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> escape punishment for harboring misinformation and extremist content its so bananas that statements like this are glossed over and unqualified. this is not a

> escape punishment for harboring misinformation and extremist content its so bananas that statements like this are glossed over and unqualified. this is not a solved problem, and its not even being treated like its a problem at all. this perception that there are a set of correct facts and incorrect facts is just so meaingless. what does it even mean to be true? $Person is on $Video saying $Statement. True or false? Well, it depends. It ALWAYS depends. are you asking if $Video.Words = $Statement.Words? almost never. You are not investigating $Video.Soundwaves and $Person.VocalCords, you are making a case for $Person.Beliefs. What if $Person.Beliefs @ $Video.TimeStamp != $Person.Beliefs @ $Today? Is it true but meaningless, or are you trying to imply conclusions contextually - but guess what, different people interpret the same context differently! an example suitable for HN is talking about security. Is your company secure? You cant answer the question because _the question is bad_. the answer to security is ALWAYS it depends. Are you talking about physically secure against a wandering drunk trying to pee on your server, or physically secure against a disgruntled employee building a killdozer and driving through your building? Are you talking about secure from some kid who finds LOIC and tries to DoS you or from a long term campaign from a nation-state APT? The discussion _requires_ framing, and so does discussing "misinformation and extremist content"

A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
Agreed. It is one of those phrases that raises my hair each time right along with lawful intercept and hate speech. It is disheartening to see it unquestioned and in mainstream.
advisedwang 7y ago
Sure, there's no black or white answer to what is misinformation or extreemist. But regulation and the courts aren't black and white. We regulate the content of broadcast media just fine without hand-wringing about the grey areas.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  Compared to internet UGC, the flow of new content into broadcast media minuscule. According to a random Google search, three hundred hours of new video are added to YouTube each minute. It's unlikely that much new broadcast media is created each hour. And YouTube is just one of many sites. It wouldn't surprise me at all to find that UGC is created at a rate of more than 1000x that of broadcast media. That difference in scale, and the difference in economic value per unit of content, makes a solved problem in one medium an tricky challenge in the other.
- ahi 7y ago
  We do not regulate the content of broadcast media just fine.
leftyted 7y ago
I agree with you. But it is encouraging that there are adults in the room: > Kate Klonick, a law professor at St. John’s University in New York, urged caution. > “This is a massive norm-setting period,” she said, with any alterations to one of the internet’s key legal frameworks likely to draw unexpected consequences. “It’s hard to know exactly what the ramifications might be.”
- CobrastanJorji 7y ago
  She's absolutely right, but my fear is that room she is in is not the room where it happens.
MadWombat 7y ago
This is a bizarre line of reasoning > his perception that there are a set of correct facts and incorrect facts is just so meaingless Yes, there are facts. In your example, if I say "person X said Y" and have a video of them saying it, I am stating a fact. I am not dealing in beliefs and I don't give a fuck whether or not the person still supports the statements they made or not. I am saying that at some point in time T, person X said Y and this fact is on record.
- bearcobra 7y ago
  There is still the challenge of the context of "person X said Y" Were they saying it sarcastically? Were they quoting someone else? Does Y include the content said before or after? That can meaningfully change the "fact"
- oconnor663 7y ago
  On the extreme end, a video can be totally fake. Slightly less extreme, a video might be "fake" in that it's an actor playing a role, and the words they're saying belong to the character and not the actor. More commonly, a video might be taken out of context, so that the apparent meaning of a statement in isolation is the opposite of what it originally meant. (Compare "I hate group X" to "I think people who say 'I hate group X' are jerks.") Modern politics is effectively a distributed indexing system for exactly these most ambiguous cases, coupled with large media apparatuses for broadcasting them. And these are the problems with the simplest sort of fact, "A said B." That's not even the majority of misinformation out there. We usually have to contend with even worse ambiguities, like whether A "caused" B, or whether A "supported" B, or whether A "criticized" B. In everyday life of course, these problems are solvable. We find ways to punish people for acting in bad faith, and the incentives mostly line up. But that is very much not how things work in politics or in law. People have large incentives to seek out ambiguous cases. These edge cases become the typical case.
  - MadWombat 7y ago
    > On the extreme end, a video can be totally fake Sure. And either you can prove it or not. But that is not what I am arguing against. The way things seem to be working today, is that you say "person X cures cancer" and I say "person X eats babies", neither one of us has any proof whatsoever, but that is OK because nobody ever asks for proof because "hey, there is no such thing as facts anymore"
micmil 7y ago
You are willfully conflating abstract concepts with known and provable facts. Whether you are doing this due to ignorance or malice, stop it. "Is your company secure?" has no factual answer, as you state. "LIBRULZ KILL AND EAT BABIES ON COURTHOUSE STEPS WHILE THE JESUS CRIES" Well... that's pretty damn easy to fact check. Oh, wait, there was nobody on the courthouse steps eating babies? Well shit, I guess that's a LIE.
SuperFerret 7y ago
Determining truth from lies is hard, that's true. Doesn't mean we should accept blatant lies and ignore sound truths. That's the problem with "conservative" politics in general.
shkkmo 7y ago
> his perception that there are a set of correct facts and incorrect facts is just so meaingless. While there are large grey areas in the middle where subject opinion, context, and fuzzy word definitions make truth values complicated, there are also some very clear black and white areas for blatantly false concrete claims are being made and spread that have no basis in reality. I think there are ways to regulate and pushing blatant disinformation while leaving the greyer borders up to individual discretion and discernment.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  Perhaps. But who gets to decide which side of the line any given statement is on? Imagine, for example, that the person appointed to decide that is an anti-vaxxer. Or that they just left a gig at Monsanto/Bayer, and feel like all claims that Roundup/glyphosate might cause some harm to someone are blatantly false. Or the person appointed was a Democratic activist. Or a Republican activist. Pick your poison. And now this person is given the power to decide which claims are blatantly false, as opposed to grey. While there are claims that are black and white, and claims that are grey, empowering someone to enforce that clearly-false claims cannot be published is going to bite you, because that person is going to have their own perspectives, biases, and (probably) agenda. It takes something close to a saint to not inflict their own agenda, and saints are in short supply.
  - shkkmo 7y ago
    > Perhaps. But who gets to decide which side of the line any given statement is on? Umm... we have an existing legal system already does this. It certainly isn't perfect, but your argument seems to boil down to: we don't have a perfect legal system, so we shouldn't have any laws. I don't see any reason why we can't have laws that make it illegal to run around and hand out pamphlets that deliberately misinform people about if / when they can vote. > Roundup/glyphosate might cause some harm to someone You seem to be using an inherently grey claim to make your point. Of course glyphosate might cause harm to someone, there is almost literally nothing that has no possibility to cause harm to someone. This is exactly the sort of claim whose truth value depends on the context and meaning with which you interpret it. This is different from a claim like "I have a bachelor's degree from UC Davis" or "You cannot vote without a drivers license"
nathan_compton 7y ago
While I'm sympathetic to your point, sometimes appeals to complexity like this are asinine. There are plenty of complex problems which yield, to at least a degree, to effort. Historically cultures have modulated themselves in a variety of ways, including censorship of objectionable speech. Even the United States has maintained, in the past, sweeping norms which controlled what kind of rhetoric entered the public sphere. No one would suggest that these norms were always well applied, coherent, good. But its equally challenging to make the case that because of that ambiguity we should simply do nothing at all. The ability of companies like Youtube or Facebook to shift culture is probably real and thus probably demands a response, imperfect as it may be.
Faark 7y ago
> The discussion _requires_ framing, and so does discussing "misinformation and extremist content" The framing is usually implied instead of spelled out precisely. At the same time, I don't see you arguing against this (probably shitty) implied framing and instead just pretending there is none. This makes it hard for me to take seriously, since it looks so similar to the "there is no perfect security so why even try" line of arguing. And yes, my alarm bells also went off by AG Barr talking about "misinformation and extremist content", even though I actually do think we should carefully observe whether current online platforms / communication changes our societies and if in a favorable way.
- Guvante 7y ago
  > since it looks so similar to the "there is no perfect security so why even try" line of arguing. What does "misinformation and extremist content" mean? Because that is the first point. Remember that the GOP called out large companies for "silencing the right" when they enacted policies that reduced misinformation and extremist content in the past. "Misinformation and extremist content" is thus itself an illdefined thing as different people consider different things to fall under it. The framing usually used is that "if the big companies are liable the content won't be there" which history has shown is only true in so far as "if the big companies are liable user made content won't be there" effectively as huge restrictive filters need to be put in place to avoid the liability. > even though I actually do think we should carefully observe whether current online platforms / communication changes our societies and if in a favorable way Feel free to talk about it, you are not trying to enact policy. AG Barr is involved in creating policy and thus should be careful about exactly what he suggests rather than invoking the same liability boogieman that hasn't served us in the past.
tboyd47 7y ago
It's clearly a complex legal issue, but is there any logical reason why the internet should be treated differently from print and broadcast media in that regard? The only reasons I've heard are related to how -current- internet content providers' business models work. Those companies' business models are heavily enabled by the CDA itself, so isn't it sort of begging the question?
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  Print and broadcast media exercise editorial control in a way that Facebook and Google do not. That difference matters legally.
  - tboyd47 7y ago
    Huh? Are you saying Google and Facebook don't exercise editorial control? They definitely do, and the whole point of Section 230 is to give these companies editorial control without the legal liability that goes with it.
    - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
      If I'm publishing a newspaper, I decide which articles run and which ones don't. I decide on every article. I decide on every editorial. I decide on every letter to the editor. So, I'm responsible for every word. Is Facebook responsible for every word of every Facebook post? Have they decided whether to publish it or not? No. (Yes, they do have certain filters that try to exclude certain things, but that's all. A newspaper would be different if it published every letter to the editor it received, so long as it didn't contain the words "child porn", for example.)
      - tboyd47 7y ago
        I should have realized this in my first reply, but your argument is exactly what I mean by begging the question. Facebook and Google occupy a legal grey area between publisher and common carrier that was literally created by the CDA. So your argument is like saying, "Vaping has to be legal because how else is Juul going to stay in business?", or "Loot boxes have to be legal because they're so important to EA's and Activision's business model." These companies only exist because of a certain legal environment, so how can their existence be used to justify that same environment? Are Google and Facebook now considered inalienable human rights used to derive laws? Maybe Google and Facebook would be able to survive a change to the CDA, or maybe not. Who cares? The internet ran just fine before the CDA and the technology hasn't really changed much at all. Heck, the two of us are conversing right now without Google and Facebook involved. Everyone gets so bent out of shape these days about Google and Facebook but no one is willing to even imagine an internet without them. Present company excluded, of course -- at this point I'm just ranting. > A newspaper would be different if it published every letter to the editor it received, so long as it didn't contain the words "child porn", for example. This is not true. It has nothing to do with the choices of the editor and everything to do with the medium used. The CDA carves out a specific immunity for internet companies that does not apply to print and broadcast media and that's what Barr is putting on the table here.
veeralpatel979 7y ago
I think the problem of determining whether a company is secure, given a particular attacker, is one that needs to be worked on. Unfortunately I haven't made any progress in discovering a solution that would accurately determine if a company is secure or not. Given that an org's security team, or even the world (in case of zero days), may not be aware of vulnerabilities that exist in a company's infrastructure, how do you solve this problem? If anyone wants to chat about this, I'm at veeralpatel4@gmail.com

A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago

Agreed. It is one of those phrases that raises my hair each time right along with lawful intercept and hate speech. It is disheartening to see it unquestioned and in mainstream.

advisedwang 7y ago

Sure, there's no black or white answer to what is misinformation or extreemist. But regulation and the courts aren't black and white. We regulate the content of broadcast media just fine without hand-wringing about the grey areas.

asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
Compared to internet UGC, the flow of new content into broadcast media minuscule. According to a random Google search, three hundred hours of new video are added to YouTube each minute. It's unlikely that much new broadcast media is created each hour. And YouTube is just one of many sites. It wouldn't surprise me at all to find that UGC is created at a rate of more than 1000x that of broadcast media. That difference in scale, and the difference in economic value per unit of content, makes a solved problem in one medium an tricky challenge in the other.
ahi 7y ago
We do not regulate the content of broadcast media just fine.

leftyted 7y ago

I agree with you. But it is encouraging that there are adults in the room: > Kate Klonick, a law professor at St. John’s University in New York, urged caution. > “This is a massive norm-setting period,” she said, with any alterations to one of the internet’s key legal frameworks likely to draw unexpected consequences. “It’s hard to know exactly what the ramifications might be.”

CobrastanJorji 7y ago
She's absolutely right, but my fear is that room she is in is not the room where it happens.

MadWombat 7y ago

This is a bizarre line of reasoning > his perception that there are a set of correct facts and incorrect facts is just so meaingless Yes, there are facts. In your example, if I say "person X said Y" and have a video of them saying it, I am stating a fact. I am not dealing in beliefs and I don't give a fuck whether or not the person still supports the statements they made or not. I am saying that at some point in time T, person X said Y and this fact is on record.

bearcobra 7y ago
There is still the challenge of the context of "person X said Y" Were they saying it sarcastically? Were they quoting someone else? Does Y include the content said before or after? That can meaningfully change the "fact"
oconnor663 7y ago
On the extreme end, a video can be totally fake. Slightly less extreme, a video might be "fake" in that it's an actor playing a role, and the words they're saying belong to the character and not the actor. More commonly, a video might be taken out of context, so that the apparent meaning of a statement in isolation is the opposite of what it originally meant. (Compare "I hate group X" to "I think people who say 'I hate group X' are jerks.") Modern politics is effectively a distributed indexing system for exactly these most ambiguous cases, coupled with large media apparatuses for broadcasting them. And these are the problems with the simplest sort of fact, "A said B." That's not even the majority of misinformation out there. We usually have to contend with even worse ambiguities, like whether A "caused" B, or whether A "supported" B, or whether A "criticized" B. In everyday life of course, these problems are solvable. We find ways to punish people for acting in bad faith, and the incentives mostly line up. But that is very much not how things work in politics or in law. People have large incentives to seek out ambiguous cases. These edge cases become the typical case.
- MadWombat 7y ago
  > On the extreme end, a video can be totally fake Sure. And either you can prove it or not. But that is not what I am arguing against. The way things seem to be working today, is that you say "person X cures cancer" and I say "person X eats babies", neither one of us has any proof whatsoever, but that is OK because nobody ever asks for proof because "hey, there is no such thing as facts anymore"

micmil 7y ago

You are willfully conflating abstract concepts with known and provable facts. Whether you are doing this due to ignorance or malice, stop it. "Is your company secure?" has no factual answer, as you state. "LIBRULZ KILL AND EAT BABIES ON COURTHOUSE STEPS WHILE THE JESUS CRIES" Well... that's pretty damn easy to fact check. Oh, wait, there was nobody on the courthouse steps eating babies? Well shit, I guess that's a LIE.

SuperFerret 7y ago

Determining truth from lies is hard, that's true. Doesn't mean we should accept blatant lies and ignore sound truths. That's the problem with "conservative" politics in general.

shkkmo 7y ago

> his perception that there are a set of correct facts and incorrect facts is just so meaingless. While there are large grey areas in the middle where subject opinion, context, and fuzzy word definitions make truth values complicated, there are also some very clear black and white areas for blatantly false concrete claims are being made and spread that have no basis in reality. I think there are ways to regulate and pushing blatant disinformation while leaving the greyer borders up to individual discretion and discernment.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
Perhaps. But who gets to decide which side of the line any given statement is on? Imagine, for example, that the person appointed to decide that is an anti-vaxxer. Or that they just left a gig at Monsanto/Bayer, and feel like all claims that Roundup/glyphosate might cause some harm to someone are blatantly false. Or the person appointed was a Democratic activist. Or a Republican activist. Pick your poison. And now this person is given the power to decide which claims are blatantly false, as opposed to grey. While there are claims that are black and white, and claims that are grey, empowering someone to enforce that clearly-false claims cannot be published is going to bite you, because that person is going to have their own perspectives, biases, and (probably) agenda. It takes something close to a saint to not inflict their own agenda, and saints are in short supply.
- shkkmo 7y ago
  > Perhaps. But who gets to decide which side of the line any given statement is on? Umm... we have an existing legal system already does this. It certainly isn't perfect, but your argument seems to boil down to: we don't have a perfect legal system, so we shouldn't have any laws. I don't see any reason why we can't have laws that make it illegal to run around and hand out pamphlets that deliberately misinform people about if / when they can vote. > Roundup/glyphosate might cause some harm to someone You seem to be using an inherently grey claim to make your point. Of course glyphosate might cause harm to someone, there is almost literally nothing that has no possibility to cause harm to someone. This is exactly the sort of claim whose truth value depends on the context and meaning with which you interpret it. This is different from a claim like "I have a bachelor's degree from UC Davis" or "You cannot vote without a drivers license"

nathan_compton 7y ago

While I'm sympathetic to your point, sometimes appeals to complexity like this are asinine. There are plenty of complex problems which yield, to at least a degree, to effort. Historically cultures have modulated themselves in a variety of ways, including censorship of objectionable speech. Even the United States has maintained, in the past, sweeping norms which controlled what kind of rhetoric entered the public sphere. No one would suggest that these norms were always well applied, coherent, good. But its equally challenging to make the case that because of that ambiguity we should simply do nothing at all. The ability of companies like Youtube or Facebook to shift culture is probably real and thus probably demands a response, imperfect as it may be.

Faark 7y ago

> The discussion _requires_ framing, and so does discussing "misinformation and extremist content" The framing is usually implied instead of spelled out precisely. At the same time, I don't see you arguing against this (probably shitty) implied framing and instead just pretending there is none. This makes it hard for me to take seriously, since it looks so similar to the "there is no perfect security so why even try" line of arguing. And yes, my alarm bells also went off by AG Barr talking about "misinformation and extremist content", even though I actually do think we should carefully observe whether current online platforms / communication changes our societies and if in a favorable way.

Guvante 7y ago
> since it looks so similar to the "there is no perfect security so why even try" line of arguing. What does "misinformation and extremist content" mean? Because that is the first point. Remember that the GOP called out large companies for "silencing the right" when they enacted policies that reduced misinformation and extremist content in the past. "Misinformation and extremist content" is thus itself an illdefined thing as different people consider different things to fall under it. The framing usually used is that "if the big companies are liable the content won't be there" which history has shown is only true in so far as "if the big companies are liable user made content won't be there" effectively as huge restrictive filters need to be put in place to avoid the liability. > even though I actually do think we should carefully observe whether current online platforms / communication changes our societies and if in a favorable way Feel free to talk about it, you are not trying to enact policy. AG Barr is involved in creating policy and thus should be careful about exactly what he suggests rather than invoking the same liability boogieman that hasn't served us in the past.

tboyd47 7y ago

It's clearly a complex legal issue, but is there any logical reason why the internet should be treated differently from print and broadcast media in that regard? The only reasons I've heard are related to how -current- internet content providers' business models work. Those companies' business models are heavily enabled by the CDA itself, so isn't it sort of begging the question?

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
Print and broadcast media exercise editorial control in a way that Facebook and Google do not. That difference matters legally.
- tboyd47 7y ago
  Huh? Are you saying Google and Facebook don't exercise editorial control? They definitely do, and the whole point of Section 230 is to give these companies editorial control without the legal liability that goes with it.
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    If I'm publishing a newspaper, I decide which articles run and which ones don't. I decide on every article. I decide on every editorial. I decide on every letter to the editor. So, I'm responsible for every word. Is Facebook responsible for every word of every Facebook post? Have they decided whether to publish it or not? No. (Yes, they do have certain filters that try to exclude certain things, but that's all. A newspaper would be different if it published every letter to the editor it received, so long as it didn't contain the words "child porn", for example.)
    - tboyd47 7y ago
      I should have realized this in my first reply, but your argument is exactly what I mean by begging the question. Facebook and Google occupy a legal grey area between publisher and common carrier that was literally created by the CDA. So your argument is like saying, "Vaping has to be legal because how else is Juul going to stay in business?", or "Loot boxes have to be legal because they're so important to EA's and Activision's business model." These companies only exist because of a certain legal environment, so how can their existence be used to justify that same environment? Are Google and Facebook now considered inalienable human rights used to derive laws? Maybe Google and Facebook would be able to survive a change to the CDA, or maybe not. Who cares? The internet ran just fine before the CDA and the technology hasn't really changed much at all. Heck, the two of us are conversing right now without Google and Facebook involved. Everyone gets so bent out of shape these days about Google and Facebook but no one is willing to even imagine an internet without them. Present company excluded, of course -- at this point I'm just ranting. > A newspaper would be different if it published every letter to the editor it received, so long as it didn't contain the words "child porn", for example. This is not true. It has nothing to do with the choices of the editor and everything to do with the medium used. The CDA carves out a specific immunity for internet companies that does not apply to print and broadcast media and that's what Barr is putting on the table here.

veeralpatel979 7y ago

I think the problem of determining whether a company is secure, given a particular attacker, is one that needs to be worked on. Unfortunately I haven't made any progress in discovering a solution that would accurately determine if a company is secure or not. Given that an org's security team, or even the world (in case of zero days), may not be aware of vulnerabilities that exist in a company's infrastructure, how do you solve this problem? If anyone wants to chat about this, I'm at veeralpatel4@gmail.com