3 ms·

It's kind of a ridiculous idea. Before S230 that was the case: Executing any editorial control risked you being concluded to be the publisher. Online provider

by nullc 6y ago

It's kind of a ridiculous idea. Before S230 that was the case: Executing any editorial control risked you being concluded to be the publisher. Online providers said this is bullshit, we want be able to remove garbage -- lies, obscene material, defamation, etc. If moderating makes us publishers over everything on our site and legally liable, we can't do that. Make us immune so we can clean up the worst of things, and you can still always go after the actual sources. So I think it only makes sense to the extent that the world before S230 also made sense. But that's a world where sites like twitter probably couldn't have come into being. Without S230 the law is bizarre because it treated running a public venue as equivalently of being a publisher for everything that happened in it. It would be like if I ran a shopping mall and some member of the public came in and started calling you a paedophile that you could sue the mall simply because at other times I removed other people who were urinating on the walls.

Udik 6y ago
On the other hand, there must be a limit on the amount of "moderation" you're allowed to perform before becoming a publisher. If you start labelling content as misleading (but don't remove it) or even if you privilege certain content instead of another (for example, you privilege social media posts advertising a product because it increases your revenue) then you could be considered a publisher. Let's put in another way: publishers used to produce content (as in select, solicit, remunerate) to further their interests (financial, but sometimes also political, or cultural). Now the big social networks don't need to produce the content, but they can tap into such an enormous amount of it that they can limit themselves to shaping it. Promote certain posts, reduce the visibility of others. The overall effect is the same. You could probably make Facebook or Twitter in a great cultural publications just by tweaking the algorithm that determines the visibility of the posts.
- nullc 6y ago
  > On the other hand, there must be a limit on the amount of "moderation" you're allowed to perform before becoming a publisher. That isn't clear to me at all. The publisher is essentially the author from a liability perspective. I do agree (see my other post in this thread) that there are serious concerns about the moderation power of the operators of these massive online public forums. But that doesn't make treating them as the author from a liability perspective the right tool for dealing with that. Particularly because in most specific cases where their moderation power might be misused there is no question of liability. Imagine a site where everyone was always honest and nice, but the operator ruthlessly censored all posts by Georgists and S230 didn't exist. Okay, they'd be liable for their users posts-- but so what? There is nothing there for anyone to sue over. The Georgists would still be totally silenced.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > That isn't clear to me at all. The publisher is essentially the author from a liability perspective. In a newspaper that selectively chooses to print some letters from readers, would the author be the publisher or the newspaper? That's an example of extreme moderation ("out of the 1000 letters we received this week, we will print this one") while Twitter is likely closer to the other extreme ("out of these 1000 Tweets, we'll hide/delete this one").
- karatestomp 6y ago
  IMO it's when you start curating and suggesting in complex ways rather than simple "most popular having (user-provided) tag X" ways. Throw in other stuff like monetizability but denying that to some creators, and IMO Youtube is way over the line and the rest aren't far behind, because they can't resist using their position to manipulate what the user sees—there's too much money in it.

by nullc 6y ago

Udik 6y ago

On the other hand, there must be a limit on the amount of "moderation" you're allowed to perform before becoming a publisher. If you start labelling content as misleading (but don't remove it) or even if you privilege certain content instead of another (for example, you privilege social media posts advertising a product because it increases your revenue) then you could be considered a publisher. Let's put in another way: publishers used to produce content (as in select, solicit, remunerate) to further their interests (financial, but sometimes also political, or cultural). Now the big social networks don't need to produce the content, but they can tap into such an enormous amount of it that they can limit themselves to shaping it. Promote certain posts, reduce the visibility of others. The overall effect is the same. You could probably make Facebook or Twitter in a great cultural publications just by tweaking the algorithm that determines the visibility of the posts.

nullc 6y ago
> On the other hand, there must be a limit on the amount of "moderation" you're allowed to perform before becoming a publisher. That isn't clear to me at all. The publisher is essentially the author from a liability perspective. I do agree (see my other post in this thread) that there are serious concerns about the moderation power of the operators of these massive online public forums. But that doesn't make treating them as the author from a liability perspective the right tool for dealing with that. Particularly because in most specific cases where their moderation power might be misused there is no question of liability. Imagine a site where everyone was always honest and nice, but the operator ruthlessly censored all posts by Georgists and S230 didn't exist. Okay, they'd be liable for their users posts-- but so what? There is nothing there for anyone to sue over. The Georgists would still be totally silenced.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > That isn't clear to me at all. The publisher is essentially the author from a liability perspective. In a newspaper that selectively chooses to print some letters from readers, would the author be the publisher or the newspaper? That's an example of extreme moderation ("out of the 1000 letters we received this week, we will print this one") while Twitter is likely closer to the other extreme ("out of these 1000 Tweets, we'll hide/delete this one").
karatestomp 6y ago
IMO it's when you start curating and suggesting in complex ways rather than simple "most popular having (user-provided) tag X" ways. Throw in other stuff like monetizability but denying that to some creators, and IMO Youtube is way over the line and the rest aren't far behind, because they can't resist using their position to manipulate what the user sees—there's too much money in it.