we're common carriers'. And then to actually behave like common carriers.. At least that would have gotten them to first base. Now they look like heavy handed censors with a stake in the game.
loceng 7y ago
If you don't want to act as a steward of society - with your own leadership, governance, as a lead - if you don't want to be accountable to potential societal consequences, then sure, ignore the behaviour of bad actors or the irrational. The problem has been lock-in and users unable to "take their network with them." The idea of decentralization to me is being fully mobile and having the decision to be able to choose what network(s) you're part of, and in part that would be based on leadership, governance, rules that each platform can have in place - and ideally enforcing and evolving as necessary. Imagine you could have Facebook but immediately you can decide who's leadership you're following for moderation and all other settings/decisions of the platform - and thus who your attention, money, goes to. The government being in charge of moderating free speech - except for perhaps acting along with, setting rules for authority like police - is going to be very inefficient, bureaucratic, not leveraging the efficiencies of free market systems, capitalism. Government could potentially play an important role, however private sector options are likely to exist sooner and be better. Let people choose who moderates their community, networks, allow the best options to naturally rise to the top - to act as role models for competitors to take notice and attempt to mimic the best parts.
- loceng 7y ago
  This comments' votes have been going up and down since I posted it - funny to see.
positr0n 7y ago
> "We're publishers. Whatever goes through our pipes goes through our pipes. If it's illegal, we'll take it down. Give us a court order. Otherwise we don't touch it." It is not possible to do that and make as much money as google, fb, etc. The end result of unmoderated public places on the internet is always this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread... Which is great! But not for making money. From that article: > Allowing any aspect of your brand to come anywhere near something unpopular and taboo is like a giant Christmas present for people who hate you [...] It doesn’t matter if taboo material makes up 1% of your comment section; it will inevitably make up 100% of what people hear about your comment section and then of what people think is in your comment section.
- prepend 7y ago
  > It is not possible to do that and make as much money as google, fb, etc. Exactly. This is a choice that companies need to make. Or a regulation coming.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    A regulation is coming anyway; the CDA safe harbor, which is what both those complaining about what the big tech firms are censoring and those complaining about what they are not censoring are targeting, has been under broad, bipartisan attack for some time, under a variety of different pretexts. Pm
dmode 7y ago
Naval, like most VC investors, think too highly of themselves and go on twitter tirades in areas where they have absolutely no clue what they are talking about. The quote above is a real example. Their views are tinged by living in advance Western societies, and in their libertarian bubbles. In real life, a platform like Google and Facebook, that has unprecedented reach globally, is the opposite of a private phone call. ISIS rode YouTube's lax enforcement policy to create a Caliphate and slaughter millions of people. Was Naval advocating Google to wait for an order from the Syrian government before taking out beheading videos ? In India, WhatsApp is used by religious extremists to form lynching mobs, resulting in deaths of multiple people just based on rumors. We are living in a world, where we have software platforms that hold unprecedented leverage to alter people's lives. We should try to move away from some one size fits all simplistic policies that are created in Sand Hill road thought bubble
- neonate 7y ago
  If I understand the argument, he isn't saying that those horrible things are fine and should be allowed. He's saying that it's the government's job to do something about them. Once the tech companies took a bite out of that poisoned apple, their fate was sealed, to become government-controlled.
  - dmode 7y ago
    In many places across the world, there is barely any government to act on these things. A functioning government is limited to a handful of countries
MuffinFlavored 7y ago
> "If it's illegal, we'll take it down. Give us a court order. Otherwise we don't touch it" I think that works better on paper than in practice. If I get offended enough by something, can't I go try to sue under the premise of defamation?
- prepend 7y ago
  If you sue successfully you can get a legal order to take down the content as part of the judgement. Libel, slander, and harassment are all crimes or civil offenses (illegal). They work pretty well.
- sparrish 7y ago
  Carriers can't be sued for the content they carry. It's been tried many times and so long as the carrier acts like a carrier (neutral channel), it fails.
  - adrr 7y ago
    Working at MySpace and getting sued by all the state attorney generals, that defense doesn’t work. We were ultimately responsible for the actions of our users including exploitation of minors which triggered the investigations.
ericdykstra 7y ago
This sounds right, but what if the corporations are more powerful than the government? What if they have enough money to collectively rent enough politicians so that they never have to face the scrutiny that Naval is talking about here? If social media platforms are picking the next congressmen and next president, and you’re in Congress vying to keep your seat, do you really want to introduce or sponsor legislation to upset these companies?
nostrademons 7y ago
They did this for many years - when I moved to Silicon Valley in 2009 tech's attitude was "We just provide the mechanism, we let our users determine policy". My first couple years at Google (09-10), management was very insistent that "We don't take sides - we show the user the best result for their query regardless of how much we dislike it." There were examples like literal searches for Nazis where the top result was a hate group and rather than censor it, Google took out a house ad (basically paid themselves, using the mechanisms available to the general public) saying "Don't like these results? We don't either, but we believe strongly in freedom of speech, and so we're using this space to explain our views without depriving others of theirs." The thing is, sometime around 2012-2014 this became unacceptable. Public discourse shifted into "silence is complicitness - if you allow this speech on your platform, that means that you endorse it." So it became a forced-choice issue. And the thing is that if it's a forced choice, very few people are going to stand up and defend Nazis. Most of these tech execs personally hold fairly liberal, progressive views. When the general public said "You're a Nazi sympathizer because you show Nazi websites in the search results", a.) it wasn't true and b.) it was personally insulting, because that was essentially the opposite of what actually was true. And then once that started happening, you run into the age-old problem with restricting freedom of speech, which is that the people who hold the power to restrict it might not agree with you on what's worth restricting. Be careful what you wish for.
- adamsea 7y ago
  If search engine results are a "public space", can you yell fire in a crowded theater?
- neonate 7y ago
  > Public discourse shifted into "silence is complicitness - if you allow this speech on your platform, that means that you endorse it." Public discourse? Or the loudest segment of the discourse most influential on Googlers?
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    The loudest segment of the discourse most influential on Googlers, but this caveat is usually inherent when we talk about "public discourse". (If you've studied Foucault, you'll recognize that power and influence are inherently tied in with the concept of discourse. Public speech happens all the time, but it only gets labeled "discourse" when it influences or is intended to influence society in some way.)
noelsusman 7y ago
Google, Facebook, and Twitter are not "literally picking" the next president or the next congressman. That is delusional.
- chabad360 7y ago
  Obviously they're not "literally" picking the next president, however they have full control on what opinions you see first, and they have utilized that ability to tilt many (yes, very many) people's opinions (especially those whose understanding of even general politics is superficial) towards a specific candidate.
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    Under that logic we need to heavily regulate cereal boxes and milk cartons because many of us see that first thing every morning. My philosophy is to always be suspicious of those grabbing at the keys to power - they are up to no good.
Animats 7y ago
Worse, they don't want someone else doing their filtering. Try to write a Twitter or Facebook client with spam filtering. They don't want the user to have that kind of control.
testis321 7y ago
There should be only once choice, either you're a platform or a publisher. A platform should be open, and only illegal stuff should be removed. No preferences, no nothing. A publisher can be closed, can be whatever they want it, can filter whatever, promote whatever and censor whatever. ...but! If you're a publisher, you've decided what to publish, and you should be responsible for all content published on your webpage. Fake news? Illegal porn? Nuclear bomb plans? Your problem, your responsiblity, you face the consequences. If you want to be an open platform and blame users for content posted there (and have them face the consequences), then you should have no right to promote, censor or block/hide content (except illegal).
- mike00632 7y ago
  The "illegal" criteria seems rational for countries that have rational laws but in many countries there are laws against political speech or criticism of people in power. By removing that 'illegal' speech in those countries the platform is in effect working as a government actor to police customers in those nations.
  - Reelin 7y ago
    In such nations (ex China), this entire debate is irrelevant - you follow their rules or they kick you out. In western societies, this debate is relevant and I strongly side with the poster you replied to. That being said, reasonably unbiased filtering should probably be allowed in some form. For example, while I don't want YouTube picking sides politically, I also wouldn't want to force them to host hardcore pornography against their will.
BurningFrog 7y ago
> ...so they will be controlled by the government." The cynical Regulatory Capture inspired take is that they want to be regulated now. Because regulation always favors the established players and makes it very hard for newcomers to overthrow them. Google, FB etc are now big and old enough to need that protection, and settle in to comfortable corporate middle age.
mhermher 7y ago
They're more like broadcasters than carriers. The phone companies don't broadcast. If you broadcast, then you're going to run into this issue one way or another.
arminiusreturns 7y ago
Considering In-Q-Tels involvement, sometimes I think they major social media companies were setup as trojan horses to enable censorship and governmental control in the first place. (besides the more obvious surveillance aspect)
deleted 7y ago
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Alex3917 7y ago
I mean you can say it's a clear analysis in the abstract, but if you look at the HN comments on the thread about CloudFlare cutting off 8chan it's clear that most people no longer agree with the principle as soon as they're presented with a real world example. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20610395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20610395
deleted 7y ago
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sanderjd 7y ago
The problem with the analogy to the phone system is that conversations via phone are transient and private. There is no place with the AT&T logo on it where you can go and see that awful thing that person said. The internet itself is a much better fit for the phone company analogy, and indeed internet service and backbone providers have pretty much entirely been able to stay out of this. A better (though still imperfect) analogy really is media: TV stations, newspapers, magazines, radio stations. And indeed you see similar problems there as the online media companies are facing now. The biggest difference is that traditional media companies were forced to make editorial choices because of physical constraints - physical space for print, airtime and spectrum for TV and radio - so this question of whether you could just let anyone say anything in your publication or on your broadcast just never really came up.
angrygoat 7y ago
A better analogy for Twitter and Facebook is the town square, rather than the phone company. They don't just enable point to point discussion, but broadcast to any and all who will listen. Which is fine, and good, except when algorithms keyed only to engagement cause the noisiest, most provocative and potentially divisive content to be amplified. We have, for a very long time, had laws concerning appropriate behaviour in a town square, or any other 'public' setting: don't incite riots, don't behave violently towards others, be respectful if someone doesn't want to talk and walks away. I support the efforts we're now seeing to bring those norms into online spaces.
- mavhc 7y ago
  This is the actual thing about technology, amplification. One person has 1 voice, but then they buy a megaphone, or say something to get attention online and the algorithms are programmed to say that's good. What's picked to be amplified, or muted, is the issue.
atupis 7y ago
Problem is that is only a carrier creates a barrier to monetize the platform through ads. Nobody with a serious brand doesn't want to see ads next to nazi propaganda and some kinky furry porn.
dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
The problem wasn't so much about "taking stuff down that wasn't illegal because somebody screamed." More problematic wa sthe fact that, in the case of Facebook, their algorithms promoted content that was more "engaging" (read: controversial), so basically the whole system turned out to be optimized for fake news.
Jack5500 7y ago
This has actually been the law in i.e. Germany and I think many other countries as well. As long as the platform doesn't interfere with the content (§ 8 Abs. 1 TMG) they are directly accountable for the content (Which doesn't mean that they don't have to take it down in case of an infringement for example). But as soon as they moderate said content they are legally liable. And this is exactly what social media platforms have done and that is one reason why they are responsible for their content now. This is of course only one part of the truth, because at the same time there has been a shift in perception of these platforms and other laws (i.e. Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz) have been specifically aimed at social media platforms to hold them accountable.
sam1r 7y ago
"Wow, that is such a clear analysis that someone should transcribe it." There's no way the three could have predicted the show that would have been put on today. Just like we couldn't have predicted the massive impact iphones/android [steve jobs + android] would have had in the past decade on today's society. My two cents, i guess.
ezoe 7y ago
The problem is, the current law isn't match the pipe analogy. If it's a private communication, they can be a pipe. But they are publicly present the information as soon as it gets to the pipe. There are many expressions you can't publicly present by law. For example, copyright infringement, privacy infringement, pornography, national/personal/organization secret, fraud, malware and all. You may argue some of them are ridiculous, but there are some expression you agree to be supressed. Like the fake news of you committing the crime. Yes, In an ideal rule of the law world, you should take the court order to censor that expression. But it takes time. The current law is, if you knowingly publish the material that is obviously illegal and ignore the censorship demand, you are responsible for that.
oever 7y ago
People working for Google, Facebook, and Twitter are smart. They understand this and have used the argument of being just infrastructure in the past. They had to switch their story because they are not a neutral carrier. They prefer some messages over others. This is linked to their revenue model. The simplest solution to 'just be infrastructure' is to show all messages linearly. A more complex solution with possibly lower revenue is this: they could let the users pick algorithms to filter and sort the content, then they could claim to be infrastructure again. The user would need to be able to inspect the algorithms. The simplest one would be: no sorting, no filtering. That would make the sites unpleasant. The smart people at Google, Facebook, and Twitter must have considered this option but decided that it is more profitable to share the power over what people see with the regulators than to share it with the people.
tudorw 7y ago
If Google, Facebook, and Twitter had been smart about this, they... would have consulted deeply with lawmakers, regulators, copyright owners and other deeply entrenched parties before doing anything... move fast, and, er, what was it again ?
te_chris 7y ago
The day they started messing with ML driven results and TL's was the day the whole argument about neutrality went out the window.
elbrian 7y ago
Excellent analogy! I'm so happy that telephone carriers do nothing to prevent my phone from being called by spammers 10x daily.

padraic7a 7y ago

Being a publisher might get you off in the States, but in a lot of countries publishers are held to be legally culpable for material they publish. So publishing nazis, online abuse, illegal content etc is a legal issue.

weberc2 7y ago
> If it's illegal, we'll take it down. Give us a court order. Otherwise we don't touch it.
- kelnos 7y ago
  What about jurisdictions where the act of allowing something to be published will trigger a fine or other bad consequences? Doesn't it make sense to pro-actively remove things then?
mch82 7y ago
This is also true in the US. See my reply to the parent. The Naval quote is wrong.
- anm89 7y ago
  He's exactly right on it. Facebook is not a court. If certain speech is illegal, how would they even decide? If certain speech is illegal, have a court label it illegal and send them an order to remove. That concept exists within our system.
  - mch82 7y ago
    Naval is exactly wrong. Facebook must choose between being a “platform” like a phone company and being a “publisher” like a newspaper or broadcaster. The rules are different and the accountability is different, which is why Fb lawyers spent years and millions arguing for “platform” status. Edit: my main goal for posting my comment is to prevent some startup on HN from reading the parent & deciding to classify itself as a “publisher” only to find later that was a huge mistake. I’m not a lawyer & they shouldn’t take my advice, but hopefully they’ll at least double check with someone who is.
    - prepend 7y ago
      Facebook certainly wants to be a platform based on their lobbying. But they are clearly a publisher by setting editorial guidelines and sponsoring and removing content.

TulliusCicero 7y ago

The phone company analogy doesn't really work, because phone calls are by default private, between exactly two parties, usually just two people. If you look at the tech company equivalent of that, like FB messenger, or Hangouts, or other messaging systems, they behave more similarly to the phone company. It'd be difficult to get in trouble for something you said in a private message. If you want the analogy to make sense, you'd have to use something that's more of a broadcasting platform, like TV or radio, or a magazine.

anm89 7y ago
Disagree with this. First off, in the world of VOIP and conference calls this isn't true anymore, and we still don't censor VOIP providers. The point is you can choose to be a carrier or you can chose to be a service.
TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
We don’t need analogies. It’s fairly clear how these organisations and their internet powered machination work. So let’s talk about them in that context.
seamyb88 7y ago
The phone analogy is terrible because the vitriol doesn't prevail. You aren't bombarded with 100 people's bigotry every time you pick up the phone.
- gd1 7y ago
  What about the postal service then? That is a common carrier. Never mind being bombarded with bigotry, people can bombard you with literal bombs using the postal service, but hey if some kids are shitposting memes on 8chan... well we have to shut down that service altogether.
  - Fnoord 7y ago
    Radio, TV, and newspaper are each a better analogy. Postal service is more akin to the infrastructure of radio/TV/newspaper (which differs, and is rather not one but various, e.g. cable, FM, and paperboys). The analogy with Internet would be transit providers. The undersea cables between US and EU, for example. These are heavily logged, e.g. by UK. Imagine all your post be scanned, that'd be GDR-esque.

Mvandenbergh 7y ago

The problem with at least Facebook and Twitter (and possibly Google) in this analysis is that their attention-grabbing model requires them to analyse and interfere with the data which is coming through their systems. The only way not to do that would be for FB timelines and Twitter feeds to be strictly sequential feeds which at some point in the past they may have been but they are not now. Once you start basing your business model on selectively making some content more visible, you have already crossed a rubicon between a strictly neutral common carrier and a publisher. (There is an error in the quote where they use publisher when they mean common carrier, a publisher is precisely an organisation that does have full editorial control of what they put out which is the opposite of what they intend from the rest of the quote.

chr1 7y ago
They could make the algorithm customizable and let the user to control it. That would be much better than the current blackbox where you get uninteresting stories promoted because of misclicking once, and have no way to tell the algorithm about its mistakes.
- luckylion 7y ago
  > They could make the algorithm customizable and let the user to control it. It often gets it wrong, but that's the general idea, isn't it? You don't customize it by checking some boxes or adding some keywords, you customize it by giving attention to some results more than to others. Obviously, there's the added layer that they aren't optimizing for your satisfaction but for your business value to them.
jyrkesh 7y ago
Exactly. At face value, I'm firmly in favor of what Ravikant was saying, but even the simple example of a spam filter proves how it's impossible in practice: without basic spam filtering, something like Twitter would be absolutely unusable in the face of endless crypto and malware spam. At some level, Twitter/FB/et al have to do SOMETHING to shape/filter the volume of traffic they receive.

TheOperator 7y ago

It's inevitable these platforms will have government mandated restrictions on speech, as well as government mandates to NOT restrict speech. There's no other way to really manage the issue. Whinging of the poorly informed that free speech protections can only apply to the government aside.

spamizbad 7y ago

Doesn’t make sense: a phone conversation is more akin to a gchat or messenger convo. A Facebook page or wall is more akin to publishing... and historically publishers have used considerable discretion about what gets published.

pas 7y ago

They fucked up when money entered the picture. Naturally some companies don't want their ads next to ISIL/ISIS beheading/recruitment videos for some reason... and it's allegedly bad for growing the audience too. The bottom line is, that G/FB/Tw did not remain neutral, because that hurt the aforementioned bottom line. Now, of course - as you said/transcribed - the problem is that if fascism becomes profitable then what?

namirez 7y ago

> If it's illegal, we'll take it down. Give us a court order. Otherwise we don't touch it. Interestingly the underlying assumptions in most analyses like this is that everyone lives in US and obeys US laws. What if China goes after a political dissident through Facebook? Even worse, what if Facebook propaganda is used to incite genocide by the government of Myanmar? Where do you get the court order to take it down? Unfortunately the business model of Silicon Valley is at odds with this simplistic first-amendment/court-order sort of argument.

legostormtroopr 7y ago
> Interestingly the underlying assumptions in most analyses like this is that everyone lives in US and obeys US laws. Even better! Stop trying to act like global companies, and pick a jurisdiction to work out of. If Facebook is an American company (which they are), they are held to and follow US laws. Maybe this means that Facebook doesn't remove Nazi propaganda because of the US 1st Amendment. What follows is actual proper competition, perhaps Germany bans Facebook, which means either a new German company GesichtBuch, can compete by being based in Germany and following german laws. Or, people enjoy Facebook and then rally their government for laws to be changed. What we have now is companies trying to exist in every country, which means they have to follow the worst laws of every country.
- wolco 7y ago
  So give up Germany (lost: billions in revenue) or give up Nazi propaganda (lost:thousands in revenue). Companies are trying to make money. That's the purpose of a company.
  - prepend 7y ago
    So give up China (lost billions) or give up democratic propaganda. It’s not the size of the market that should determine right or wrong. Having free speech laws means you get democracy and nazi stuff and spend time on more important stuff as to what’s too nazi or too democratic. Just rely on the rule of law.

arrrg 7y ago

Public-facing communication has always been trickier and much more muddied. Twitter is not like telephone (except direct messages I suppose). A more apt comparison would be newspapers (which have publishers and editorial staff) or radio/TV (with similar structures). So the analogy only really works if you claim something like “Twitter should have been like paper mills“, but I’m not sure whether that’s the right analogy or useful way of thinking about Twitter. Sometimes things are just complex and I do actually think it’s wrong for Twitter to run away from this responsibility. They are the ones who want to run this public-facing way of communicating as a capitalist enterprise, they should be beholden to doing it right (whatever that means – but that’s the hard part and it’s ok that it’s hard).

kelnos 7y ago

The telephone analogy is terrible. Phone calls are usually between two people, or a small number of people. At the very least, they're bounded to some relatively small number. When you post something on Twitter, unless your account is private, you've broadcasted your speech to anyone in the world who cares to see it. Not moderating any speech at all is a quick way to allow a community to turn into a cesspit of spam and trolling. Look at any web board or forum over the past several decades for inspiration. They either have moderation, or they get overrun.

ericdykstra 7y ago
Twitter isn’t a phone call, but it also isn’t a message board. You only see the tweets of the people you personally choose to follow; it doesn’t matter if there are 100 billion spam accounts posting ads to nobody. There are millions of Twitter accounts in Japanese, but if you don’t follow any of them, and nobody you follow retweets them, you’d never know they exist. You can also block or mute specific accounts, mute keywords, etc for even finer control.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > You only see the tweets of the people you personally choose to follow That's not at all true by default; you also see tweets from people that have paid for involuntary reach for the tweet (promoted tweets), tweets that people you follow have interacted with, tweets that respond to or mention people you follow, and probably others that I'm forgetting.
  - ericdykstra 7y ago
    So Twitter broke their platform, and they show ads. This is vastly different from a message board that shows all messages to all users.
- deleted 7y ago
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- fouc 7y ago

mch82 7y ago

Edit: I see the Naval quote is from the Joe Rogan podcast (which I often enjoy). I haven’t listened to the episode, so don’t have full context but Naval seems to have the timeline, “publisher”, and “platform” confused. Facebook, Google (YouTube), and Twitter have historically claimed to be “neutral tech platforms” like phone utilities or internet service providers. They maintained that claim so that responsibility for content would be on the user/sharer and so they could avoid regulation. More recently, at least Facebook has claimed (2018) it is a “publisher”. They updated their claim in order to justify the right to editorialize & choose what content people see on Facebook. The shift to “publisher” aligns with the reality that the news feed algorithm is a form of editorializing. The algorithm decides what you see. It doesn’t matter if a human or a computer is making the decision.

manfredo 7y ago
The news feed does not editorialize. It doesn't edit the content itself. It's automated curation. Furthermore this whole "publisher" vs "platform" argument is not nearly as relevant as people make it seem. Contrary to popular belief, tech companies describing themselves as publishers instead of platforms does not affect the fact that they are not held liable for user generated content (so long as they meet reasonable standards for taking it down when notified). The New York Times is afforded the same protection for user generated content that they host (e.g. their comments section).
- deleted 7y ago
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- mch82 7y ago
  “Facebook, [company attorneys] repeatedly argued, is a publisher, and a company that makes editorial decisions, which are protected by the first amendment.” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/02/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-platform-publisher-lawsuit https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/02/facebook-...
  - manfredo 7y ago

viraptor 7y ago

> We're publishers. Whatever goes through our pipes goes through our pipes. If it's illegal, we'll take it down. That's a great way to lose users though. They need to provide some limit for abuse. That means either good moderation tools for end-user (which I don't see how they could scale without also providing bad-people-lists) or moderation on their side. Otherwise you end up with /b/ or worse. If they want their users (and advertisers) to stay, they need to filter content. They're social networks, not limited-scope opt-in party lines.

johnzhou 7y ago

That's a great way to lose advertisers. Case in point: Youtube's demonetization policy.

drak0n1c 7y ago
Advertisers didn't care for over a decade until partisan agitators such as Media Matters and Vox methodically cherry picked screenshots of brands next to maligned youtube channels, and then contacted brands threatening to publish names and shame if they didn't pull their advertising. The result of this short-sighted crusade was Youtube becoming unprofitable for millions of small creators around the world, and people of all sides of politics suffering including non-political LGBT creators.
- lackbeard 7y ago
  This is the first I’ve heard this hypothesis. Do you have links to any data?
hnuser54 7y ago
Any particular advertiser needs Youtube more than Youtube needs the advertiser. Youtube has a critical hold on the young adult market in particular. If Youtube just said, "if you don't like it, Pepsi, someone else can enjoy this ad space instead", what recourse would they have? In conclusion Youtube demonetizes because they want to and need an excuse.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  If you look at the data, the "adpocalypse" cost alphabet over 70 billion dollars on their market cap.
flukus 7y ago
It's also a great way to whitewash history. Want to educate the next generation about Hitlers atrocities? No money for you. Basically anything war seems to be getting demonetized these days. Advertisers only want to appear next to cats on roombas.

jacquesm 7y ago

'we're publishers' is exactly the wrong thing to say. Publishers have some responsibility over what they publish. The smart thing to say would have been 'we're common carriers'. And then to actually behave like common carriers.. At least that would have gotten them to first base. Now they look like heavy handed censors with a stake in the game.

loceng 7y ago

If you don't want to act as a steward of society - with your own leadership, governance, as a lead - if you don't want to be accountable to potential societal consequences, then sure, ignore the behaviour of bad actors or the irrational. The problem has been lock-in and users unable to "take their network with them." The idea of decentralization to me is being fully mobile and having the decision to be able to choose what network(s) you're part of, and in part that would be based on leadership, governance, rules that each platform can have in place - and ideally enforcing and evolving as necessary. Imagine you could have Facebook but immediately you can decide who's leadership you're following for moderation and all other settings/decisions of the platform - and thus who your attention, money, goes to. The government being in charge of moderating free speech - except for perhaps acting along with, setting rules for authority like police - is going to be very inefficient, bureaucratic, not leveraging the efficiencies of free market systems, capitalism. Government could potentially play an important role, however private sector options are likely to exist sooner and be better. Let people choose who moderates their community, networks, allow the best options to naturally rise to the top - to act as role models for competitors to take notice and attempt to mimic the best parts.

loceng 7y ago
This comments' votes have been going up and down since I posted it - funny to see.

positr0n 7y ago

> "We're publishers. Whatever goes through our pipes goes through our pipes. If it's illegal, we'll take it down. Give us a court order. Otherwise we don't touch it." It is not possible to do that and make as much money as google, fb, etc. The end result of unmoderated public places on the internet is always this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread... Which is great! But not for making money. From that article: > Allowing any aspect of your brand to come anywhere near something unpopular and taboo is like a giant Christmas present for people who hate you [...] It doesn’t matter if taboo material makes up 1% of your comment section; it will inevitably make up 100% of what people hear about your comment section and then of what people think is in your comment section.

prepend 7y ago
> It is not possible to do that and make as much money as google, fb, etc. Exactly. This is a choice that companies need to make. Or a regulation coming.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  A regulation is coming anyway; the CDA safe harbor, which is what both those complaining about what the big tech firms are censoring and those complaining about what they are not censoring are targeting, has been under broad, bipartisan attack for some time, under a variety of different pretexts. Pm

dmode 7y ago

Naval, like most VC investors, think too highly of themselves and go on twitter tirades in areas where they have absolutely no clue what they are talking about. The quote above is a real example. Their views are tinged by living in advance Western societies, and in their libertarian bubbles. In real life, a platform like Google and Facebook, that has unprecedented reach globally, is the opposite of a private phone call. ISIS rode YouTube's lax enforcement policy to create a Caliphate and slaughter millions of people. Was Naval advocating Google to wait for an order from the Syrian government before taking out beheading videos ? In India, WhatsApp is used by religious extremists to form lynching mobs, resulting in deaths of multiple people just based on rumors. We are living in a world, where we have software platforms that hold unprecedented leverage to alter people's lives. We should try to move away from some one size fits all simplistic policies that are created in Sand Hill road thought bubble

neonate 7y ago
If I understand the argument, he isn't saying that those horrible things are fine and should be allowed. He's saying that it's the government's job to do something about them. Once the tech companies took a bite out of that poisoned apple, their fate was sealed, to become government-controlled.
- dmode 7y ago
  In many places across the world, there is barely any government to act on these things. A functioning government is limited to a handful of countries

MuffinFlavored 7y ago

> "If it's illegal, we'll take it down. Give us a court order. Otherwise we don't touch it" I think that works better on paper than in practice. If I get offended enough by something, can't I go try to sue under the premise of defamation?

prepend 7y ago
If you sue successfully you can get a legal order to take down the content as part of the judgement. Libel, slander, and harassment are all crimes or civil offenses (illegal). They work pretty well.
sparrish 7y ago
Carriers can't be sued for the content they carry. It's been tried many times and so long as the carrier acts like a carrier (neutral channel), it fails.
- adrr 7y ago
  Working at MySpace and getting sued by all the state attorney generals, that defense doesn’t work. We were ultimately responsible for the actions of our users including exploitation of minors which triggered the investigations.

ericdykstra 7y ago

This sounds right, but what if the corporations are more powerful than the government? What if they have enough money to collectively rent enough politicians so that they never have to face the scrutiny that Naval is talking about here? If social media platforms are picking the next congressmen and next president, and you’re in Congress vying to keep your seat, do you really want to introduce or sponsor legislation to upset these companies?

nostrademons 7y ago

They did this for many years - when I moved to Silicon Valley in 2009 tech's attitude was "We just provide the mechanism, we let our users determine policy". My first couple years at Google (09-10), management was very insistent that "We don't take sides - we show the user the best result for their query regardless of how much we dislike it." There were examples like literal searches for Nazis where the top result was a hate group and rather than censor it, Google took out a house ad (basically paid themselves, using the mechanisms available to the general public) saying "Don't like these results? We don't either, but we believe strongly in freedom of speech, and so we're using this space to explain our views without depriving others of theirs." The thing is, sometime around 2012-2014 this became unacceptable. Public discourse shifted into "silence is complicitness - if you allow this speech on your platform, that means that you endorse it." So it became a forced-choice issue. And the thing is that if it's a forced choice, very few people are going to stand up and defend Nazis. Most of these tech execs personally hold fairly liberal, progressive views. When the general public said "You're a Nazi sympathizer because you show Nazi websites in the search results", a.) it wasn't true and b.) it was personally insulting, because that was essentially the opposite of what actually was true. And then once that started happening, you run into the age-old problem with restricting freedom of speech, which is that the people who hold the power to restrict it might not agree with you on what's worth restricting. Be careful what you wish for.

adamsea 7y ago
If search engine results are a "public space", can you yell fire in a crowded theater?
neonate 7y ago
> Public discourse shifted into "silence is complicitness - if you allow this speech on your platform, that means that you endorse it." Public discourse? Or the loudest segment of the discourse most influential on Googlers?
- nostrademons 7y ago
  The loudest segment of the discourse most influential on Googlers, but this caveat is usually inherent when we talk about "public discourse". (If you've studied Foucault, you'll recognize that power and influence are inherently tied in with the concept of discourse. Public speech happens all the time, but it only gets labeled "discourse" when it influences or is intended to influence society in some way.)

noelsusman 7y ago

Google, Facebook, and Twitter are not "literally picking" the next president or the next congressman. That is delusional.

chabad360 7y ago
Obviously they're not "literally" picking the next president, however they have full control on what opinions you see first, and they have utilized that ability to tilt many (yes, very many) people's opinions (especially those whose understanding of even general politics is superficial) towards a specific candidate.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  Under that logic we need to heavily regulate cereal boxes and milk cartons because many of us see that first thing every morning. My philosophy is to always be suspicious of those grabbing at the keys to power - they are up to no good.

Animats 7y ago

Worse, they don't want someone else doing their filtering. Try to write a Twitter or Facebook client with spam filtering. They don't want the user to have that kind of control.

testis321 7y ago

There should be only once choice, either you're a platform or a publisher. A platform should be open, and only illegal stuff should be removed. No preferences, no nothing. A publisher can be closed, can be whatever they want it, can filter whatever, promote whatever and censor whatever. ...but! If you're a publisher, you've decided what to publish, and you should be responsible for all content published on your webpage. Fake news? Illegal porn? Nuclear bomb plans? Your problem, your responsiblity, you face the consequences. If you want to be an open platform and blame users for content posted there (and have them face the consequences), then you should have no right to promote, censor or block/hide content (except illegal).

mike00632 7y ago
The "illegal" criteria seems rational for countries that have rational laws but in many countries there are laws against political speech or criticism of people in power. By removing that 'illegal' speech in those countries the platform is in effect working as a government actor to police customers in those nations.
- Reelin 7y ago
  In such nations (ex China), this entire debate is irrelevant - you follow their rules or they kick you out. In western societies, this debate is relevant and I strongly side with the poster you replied to. That being said, reasonably unbiased filtering should probably be allowed in some form. For example, while I don't want YouTube picking sides politically, I also wouldn't want to force them to host hardcore pornography against their will.

BurningFrog 7y ago

> ...so they will be controlled by the government." The cynical Regulatory Capture inspired take is that they want to be regulated now. Because regulation always favors the established players and makes it very hard for newcomers to overthrow them. Google, FB etc are now big and old enough to need that protection, and settle in to comfortable corporate middle age.

mhermher 7y ago

They're more like broadcasters than carriers. The phone companies don't broadcast. If you broadcast, then you're going to run into this issue one way or another.

arminiusreturns 7y ago

Considering In-Q-Tels involvement, sometimes I think they major social media companies were setup as trojan horses to enable censorship and governmental control in the first place. (besides the more obvious surveillance aspect)

deleted 7y ago

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Alex3917 7y ago

I mean you can say it's a clear analysis in the abstract, but if you look at the HN comments on the thread about CloudFlare cutting off 8chan it's clear that most people no longer agree with the principle as soon as they're presented with a real world example. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20610395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20610395

deleted 7y ago

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sanderjd 7y ago

The problem with the analogy to the phone system is that conversations via phone are transient and private. There is no place with the AT&T logo on it where you can go and see that awful thing that person said. The internet itself is a much better fit for the phone company analogy, and indeed internet service and backbone providers have pretty much entirely been able to stay out of this. A better (though still imperfect) analogy really is media: TV stations, newspapers, magazines, radio stations. And indeed you see similar problems there as the online media companies are facing now. The biggest difference is that traditional media companies were forced to make editorial choices because of physical constraints - physical space for print, airtime and spectrum for TV and radio - so this question of whether you could just let anyone say anything in your publication or on your broadcast just never really came up.

angrygoat 7y ago

A better analogy for Twitter and Facebook is the town square, rather than the phone company. They don't just enable point to point discussion, but broadcast to any and all who will listen. Which is fine, and good, except when algorithms keyed only to engagement cause the noisiest, most provocative and potentially divisive content to be amplified. We have, for a very long time, had laws concerning appropriate behaviour in a town square, or any other 'public' setting: don't incite riots, don't behave violently towards others, be respectful if someone doesn't want to talk and walks away. I support the efforts we're now seeing to bring those norms into online spaces.

mavhc 7y ago
This is the actual thing about technology, amplification. One person has 1 voice, but then they buy a megaphone, or say something to get attention online and the algorithms are programmed to say that's good. What's picked to be amplified, or muted, is the issue.

atupis 7y ago

Problem is that is only a carrier creates a barrier to monetize the platform through ads. Nobody with a serious brand doesn't want to see ads next to nazi propaganda and some kinky furry porn.

dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago

The problem wasn't so much about "taking stuff down that wasn't illegal because somebody screamed." More problematic wa sthe fact that, in the case of Facebook, their algorithms promoted content that was more "engaging" (read: controversial), so basically the whole system turned out to be optimized for fake news.

Jack5500 7y ago

This has actually been the law in i.e. Germany and I think many other countries as well. As long as the platform doesn't interfere with the content (§ 8 Abs. 1 TMG) they are directly accountable for the content (Which doesn't mean that they don't have to take it down in case of an infringement for example). But as soon as they moderate said content they are legally liable. And this is exactly what social media platforms have done and that is one reason why they are responsible for their content now. This is of course only one part of the truth, because at the same time there has been a shift in perception of these platforms and other laws (i.e. Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz) have been specifically aimed at social media platforms to hold them accountable.

sam1r 7y ago

"Wow, that is such a clear analysis that someone should transcribe it." There's no way the three could have predicted the show that would have been put on today. Just like we couldn't have predicted the massive impact iphones/android [steve jobs + android] would have had in the past decade on today's society. My two cents, i guess.

ezoe 7y ago

The problem is, the current law isn't match the pipe analogy. If it's a private communication, they can be a pipe. But they are publicly present the information as soon as it gets to the pipe. There are many expressions you can't publicly present by law. For example, copyright infringement, privacy infringement, pornography, national/personal/organization secret, fraud, malware and all. You may argue some of them are ridiculous, but there are some expression you agree to be supressed. Like the fake news of you committing the crime. Yes, In an ideal rule of the law world, you should take the court order to censor that expression. But it takes time. The current law is, if you knowingly publish the material that is obviously illegal and ignore the censorship demand, you are responsible for that.

oever 7y ago

People working for Google, Facebook, and Twitter are smart. They understand this and have used the argument of being just infrastructure in the past. They had to switch their story because they are not a neutral carrier. They prefer some messages over others. This is linked to their revenue model. The simplest solution to 'just be infrastructure' is to show all messages linearly. A more complex solution with possibly lower revenue is this: they could let the users pick algorithms to filter and sort the content, then they could claim to be infrastructure again. The user would need to be able to inspect the algorithms. The simplest one would be: no sorting, no filtering. That would make the sites unpleasant. The smart people at Google, Facebook, and Twitter must have considered this option but decided that it is more profitable to share the power over what people see with the regulators than to share it with the people.

tudorw 7y ago

If Google, Facebook, and Twitter had been smart about this, they... would have consulted deeply with lawmakers, regulators, copyright owners and other deeply entrenched parties before doing anything... move fast, and, er, what was it again ?

te_chris 7y ago

The day they started messing with ML driven results and TL's was the day the whole argument about neutrality went out the window.

elbrian 7y ago

Excellent analogy! I'm so happy that telephone carriers do nothing to prevent my phone from being called by spammers 10x daily.