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That's nonsense. Showing "their algorithms and content-removal practices are politically neutral" is not an insurmountable bar. It's just inconvenient for Big T

That's nonsense. Showing "their algorithms and content-removal practices are politically neutral" is not an insurmountable bar. It's just inconvenient for Big Tech's supporting interests.

throwawaygh 6y ago
Really? You think we can here in this thread all agree to what it means for an algorithm or content-removal practice to be "politically neutral"? If so, please go ahead! But I seriously doubt it. This is a thing political philosophers argue about in journals to this day, that lawyers argue about in SCOTUS cases to this day, and that has been litigated to death in thousands of HN threads over the years. The question of what "politically neutral" means is perhaps the MOST political question there is. The delineation of political speech from non-political speech defines the playing field. And even setting aside genuine disagreement, politics does not operate on good faith. It operates on power. In practice, the bill does not outline specific criteria. So "politically neutral" will mean whatever the FTC wants it to mean. Which means it will mean whatever the appointees of the FTC chair want it to mean. Josh Hawley, of course, knows and understands how power works. He would not be proposing this bill if the big tech companies were right-biased. Democrats also understand how power works. So, in this counter-factual world of right-biased social media, it would be Democrats clamoring for federal intervention and Hawley decrying the "Democrat attack on the most successful American companies". Do you really believe otherwise?
- adamiscool8 6y ago
  Very simple. No primary moderation action should be made based on human input. Automated moderation should look for identifiable harms (i.e. illicit content, directed threats, terrorism), and absolutely nothing should be removed or blocked based on vague and nebulously defined concerns over "misinformation". Voila -- political neutrality in moderation.
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    > No primary moderation action should be made based on human input 1. That means no HN. 2. I normally don't have to remind people of this at places like HN, but... algorithms are written by... humans! Supervised algos use data labeled by... humans! > Automated moderation should look for identifiable harms (i.e. illicit content, directed threats, terrorism) Why do you list terrorism separately from directed threats? What is the line/difference between "terrorism" and an "undirected threat"? Are militia groups that don't make directed threats terrorists? Are radical religious groups that don't make directed threats terrorists? What if they are run by actual terrorists but none of the speech amounts to a directed threat? Speaking of which, what is a terrorist organization? Is the KKK? What about small white nationalist or black power militia groups? What about QAnon? What about antifa? What about BLM? What about Westboro Baptist? What about the Black Panthers? There are people -- elected officials -- who think each of those is a terror organization. So, defining terrorist organization is absolutely a political fight. Maybe we avoid that and just talk about directed threats/ Ok. Does that mean that Al Qaeda allowed to operate on FB as long as they don't make directed threats? In fact, that FB is prohibited from not allowing Al Qaeda on as long as they don't make directed threats? That seems like not a solution anyone is going to get behind. We haven't even gotten past the "obviously terrorism=bad" and we already have to declare whether BLM, QAnon, Westboro, or militia groups are "terrorists". Which some senators believe is the case and is a 100% political question. > illicit content Is Ginsberg's Howl illicit? Is a picture of two women kissing illicit? What about non-sexualized nude breasts? What about nude male bodies? What about an erect penis but in a non-erotic context? Will the dominant answers to these questions be the same in 50 years? Lots of people would say a site that allows pictures of heterosexual kissing but not not pictures of homosexual kissing is obviously taking a political position, but that was outside the realm of "political opinion" when I entered adulthood! Any public homosexual display of affection was obviously illicit. > absolutely nothing should be removed or blocked based on vague and nebulously defined concerns over "misinformation". What does vague mean? What does nebulously defined mean? What is the difference between misinformation and libel? What is the difference between misinformation and dangerous information? Is it impressible to remove a video that's targeted at kids and encourages huffing glue as a fun and harm-free activity? Anyone who has moderated a forum knows that such an algorithm is going to have all sorts of holes and perceived biases. I've never written an automod that some user doesn't get pissed off about. More generally: that's just straight-up moderation, it has nothing to do with tweaks to recommendation algos. What if Twitter realizes that people leave the site if they see stuff about abortion but stay if they see stuff about LGBT rights? Again, viewpoint-neutral, Americans just one day start yawning about abortion and really polarize on LGBT stuff. Can they prioritize posts about LGBT rights over posts about abortion as long as the content served up on the preferred topic is viewpoint-neutral and the only algorithmic goal is more lingering eyeballs? If no to that, how about sports news vs. SCOTUS decision news? If yes to that, what about COVID case counts vs. Jobs Report numbers? Even more generally: anyone who's stayed up to date on robust machine learning knows that defining good notions of robustness -- and political neutrality is a type of robustness -- is very much an open problem. So even if we had a precise definition of political neutrality, which I don't think we do, "simply create an algorithm that has that property" is very much an open algorithmic problem. In fact, there are even some impossibility theorems in this space. So even if we can define neutrality in a perfectly neutral way -- which we can't -- this might be like passing a constitutional amendment that demands a voting system has all of: Non-dictatorship, unrestricted domain, monotonicity, IIA, and non-imposition. You can legislatively demand "the perfect voting system", but the universe is not obliged to ensure the existence of such a thing. Same for some types of robust ML, and no one knows which side of an impossibility theorem some precise-enough-to-code notion of political neutrality might fall on. Which also brings up the REAL question: are tweaks to recommendation algorithms allowed? Obviously we can't ask FB/Twitter to freeze their recommendation algos -- it's their core product. So. If they notice an "obvious bias" and tweak the algorithm to correct for it, who decides whether that was a biased human intervention or a totally appropriate bug fix? Oh, right, a politically appointed FTC. I think that "politically neutral" is impossible to formalize in code because it is a fundamental contradiction in terms. But even if it does, I suspect that any reasonable lists of formal specifications might be either mathematically impossible to train a classifier to respect or else at least AGI-complete to actually implement. But if you disagree, I'm happy to clone the Github repo and mess around with your proposal.
- judge2020 6y ago
  Exactly. Imagine a republican-backed FCC arguing that, because more voters in the US are democrat, it's not politically neutral to try to show a news article to everyone in the US and the algorithm should try to show it only to an equal number of republicans and democrats.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  I'm not a republican, nor a Trump supporter, but I disagree. I think the courts would be able to create a body of case law over whether a removal was due to a post being "violent, obscene or harassing" or for some other reason. We can't be terrified of regulating platforms that have massive amounts of control over what most people see or hear about.
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    > I think the courts would be able to create a body of case law over whether a removal was due to a post being "violent, obscene or harassing" or for some other reason. 1. Maybe, but that's not what Hawley's bill does. 2. Leaving inherently political questions up to the courts invites politicizing the courts -- something that's already happened and that, if it continues apace, threatens to delegitimize and gridlock the entire federal legal system. 3. Given that you're not a Trump supporter or Republican, perhaps you should review the last 20 years of federal judicial appointments before placing so much faith in the courts... > We can't be terrified of regulating platforms that have massive amounts of control over what most people see or hear about. Agreed. I think there are lots of reasonable approaches toward regulation and/or self-regulation. The ability of customers to choose from a marketplace of recommendation algos (or implement their own) is the obvious market-based solution. However, I do not think a politically appointed committee whose job is to define political neutrality is a reasonable approach. And I think that leaving inherently political moderation choices up to the courts would be even worse -- at least FTC chairs aren't lifetime appointments, and at least politicizing the FTC won't deteriorate public trust in the one portion of the federal government that is not yet perceived as nakedly partisan.
- JoshTriplett 6y ago
  Exactly. Also, people have a stronger uncomfortable negative reaction to news they don't like than a positive reaction to news they agree with, and extremists think even neutral descriptions of reality are biased against them, so if you show a neutral selection to a non-neutral person they're likely to see it as biased because it doesn't align with their perception of what the proportions should be. Nobody will ever agree on what "neutral" means, which means most likely it'll mean "biased in favor of who currently has political power".
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > You think we can here in this thread all agree to what it means for an algorithm or content-removal practice to be "politically neutral"? Well, there's a simple answer, but I doubt we'll agree on it. It is impossible for a content-removal practice, algorithmic or otherwise, to be politically neutral. Any such practice will involve (whether implemented case-by-case or encoded into the design of the algorthm) judgements of a political nature and with political impacts.
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    > It is impossible for a content-removal practice, algorithmic or otherwise, to be politically neutral. Right. My point is that Hawley's whole premise of a "politically appointed political neutrality committee" is absurdly transparent.
untog 6y ago
> Showing "their algorithms and content-removal practices are politically neutral" is not an insurmountable bar. It is when political appointees are the ones who judge if you've cleared the bar.
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
It seems pretty insurmountable to me. Can you go into more detail about how they'd do it? I've seen a lot of fights where one side says "putting this post up is biased against me" and another says "taking this post down is biased against me", and I'm not sure how Facebook could resolve those disputes with confidence the FCC won't say they did it wrong.
- jcranmer 6y ago
  I think that's the point of this bill. They force Facebook et al. to get certified bias-free in a manner that basically makes it impossible to get that certification. So then they get the headlines saying "FCC finds Facebook is biased!!!111" The bill would be more palatable to me if they simply dropped the immunity, without any certification process. But then demonstrating bias would require winning civil lawsuits, which requires demonstrating damage suffered by the bias and also convincing 12 members of the jury in a unanimous vote... which is unlikely to happen, I think. (Addendum: actually, the real point of the bill may be to just say "Facebook/Twitter/Google is biased, and I'm doing something about it!" and ignore any actual chance of it making law or being reasonable. It's not like many people actually read details of bills to understand what it does and doesn't say.)
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    > The bill would be more palatable to me if they simply dropped the immunity, without any certification process. But then demonstrating bias would require winning civil lawsuits, which requires demonstrating damage suffered by the bias and also convincing 12 members of the jury in a unanimous vote... which is unlikely to happen, I think. No. Killing 230 entirely would allow Twitter and Facebook to be as politically biased as they want. However, if one of their users libels you, then you could sue Facebook in addition to that user. And if any Facebook user posts child porn, even for a short period of time, relevant parties at Facebook could face criminal charges for distribution. You couldn't sue Facebook for being politically biased, but Facebook would be responsible for actual crimes that its users commit. Hawley's bill says "you won't be responsible for the illegal stuff your users do (i.e., you get 230 protections), but only as long as you keep my political appointees happy."
bosswipe 6y ago
The hypocrisy of the same FCC that said that network neutrality was too much regulation to now demand "political neutrality" is outrageous.
jcranmer 6y ago
Note that the test actually proposed (not the press release blurb) says: > The moderation practices of a provider of interactive computer services are politically biased if the provider moderates information provided by information content providers in a manner that [...] disproportionately restricts or promotes access to, or the availability of, information from a political party, political candidate, or political viewpoint That means that any service that chooses to do something like suppress known conspiracy theories is going to fall afoul of the proposed changes.
- JoshTriplett 6y ago
  For that matter, a policy of restricting hate speech will currently restrict one party more than another. A policy of prohibiting disinformation that could lead to voter suppression will currently restrict one party more than another. A policy of prohibiting misinformation about the ongoing pandemic will currently restrict one party more than another.
klyrs 6y ago
What does "politically neutral" mean, anyway? What happens if I establish a political party whose solitary goal is to torture babies, kittens and puppies to death? Is that suddenly a "political opinion" which must be protected?

That's nonsense. Showing "their algorithms and content-removal practices are politically neutral" is not an insurmountable bar. It's just inconvenient for Big Tech's supporting interests.

throwawaygh 6y ago

Really? You think we can here in this thread all agree to what it means for an algorithm or content-removal practice to be "politically neutral"? If so, please go ahead! But I seriously doubt it. This is a thing political philosophers argue about in journals to this day, that lawyers argue about in SCOTUS cases to this day, and that has been litigated to death in thousands of HN threads over the years. The question of what "politically neutral" means is perhaps the MOST political question there is. The delineation of political speech from non-political speech defines the playing field. And even setting aside genuine disagreement, politics does not operate on good faith. It operates on power. In practice, the bill does not outline specific criteria. So "politically neutral" will mean whatever the FTC wants it to mean. Which means it will mean whatever the appointees of the FTC chair want it to mean. Josh Hawley, of course, knows and understands how power works. He would not be proposing this bill if the big tech companies were right-biased. Democrats also understand how power works. So, in this counter-factual world of right-biased social media, it would be Democrats clamoring for federal intervention and Hawley decrying the "Democrat attack on the most successful American companies". Do you really believe otherwise?

adamiscool8 6y ago
Very simple. No primary moderation action should be made based on human input. Automated moderation should look for identifiable harms (i.e. illicit content, directed threats, terrorism), and absolutely nothing should be removed or blocked based on vague and nebulously defined concerns over "misinformation". Voila -- political neutrality in moderation.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  > No primary moderation action should be made based on human input 1. That means no HN. 2. I normally don't have to remind people of this at places like HN, but... algorithms are written by... humans! Supervised algos use data labeled by... humans! > Automated moderation should look for identifiable harms (i.e. illicit content, directed threats, terrorism) Why do you list terrorism separately from directed threats? What is the line/difference between "terrorism" and an "undirected threat"? Are militia groups that don't make directed threats terrorists? Are radical religious groups that don't make directed threats terrorists? What if they are run by actual terrorists but none of the speech amounts to a directed threat? Speaking of which, what is a terrorist organization? Is the KKK? What about small white nationalist or black power militia groups? What about QAnon? What about antifa? What about BLM? What about Westboro Baptist? What about the Black Panthers? There are people -- elected officials -- who think each of those is a terror organization. So, defining terrorist organization is absolutely a political fight. Maybe we avoid that and just talk about directed threats/ Ok. Does that mean that Al Qaeda allowed to operate on FB as long as they don't make directed threats? In fact, that FB is prohibited from not allowing Al Qaeda on as long as they don't make directed threats? That seems like not a solution anyone is going to get behind. We haven't even gotten past the "obviously terrorism=bad" and we already have to declare whether BLM, QAnon, Westboro, or militia groups are "terrorists". Which some senators believe is the case and is a 100% political question. > illicit content Is Ginsberg's Howl illicit? Is a picture of two women kissing illicit? What about non-sexualized nude breasts? What about nude male bodies? What about an erect penis but in a non-erotic context? Will the dominant answers to these questions be the same in 50 years? Lots of people would say a site that allows pictures of heterosexual kissing but not not pictures of homosexual kissing is obviously taking a political position, but that was outside the realm of "political opinion" when I entered adulthood! Any public homosexual display of affection was obviously illicit. > absolutely nothing should be removed or blocked based on vague and nebulously defined concerns over "misinformation". What does vague mean? What does nebulously defined mean? What is the difference between misinformation and libel? What is the difference between misinformation and dangerous information? Is it impressible to remove a video that's targeted at kids and encourages huffing glue as a fun and harm-free activity? Anyone who has moderated a forum knows that such an algorithm is going to have all sorts of holes and perceived biases. I've never written an automod that some user doesn't get pissed off about. More generally: that's just straight-up moderation, it has nothing to do with tweaks to recommendation algos. What if Twitter realizes that people leave the site if they see stuff about abortion but stay if they see stuff about LGBT rights? Again, viewpoint-neutral, Americans just one day start yawning about abortion and really polarize on LGBT stuff. Can they prioritize posts about LGBT rights over posts about abortion as long as the content served up on the preferred topic is viewpoint-neutral and the only algorithmic goal is more lingering eyeballs? If no to that, how about sports news vs. SCOTUS decision news? If yes to that, what about COVID case counts vs. Jobs Report numbers? Even more generally: anyone who's stayed up to date on robust machine learning knows that defining good notions of robustness -- and political neutrality is a type of robustness -- is very much an open problem. So even if we had a precise definition of political neutrality, which I don't think we do, "simply create an algorithm that has that property" is very much an open algorithmic problem. In fact, there are even some impossibility theorems in this space. So even if we can define neutrality in a perfectly neutral way -- which we can't -- this might be like passing a constitutional amendment that demands a voting system has all of: Non-dictatorship, unrestricted domain, monotonicity, IIA, and non-imposition. You can legislatively demand "the perfect voting system", but the universe is not obliged to ensure the existence of such a thing. Same for some types of robust ML, and no one knows which side of an impossibility theorem some precise-enough-to-code notion of political neutrality might fall on. Which also brings up the REAL question: are tweaks to recommendation algorithms allowed? Obviously we can't ask FB/Twitter to freeze their recommendation algos -- it's their core product. So. If they notice an "obvious bias" and tweak the algorithm to correct for it, who decides whether that was a biased human intervention or a totally appropriate bug fix? Oh, right, a politically appointed FTC. I think that "politically neutral" is impossible to formalize in code because it is a fundamental contradiction in terms. But even if it does, I suspect that any reasonable lists of formal specifications might be either mathematically impossible to train a classifier to respect or else at least AGI-complete to actually implement. But if you disagree, I'm happy to clone the Github repo and mess around with your proposal.
judge2020 6y ago
Exactly. Imagine a republican-backed FCC arguing that, because more voters in the US are democrat, it's not politically neutral to try to show a news article to everyone in the US and the algorithm should try to show it only to an equal number of republicans and democrats.
whimsicalism 6y ago
I'm not a republican, nor a Trump supporter, but I disagree. I think the courts would be able to create a body of case law over whether a removal was due to a post being "violent, obscene or harassing" or for some other reason. We can't be terrified of regulating platforms that have massive amounts of control over what most people see or hear about.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  > I think the courts would be able to create a body of case law over whether a removal was due to a post being "violent, obscene or harassing" or for some other reason. 1. Maybe, but that's not what Hawley's bill does. 2. Leaving inherently political questions up to the courts invites politicizing the courts -- something that's already happened and that, if it continues apace, threatens to delegitimize and gridlock the entire federal legal system. 3. Given that you're not a Trump supporter or Republican, perhaps you should review the last 20 years of federal judicial appointments before placing so much faith in the courts... > We can't be terrified of regulating platforms that have massive amounts of control over what most people see or hear about. Agreed. I think there are lots of reasonable approaches toward regulation and/or self-regulation. The ability of customers to choose from a marketplace of recommendation algos (or implement their own) is the obvious market-based solution. However, I do not think a politically appointed committee whose job is to define political neutrality is a reasonable approach. And I think that leaving inherently political moderation choices up to the courts would be even worse -- at least FTC chairs aren't lifetime appointments, and at least politicizing the FTC won't deteriorate public trust in the one portion of the federal government that is not yet perceived as nakedly partisan.
JoshTriplett 6y ago
Exactly. Also, people have a stronger uncomfortable negative reaction to news they don't like than a positive reaction to news they agree with, and extremists think even neutral descriptions of reality are biased against them, so if you show a neutral selection to a non-neutral person they're likely to see it as biased because it doesn't align with their perception of what the proportions should be. Nobody will ever agree on what "neutral" means, which means most likely it'll mean "biased in favor of who currently has political power".
dragonwriter 6y ago
> You think we can here in this thread all agree to what it means for an algorithm or content-removal practice to be "politically neutral"? Well, there's a simple answer, but I doubt we'll agree on it. It is impossible for a content-removal practice, algorithmic or otherwise, to be politically neutral. Any such practice will involve (whether implemented case-by-case or encoded into the design of the algorthm) judgements of a political nature and with political impacts.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  > It is impossible for a content-removal practice, algorithmic or otherwise, to be politically neutral. Right. My point is that Hawley's whole premise of a "politically appointed political neutrality committee" is absurdly transparent.

untog 6y ago

> Showing "their algorithms and content-removal practices are politically neutral" is not an insurmountable bar. It is when political appointees are the ones who judge if you've cleared the bar.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

It seems pretty insurmountable to me. Can you go into more detail about how they'd do it? I've seen a lot of fights where one side says "putting this post up is biased against me" and another says "taking this post down is biased against me", and I'm not sure how Facebook could resolve those disputes with confidence the FCC won't say they did it wrong.

jcranmer 6y ago
I think that's the point of this bill. They force Facebook et al. to get certified bias-free in a manner that basically makes it impossible to get that certification. So then they get the headlines saying "FCC finds Facebook is biased!!!111" The bill would be more palatable to me if they simply dropped the immunity, without any certification process. But then demonstrating bias would require winning civil lawsuits, which requires demonstrating damage suffered by the bias and also convincing 12 members of the jury in a unanimous vote... which is unlikely to happen, I think. (Addendum: actually, the real point of the bill may be to just say "Facebook/Twitter/Google is biased, and I'm doing something about it!" and ignore any actual chance of it making law or being reasonable. It's not like many people actually read details of bills to understand what it does and doesn't say.)
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  > The bill would be more palatable to me if they simply dropped the immunity, without any certification process. But then demonstrating bias would require winning civil lawsuits, which requires demonstrating damage suffered by the bias and also convincing 12 members of the jury in a unanimous vote... which is unlikely to happen, I think. No. Killing 230 entirely would allow Twitter and Facebook to be as politically biased as they want. However, if one of their users libels you, then you could sue Facebook in addition to that user. And if any Facebook user posts child porn, even for a short period of time, relevant parties at Facebook could face criminal charges for distribution. You couldn't sue Facebook for being politically biased, but Facebook would be responsible for actual crimes that its users commit. Hawley's bill says "you won't be responsible for the illegal stuff your users do (i.e., you get 230 protections), but only as long as you keep my political appointees happy."

bosswipe 6y ago

The hypocrisy of the same FCC that said that network neutrality was too much regulation to now demand "political neutrality" is outrageous.

jcranmer 6y ago

Note that the test actually proposed (not the press release blurb) says: > The moderation practices of a provider of interactive computer services are politically biased if the provider moderates information provided by information content providers in a manner that [...] disproportionately restricts or promotes access to, or the availability of, information from a political party, political candidate, or political viewpoint That means that any service that chooses to do something like suppress known conspiracy theories is going to fall afoul of the proposed changes.

JoshTriplett 6y ago
For that matter, a policy of restricting hate speech will currently restrict one party more than another. A policy of prohibiting disinformation that could lead to voter suppression will currently restrict one party more than another. A policy of prohibiting misinformation about the ongoing pandemic will currently restrict one party more than another.

klyrs 6y ago

What does "politically neutral" mean, anyway? What happens if I establish a political party whose solitary goal is to torture babies, kittens and puppies to death? Is that suddenly a "political opinion" which must be protected?