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I think that’s fine to ask social medias to choose between being a publisher or a platform. It’s perfectly fine to push your point of view online as it’s prote

I think that’s fine to ask social medias to choose between being a publisher or a platform. It’s perfectly fine to push your point of view online as it’s protected by the first. But you should bare consequences for the cases not protected by the first.

buhhh 6y ago
I don't think you understand the first amendment.
- hartator 6y ago
  Enlight us. For example, calling for the murders of specific people based on their political views or races don’t fall under the first. And social medias allow the spread of some of these messages with no consequences at the moment.
  - Miner49er 6y ago
    how is that not protected under the first amendment?
    - fredgrott 6y ago
      also private speech is more free-er than public speech
  - buttersbrian 6y ago
    That's not exactly true. "Speech is not protected by the First Amendment if the speaker intends to incite a violation of the law that is both imminent and likely." Someone randomly spouting off that people of a race or ideology should be wiped out doesn't always/exactly pass this legal test.
    - refurb 6y ago
      Great point. Visit any US neo-Nazi website and you’ll see language that one could argue is “threatening to a specific group”. But unless it’s “hey, everyone gather at 5 pm on Main St so we can start shooting people”, it’s still protected language.
      - ByteJockey 6y ago
        That's actually a point that I don't think has been decided yet, specifically "imminent". It's been ruled that "at some unspecified point in the future" doesn't count, but I can't find a case (with an admittedly short search) about where the exact boundaries are. I don't know what the exact legal definition of imminent is, but the layman's definition involves the thing happening soon. It may well depend on how close to 5 it is (but what timezone?). The same sentence with the words "right now" would almost certainly meet the test though (assuming the action was actually likely to occur).
  - checker 6y ago
    So if I sent a note with the content you just described to everyone I know via UPS and you define this content as a crime, then UPS should be held liable in facilitating this crime? So therefore UPS needs to inspect the content of every package that it delivers to avoid culpability in crimes like this? Or somehow UPS is different from a social media entity. Then what legally is a social media entity? These are interesting times. The rules will certainly change; it remains to be seen if they will ultimately change for the better.
    - hartator 6y ago
      If the UPS was already opening the mail of everyone to add its own pamphlets when you discuss x or y, yes they should be responsible for facilitating crime that they know of then.
      - checker 6y ago
        Interesting, so the implication is that web companies are generating advertising from user-submitted content, therefore it's been read by the company, so therefore any cross-user communication needs to be reviewed by a person or a sufficiently accurate AI for endorsement through publication. So in your framework, transmission of user content + advertising based on that content = culpability. I wonder if social media companies would figure out a way to legally prove transmission of a message without viewing its contents as a way to avoid culpability and maintain some level of profitability.
      - heavyset_go 6y ago
        This is like suggesting that if you build a spam filter, you need to build a filter that scans content and catches and reports every type of crime possible to commit ever.
  - sixstringtheory 6y ago
    It's not a matter of what kind of speech 1A governs, but what kind of entities. The government is the entity that is not allowed to restrict legal free speech. Private corporations are not bound by the same rule; they can restrict all they want.
  - gameman144 6y ago
    The First Amendment does protect that though. As long as the speech isn't intended to incite imminent lawless action, calling for murders is absolutely protected. E.g. "We should go harm X" is arguably illegal, since it's an immediate call to action. However, "It'd be great if X died" or "All Y should die" are certainly protected. In the same vein, this is why "Punch a Nazi" is totally legal: assault is illegal, but you're not immediately inciting a lawless action. "Let's go punch that Nazi", less so.
    - malwarebytess 6y ago
      The essential thing missing from all of these discussions (unless I am misunderstanding people) is the immediacy of the incitement. The context in which the speech matters. That is where the imminent and likely parts properly arise from. If you write a book advocating for violence against x or y group or individuals that is permissible, but if you were in a crowded square and advocated the same thing when those targets were also in the square and it is likely that your incitement will lead to violence then it is not. That's incitement, it's imminent, and it is for a lawless act. But again, if you did it at home on your blog in some nebulous sense that isn't likely to cause some specific event then it is protected speech. An important distinction here is that "true threats" are a separate category from what we are talking about. A true threat doesn't have a "likely" or "imminent" component and so is even broader in scope than violent speech in general. That is, true threats are not protected. https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1025/true-threats https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1025/true-threa...
  - buhhh 6y ago
    I'm not here to educate you.
    - dang 6y ago
      Could you please not post in the flamewar style to Hacker News? We're trying for something different here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - buhhh 6y ago
        I'm aware.
Waterluvian 6y ago
1A protects you from the government. It has no relevance to free speech among persons and corporations.
- deadmik3 6y ago
  Why is speech the only part of 1A that gets this treatment? You wouldn't say the same thing about religion
  - kube-system 6y ago
    The same is 100% true about religion. 1A does not give you protection from religious discrimination among persons and corporations. It is the Civil Rights Act that does.
    - deadmik3 6y ago
      Don't be semantic, my point is why isn't speech codified at the same level? Clearly at some point someone said "freedom of religion should mean protection from persons and corporations", why can't we say the same about speech?
      - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
        > why can't we say the same about speech? We can. We just haven't yet, and it is not clear that it would result in a world that most Americans would prefer to the one we live in. And like religion it would be subject to lots of tension and litigation about the speech of the corporation's owner vs. the speech of the corporation's customer.
      - kube-system 6y ago
        It isn't semantics. We give protected classes extra protections because they are attributes of who a person is. To give the same protections to actions that people do would be wildly different. A salesperson should be able to be fired for shit-talking their own product. A customer service representative should be able to be fired for treating a customer inappropriately. The editor of a magazine should be allowed to edit contributors' articles. Putting speech on the same level as a protected class is ridiculous.
klmadfejno 6y ago
Heck, I think it's fine for entities to be both, but recognize the need for special rules allocated to individual companies that reach a certain level of subjective public-space-y-ness If our concerns are facebook, instagram, reddit, and maybe 20 others, let's not constrain ourselves with fundamental rules that try to group them in with an obscure independent forum site that houses a few hundred members
ransom1538 6y ago
This could destroy the tech oligopolies. This would tangle them in unlimited court cases allowing for smaller sites with smaller pockets [1] to flourish. I imagine they will fight this to the death - or drag it in court at least until November elections for a pro-Oligopoly (Biden) camp to take over. [1] Lawyers hate small pockets.
- ipsum2 6y ago
  > [1] Lawyers hate small pockets. Judging from patent trolls (technically their lawyers) suing small startups, I don't see how thats the case, unless each website was serving <100 people and making 0 revenue.
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  If this does destroy tech oligopolies, they'll have nobody to blame for it but themselves. They've had over a decade to prove that they're fair and impartial and, if anything, have worked overtime to prove the opposite.
  - esoterica 6y ago
    Private organizations have zero obligation to be fair and impartial. If you want a company to be run differently, start your own. It's funny how conservatives were totally on board with deregulation and perfectly fine with corporations steamrolling every one else as long as they were aligned with conservative objectives. Then the moment a powerful corporate faction with liberal-ish sensibilities emerges, they freak out and abandon all their fake principles and run crying to the nanny state to save them from the big evil corporations.
    - xpe 6y ago
      1. Please note that ‘obligation’ is not the only standard at play. Companies exist in a social and economic context. (I have previous comments on this topic that can be easily found.) 2. The ‘if you want a company to be run differently, start your own’ argument is tiresome and weak. There are (and should be) many mechanisms to influence corporate behavior. 3. Even the pre-Trump Republican Party has long taken flack from libertarians who essentially argue that one core principle should guide their political philosophy. 3B. Personally, I have not found a strong philosophical grounding to claim that political philosophies should be reducible to one core thought from which everything neatly derives. (That would be nice, wouldn’t it?) In my experience, figuring out public policy decisions is fundamentally more complex than that due to the interplay of conflicting values and moralities.
pchristensen 6y ago
I think that most of them should remain platforms, but that recommendation algorithms should be treated as publishers. So a reverse chronological feed would be protected by 230, while publishers would be liable for the contents in an algorithmic feed. People can subscribe to whatever sketchy content they want, but it won't be pushed to people that didn't ask for it.
- OrangeMango 6y ago
  I don't agree with the downvotes: it's a concept that should get more discussion, in the sense of "where should the line be drawn between common carrier behavior and publisher behavior?"
- donmcronald 6y ago
  That’s a fantastic distinction. I would love to see that happen.
esoterica 6y ago
> I think that’s fine to ask social medias to choose between being a publisher or a platform. Why should we force websites to choose between being a publisher and a completely unmoderated platform? Why do people keep parroting that line with zero justification as if it's self-evident? You are commenting right now on a website that is heavily moderated, a website that could not possibly exist if the admins faced personal legal liability for any illegal content an anonymous commenter posts on here. If you don't think Hacker News should be legally allowed to exist why are you posting here? Nobody outside of a fringe group of edgelords wants their favorite Internet communities to turn into 8chan. But the legal regime you are suggesting would make any other kind of website that hosts user generated content effectively illegal.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
  When HN's demographic imagines such legislation, they are thinking about how racist views get quickly kicked off of other platforms, and they want those other platforms to suffer. You won't hear any of these proponents complain about someone getting banned on HN, because it's an environment where their line of thinking is dominant.

buhhh 6y ago

I don't think you understand the first amendment.

hartator 6y ago
Enlight us. For example, calling for the murders of specific people based on their political views or races don’t fall under the first. And social medias allow the spread of some of these messages with no consequences at the moment.
- Miner49er 6y ago
  how is that not protected under the first amendment?
  - fredgrott 6y ago
    also private speech is more free-er than public speech
- buttersbrian 6y ago
  That's not exactly true. "Speech is not protected by the First Amendment if the speaker intends to incite a violation of the law that is both imminent and likely." Someone randomly spouting off that people of a race or ideology should be wiped out doesn't always/exactly pass this legal test.
  - refurb 6y ago
    Great point. Visit any US neo-Nazi website and you’ll see language that one could argue is “threatening to a specific group”. But unless it’s “hey, everyone gather at 5 pm on Main St so we can start shooting people”, it’s still protected language.
    - ByteJockey 6y ago
      That's actually a point that I don't think has been decided yet, specifically "imminent". It's been ruled that "at some unspecified point in the future" doesn't count, but I can't find a case (with an admittedly short search) about where the exact boundaries are. I don't know what the exact legal definition of imminent is, but the layman's definition involves the thing happening soon. It may well depend on how close to 5 it is (but what timezone?). The same sentence with the words "right now" would almost certainly meet the test though (assuming the action was actually likely to occur).
- checker 6y ago
  So if I sent a note with the content you just described to everyone I know via UPS and you define this content as a crime, then UPS should be held liable in facilitating this crime? So therefore UPS needs to inspect the content of every package that it delivers to avoid culpability in crimes like this? Or somehow UPS is different from a social media entity. Then what legally is a social media entity? These are interesting times. The rules will certainly change; it remains to be seen if they will ultimately change for the better.
  - hartator 6y ago
    If the UPS was already opening the mail of everyone to add its own pamphlets when you discuss x or y, yes they should be responsible for facilitating crime that they know of then.
    - checker 6y ago
      Interesting, so the implication is that web companies are generating advertising from user-submitted content, therefore it's been read by the company, so therefore any cross-user communication needs to be reviewed by a person or a sufficiently accurate AI for endorsement through publication. So in your framework, transmission of user content + advertising based on that content = culpability. I wonder if social media companies would figure out a way to legally prove transmission of a message without viewing its contents as a way to avoid culpability and maintain some level of profitability.
    - heavyset_go 6y ago
      This is like suggesting that if you build a spam filter, you need to build a filter that scans content and catches and reports every type of crime possible to commit ever.
- sixstringtheory 6y ago
  It's not a matter of what kind of speech 1A governs, but what kind of entities. The government is the entity that is not allowed to restrict legal free speech. Private corporations are not bound by the same rule; they can restrict all they want.
- gameman144 6y ago
  The First Amendment does protect that though. As long as the speech isn't intended to incite imminent lawless action, calling for murders is absolutely protected. E.g. "We should go harm X" is arguably illegal, since it's an immediate call to action. However, "It'd be great if X died" or "All Y should die" are certainly protected. In the same vein, this is why "Punch a Nazi" is totally legal: assault is illegal, but you're not immediately inciting a lawless action. "Let's go punch that Nazi", less so.
  - malwarebytess 6y ago
    The essential thing missing from all of these discussions (unless I am misunderstanding people) is the immediacy of the incitement. The context in which the speech matters. That is where the imminent and likely parts properly arise from. If you write a book advocating for violence against x or y group or individuals that is permissible, but if you were in a crowded square and advocated the same thing when those targets were also in the square and it is likely that your incitement will lead to violence then it is not. That's incitement, it's imminent, and it is for a lawless act. But again, if you did it at home on your blog in some nebulous sense that isn't likely to cause some specific event then it is protected speech. An important distinction here is that "true threats" are a separate category from what we are talking about. A true threat doesn't have a "likely" or "imminent" component and so is even broader in scope than violent speech in general. That is, true threats are not protected. https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1025/true-threats https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1025/true-threa...
- buhhh 6y ago
  I'm not here to educate you.
  - dang 6y ago
    Could you please not post in the flamewar style to Hacker News? We're trying for something different here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - buhhh 6y ago
      I'm aware.

Waterluvian 6y ago

1A protects you from the government. It has no relevance to free speech among persons and corporations.

deadmik3 6y ago
Why is speech the only part of 1A that gets this treatment? You wouldn't say the same thing about religion
- kube-system 6y ago
  The same is 100% true about religion. 1A does not give you protection from religious discrimination among persons and corporations. It is the Civil Rights Act that does.
  - deadmik3 6y ago
    Don't be semantic, my point is why isn't speech codified at the same level? Clearly at some point someone said "freedom of religion should mean protection from persons and corporations", why can't we say the same about speech?
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
      > why can't we say the same about speech? We can. We just haven't yet, and it is not clear that it would result in a world that most Americans would prefer to the one we live in. And like religion it would be subject to lots of tension and litigation about the speech of the corporation's owner vs. the speech of the corporation's customer.
    - kube-system 6y ago
      It isn't semantics. We give protected classes extra protections because they are attributes of who a person is. To give the same protections to actions that people do would be wildly different. A salesperson should be able to be fired for shit-talking their own product. A customer service representative should be able to be fired for treating a customer inappropriately. The editor of a magazine should be allowed to edit contributors' articles. Putting speech on the same level as a protected class is ridiculous.

klmadfejno 6y ago

Heck, I think it's fine for entities to be both, but recognize the need for special rules allocated to individual companies that reach a certain level of subjective public-space-y-ness If our concerns are facebook, instagram, reddit, and maybe 20 others, let's not constrain ourselves with fundamental rules that try to group them in with an obscure independent forum site that houses a few hundred members

ransom1538 6y ago

This could destroy the tech oligopolies. This would tangle them in unlimited court cases allowing for smaller sites with smaller pockets [1] to flourish. I imagine they will fight this to the death - or drag it in court at least until November elections for a pro-Oligopoly (Biden) camp to take over. [1] Lawyers hate small pockets.

ipsum2 6y ago
> [1] Lawyers hate small pockets. Judging from patent trolls (technically their lawyers) suing small startups, I don't see how thats the case, unless each website was serving <100 people and making 0 revenue.
commandlinefan 6y ago
If this does destroy tech oligopolies, they'll have nobody to blame for it but themselves. They've had over a decade to prove that they're fair and impartial and, if anything, have worked overtime to prove the opposite.
- esoterica 6y ago
  Private organizations have zero obligation to be fair and impartial. If you want a company to be run differently, start your own. It's funny how conservatives were totally on board with deregulation and perfectly fine with corporations steamrolling every one else as long as they were aligned with conservative objectives. Then the moment a powerful corporate faction with liberal-ish sensibilities emerges, they freak out and abandon all their fake principles and run crying to the nanny state to save them from the big evil corporations.
  - xpe 6y ago
    1. Please note that ‘obligation’ is not the only standard at play. Companies exist in a social and economic context. (I have previous comments on this topic that can be easily found.) 2. The ‘if you want a company to be run differently, start your own’ argument is tiresome and weak. There are (and should be) many mechanisms to influence corporate behavior. 3. Even the pre-Trump Republican Party has long taken flack from libertarians who essentially argue that one core principle should guide their political philosophy. 3B. Personally, I have not found a strong philosophical grounding to claim that political philosophies should be reducible to one core thought from which everything neatly derives. (That would be nice, wouldn’t it?) In my experience, figuring out public policy decisions is fundamentally more complex than that due to the interplay of conflicting values and moralities.

pchristensen 6y ago

I think that most of them should remain platforms, but that recommendation algorithms should be treated as publishers. So a reverse chronological feed would be protected by 230, while publishers would be liable for the contents in an algorithmic feed. People can subscribe to whatever sketchy content they want, but it won't be pushed to people that didn't ask for it.

OrangeMango 6y ago
I don't agree with the downvotes: it's a concept that should get more discussion, in the sense of "where should the line be drawn between common carrier behavior and publisher behavior?"
donmcronald 6y ago
That’s a fantastic distinction. I would love to see that happen.

esoterica 6y ago

> I think that’s fine to ask social medias to choose between being a publisher or a platform. Why should we force websites to choose between being a publisher and a completely unmoderated platform? Why do people keep parroting that line with zero justification as if it's self-evident? You are commenting right now on a website that is heavily moderated, a website that could not possibly exist if the admins faced personal legal liability for any illegal content an anonymous commenter posts on here. If you don't think Hacker News should be legally allowed to exist why are you posting here? Nobody outside of a fringe group of edgelords wants their favorite Internet communities to turn into 8chan. But the legal regime you are suggesting would make any other kind of website that hosts user generated content effectively illegal.

x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
When HN's demographic imagines such legislation, they are thinking about how racist views get quickly kicked off of other platforms, and they want those other platforms to suffer. You won't hear any of these proponents complain about someone getting banned on HN, because it's an environment where their line of thinking is dominant.