3 ms·
Without any attempt to weigh in on political sides, this debate made me think of an interesting "hack" to act as a publisher while enjoying the protections of a
by xamuel 6y ago
Without any attempt to weigh in on political sides, this debate made me think of an interesting "hack" to act as a publisher while enjoying the protections of a platform:
1. Start a website where users are able to write arbitrary articles.
2. Have a bot systematically spam your site with all possible articles (suitably limited so as to make this technically doable).
3. Systematically weed out all the articles which are NOT equal to the articles you actually wanted to publish.
Voila, now you've published all and only the articles you wanted, and yet you're just an innocent platform, not a publisher!
If your site is sufficiently widely used, you can even cut out step 2 and replace it with organic human beings.
- kube-system 6y agoThe law isn't really hackable in the same way a machine is, because the law isn't interpreted by a machine, it is interpreted by a court, which would take all of the above into account when applying the law.
- nullc 6y agoBingo. At least if anyone could figure out that you were doing it (including, e.g. discovery finding emails where you discuss it) any could would happily see right through it.
- probably_wrong 6y agoThat's not so much of a "hack", more like "fraud with enough extra steps to make it difficult to prosecute". That doesn't mean that it wouldn't work. Adult websites have been accused of something similar: as the version goes, they'll take your (illegally published) video down on request, no questions asked, but "someone" will upload it again later. I've never heard of anyone being prosecuted for this, though, which means that either it isn't true, or it is and your plan would work just fine.
- inetknght 6y ago> That's not so much of a "hack", more like "fraud with enough extra steps to make it difficult to prosecute". Demonstrate that users on Twitter aren't bots. Otherwise I don't see a difference here.
- closeparen 6y agoIt's not clear why this is a binary category at all. If we want to treat first-party content differently from third-party content, just do that?