12 ms·

The problem is not that Section 230 clearly requires platforms to be neutral. The problem is that it doesn’t. Section 230 isn't in the Bill of Rights. It's a l

by zaroth 6y ago

The problem is not that Section 230 clearly requires platforms to be neutral. The problem is that it doesn’t. Section 230 isn't in the Bill of Rights. It's a legislative gift that was given to internet companies to help them grow by granting them a special legal shield for all the highly problematic content that they host and monetize. If they want to editorialize on the back of that content, then I don't see why they should have such special status. We do not need to eliminate Section 230. But the definition of 'Good Samaritan' blocking and 'good faith efforts' should explicitly not include the editorial decisions of a publisher.

roywiggins 6y ago
If you tried to enforce a "neutrality" requirement, you'd slam face-first into the First Amendment. It would be government mandated viewpoint discrimination.
- LegitShady 6y ago
  which is why the legal exemption should be tossed entirely, and new publishers like twitter and facebook who have demonstrated control of what gets seen on their platform, should be liable for the content on their platforms.
  - roywiggins 6y ago
    That would make Hacker News liable for any defamation posted in the comments section. Well done, you just killed HN.
    - LegitShady 6y ago
      shrug if thats the cost of stopping technocratic control of the flow of information in society and openly censoring, its cheap.
      - roywiggins 6y ago
        Throwing out all online discussion fora is rather throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The replacement would be centralized media companies that have total and absolute control over information flow. Goodbye Mastodon (every Mastodon instance is liable for all toots). Goodbye Internet Archive (can't host content that might be defamatory, they'll be liable). Goodbye GitHub pull requests (Git would be liable for any defamation contained in them). And so on.
        LegitShady 6y ago
        I would happily see all of those things go away to make sure Silicon Valley can't control who sees what. It's not that I don't understand the value of those things, its that I see the value of not having information in society be controlled by a few companies as having far larger value.
        roywiggins 6y ago
        If you choke off user-generated content, the remaining content will be directly produced by Disney and other media conglomerates. That's not better, that's worse. The only people able to blog, for instance, would be people who have the technical chops to completely self-host. Everyone else would be reduced to handing out flyers on the corner like the bad old days. The behemoth old-media companies would be fine, because they can afford lawyers to go over everything they publish. Not only would it not be worth it, repealing section 230 would consolidate behemoth media companies' control, not break it. It would do the absolute opposite of what you want.
  - madeofpalk 6y ago
    You're aware that this will result in _more_ content from being moderated off the sites, right?
    - Karunamon 6y ago
      Full devils advocate mode here.. I think it would likely result in a severe scaling back of the operations of Facebook and Twitter (and Reddit and [...]). There are simply not enough people to hire as moderators and coordinate at the scales they're running at right now to operate in a manner that won't get them sued on the regular. I also think this would result in a mad dash for anonymous, distributed, decentralized communication methods, i.e. things that can't be the target of a subpoena. Given the toxic influence of both social media on society, and the severe centralization we're operating under... both of those things look very tempting.
      - madeofpalk 6y ago
        I think it would be a net negative for the internet, attacking the very thing that let it get to this place.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  Not if you have a 6-3 majority on the court... 1A is whatever SCOTUS says it is.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > Not if you have a 6-3 majority on the court... 1A is whatever SCOTUS says it is. That's true. Like much of the Constitution, the text is pithy and doesn't specify its definitions. The current legal interpretation of the First Amendment and free speech rest on a particular philosophical traditions that the court adopted in the last century, and especially after the 60s. A lot of people have absolute faith in the functioning of a "marketplace of ideas," but it's not at all clear to me that a such a market can work well when it's flooded by disinformation, just like a market of goods can't work well when it's flooded by counterfeits. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/magazine/free-speech.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/magazine/free-speech.html
nahtnam 6y ago
I agree with this. From a libertarian stand point, the gov stepped in to help (rightfully, sometimes we need it) but it was originally written in a way that is now being abused. I don't see a problem changing it so that if you a companies gets to decide what they want to show and not show, they should be liable just like news sites. I'm open to hearing the opposite side if anyone has any arguments on why it shouldn't change
- roywiggins 6y ago
  From a libertarian standpoint, the government regulating "neutrality" is a nightmare. Should Hacker News be required to treat all links the same? If not, exactly how do you think a government "neutrality" mandate would work? Because such a mandate means that if the HN moderators are a little biased, the whole shebang would become liable for any defamatory comments posted here. That's a government-mandated sword of Damocles hanging over every single moderation decision made here.
  - nahtnam 6y ago
    If you falsely slander me, doesn't 230 make it so that Hacker News can't get sued? If the government is protecting the company here, then the government should be able to also enforce rules that come with that benefit right?
    - roywiggins 6y ago
      Maybe, but they can't condition a benefit on "neutrality." Conditioning makes it viewpoint discrimination, which is unconstitutional.
- dlp211 6y ago
  Well they aren't news sites. They are private entities providing general platforms. Speech, per the US legal system, is more than just what one says, but also the actions one takes. These companies have not only a right, but a duty as publicly traded companies to protect their platforms as they see fit. I fail to see how moderators on vBulletin boards in 2002 are any different then moderators/admins/algorithms on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc in 2020. The scale is different, sure, but you are not entitled to the amplification of these platforms just because they are bigger the same way you weren't entitled to the amplification on those old vBulletin board systems.
shadowgovt 6y ago
Neutral is very much in the eye of the beholder. To start considering this scenario, we'd have to ask "Who will be the arbiter of whether a site's content is 'neutral?'"
- kyleblarson 6y ago
  Seems like a pretty easy call if the site in question blocks peoples' accounts for posting an article from the 4th largest print news publication in the USA.
  - mthoms 6y ago
    It's only "a pretty easy call" when you cherry pick extremely easy, outlying examples. What about more nuanced cases? Who will be arbiter of "neutral" then?
  - bananabreakfast 6y ago
    It was an article that blatantly violated the posting medium's terms. Doesn't matter if the government itself posted that article. Doxxing info is immoral and should be blocked.
  - eranimo 6y ago
    It's actually the 8th largest, not 4th largest.
- joshuaheard 6y ago
  Follow the First Amendment.
  - kodablah 6y ago
    But the first amendment prevents the government from telling me or my company that I have to follow the first amendment like they do.
    - roywiggins 6y ago
klyrs 6y ago
Would you also advocate that we bring back the FCC's Fairness Doctrine, so that news sources would be required to present contrasting viewpoints? Arguments against that were based on the first amendment; that a free press should have complete editorial control over the content that they distribute.
- zaroth 6y ago
  I think that libel laws could be eased just a bit. As it stands, to sue a newspaper for libel you need to prove that they knew what they were reporting was false, or that they showed a "reckless disregard" for the truth. It's a very high standard, but occasionally you will see cases settle (e.g. Covington High student). I do not think the government should be intervening on content decisions. I think; (1) publishers & platforms should be legally responsible for content they host if they are going to editorialize on it (2) from a 'net neutrality' standpoint, that utilities and platforms should be mostly blind and entirely blameless for the packets they carry, and (3) we should allow some level of packet and/or content classification in the middle of #1 and #2 without making the utility/platform fully liable for the packets/content they are carrying, if that classification is based on fairly protecting the network/platform from "attack". The only reason I can see for a fairness doctrine would be based on a theory of anti-trust. To the extent that Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Google, etc. are monopolies, their ability to censor non-obscene viewpoints on their platforms should be limited... and that's a spectrum not a binary switch.
- stale2002 6y ago
  > that news sources would be required to present contrasting viewpoints Personally, I don't have a problem with publishers engaging in publishing. So I wouldn't support that. But there is a large, philosophical difference, IMO, between a publisher and a platform. And our laws need to be changed to further clarify this.
  - klyrs 6y ago
    I'd love to see the Citizens United ruling overturned. It would be great for our society to not treat corporations as people. But as it stands, corporations are found to have free speech rights. Social media companies are both publishers and platforms. Many news sites now have comments sections, too -- they're both publishers and platforms. What is the large, philosophical difference that separates them?
madeofpalk 6y ago
> should explicitly not include the editorial decisions of a publisher what happens when I want to run CatTalk.com and, and its against the rules to talk about Dogs, and someone comes in talking about Dogs? Shouldnt you have the ability to run and moderate and host the content on your site that you decide?
- zaroth 6y ago
  Of course the have the ability and the right to host and moderate your own content! You just do it without Section 230 protection. That means you have a responsibility for that content; the same legal liability that newspapers and magazines have when publishing articles and editorials.
  - tzs 6y ago
    Newspapers and magazines run each article past editorial review before publishing it, and usually fact check anything that looks like it might be libelous or controversial. They don't just accept what the writer submitted and go to press. It's hard to see how you could run a site that provided near real time broadcast communication to the general public if you had to do that level of vetting of each post to make sure nothing slipped through that might get you sued.
  - eli 6y ago
    Newspapers and magazines have a staff of editors (and sometimes lawyers!) review each issue before it's published. That's the standard you want to apply to anyone running any forum anywhere on the internet? That every comment has to be carefully prescreened for legal compliance? And even then you have to operate under a substantially increased risk of lawsuit. Maybe you prescreen every comment but you make a bad call and something defamatory gets through. Or maybe someone sues you under bad faith and you have to pay to defend it or settle. This is a very bad future for the internet. It's an internet where the powerful, who have the full support of publishers, will get to have their voices heard loudly. And the less powerful, who do not have teams of lawyers willing to fight on their behalf, will have a very hard time getting their voices heard.
nomdep 6y ago
They don't even need to be "neutral", just to have written rules that apply to everyone. eg: no spam. That rules could include biases like "no news that favor Trump reelection", but they should be in their terms of service explicitly.
root_axis 6y ago
Explicit deliberate bias is protected speech.
tzs 6y ago
> If they want to editorialize on the back of that content, then I don't see why they should have such special status. They don't have special status for their editorializing. If Facebook or Twitter or any other interactive computer service produces editorial content that, say, libels someone, they could be sued over that and would not have a section 230 defense.
- Karunamon 6y ago
  Would you consider "this is dangerous" or "this is misinformation" to be editorializing? What about "adding context"[1], as Jack Dorsey has promised to do at twitter? Given that all are judgement calls, I'd say it's impossible for it to not be. There's a difference between merely removing something and giving your opinion on the contents. [1]: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1317081843443912706 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1317081843443912706
  - tzs 6y ago
    If they give their opinion on the content, they would be liable for that, because (1) it is not information provided by another information content provider, and so is out of scope for section 230, and (2) even if it were in scope they would be liable as the author--230 essentially says "go after the author, not the host" and in this case they would be sued as the author, not as the host.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> It's a legislative gift that was given to internet companies to help them grow by granting them a special legal shield for all the highly problematic content that they host and monetize. No, it was given to them to encourage them to engage in "good-faith" censorship of things that the government doesn't like by not making such censorship move them from the relatively weak distributor-liability regime where they were only liable based on a responsibility to stop distributing content once they had notice of its unlawfulness to the any-oversight-is-on-you publisher liability regime. It wasn't to "help them grow", which it was assumed they would do anyway, it was to encourage them to try to restrict "bad" content as they grew (it is the one surviving part of the internet censorship Communications Decency Act, and like the rest of that act was, in fact, directed at promoting internet censorship.)

by zaroth 6y ago

roywiggins 6y ago

If you tried to enforce a "neutrality" requirement, you'd slam face-first into the First Amendment. It would be government mandated viewpoint discrimination.

LegitShady 6y ago
which is why the legal exemption should be tossed entirely, and new publishers like twitter and facebook who have demonstrated control of what gets seen on their platform, should be liable for the content on their platforms.
- roywiggins 6y ago
  That would make Hacker News liable for any defamation posted in the comments section. Well done, you just killed HN.
  - LegitShady 6y ago
    shrug if thats the cost of stopping technocratic control of the flow of information in society and openly censoring, its cheap.
    - roywiggins 6y ago
      Throwing out all online discussion fora is rather throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The replacement would be centralized media companies that have total and absolute control over information flow. Goodbye Mastodon (every Mastodon instance is liable for all toots). Goodbye Internet Archive (can't host content that might be defamatory, they'll be liable). Goodbye GitHub pull requests (Git would be liable for any defamation contained in them). And so on.
      - LegitShady 6y ago
        I would happily see all of those things go away to make sure Silicon Valley can't control who sees what. It's not that I don't understand the value of those things, its that I see the value of not having information in society be controlled by a few companies as having far larger value.
        roywiggins 6y ago
        If you choke off user-generated content, the remaining content will be directly produced by Disney and other media conglomerates. That's not better, that's worse. The only people able to blog, for instance, would be people who have the technical chops to completely self-host. Everyone else would be reduced to handing out flyers on the corner like the bad old days. The behemoth old-media companies would be fine, because they can afford lawyers to go over everything they publish. Not only would it not be worth it, repealing section 230 would consolidate behemoth media companies' control, not break it. It would do the absolute opposite of what you want.
- madeofpalk 6y ago
  You're aware that this will result in _more_ content from being moderated off the sites, right?
  - Karunamon 6y ago
    Full devils advocate mode here.. I think it would likely result in a severe scaling back of the operations of Facebook and Twitter (and Reddit and [...]). There are simply not enough people to hire as moderators and coordinate at the scales they're running at right now to operate in a manner that won't get them sued on the regular. I also think this would result in a mad dash for anonymous, distributed, decentralized communication methods, i.e. things that can't be the target of a subpoena. Given the toxic influence of both social media on society, and the severe centralization we're operating under... both of those things look very tempting.
    - madeofpalk 6y ago
      I think it would be a net negative for the internet, attacking the very thing that let it get to this place.
throwawaygh 6y ago
Not if you have a 6-3 majority on the court... 1A is whatever SCOTUS says it is.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > Not if you have a 6-3 majority on the court... 1A is whatever SCOTUS says it is. That's true. Like much of the Constitution, the text is pithy and doesn't specify its definitions. The current legal interpretation of the First Amendment and free speech rest on a particular philosophical traditions that the court adopted in the last century, and especially after the 60s. A lot of people have absolute faith in the functioning of a "marketplace of ideas," but it's not at all clear to me that a such a market can work well when it's flooded by disinformation, just like a market of goods can't work well when it's flooded by counterfeits. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/magazine/free-speech.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/magazine/free-speech.html

nahtnam 6y ago

I agree with this. From a libertarian stand point, the gov stepped in to help (rightfully, sometimes we need it) but it was originally written in a way that is now being abused. I don't see a problem changing it so that if you a companies gets to decide what they want to show and not show, they should be liable just like news sites. I'm open to hearing the opposite side if anyone has any arguments on why it shouldn't change

roywiggins 6y ago
From a libertarian standpoint, the government regulating "neutrality" is a nightmare. Should Hacker News be required to treat all links the same? If not, exactly how do you think a government "neutrality" mandate would work? Because such a mandate means that if the HN moderators are a little biased, the whole shebang would become liable for any defamatory comments posted here. That's a government-mandated sword of Damocles hanging over every single moderation decision made here.
- nahtnam 6y ago
  If you falsely slander me, doesn't 230 make it so that Hacker News can't get sued? If the government is protecting the company here, then the government should be able to also enforce rules that come with that benefit right?
  - roywiggins 6y ago
    Maybe, but they can't condition a benefit on "neutrality." Conditioning makes it viewpoint discrimination, which is unconstitutional.
dlp211 6y ago
Well they aren't news sites. They are private entities providing general platforms. Speech, per the US legal system, is more than just what one says, but also the actions one takes. These companies have not only a right, but a duty as publicly traded companies to protect their platforms as they see fit. I fail to see how moderators on vBulletin boards in 2002 are any different then moderators/admins/algorithms on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc in 2020. The scale is different, sure, but you are not entitled to the amplification of these platforms just because they are bigger the same way you weren't entitled to the amplification on those old vBulletin board systems.

shadowgovt 6y ago

Neutral is very much in the eye of the beholder. To start considering this scenario, we'd have to ask "Who will be the arbiter of whether a site's content is 'neutral?'"

kyleblarson 6y ago
Seems like a pretty easy call if the site in question blocks peoples' accounts for posting an article from the 4th largest print news publication in the USA.
- mthoms 6y ago
  It's only "a pretty easy call" when you cherry pick extremely easy, outlying examples. What about more nuanced cases? Who will be arbiter of "neutral" then?
- bananabreakfast 6y ago
  It was an article that blatantly violated the posting medium's terms. Doesn't matter if the government itself posted that article. Doxxing info is immoral and should be blocked.
- eranimo 6y ago
  It's actually the 8th largest, not 4th largest.
joshuaheard 6y ago
Follow the First Amendment.
- kodablah 6y ago
  But the first amendment prevents the government from telling me or my company that I have to follow the first amendment like they do.
  - roywiggins 6y ago

klyrs 6y ago

Would you also advocate that we bring back the FCC's Fairness Doctrine, so that news sources would be required to present contrasting viewpoints? Arguments against that were based on the first amendment; that a free press should have complete editorial control over the content that they distribute.

zaroth 6y ago
I think that libel laws could be eased just a bit. As it stands, to sue a newspaper for libel you need to prove that they knew what they were reporting was false, or that they showed a "reckless disregard" for the truth. It's a very high standard, but occasionally you will see cases settle (e.g. Covington High student). I do not think the government should be intervening on content decisions. I think; (1) publishers & platforms should be legally responsible for content they host if they are going to editorialize on it (2) from a 'net neutrality' standpoint, that utilities and platforms should be mostly blind and entirely blameless for the packets they carry, and (3) we should allow some level of packet and/or content classification in the middle of #1 and #2 without making the utility/platform fully liable for the packets/content they are carrying, if that classification is based on fairly protecting the network/platform from "attack". The only reason I can see for a fairness doctrine would be based on a theory of anti-trust. To the extent that Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Google, etc. are monopolies, their ability to censor non-obscene viewpoints on their platforms should be limited... and that's a spectrum not a binary switch.
stale2002 6y ago
> that news sources would be required to present contrasting viewpoints Personally, I don't have a problem with publishers engaging in publishing. So I wouldn't support that. But there is a large, philosophical difference, IMO, between a publisher and a platform. And our laws need to be changed to further clarify this.
- klyrs 6y ago
  I'd love to see the Citizens United ruling overturned. It would be great for our society to not treat corporations as people. But as it stands, corporations are found to have free speech rights. Social media companies are both publishers and platforms. Many news sites now have comments sections, too -- they're both publishers and platforms. What is the large, philosophical difference that separates them?

madeofpalk 6y ago

> should explicitly not include the editorial decisions of a publisher what happens when I want to run CatTalk.com and, and its against the rules to talk about Dogs, and someone comes in talking about Dogs? Shouldnt you have the ability to run and moderate and host the content on your site that you decide?

zaroth 6y ago
Of course the have the ability and the right to host and moderate your own content! You just do it without Section 230 protection. That means you have a responsibility for that content; the same legal liability that newspapers and magazines have when publishing articles and editorials.
- tzs 6y ago
  Newspapers and magazines run each article past editorial review before publishing it, and usually fact check anything that looks like it might be libelous or controversial. They don't just accept what the writer submitted and go to press. It's hard to see how you could run a site that provided near real time broadcast communication to the general public if you had to do that level of vetting of each post to make sure nothing slipped through that might get you sued.
- eli 6y ago
  Newspapers and magazines have a staff of editors (and sometimes lawyers!) review each issue before it's published. That's the standard you want to apply to anyone running any forum anywhere on the internet? That every comment has to be carefully prescreened for legal compliance? And even then you have to operate under a substantially increased risk of lawsuit. Maybe you prescreen every comment but you make a bad call and something defamatory gets through. Or maybe someone sues you under bad faith and you have to pay to defend it or settle. This is a very bad future for the internet. It's an internet where the powerful, who have the full support of publishers, will get to have their voices heard loudly. And the less powerful, who do not have teams of lawyers willing to fight on their behalf, will have a very hard time getting their voices heard.

nomdep 6y ago

They don't even need to be "neutral", just to have written rules that apply to everyone. eg: no spam. That rules could include biases like "no news that favor Trump reelection", but they should be in their terms of service explicitly.

root_axis 6y ago

Explicit deliberate bias is protected speech.

tzs 6y ago

> If they want to editorialize on the back of that content, then I don't see why they should have such special status. They don't have special status for their editorializing. If Facebook or Twitter or any other interactive computer service produces editorial content that, say, libels someone, they could be sued over that and would not have a section 230 defense.

Karunamon 6y ago
Would you consider "this is dangerous" or "this is misinformation" to be editorializing? What about "adding context"[1], as Jack Dorsey has promised to do at twitter? Given that all are judgement calls, I'd say it's impossible for it to not be. There's a difference between merely removing something and giving your opinion on the contents. [1]: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1317081843443912706 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1317081843443912706
- tzs 6y ago
  If they give their opinion on the content, they would be liable for that, because (1) it is not information provided by another information content provider, and so is out of scope for section 230, and (2) even if it were in scope they would be liable as the author--230 essentially says "go after the author, not the host" and in this case they would be sued as the author, not as the host.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> It's a legislative gift that was given to internet companies to help them grow by granting them a special legal shield for all the highly problematic content that they host and monetize. No, it was given to them to encourage them to engage in "good-faith" censorship of things that the government doesn't like by not making such censorship move them from the relatively weak distributor-liability regime where they were only liable based on a responsibility to stop distributing content once they had notice of its unlawfulness to the any-oversight-is-on-you publisher liability regime. It wasn't to "help them grow", which it was assumed they would do anyway, it was to encourage them to try to restrict "bad" content as they grew (it is the one surviving part of the internet censorship Communications Decency Act, and like the rest of that act was, in fact, directed at promoting internet censorship.)