11 ms·

The solution to this seems pretty straightforward: force social media companies to choose to identify as a "platform" or a "publisher", rather than a mix of the

The solution to this seems pretty straightforward: force social media companies to choose to identify as a "platform" or a "publisher", rather than a mix of the two that gets to claim the most convenient aspects of both. If they choose "platform", then they can take no responsibility for content posted, but also allow all content, and only remove content when it is required of them by the legal system (when the content is illegal and has been reported as such) If they choose "publisher" then they are free to censor, "deplatform", delete, or restrict posting of anything they wish, but if someone posts something illegal, they take their share of legal responsibility for publishing it.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> If they choose "platform", then they can take no responsibility for content posted, but also allow all content, and only remove content when it is required of them by the legal system (when the content is illegal and has been reported as such) If you require the content to be illegal for a platform to remove it and there is a consequence for being wrong, that's a problem since the determination outside of platform competency, which encourages them not to act even against likely-illegal content. Section 230 was adopted specifically to address this problem, that attempts to constrain socially undesirable content (even if aimed at illegal content) risked making online providers liable for all content under the model applies to traditional media which was viewed as not functioning at web scale, at least without inhibiting innovation greatly (of course, it's pure coincidence that Section 230 support is eroding when there are now huge incumbents that have an advantage from drastically making it more expensive to scale up new challengers.)
- sieabahlpark 7y ago
  Add a toggle switch to enable the content. Bam, now you have a free platform and for those who don't want to see the content they disagree with now don't have to. You even give an incentive to create an account. You literally cannot please everyone so trying to is a lost cause.
emilfihlman 7y ago
This would indeed be a good thing. I wonder if there's a push to do that already somewhere?
- Notorious_BLT 7y ago
  I believe this proposal would more or less be the DEFAULT were it not for Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Section 230 has had both good results (bloggers aren't going to get in trouble because someone posted something illegal in their comments) and bad results (twitter/youtube/paypal were all allowed to nuke Alex Jones from orbit simultaneously, removing his ability to distribute content, communicate with followers, and accept payments). I don't like or agree with Alex Jones (he's a wacko, but people have made some funny videos out of his freakouts), but people have to remember: if it can happen to one person, the same could happen to anyone. People praised this "deplatforming" because they didn't like the target. But this is essentially praising these sites for crippling someone's career without any oversight.
  - xxpor 7y ago
    Limiting deplatforming is taking away Twitter/YouTube's etc 1st amendment rights.
    - saurik 7y ago
      If the choice of deplatforming someone is a 1st amendment speech act (which I am ok with), then the choice to not do so needs to be a prosecutable offense (at which point you are just arguing that everyone should be a "publisher"). (Then, if websites can't manage to exist in this legally-consistent regime, maybe we finally get research into distributed systems in order to have true "platforms".)
      - dooglius 7y ago
        Did you miss a "not" there or are you saying deplatforming should be a requirement?
    - 7y ago
Invictus0 7y ago
What is to stop a company from choosing to be a platform, and then use dark patterns to censor certain views? IE Google placing a competitor's sites on page 2 or reddit hiding a certain community from its popular page.
- buzzkillington 7y ago
  Laws.
- v64 7y ago
  In this case, if it were regulated and there was evidence they were doing that, a lawsuit could be brought against them.
jjeaff 7y ago
I think the big platforms would love to be treated as platforms only. But the problem is that the platform owner is the best positioned to police the content. If they have to rely on the legal system to take things down, there is going to be a lot more nefarious activity that goes untouched. And I don't think the public or our politicians have the stomach for that.
- AmericanChopper 7y ago
  > If they have to rely on the legal system to take things down, there is going to be a lot more nefarious activity that goes untouched. The DMCA does a reasonably good job of handling that exact problem for copyright infringing content, while still providing due process. Edit: I have no idea why this is being downvoted, what I’ve said is completely true. If you’re mad about YouTube’s terrible policies, they’re not related to DMCA. They have their own completely seperate (and highly oppressive) system for handling infringement claims (in addition to their DMCA obligations).
  - noodlesUK 7y ago
    This DMCA? https://twitter.com/JRhodesPianist/status/1036929244654460928 https://twitter.com/JRhodesPianist/status/103692924465446092... https://www.eff.org/takedowns https://www.eff.org/takedowns The DMCA is fundamentally flawed and is a terrible model to base any future system on.
    - AmericanChopper 7y ago
      The DMCA is fine. It’s everything services providers to in addition to DMCA that causes problems. The DMCA process is very simply: 1. You receive a takedown notice 2. If it’s not valid, you submit a declaration that it’s not 3. Your content is restored and the claimant now has to take you to court if they still think it’s infringing 4. If you lied on your counterclaim, your now also guilty of perjury The only thing it’s really missing is an imminent threat of perjury for frivolous claims (there also some obvious areas to make the process more efficient). But as far as a simple way of managing offending content, while still providing due process, the general format is quite good. It’s other unrelated policies that tend to get people the most riled up. https://www.publicknowledge.org/blog/universal-music-group-and-youtube-agree-to-forget-about-fair-use https://www.publicknowledge.org/blog/universal-music-group-a...
alexis_fr 7y ago
That is a solution only valid for US and for the current legislation since it was introduced in 2006. It can be changed at any time. For example other countries may use of laws (EU Arricle 13, for instance) to bend social media [1], and Facebook has accepted to have Marlène Schiappa’s (our Minister of Equality) agents in-house. Law is the embodiment of the current political power balance, not a fixed referential to stake culprits upon. And for the moment, social media are the power in the balance, so it’s hard to use the law against them. [1] https://juliareda.eu/2019/12/french_uploadfilter_law/ https://juliareda.eu/2019/12/french_uploadfilter_law/
- Notorious_BLT 7y ago
  So you're saying that Social media sites have more power than the elected government of a country, and you're arguing that's a a GOOD thing? Or am I misinterpreting that?
dwild 7y ago
That seems like a good idea but it's simplify the issue way too much. > but also allow all content, Almost no platform survive without a bit of moderation. If you don't moderate, you'll get any kind of content, including spam, troll, etc... Add that to the fact that you'll get people that will just push to boycott such kind of platforms, and thus you'll no longer have much possible ways to make this kind of platform exist. > but if someone posts something illegal, they take their share of legal responsibility for publishing it. That's also kind of impossible. The law evolved to consider that impossibility to look at every piece of content, and this is why the DMCA exist. Look at Youtube which try to filter their content much further than the law currently require, they have HUGE teams of moderators, multiple tens of thousands, with some of the best kind of neural network, working on this and yet it fail so often. The world isn't binary, we need a bit of both. It could be an interesting experiment though to allow legally the kind of platform you suggest. Someway to protect website owner from any legal retaliation. It would most probably look like 4chan, but still interesting.
- dntbnmpls 7y ago
  > Almost no platform survive without a bit of moderation. If you don't moderate, you'll get any kind of content, including spam, troll, etc... There is moderation and there is censorship. Nobody is against filtering spam. Trolling is fine in my opinion. Just let the user have the option of blocking who they want to block an follow who they want to follow. > Add that to the fact that you'll get people that will just push to boycott such kind of platforms, and thus you'll no longer have much possible ways to make this kind of platform exist. If that was true, twitter, reddit, facebook, google wouldn't exist in the first place. > That's also kind of impossible. No it is not. Publishers don't find it impossible. Platforms don't find it impossible. If it was impossible, telcoms and publishers wouldn't exist. > It could be an interesting experiment though to allow legally the kind of platform you suggest. We already had this kind of platform. > It would most probably look like 4chan, but still interesting. No, it would look like 2009-2013 twitter, reddit, facebook, etc.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > There is moderation and there is censorship All moderation is censorship, though not all censorship is moderation.
Razengan 7y ago
> force social media companies to choose to identify as a "platform" or a "publisher" Who is going to "force" them? Governments? That ask them to censor and censure people in the first place?
- weberc2 7y ago
  Governments aren’t homogeneous. In the US there’s plenty of energy (especially among conservatives) to restrict social media giants’ right to censor, at least with respect to political censorship.
schoen 7y ago
This is roughly some people's interpretation of the situation in the U.S. prior to 1996, following the Cubby and Stratton Oakmont cases. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communications_Decency_Act#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati... The legislators who created §230 thought these incentives were bad, and wanted service operators to be able to choose to place themselves somewhere other than these two endpoints.
- saurik 7y ago
  Did providers really have the ability to claim to be "platforms" before? If so, then I guess I am super anti- section 230 (which I have always been somewhat uncomfortable with, despite the EFF insisting that I should like it... but their arguments frankly always felt like "without this we don't have platforms", and I agree we should have platforms and would not want a world without platforms; in some sense I feel like the correct solution is force everyone to be a publisher and then you get people building distributed systems to have platforms, so no one can be said to own or control them).
  - schoen 7y ago
    > Did providers really have the ability to claim to be "platforms" before? Possibly! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubby,_Inc._v._CompuServe_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubby,_Inc._v._CompuServe_Inc. > despite the EFF insisting that I should like it... I should mention that I work there and I like §230 very much (although I'm not doing much work on it at the moment). One idea that I think is helpful here is that there are so many intermediaries that are involved in allowing you to communicate with someone. https://www.eff.org/free-speech-weak-link https://www.eff.org/free-speech-weak-link People are already applying all kinds of pressure on each of those intermediaries; with weakened §230 protections, more of them would also be threatening litigation. > in some sense I feel like the correct solution is force everyone to be a publisher I also like this at some level, and I remember when I had my own web site hosted on my own desktop computer. (Some of my online communications are still hosted by my friend.) But I don't tend to think tinkering with intermediaries' incentives about content is the thing that will get us there, because there are so many other practical advantages that people have perceived in the more centralized services.
Buge 7y ago
What would Hacker News be? If someone posts spam comments on HN are the mods allowed to delete them? If someone writes a false comment is HN liable for that false comment?
- weberc2 7y ago
  That’s a good question. Presumably you could draw some line to distinguish between small communities and enormous ones (tens of millions of monthly active users, for example), or distinguish between social media and forums.
- bsdetector 7y ago
  All that would happen is the platform and the moderation would be separated, and the moderation optional. There would be a 4chan-like hacker news platform, and hacker news modlist that hides problematic comments. Hacker news already operates like this in a small way with shadowbanned accounts. Users can choose whether to see shadowbanned comments or hide them from view, what level of censorship they prefer. Platforms only being platforms wouldn't turn everything into spam and screeching. It just means you'd be able to see that if you wanted to.
  - ta999999171 7y ago
    I only use HN clients where the default is the sensible thing, see everything. Curious what the website uses as a default for no logged in account/new accounts - anyone fill in the blank for me?
    - Fnoord 7y ago
      Showdead is off by default. You can test it in private/incognito mode.
      - ta999999171 7y ago
        Welp, there goes the respect I had. Censorship by default, not just for crybabies who are afraid of reading things they don't like. Depressing. But, that's what I've come to expect on this channel.
ajross 7y ago
You wrote that comment on a moderated, zero revenue forum! You really want HN to be liable for every post here? Where would you post that opinion if they shut it down instead?
- weberc2 7y ago
  Seems like one could craft policy that treats social media giants differently than relatively small forums, no?
graeme 7y ago
Can we assume you’ve never moderated any forum, or the comments on any web site? Any site owner automatically removes thousands of spam comments. But these aren’t illegal. Your system would either: 1. Force sites to publish all legal spam, or 2. Face liability if anyone sneaks illegal content in. In practice all sites would need to censor all comments until they passed human approval. At big sites would probably need approval from lawyers.
- simlevesque 7y ago
  Platforms would need to allow themselves to be DDOS... Not gonna happen. It won't stop alt-right talking heads with no clue about the world to promote their "platform/publisher" agenda.
tzs 7y ago
So if I run a large chess forum, and want to delete posts that aren't about chess, I would have to choose "publisher"? And if some user X posted something about a dispute they were having with chess tournament organizer Y, and Y felt this was untrue and decided to sue X for libel, I'd also have responsibility for that alleged libel because I'm the publisher? Before anyone says that this is a ridiculous scenario, that's pretty similar to that happened with Prodigy's bulletin boards before the CDA. Prodigy had content guidelines for their boards, moderators that moderated to enforce those guidelines, and software that screened for offensive language. Someone posted a message that someone else felt was libelous, and that someone else sued both the poster and Prodigy. The court ruled that because Prodigy enforced content guidelines and had filters for bad language, they were a publisher and responsible for the content of all the messages. It was that case that was one of the main inspirations for the CDA. Before that, the way the case law was shaping up there were only going to be two options for an online forum. 1. If the forum does not want to be liable for what its users say, it cannot moderate or restrict their content, except as required by law. 2. If the forum places any restrictions on content, then it is essentially in the same position as a newspaper or a book publisher, and to keep its legal risks under control it is probably going to have to do a similar level of fact checking.
- andrewgioia 7y ago
  A law like this could only apply to websites operating at a certain scale, exceeding some revenue threshold, owned by publicly traded companies, or some other proxy to get only the sites we’re talking about here. This is just off the top of my head too, I’m sure much smarter people can craft a framework much better than OP’s which is already a very good one.
- fulldecent2 7y ago
  Yes, I would like the recourse of suing you for libel in this situation. And if you would like to protect against that risk you should consider including a "flag" button or something on each post where I, member of public, can get ahold of you personally, without needing to create an account.
- saurik 7y ago
Arbalest 7y ago
Sounds like this decision may be made for them, see previous discussion on one method which may be used to ban E2E https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22202110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22202110
danShumway 7y ago
First question: what would you make different between your proposed system and the (somewhat notorious) DMCA claim system that we have right now? Do you think that the DMCA claim system is a good model for this? Or are there additional safeguards you would put in place to stop platforms from just removing anything they get a request for? Would you make filers liable for frivolous takedown requests? If so, does that mean that takedown requests can't happen anonymously? We already have a system in place where anybody can request anything get taken down for copyright reasons, and unsurprisingly, it is widely abused for censorship. Second question: when you see platforms like 8Chan taken down today, do you think that's wrong? Should companies like Cloudflare be forced by the government to leave those sites up, even when they're advocating for completely despicable things or crossing a line into outright threats? If Cloudflare isn't going to be forced by the government to leave those sites up, why would anyone willingly host the platforms that can't do any moderation at all, even of open hate speech, rampant spam/scam advertising, pornography, or borderline illegal stalking/threats? To push that question a step farther -- when you look at GMail's auto-rejection and sorting of spam, do you think that's wrong? Third question: do kids get to have user-generated content hosted anywhere? They can't realistically go on 8-Chan, so is the idea that they won't join forums until they're old enough that they feel comfortable in environments filled with Nazis? Bear in mind that this includes communities like Miiverse. Nintendo isn't human-moderating every Miiverse post before it goes public. There's no world where they willingly open themselves up to the kind of liability you're talking about, those platforms would just be shut down. Final question, and I do genuinely mean this as a question, not as a dismissal or as a request to go away: why are you on Hackernews right now, given that Hackernews fits very squarely in the category you're saying shouldn't exist? Hackernews is heavily moderated (way more heavily than Twitter), but it also allows people to post crazy stuff. The moderation mostly happens after the fact, which would open the owners up to liability. Would Hackernews be a better community if submissions/posts weren't moderated? Would Hackernews be a better community if every post you made went into a human-moderated queue, and you had to wait (at least) 2-3 days before it became publicly visible? Bear in mind, Hackernews is largely moderated by something like 3 people, so even in the best case scenario they're definitely going to need to hire more and get a bit more aggressive about advertising and fees.

dragonwriter 7y ago

> If they choose "platform", then they can take no responsibility for content posted, but also allow all content, and only remove content when it is required of them by the legal system (when the content is illegal and has been reported as such) If you require the content to be illegal for a platform to remove it and there is a consequence for being wrong, that's a problem since the determination outside of platform competency, which encourages them not to act even against likely-illegal content. Section 230 was adopted specifically to address this problem, that attempts to constrain socially undesirable content (even if aimed at illegal content) risked making online providers liable for all content under the model applies to traditional media which was viewed as not functioning at web scale, at least without inhibiting innovation greatly (of course, it's pure coincidence that Section 230 support is eroding when there are now huge incumbents that have an advantage from drastically making it more expensive to scale up new challengers.)

sieabahlpark 7y ago
Add a toggle switch to enable the content. Bam, now you have a free platform and for those who don't want to see the content they disagree with now don't have to. You even give an incentive to create an account. You literally cannot please everyone so trying to is a lost cause.

emilfihlman 7y ago

This would indeed be a good thing. I wonder if there's a push to do that already somewhere?

Notorious_BLT 7y ago
I believe this proposal would more or less be the DEFAULT were it not for Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Section 230 has had both good results (bloggers aren't going to get in trouble because someone posted something illegal in their comments) and bad results (twitter/youtube/paypal were all allowed to nuke Alex Jones from orbit simultaneously, removing his ability to distribute content, communicate with followers, and accept payments). I don't like or agree with Alex Jones (he's a wacko, but people have made some funny videos out of his freakouts), but people have to remember: if it can happen to one person, the same could happen to anyone. People praised this "deplatforming" because they didn't like the target. But this is essentially praising these sites for crippling someone's career without any oversight.
- xxpor 7y ago
  Limiting deplatforming is taking away Twitter/YouTube's etc 1st amendment rights.
  - saurik 7y ago
    If the choice of deplatforming someone is a 1st amendment speech act (which I am ok with), then the choice to not do so needs to be a prosecutable offense (at which point you are just arguing that everyone should be a "publisher"). (Then, if websites can't manage to exist in this legally-consistent regime, maybe we finally get research into distributed systems in order to have true "platforms".)
    - dooglius 7y ago
      Did you miss a "not" there or are you saying deplatforming should be a requirement?
  - 7y ago

Invictus0 7y ago

What is to stop a company from choosing to be a platform, and then use dark patterns to censor certain views? IE Google placing a competitor's sites on page 2 or reddit hiding a certain community from its popular page.

buzzkillington 7y ago
Laws.
v64 7y ago
In this case, if it were regulated and there was evidence they were doing that, a lawsuit could be brought against them.

jjeaff 7y ago

I think the big platforms would love to be treated as platforms only. But the problem is that the platform owner is the best positioned to police the content. If they have to rely on the legal system to take things down, there is going to be a lot more nefarious activity that goes untouched. And I don't think the public or our politicians have the stomach for that.

AmericanChopper 7y ago
> If they have to rely on the legal system to take things down, there is going to be a lot more nefarious activity that goes untouched. The DMCA does a reasonably good job of handling that exact problem for copyright infringing content, while still providing due process. Edit: I have no idea why this is being downvoted, what I’ve said is completely true. If you’re mad about YouTube’s terrible policies, they’re not related to DMCA. They have their own completely seperate (and highly oppressive) system for handling infringement claims (in addition to their DMCA obligations).
- noodlesUK 7y ago
  This DMCA? https://twitter.com/JRhodesPianist/status/1036929244654460928 https://twitter.com/JRhodesPianist/status/103692924465446092... https://www.eff.org/takedowns https://www.eff.org/takedowns The DMCA is fundamentally flawed and is a terrible model to base any future system on.
  - AmericanChopper 7y ago
    The DMCA is fine. It’s everything services providers to in addition to DMCA that causes problems. The DMCA process is very simply: 1. You receive a takedown notice 2. If it’s not valid, you submit a declaration that it’s not 3. Your content is restored and the claimant now has to take you to court if they still think it’s infringing 4. If you lied on your counterclaim, your now also guilty of perjury The only thing it’s really missing is an imminent threat of perjury for frivolous claims (there also some obvious areas to make the process more efficient). But as far as a simple way of managing offending content, while still providing due process, the general format is quite good. It’s other unrelated policies that tend to get people the most riled up. https://www.publicknowledge.org/blog/universal-music-group-and-youtube-agree-to-forget-about-fair-use https://www.publicknowledge.org/blog/universal-music-group-a...

alexis_fr 7y ago

That is a solution only valid for US and for the current legislation since it was introduced in 2006. It can be changed at any time. For example other countries may use of laws (EU Arricle 13, for instance) to bend social media [1], and Facebook has accepted to have Marlène Schiappa’s (our Minister of Equality) agents in-house. Law is the embodiment of the current political power balance, not a fixed referential to stake culprits upon. And for the moment, social media are the power in the balance, so it’s hard to use the law against them. [1] https://juliareda.eu/2019/12/french_uploadfilter_law/ https://juliareda.eu/2019/12/french_uploadfilter_law/

Notorious_BLT 7y ago
So you're saying that Social media sites have more power than the elected government of a country, and you're arguing that's a a GOOD thing? Or am I misinterpreting that?

dwild 7y ago

That seems like a good idea but it's simplify the issue way too much. > but also allow all content, Almost no platform survive without a bit of moderation. If you don't moderate, you'll get any kind of content, including spam, troll, etc... Add that to the fact that you'll get people that will just push to boycott such kind of platforms, and thus you'll no longer have much possible ways to make this kind of platform exist. > but if someone posts something illegal, they take their share of legal responsibility for publishing it. That's also kind of impossible. The law evolved to consider that impossibility to look at every piece of content, and this is why the DMCA exist. Look at Youtube which try to filter their content much further than the law currently require, they have HUGE teams of moderators, multiple tens of thousands, with some of the best kind of neural network, working on this and yet it fail so often. The world isn't binary, we need a bit of both. It could be an interesting experiment though to allow legally the kind of platform you suggest. Someway to protect website owner from any legal retaliation. It would most probably look like 4chan, but still interesting.

dntbnmpls 7y ago
> Almost no platform survive without a bit of moderation. If you don't moderate, you'll get any kind of content, including spam, troll, etc... There is moderation and there is censorship. Nobody is against filtering spam. Trolling is fine in my opinion. Just let the user have the option of blocking who they want to block an follow who they want to follow. > Add that to the fact that you'll get people that will just push to boycott such kind of platforms, and thus you'll no longer have much possible ways to make this kind of platform exist. If that was true, twitter, reddit, facebook, google wouldn't exist in the first place. > That's also kind of impossible. No it is not. Publishers don't find it impossible. Platforms don't find it impossible. If it was impossible, telcoms and publishers wouldn't exist. > It could be an interesting experiment though to allow legally the kind of platform you suggest. We already had this kind of platform. > It would most probably look like 4chan, but still interesting. No, it would look like 2009-2013 twitter, reddit, facebook, etc.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > There is moderation and there is censorship All moderation is censorship, though not all censorship is moderation.

Razengan 7y ago

> force social media companies to choose to identify as a "platform" or a "publisher" Who is going to "force" them? Governments? That ask them to censor and censure people in the first place?

weberc2 7y ago
Governments aren’t homogeneous. In the US there’s plenty of energy (especially among conservatives) to restrict social media giants’ right to censor, at least with respect to political censorship.

schoen 7y ago

This is roughly some people's interpretation of the situation in the U.S. prior to 1996, following the Cubby and Stratton Oakmont cases. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communications_Decency_Act#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati... The legislators who created §230 thought these incentives were bad, and wanted service operators to be able to choose to place themselves somewhere other than these two endpoints.

saurik 7y ago
Did providers really have the ability to claim to be "platforms" before? If so, then I guess I am super anti- section 230 (which I have always been somewhat uncomfortable with, despite the EFF insisting that I should like it... but their arguments frankly always felt like "without this we don't have platforms", and I agree we should have platforms and would not want a world without platforms; in some sense I feel like the correct solution is force everyone to be a publisher and then you get people building distributed systems to have platforms, so no one can be said to own or control them).
- schoen 7y ago
  > Did providers really have the ability to claim to be "platforms" before? Possibly! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubby,_Inc._v._CompuServe_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubby,_Inc._v._CompuServe_Inc. > despite the EFF insisting that I should like it... I should mention that I work there and I like §230 very much (although I'm not doing much work on it at the moment). One idea that I think is helpful here is that there are so many intermediaries that are involved in allowing you to communicate with someone. https://www.eff.org/free-speech-weak-link https://www.eff.org/free-speech-weak-link People are already applying all kinds of pressure on each of those intermediaries; with weakened §230 protections, more of them would also be threatening litigation. > in some sense I feel like the correct solution is force everyone to be a publisher I also like this at some level, and I remember when I had my own web site hosted on my own desktop computer. (Some of my online communications are still hosted by my friend.) But I don't tend to think tinkering with intermediaries' incentives about content is the thing that will get us there, because there are so many other practical advantages that people have perceived in the more centralized services.

Buge 7y ago

What would Hacker News be? If someone posts spam comments on HN are the mods allowed to delete them? If someone writes a false comment is HN liable for that false comment?

weberc2 7y ago
That’s a good question. Presumably you could draw some line to distinguish between small communities and enormous ones (tens of millions of monthly active users, for example), or distinguish between social media and forums.
bsdetector 7y ago
All that would happen is the platform and the moderation would be separated, and the moderation optional. There would be a 4chan-like hacker news platform, and hacker news modlist that hides problematic comments. Hacker news already operates like this in a small way with shadowbanned accounts. Users can choose whether to see shadowbanned comments or hide them from view, what level of censorship they prefer. Platforms only being platforms wouldn't turn everything into spam and screeching. It just means you'd be able to see that if you wanted to.
- ta999999171 7y ago
  I only use HN clients where the default is the sensible thing, see everything. Curious what the website uses as a default for no logged in account/new accounts - anyone fill in the blank for me?
  - Fnoord 7y ago
    Showdead is off by default. You can test it in private/incognito mode.
    - ta999999171 7y ago
      Welp, there goes the respect I had. Censorship by default, not just for crybabies who are afraid of reading things they don't like. Depressing. But, that's what I've come to expect on this channel.

ajross 7y ago

You wrote that comment on a moderated, zero revenue forum! You really want HN to be liable for every post here? Where would you post that opinion if they shut it down instead?

weberc2 7y ago
Seems like one could craft policy that treats social media giants differently than relatively small forums, no?

graeme 7y ago

Can we assume you’ve never moderated any forum, or the comments on any web site? Any site owner automatically removes thousands of spam comments. But these aren’t illegal. Your system would either: 1. Force sites to publish all legal spam, or 2. Face liability if anyone sneaks illegal content in. In practice all sites would need to censor all comments until they passed human approval. At big sites would probably need approval from lawyers.

simlevesque 7y ago
Platforms would need to allow themselves to be DDOS... Not gonna happen. It won't stop alt-right talking heads with no clue about the world to promote their "platform/publisher" agenda.

tzs 7y ago

So if I run a large chess forum, and want to delete posts that aren't about chess, I would have to choose "publisher"? And if some user X posted something about a dispute they were having with chess tournament organizer Y, and Y felt this was untrue and decided to sue X for libel, I'd also have responsibility for that alleged libel because I'm the publisher? Before anyone says that this is a ridiculous scenario, that's pretty similar to that happened with Prodigy's bulletin boards before the CDA. Prodigy had content guidelines for their boards, moderators that moderated to enforce those guidelines, and software that screened for offensive language. Someone posted a message that someone else felt was libelous, and that someone else sued both the poster and Prodigy. The court ruled that because Prodigy enforced content guidelines and had filters for bad language, they were a publisher and responsible for the content of all the messages. It was that case that was one of the main inspirations for the CDA. Before that, the way the case law was shaping up there were only going to be two options for an online forum. 1. If the forum does not want to be liable for what its users say, it cannot moderate or restrict their content, except as required by law. 2. If the forum places any restrictions on content, then it is essentially in the same position as a newspaper or a book publisher, and to keep its legal risks under control it is probably going to have to do a similar level of fact checking.

andrewgioia 7y ago
A law like this could only apply to websites operating at a certain scale, exceeding some revenue threshold, owned by publicly traded companies, or some other proxy to get only the sites we’re talking about here. This is just off the top of my head too, I’m sure much smarter people can craft a framework much better than OP’s which is already a very good one.
fulldecent2 7y ago
Yes, I would like the recourse of suing you for libel in this situation. And if you would like to protect against that risk you should consider including a "flag" button or something on each post where I, member of public, can get ahold of you personally, without needing to create an account.
saurik 7y ago

Arbalest 7y ago

Sounds like this decision may be made for them, see previous discussion on one method which may be used to ban E2E https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22202110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22202110

danShumway 7y ago

First question: what would you make different between your proposed system and the (somewhat notorious) DMCA claim system that we have right now? Do you think that the DMCA claim system is a good model for this? Or are there additional safeguards you would put in place to stop platforms from just removing anything they get a request for? Would you make filers liable for frivolous takedown requests? If so, does that mean that takedown requests can't happen anonymously? We already have a system in place where anybody can request anything get taken down for copyright reasons, and unsurprisingly, it is widely abused for censorship. Second question: when you see platforms like 8Chan taken down today, do you think that's wrong? Should companies like Cloudflare be forced by the government to leave those sites up, even when they're advocating for completely despicable things or crossing a line into outright threats? If Cloudflare isn't going to be forced by the government to leave those sites up, why would anyone willingly host the platforms that can't do any moderation at all, even of open hate speech, rampant spam/scam advertising, pornography, or borderline illegal stalking/threats? To push that question a step farther -- when you look at GMail's auto-rejection and sorting of spam, do you think that's wrong? Third question: do kids get to have user-generated content hosted anywhere? They can't realistically go on 8-Chan, so is the idea that they won't join forums until they're old enough that they feel comfortable in environments filled with Nazis? Bear in mind that this includes communities like Miiverse. Nintendo isn't human-moderating every Miiverse post before it goes public. There's no world where they willingly open themselves up to the kind of liability you're talking about, those platforms would just be shut down. Final question, and I do genuinely mean this as a question, not as a dismissal or as a request to go away: why are you on Hackernews right now, given that Hackernews fits very squarely in the category you're saying shouldn't exist? Hackernews is heavily moderated (way more heavily than Twitter), but it also allows people to post crazy stuff. The moderation mostly happens after the fact, which would open the owners up to liability. Would Hackernews be a better community if submissions/posts weren't moderated? Would Hackernews be a better community if every post you made went into a human-moderated queue, and you had to wait (at least) 2-3 days before it became publicly visible? Bear in mind, Hackernews is largely moderated by something like 3 people, so even in the best case scenario they're definitely going to need to hire more and get a bit more aggressive about advertising and fees.