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In my opinion, the solution is simple: If any “platform” censors beyond removing illegal or copyrighted content or spam, they should have their “platform” stat

In my opinion, the solution is simple: If any “platform” censors beyond removing illegal or copyrighted content or spam, they should have their “platform” status revoked, and they should be considered a publisher. This prevents such companies from using “platform” status as a cost saving mechanism to help them become large monopolies. Companies like Facebook would not have been able to take over so much of the market if they had to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on curating content to prevent lawsuits, etc. I also don’t think of this as some kind of punishment. It’s perfectly reasonable to want to set up some kind of publishing company that has user-generated content; it’s just not reasonable to expect such a company to grow to such a global scale as Twitter or Facebook. Edit: added “spam” to reasons

deleted 7y ago
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pavel_lishin 7y ago
> If any “platform” censors beyond removing illegal or copyrighted content, they should have their “platform” status revoked, and they should be considered a publisher. What about spam? And would this extend to marketplaces? If a company allows users to sell educational resources for kids, what would happen if they start removing items that clearly don't fit?
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- buboard 7y ago
  They could have a checkbox "remove spam" that the moderators could turn on and off. There's not a lot of ambiguity about spam so it's not a real issue. I think the law should be "platforms should not tinker with their users' expressed preferences - you can't hide something that they 've chosen to subscribe to". > And would this extend to marketplaces? I believe these are already considered publishers ? In any case it's no different than how traditional bookstores work
  - danShumway 7y ago
    > There's not a lot of ambiguity about spam so it's not a real issue. People say this, I don't think it's true. I think there is ambiguity around when marketing crosses into spam. If you look at different communities, even HN and Reddit, you'll find different opinions about what kind of promotion crosses that line. Individual communities need to be able to make their own decisions on that, they don't need blanket rules applied across the board to all platforms.
    - buboard 7y ago
      reddit has already a "spam level" slider. They should allow subreddits to turn off spam filtering completely - although of course it doesnt make sense. But if they want to be classified as a simple carrier they would have to .
      - danShumway 7y ago
        In your definition of censorship, would it be OK for Facebook to hide some political articles behind a "filter dishonest posts" setting that was on by default for users and groups? Is it OK to do that to a marketing post?
        buboard 7y ago
        I think facebook should be required to have controls to turn off their various filterings. And they should be held liable if someone can prove they systematic hide certain views from searches. That would be enough for me (having them on by default is also OK). (Incidentally i started using twitter in "view latest" mode and i prefer it - turns out their expensive algorithms were pretty useless for me)
  - pavel_lishin 7y ago
    > There's not a lot of ambiguity about spam so it's not a real issue I couldn't disagree harder. I'd go into detail, but a) I'm at work, and b) the fact that we disagree is evidence that there _is_ ambiguity.
- repolfx 7y ago
  Spam can be solved by just making it easy for people to spot when something was classified as spam, e.g. as spam folders do.
  - abathur 7y ago
    Maybe I'm misreading this comment or the context (because I think the biggest single piece we're currently lacking in platform moderation is maximal transparency into what/who gets moderated and how)... but how would this "solve" spam in any case where the ratio of spam-to-signal crosses whatever threshold it takes to start breaking a platform's network effects, reducing engagement, driving out existing users, warding off new ones, shifting how the community views what the platform is for, etc.?
    - repolfx 7y ago
      Spam didn't break email's network effects. Yeah, it hurts it a bit, but there were lots of attempts to build competing email networks that didn't go anywhere. This is partly because email isn't "for" anything except communication. The idea that platforms must stand for something is new and wrong. A good platform stands for nothing and is open to everyone.
      - abathur 7y ago
        This might just come down to why I'm not sure I'm interpreting you right. It's one thing to have the platform equivalent of a spam folder for new top-level posts that smell like junk. But these platforms have more significant design challenges: to cleanly handle replies, retweets + commentary, mentions, comments, threads, and anything else that is sort of inherently contextual (including the possibility that there are legitimate non-spam posts that interact with a spam post to quote, comment, reply, warn others, and so on). I'm a little skeptical about how well anyone can meet that design in a way that makes it easy to see what was flagged as spam and isn't also sensitive to the ratio of spam to legitimate posts... Its possible you're imagining that spam posts don't show up at all in a thread unless you hit a single toggle that re-renders the thread with any pruned replies and branches in place. Interfaces like this don't spiral out if the ratio changes, but I also don't think they make it easy to spot the flagged posts. An interface that marks the posts in-thread can make it easier, but they're sensitive to that ratio. Very sensitive if they shows the full post, and a little sensitive if they replace the post with a clickable indicator that there's suspected spam there.
Traster 7y ago
I see two issues with this. First: What you're describing is Gab - a platform that literally only enforces legal restrictions, the dynamic on that site is that the most extreme voices drive away the reasonable people that actually attract new people. Your rule would essentially also stop reddit from existing. The second is that Facebook doesn't have to censor you to censor you. They just tweak your post so it stops showing up other peoples feeds. Youtube does this all the time, they don't censor anyone, they just make sure no one can find the voices they don't like. Meanwhile the content they like gets boosted, we've seen this all the time where you go to youtube for a video about puppies and thanks to autoplay 4 hours later you're hearing about how feminists are destroying western civilization from within by Jordan Peterson.
- buboard 7y ago
  Those are real problems. For this to work, reddit would have to remove its frontpage and r/all - everything would have to be explicitly subscription based. Youtube should be required to enable alternative modes (view all latest) and should be held liable if one can prove that they are e.g. suppressing a legal viewpoint in their searches. I see this as win-win for transparency
bcrosby95 7y ago
I agree with the spirit of the idea, even if it might not be realistically defined or enforced. One thing that comes to mind is how do you define "illegal" content? A huge hangup here tends to be free speech - lots of legal free speech is not legal in places like Europe - e.g. there generally isn't a concept of hate speech in the US, and in the US inciting violence literally means "lets go over here and beat these people up right now" - anything less tends not to be inciting violence. Europe tends to be a lot more restrictive on these fronts. And if you want the bar to be "illegal anywhere", then places like China would make a lot of things illegal that everyone in the west would be fine with. If you want to say that of course we wouldn't pay attention to China, now you're back to picking and choosing countries likely based upon arbitrary metrics.
- buboard 7y ago
  Illegal content is pretty well defined. Pretty much every platform bans illegal content , quite effectively and taking into account local variations so it's not an issue.
- AlchemistCamp 7y ago
  > lots of legal free speech is not legal in places like Europe... places like China would make a lot of things illegal that everyone in the west would be fine with The obvious solution, for a US company, is to follow US law and accept that some content will be blocked in China, strict theocratic states and possibly Europe.
marcinzm 7y ago
So no specialized platforms that cover a single topic or area? After all, then they'd need to delete off topic posts. What about user moderators deleting things? What about a mailing list owner enforcing guidelines? Or is all public online communication one giant unmanaged and unstructured sets of posts on everything and anything? Or, in reality, nothing but paid advertisements. edit: What about downvoting? Does that not count because it's by users? However the algorithm for ranking and matching is controlled by the platform, does that count as censorship since it will promote some posts over others?
- buboard 7y ago
  > no specialized platforms That's not an issue with reddit - moderators are not paid, nor is reddit responsible for them - and when users subscribe in a sub, the contract is that they 'll abide by moderation rules and downvoting rules. That's not corporate censorship. The problem is when the company itself starts censoring what the users have voluntarily subscribed to read.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    Yet HN are, as I understand it, responsible for dang and sctb. They regularly moderate away the shite - which preserves one of the less polluted spots on the net. How do you square that circle? Surely you should object to what HN does - in fact why would a believer in no censorship even have an account here if HN are censoring (moderating and limiting) what everyone is able to say?
    - buboard 7y ago
      Yeap, having paid moderators would classify you as a publisher - you 're essentially a newspaper publishing op-eds. HN would be a publisher and i don't find that wrong. However, HN could instead be subreddit in reddit's platform, with HN (or preferably an unrelated external entity) paying the moderators.
      - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
shadowgovt 7y ago
That pushes the power to control who says what from individual companies to the government, since the government is classifying "illegal."
- buboard 7y ago
  Illegal comes in two forms: illegal to publish like calls to violence and libel laws which refer to newspapers and "publishers". While the government can sway #2 to introduce political biases, it's not easy to change the definintion of the first in an obviously biased way The companies can still choose to remain nonpublishers, i.e. platforms - but they have to be impartial. That doesn't mean that censored communities can 't exist in their platforms - but the censoring can only be done by an entity unrelated to them. I think it's a good compromise to separate the platform from the censors.
iron0013 7y ago
Hi, if you could stop spreading the lie that there is some magical distinction between a 'publisher' and a 'platform' that somehow limits what a business is legally allowed to do, I would really appreciate it, and I know a lot of other folks would too! Thanks! https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190613/03172142391/once-more-with-feeling-there-is-no-legal-distinction-between-platform-publisher.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190613/03172142391/once-...
- buboard 7y ago
  OK you can replace "platform" with "protected by CDA 230 ", the argument still stands as is. https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230 https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230
  - iron0013 7y ago
    I'm not sure what you think you're proving with that link. CDA 230 does something very close to the opposite of what you seem to think that it does. It protects the providers of interactive computer services from liability, but it does not restrict their control over whether to provide those services or not, which would of course obviously be a violation of those interactive computer services' first amendment rights. CDA 230 protects, it does not restrict. The text of the code is really quite straightforward and easy to interpret if you do it in good faith, putting your ideology aside.
    - buboard 7y ago
      > it does not restrict their control this whole thread is about the hypothetical situation in which the two are linked by new laws
      - iron0013 7y ago
        A hypothetical situation which could never arise, because the first amendment protects everyone, including both the users AND the operators of interactive computer services (such as HN, Reddit, Facebook, Google search, etc).
danShumway 7y ago
> It’s perfectly reasonable to want to set up some kind of publishing company that has user-generated content Note that under this setup, a forum like HN would be basically impossible to maintain. How would you set up a publishing content that included user content without having a human pre-vet all of that content? And HN has, like, 3 moderators? The practical end result of this would be that the Internet would split into a bunch of 8chans, and a bunch of TV stations, with nothing in-between. If you care about free expression, making businesses scared of user content is counterproductive.
- repolfx 7y ago
  Depends what you mean by "a forum like HN". Before HN the main geek watering hole was Slashdot, which famously never censored content and fought strongly against attempts to force it to do so. Slashdot also had a rather sophisticated moderation and scoring system, that allowed spam (hot grits etc) to be downranked and appear auto-collapsed, whilst longer form content was upvoted and expanded by default - even if it was a reply to negative ranked content. You may feel a personal preference for HN, or not, but they were essentially the same from the perspective of any lawyer. In other words HN could easily keep its distinctive feel without ever banning or erasing anything, just by implementing sufficient controls that let users see what they want to see: in fact it already does via options like showdead.
  - potatoz2 7y ago
    The idea that it's OK to implement an algorithm that takes some user's input to censor posts but it's not OK to do so directly seems like it skirts the central question. If I have upvotes and downvotes, weighted the way I like, and I limit who can get an account in the first place, I can probably achieve the speech outcome I want relatively easily "without" human intervention.
MadWombat 7y ago
Once you add spam to this list, it becomes super fuzzy. Unsolicited marketing is obviously spam and so are the Nigerian scams, but what about some cult manifesto or conspiracy theory or chain mail letter? Or possibly a crowdfunding link that some well meaning, but misguided people sent around a few thousand times? Or possibly a request for donations by some non-profit? Propaganda posts by a political party? Where is the line?
- gonational 7y ago
  Why would a “conspiracy theory” be considered spam? A chain mail letter might be spam. A “cult manifesto” is probably not. I don’t think it’s too fuzzy, as long as companies don’t arbitrarily define “things we don’t like” as “spam”.

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pavel_lishin 7y ago

> If any “platform” censors beyond removing illegal or copyrighted content, they should have their “platform” status revoked, and they should be considered a publisher. What about spam? And would this extend to marketplaces? If a company allows users to sell educational resources for kids, what would happen if they start removing items that clearly don't fit?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
buboard 7y ago
They could have a checkbox "remove spam" that the moderators could turn on and off. There's not a lot of ambiguity about spam so it's not a real issue. I think the law should be "platforms should not tinker with their users' expressed preferences - you can't hide something that they 've chosen to subscribe to". > And would this extend to marketplaces? I believe these are already considered publishers ? In any case it's no different than how traditional bookstores work
- danShumway 7y ago
  > There's not a lot of ambiguity about spam so it's not a real issue. People say this, I don't think it's true. I think there is ambiguity around when marketing crosses into spam. If you look at different communities, even HN and Reddit, you'll find different opinions about what kind of promotion crosses that line. Individual communities need to be able to make their own decisions on that, they don't need blanket rules applied across the board to all platforms.
  - buboard 7y ago
    reddit has already a "spam level" slider. They should allow subreddits to turn off spam filtering completely - although of course it doesnt make sense. But if they want to be classified as a simple carrier they would have to .
    - danShumway 7y ago
      In your definition of censorship, would it be OK for Facebook to hide some political articles behind a "filter dishonest posts" setting that was on by default for users and groups? Is it OK to do that to a marketing post?
      - buboard 7y ago
        I think facebook should be required to have controls to turn off their various filterings. And they should be held liable if someone can prove they systematic hide certain views from searches. That would be enough for me (having them on by default is also OK). (Incidentally i started using twitter in "view latest" mode and i prefer it - turns out their expensive algorithms were pretty useless for me)
- pavel_lishin 7y ago
  > There's not a lot of ambiguity about spam so it's not a real issue I couldn't disagree harder. I'd go into detail, but a) I'm at work, and b) the fact that we disagree is evidence that there _is_ ambiguity.
repolfx 7y ago
Spam can be solved by just making it easy for people to spot when something was classified as spam, e.g. as spam folders do.
- abathur 7y ago
  Maybe I'm misreading this comment or the context (because I think the biggest single piece we're currently lacking in platform moderation is maximal transparency into what/who gets moderated and how)... but how would this "solve" spam in any case where the ratio of spam-to-signal crosses whatever threshold it takes to start breaking a platform's network effects, reducing engagement, driving out existing users, warding off new ones, shifting how the community views what the platform is for, etc.?
  - repolfx 7y ago
    Spam didn't break email's network effects. Yeah, it hurts it a bit, but there were lots of attempts to build competing email networks that didn't go anywhere. This is partly because email isn't "for" anything except communication. The idea that platforms must stand for something is new and wrong. A good platform stands for nothing and is open to everyone.
    - abathur 7y ago
      This might just come down to why I'm not sure I'm interpreting you right. It's one thing to have the platform equivalent of a spam folder for new top-level posts that smell like junk. But these platforms have more significant design challenges: to cleanly handle replies, retweets + commentary, mentions, comments, threads, and anything else that is sort of inherently contextual (including the possibility that there are legitimate non-spam posts that interact with a spam post to quote, comment, reply, warn others, and so on). I'm a little skeptical about how well anyone can meet that design in a way that makes it easy to see what was flagged as spam and isn't also sensitive to the ratio of spam to legitimate posts... Its possible you're imagining that spam posts don't show up at all in a thread unless you hit a single toggle that re-renders the thread with any pruned replies and branches in place. Interfaces like this don't spiral out if the ratio changes, but I also don't think they make it easy to spot the flagged posts. An interface that marks the posts in-thread can make it easier, but they're sensitive to that ratio. Very sensitive if they shows the full post, and a little sensitive if they replace the post with a clickable indicator that there's suspected spam there.

Traster 7y ago

I see two issues with this. First: What you're describing is Gab - a platform that literally only enforces legal restrictions, the dynamic on that site is that the most extreme voices drive away the reasonable people that actually attract new people. Your rule would essentially also stop reddit from existing. The second is that Facebook doesn't have to censor you to censor you. They just tweak your post so it stops showing up other peoples feeds. Youtube does this all the time, they don't censor anyone, they just make sure no one can find the voices they don't like. Meanwhile the content they like gets boosted, we've seen this all the time where you go to youtube for a video about puppies and thanks to autoplay 4 hours later you're hearing about how feminists are destroying western civilization from within by Jordan Peterson.

buboard 7y ago
Those are real problems. For this to work, reddit would have to remove its frontpage and r/all - everything would have to be explicitly subscription based. Youtube should be required to enable alternative modes (view all latest) and should be held liable if one can prove that they are e.g. suppressing a legal viewpoint in their searches. I see this as win-win for transparency

bcrosby95 7y ago

I agree with the spirit of the idea, even if it might not be realistically defined or enforced. One thing that comes to mind is how do you define "illegal" content? A huge hangup here tends to be free speech - lots of legal free speech is not legal in places like Europe - e.g. there generally isn't a concept of hate speech in the US, and in the US inciting violence literally means "lets go over here and beat these people up right now" - anything less tends not to be inciting violence. Europe tends to be a lot more restrictive on these fronts. And if you want the bar to be "illegal anywhere", then places like China would make a lot of things illegal that everyone in the west would be fine with. If you want to say that of course we wouldn't pay attention to China, now you're back to picking and choosing countries likely based upon arbitrary metrics.

buboard 7y ago
Illegal content is pretty well defined. Pretty much every platform bans illegal content , quite effectively and taking into account local variations so it's not an issue.
AlchemistCamp 7y ago
> lots of legal free speech is not legal in places like Europe... places like China would make a lot of things illegal that everyone in the west would be fine with The obvious solution, for a US company, is to follow US law and accept that some content will be blocked in China, strict theocratic states and possibly Europe.

marcinzm 7y ago

So no specialized platforms that cover a single topic or area? After all, then they'd need to delete off topic posts. What about user moderators deleting things? What about a mailing list owner enforcing guidelines? Or is all public online communication one giant unmanaged and unstructured sets of posts on everything and anything? Or, in reality, nothing but paid advertisements. edit: What about downvoting? Does that not count because it's by users? However the algorithm for ranking and matching is controlled by the platform, does that count as censorship since it will promote some posts over others?

buboard 7y ago
> no specialized platforms That's not an issue with reddit - moderators are not paid, nor is reddit responsible for them - and when users subscribe in a sub, the contract is that they 'll abide by moderation rules and downvoting rules. That's not corporate censorship. The problem is when the company itself starts censoring what the users have voluntarily subscribed to read.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Yet HN are, as I understand it, responsible for dang and sctb. They regularly moderate away the shite - which preserves one of the less polluted spots on the net. How do you square that circle? Surely you should object to what HN does - in fact why would a believer in no censorship even have an account here if HN are censoring (moderating and limiting) what everyone is able to say?
  - buboard 7y ago
    Yeap, having paid moderators would classify you as a publisher - you 're essentially a newspaper publishing op-eds. HN would be a publisher and i don't find that wrong. However, HN could instead be subreddit in reddit's platform, with HN (or preferably an unrelated external entity) paying the moderators.
    - NeedMoreTea 7y ago

shadowgovt 7y ago

That pushes the power to control who says what from individual companies to the government, since the government is classifying "illegal."

buboard 7y ago
Illegal comes in two forms: illegal to publish like calls to violence and libel laws which refer to newspapers and "publishers". While the government can sway #2 to introduce political biases, it's not easy to change the definintion of the first in an obviously biased way The companies can still choose to remain nonpublishers, i.e. platforms - but they have to be impartial. That doesn't mean that censored communities can 't exist in their platforms - but the censoring can only be done by an entity unrelated to them. I think it's a good compromise to separate the platform from the censors.

iron0013 7y ago

Hi, if you could stop spreading the lie that there is some magical distinction between a 'publisher' and a 'platform' that somehow limits what a business is legally allowed to do, I would really appreciate it, and I know a lot of other folks would too! Thanks! https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190613/03172142391/once-more-with-feeling-there-is-no-legal-distinction-between-platform-publisher.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190613/03172142391/once-...

buboard 7y ago
OK you can replace "platform" with "protected by CDA 230 ", the argument still stands as is. https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230 https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230
- iron0013 7y ago
  I'm not sure what you think you're proving with that link. CDA 230 does something very close to the opposite of what you seem to think that it does. It protects the providers of interactive computer services from liability, but it does not restrict their control over whether to provide those services or not, which would of course obviously be a violation of those interactive computer services' first amendment rights. CDA 230 protects, it does not restrict. The text of the code is really quite straightforward and easy to interpret if you do it in good faith, putting your ideology aside.
  - buboard 7y ago
    > it does not restrict their control this whole thread is about the hypothetical situation in which the two are linked by new laws
    - iron0013 7y ago
      A hypothetical situation which could never arise, because the first amendment protects everyone, including both the users AND the operators of interactive computer services (such as HN, Reddit, Facebook, Google search, etc).

danShumway 7y ago

> It’s perfectly reasonable to want to set up some kind of publishing company that has user-generated content Note that under this setup, a forum like HN would be basically impossible to maintain. How would you set up a publishing content that included user content without having a human pre-vet all of that content? And HN has, like, 3 moderators? The practical end result of this would be that the Internet would split into a bunch of 8chans, and a bunch of TV stations, with nothing in-between. If you care about free expression, making businesses scared of user content is counterproductive.

repolfx 7y ago
Depends what you mean by "a forum like HN". Before HN the main geek watering hole was Slashdot, which famously never censored content and fought strongly against attempts to force it to do so. Slashdot also had a rather sophisticated moderation and scoring system, that allowed spam (hot grits etc) to be downranked and appear auto-collapsed, whilst longer form content was upvoted and expanded by default - even if it was a reply to negative ranked content. You may feel a personal preference for HN, or not, but they were essentially the same from the perspective of any lawyer. In other words HN could easily keep its distinctive feel without ever banning or erasing anything, just by implementing sufficient controls that let users see what they want to see: in fact it already does via options like showdead.
- potatoz2 7y ago
  The idea that it's OK to implement an algorithm that takes some user's input to censor posts but it's not OK to do so directly seems like it skirts the central question. If I have upvotes and downvotes, weighted the way I like, and I limit who can get an account in the first place, I can probably achieve the speech outcome I want relatively easily "without" human intervention.

MadWombat 7y ago

Once you add spam to this list, it becomes super fuzzy. Unsolicited marketing is obviously spam and so are the Nigerian scams, but what about some cult manifesto or conspiracy theory or chain mail letter? Or possibly a crowdfunding link that some well meaning, but misguided people sent around a few thousand times? Or possibly a request for donations by some non-profit? Propaganda posts by a political party? Where is the line?

gonational 7y ago
Why would a “conspiracy theory” be considered spam? A chain mail letter might be spam. A “cult manifesto” is probably not. I don’t think it’s too fuzzy, as long as companies don’t arbitrarily define “things we don’t like” as “spam”.