16 ms·

Section 230 is Good, Actually

66 points by samizdis 6y ago

duemti 6y ago
It is good, but also it can be, and is being, heavily abused. It is too much power to already mega-powerful corporations.
- Hamuko 6y ago
  How is it being abused and how would one fix it?
- cordellwren 6y ago
  The exact same could be said about Freedom of Speech itself. Or any other fundamental freedom/privilege for that matter. Potential for abuse is grounds for mitigation, not wholesale curtailment.
  - duemti 6y ago
    No because Freedom of Speech is a fundamental individual right. It should never be limited or restricted. A strong country will prevail over abusers in this case (think when America abolished slavery, segregation...). It is a compass for long term survival.
Nextgrid 6y ago
The problem with Section 230 is that nasty social media companies can use algorithms to curate the content the user sees (often without their knowledge and against their choice) in order to increase engagement & profit off it (including from content that is illegal or promotes illegal activities) but then use Section 230 as an excuse to get away with zero liability. Maybe S230 should be amended so that once you start curating the information and/or profiting off it, you become a publisher and lose S230 protection?
- withPurpose9973 6y ago
  Book publishers and magazines aren’t held to a very serious standard these days. This isn’t the UK; free speech in the US is number 1. It’s far more fundamental than any legislation will fix. America is built on aristocratic protectionism like every other nation. Things like the Constitution allowing for copyright protection for a limited time is made effectively forever given the perspective of an average human life span. It will always end up being gamed. Personally, I’m tuning out more from consumerism and “the tech industry”. Even before covid I’d grown sick of what became circular debates over big O and comp sci 101 in tech, and routine office life. I’m learning musical instruments and writing creatively. Ditched my TV. Things like 230 are useful for big tech Corp. Not me. Let them defend it. I’m not interested in performing unpaid political lobbying for them.
  - gumby 6y ago
    > Things like 230 are useful for big tech Corp. Actually that part of the law protects comment sections in personal blogs: you aren't liable for any comments left on your posts and spam fighting or highlighting etc (or not) of posts doesn't magically transform them into statements of yours. Spammers have reduced the value of comments on blog posts but they are still important.
    - withPurpose9973 6y ago
      Who cares? Encrypt your message and distribute it to interested parties. You know what I’ve learned online? Human beings do human being stuff. golf clap Society doesn’t need to protect a particular form of distribution of expression. Just your freedom to express.
  - pavlov 6y ago
    > “Things like 230 are useful for big tech Corp. Not me.” You’re writing this on a site that’s protected by Section 230. It’s useful for everyone, from the smallest blog to FB, that lets user-generated content through without premoderation. Repealing this law would mean a web with a lot more moderation, not less.
lanevorockz 6y ago
Section 230 is just allowance for mass abuse. Why should Facebook/Twitter/Google be treated differently from a media company when they are inserting their version of the Truth ? This is currently being used against Trump because everyone hates the guy, but wait until this is aimed into anyone that challenges the establishment. Bernie will never have a platform again.
- madeofpalk 6y ago
  > inserting their version of the Truth Explain? Section 230 just says that you can't be held accountable for what other people say. How can you "abuse" that? If Facebook/Twitter/Google are first hand saying/pubishing their own speach, then they can be held accountable for that.
  - jimmydorry 6y ago
    I imagine GP is talking about the text and links that FB/Twitter/Google are inserting on specific user created content. The claim is that these actions fall under the purview of "curation" and "moderation" from either side respectively.
    - Spivak 6y ago
      Let’s talk about a non-politically charged example. Take the famous Zalgo post on SO https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open... where the moderators left the content up because of its fame but added a comment at the top. SO is full of posts like this that have external significance but normally wouldn’t be allowed. I honestly don’t see anything wrong with Twitter saying “hey we think it’s important for the president’s words to stay up but we want to be clear that they wouldn’t normally and here’s why.”
    - nobody9999 6y ago
      >The claim is that these actions fall under the purview of "curation" and "moderation" from either side respectively. IIUC, if Twitter/Facebook chose, they could legally just block those tweets/posts altogether under the guise of Section 230. In fact, they do that sort of thing all the time. The only reason they've started putting "labels" on these is because they prefer not to block stuff completely. Either way, both section 230 and the fact that they're private (rather than government) entities give them that latitude. Without Section 230, they'd likely just block all those posts and much, much more in order to avoid litigation. That said, I'm less concerned about section 230 WRT to Twitter and Facebook and more concerned about small sites and blogs. Without Section 230, anyone with deep pockets could just bury anyone who allows comments on their site in lawsuits. Twitter and Facebook could fight back and likely succeed. But anyone without millions to spend on legal fees could easily be forced offline. And so I wonder, what value would be added by removing section 230 protections? I'd expect that the only folks who would really benefit would be lawyers -- and the rest of us would be poorer, both in terms the diversity of voices and diversity of platforms, for it.
samizdis 6y ago
Cory Doctorow has an interesting take on this, pointing out the pros and the cons as he sees them. https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#230 https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#230 (Unsurprisingly, he also finds in this subject further arguments to break up the platform giants, block their continuing merger-and-acquisition habits, and to mandate interoperability.)
- jedimastert 6y ago
  > who get to speak without having to host our own webservers, DNS, and CDNs This is actually an interesting point. What counts as an "interactive computer service"? If I have a wordpress-hosted instance, are they a service? I host my own website; is Digital Ocean liable because they're hosting my web server? How far up does it actually go?
cwhiz 6y ago
I disagree with the fundamental premise that we need centralized services to have “free speech” on the internet. Eliminating 230 doesn’t eliminate free speech, it eliminates centralized socialization. This is a good thing for the future of the internet, and for the future of the United States. And I further disagree that curated or editorialized content falls within the purview of this law. If you curate what I see, you are a publisher. If you editorialize what I see, you are a publisher. This law was intended to allow sites to delete abusive or illegal content without being sued. It’s now being used by big tech to curate what you see, with no user control, and to editorialize content. This behavior absolutely should not be protected under Section 230. At minimum, this section needs to be amended to exclude curated content and editorialized content.
- foolinaround 6y ago
  I agree with the parent. The post says that online services are different from print services, but this law does not specify how. Those could be added on. Is there a line an online service can cross that makes it a publisher? Now that we are into a fully centralized world, a twitter (maybe unintentionally) has become one of the main highways in the information resources being transported. The question of whether Twitter, FB are private companies are next to the point. There can always be a size restriction? no. of users etc? Also how a twitter or a facebook might fare without Section 230 needs some thought? Maybe it is good for the internet
  - cwhiz 6y ago
    If Facebook and Twitter vanished, the world would be immeasurably better.
    - politelemon 6y ago
      It would. But, I have less faith in humanity. I feel that if they disappeared we'd create and congregate on something equivalent, and possibly even worse.
- thathndude 6y ago
GordonS 6y ago
I don't want to turn this into a political rant, but a reminder about the main reason we are even arguing why we should not repeal an act designed to protect freedom of speech: Trump, the ostensible leader of the free world, was furious about #DiaperDon trending on Twitter, declaring it a threat against national security. Hopefully in a couple of months this ludicrous furore over curtailing freedom of speech will be a non-issue again.
- the-dude 6y ago
  You are carefully neglecting he called out the partisanship from the very beginning of his term?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - pavlov 6y ago
    He is currently threatening to veto the military funding bill if it doesn’t include a rider for repealing Section 230. I think most people would agree that has nothing to do with the military and shouldn’t be in the bill. We can only speculate on the real reasons he’s doing this now, but the timing feels like revenge for the fact-checking applied to his election claims.
    - the-dude 6y ago
      Slipping in unrelated stuff into bills has been par for the course for ages now if I am not mistaken. What about he is trying to get as much stuff through in the time he has left? For example, the various troop pullouts : as a non-US citizen I am very pleased with the past 4 years of foreign policy.
tphyahoo2 6y ago
what if there was a section 230 carveout where you are not liable for comments on your blog, say, as long as they are 1) digitally signed (can be by anonymous identity) 2) content is id-filterable by id, by user agents (aka browsers + user controlled software), easily enough, following a reasonable man test. so users can moderate their own content following blacklists and whitelists, if they want. law enforcement and gov can of course have their own white and blacklists. 3) you take illegal content down when notified with reasonable latency period. This can be automated for mom and pops with limited resoures, if you follow illegal content blacklists maintained by gov. If someone wants to fight the blacklist, ok, the eff can go to court, supreme court if necessary. This isn't going to happen as long as black lists aren't abused. This puts your private blog on the same footing as social media giants. Everybody follows the same rules. If government blacklist is too aggressive, society debate can go to there, where it should be. Sue the government, in court, for doing black lists too aggressively. Mom and pop isps and blog owners aren't at risk. This also forces social media giants to make their sites content filterable by user agents. They call it a user agent for a reason... There doesn't have to be a government blacklist for this to work, either. I'm just saying there could be. And if there was, this should be the focus of litigation, not 230. IE, if the blacklist was truly used only for child porn, I don't think this would go to court. But government and "powers that be" can't hide behind social media giants for censorship enforcement. They make themselves directly responsible, and it better be in a way that society finds acceptable.
- xxpor 6y ago
  So.... 4chan where everyone uses a tripcode.
  - tphyahoo2 6y ago
    interesting, never heard of tripcodes. but anyway, I would say more like 4chan with killfiles.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nomdep 6y ago
> "Without Section 230, sites that removed sexual content could be held legally responsible for that action (...) even if they wanted to create online spaces free of sexual content." The old "think of the children!". Shame on you EFF.
- Spivak 6y ago
  This really isn’t “think of the children” so much as it is wanting to create SFW online platforms. HN is a SFW space free of sexual content. It’s just an example of moderation that most people already understand. It’s the same if people wanted to create a woodworking forum and remove off-topic posts about goulash.
  - nomdep 6y ago
    Is using an example everybody agrees on to justify supression of free speech on platform that are de-facto public spaces. There is a lot of middle ground bewtween moderation in a small forum and a complete digital exile of dissenting opinions. For example, imagine how could you be affected if Zuckerberg really hated you. Not just Facebook/Instagram/Whastapp. It wouldn't be too difficult to him to convince other companies to also ban you, including cloudfront protected sites and credit card companies. I realize that five years ago it would have sounded completely insane, but the precedents for those kind of bans are growing fast.
- 542458 6y ago
  That’s not “think of the children”. That’s “not everybody feels like running a porn site” - for which there are completely legitimate reasons (more challenging legally, creates issues in some overseas markets, work-safe-ness, and yes - family friendliness).
mindvirus 6y ago
There has to be a third way. Online harassment is a huge problem for pretty much everyone, and it's only going to get worse. Companies have limited financial incentive to deal with it robustly. The other side of it is spreading false information - why are companies not liable for lies spread widely on their platform? And it they were, would it make for better tools and policies?
- GreenWatermelon 6y ago
  You can't define lies and misinformation. If every community only allowed what they think is true you get Echo chambers, which are already prevalent for said reasons. Someone's misinformation os another's hard truth. A Flat Earther considers any evidence of a round earth to be false.
carapace 6y ago
> "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." What about "laundering" of responsibility? In other words, if a service like Twitter makes it easy to dodge your personal liability for your speech, isn't that problematic? Can I write anything I want and then say "Gary provided the information." and I'm okay? Even if I can't tell you who Gary is?
jedimastert 6y ago
I'm reminded of the library of babel: an "infinite" library of every combination of characters. To write a book, all you have you do is "write" a book is find the correct one, already sitting on the shelf. If you consider that basically any opinion on a subject is recorded somewhere on YouTube, then YouTube doesn't have to "write" a thing. If they wanted to make a statement, all they have to do is sort the right thing to the top. I personally agree with section 230, but there's a fine line between curation and moderation, and it's difficult to square with the scale of the internet. There are approximately 500 hours of video uploaded every minute on YouTube. That's 30,000 every hour, or 720,000 hours every day. No matter how infinite YouTube's resources might be, there is simply no way to human moderate all of it. Do I think YouTube is toe-ing the line between moderation and curation effectively? Honestly, no. For myself, maybe, but not for the internet as a whole. But I don't think removing section 230 is the way to fix it.
- tertius 6y ago
  30,000 hours of video per hour. That's not that much. We can do a lot with speech to text as a starting point. And you can easily detect if speech to text isn't working very well. And for those that are graphic you can do image detection. It's not out of reach.
  - jedimastert 6y ago
    > We can do a lot with speech to text as a starting point. And you can easily detect if speech to text isn't working very well. > And for those that are graphic you can do image detection. It's not out of reach. YouTube does both of those things already. How well is it working out? Honestly, surprisingly well. But many, probably most, would argue not nearly enough, especially if you're legally liable for every frame of that video
    - tertius 6y ago
      I'm just arguing that it's not as big of a problem as some make it seem.

66 points by samizdis 6y ago

It is good, but also it can be, and is being, heavily abused. It is too much power to already mega-powerful corporations.

Hamuko 6y ago
How is it being abused and how would one fix it?
cordellwren 6y ago
The exact same could be said about Freedom of Speech itself. Or any other fundamental freedom/privilege for that matter. Potential for abuse is grounds for mitigation, not wholesale curtailment.
- duemti 6y ago
  No because Freedom of Speech is a fundamental individual right. It should never be limited or restricted. A strong country will prevail over abusers in this case (think when America abolished slavery, segregation...). It is a compass for long term survival.

Nextgrid 6y ago

The problem with Section 230 is that nasty social media companies can use algorithms to curate the content the user sees (often without their knowledge and against their choice) in order to increase engagement & profit off it (including from content that is illegal or promotes illegal activities) but then use Section 230 as an excuse to get away with zero liability. Maybe S230 should be amended so that once you start curating the information and/or profiting off it, you become a publisher and lose S230 protection?

withPurpose9973 6y ago
Book publishers and magazines aren’t held to a very serious standard these days. This isn’t the UK; free speech in the US is number 1. It’s far more fundamental than any legislation will fix. America is built on aristocratic protectionism like every other nation. Things like the Constitution allowing for copyright protection for a limited time is made effectively forever given the perspective of an average human life span. It will always end up being gamed. Personally, I’m tuning out more from consumerism and “the tech industry”. Even before covid I’d grown sick of what became circular debates over big O and comp sci 101 in tech, and routine office life. I’m learning musical instruments and writing creatively. Ditched my TV. Things like 230 are useful for big tech Corp. Not me. Let them defend it. I’m not interested in performing unpaid political lobbying for them.
- gumby 6y ago
  > Things like 230 are useful for big tech Corp. Actually that part of the law protects comment sections in personal blogs: you aren't liable for any comments left on your posts and spam fighting or highlighting etc (or not) of posts doesn't magically transform them into statements of yours. Spammers have reduced the value of comments on blog posts but they are still important.
  - withPurpose9973 6y ago
    Who cares? Encrypt your message and distribute it to interested parties. You know what I’ve learned online? Human beings do human being stuff. golf clap Society doesn’t need to protect a particular form of distribution of expression. Just your freedom to express.
- pavlov 6y ago
  > “Things like 230 are useful for big tech Corp. Not me.” You’re writing this on a site that’s protected by Section 230. It’s useful for everyone, from the smallest blog to FB, that lets user-generated content through without premoderation. Repealing this law would mean a web with a lot more moderation, not less.

lanevorockz 6y ago

Section 230 is just allowance for mass abuse. Why should Facebook/Twitter/Google be treated differently from a media company when they are inserting their version of the Truth ? This is currently being used against Trump because everyone hates the guy, but wait until this is aimed into anyone that challenges the establishment. Bernie will never have a platform again.

madeofpalk 6y ago
> inserting their version of the Truth Explain? Section 230 just says that you can't be held accountable for what other people say. How can you "abuse" that? If Facebook/Twitter/Google are first hand saying/pubishing their own speach, then they can be held accountable for that.
- jimmydorry 6y ago
  I imagine GP is talking about the text and links that FB/Twitter/Google are inserting on specific user created content. The claim is that these actions fall under the purview of "curation" and "moderation" from either side respectively.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    Let’s talk about a non-politically charged example. Take the famous Zalgo post on SO https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open... where the moderators left the content up because of its fame but added a comment at the top. SO is full of posts like this that have external significance but normally wouldn’t be allowed. I honestly don’t see anything wrong with Twitter saying “hey we think it’s important for the president’s words to stay up but we want to be clear that they wouldn’t normally and here’s why.”
  - nobody9999 6y ago
    >The claim is that these actions fall under the purview of "curation" and "moderation" from either side respectively. IIUC, if Twitter/Facebook chose, they could legally just block those tweets/posts altogether under the guise of Section 230. In fact, they do that sort of thing all the time. The only reason they've started putting "labels" on these is because they prefer not to block stuff completely. Either way, both section 230 and the fact that they're private (rather than government) entities give them that latitude. Without Section 230, they'd likely just block all those posts and much, much more in order to avoid litigation. That said, I'm less concerned about section 230 WRT to Twitter and Facebook and more concerned about small sites and blogs. Without Section 230, anyone with deep pockets could just bury anyone who allows comments on their site in lawsuits. Twitter and Facebook could fight back and likely succeed. But anyone without millions to spend on legal fees could easily be forced offline. And so I wonder, what value would be added by removing section 230 protections? I'd expect that the only folks who would really benefit would be lawyers -- and the rest of us would be poorer, both in terms the diversity of voices and diversity of platforms, for it.

samizdis 6y ago

Cory Doctorow has an interesting take on this, pointing out the pros and the cons as he sees them. https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#230 https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#230 (Unsurprisingly, he also finds in this subject further arguments to break up the platform giants, block their continuing merger-and-acquisition habits, and to mandate interoperability.)

jedimastert 6y ago
> who get to speak without having to host our own webservers, DNS, and CDNs This is actually an interesting point. What counts as an "interactive computer service"? If I have a wordpress-hosted instance, are they a service? I host my own website; is Digital Ocean liable because they're hosting my web server? How far up does it actually go?

cwhiz 6y ago

I disagree with the fundamental premise that we need centralized services to have “free speech” on the internet. Eliminating 230 doesn’t eliminate free speech, it eliminates centralized socialization. This is a good thing for the future of the internet, and for the future of the United States. And I further disagree that curated or editorialized content falls within the purview of this law. If you curate what I see, you are a publisher. If you editorialize what I see, you are a publisher. This law was intended to allow sites to delete abusive or illegal content without being sued. It’s now being used by big tech to curate what you see, with no user control, and to editorialize content. This behavior absolutely should not be protected under Section 230. At minimum, this section needs to be amended to exclude curated content and editorialized content.

foolinaround 6y ago
I agree with the parent. The post says that online services are different from print services, but this law does not specify how. Those could be added on. Is there a line an online service can cross that makes it a publisher? Now that we are into a fully centralized world, a twitter (maybe unintentionally) has become one of the main highways in the information resources being transported. The question of whether Twitter, FB are private companies are next to the point. There can always be a size restriction? no. of users etc? Also how a twitter or a facebook might fare without Section 230 needs some thought? Maybe it is good for the internet
- cwhiz 6y ago
  If Facebook and Twitter vanished, the world would be immeasurably better.
  - politelemon 6y ago
    It would. But, I have less faith in humanity. I feel that if they disappeared we'd create and congregate on something equivalent, and possibly even worse.
thathndude 6y ago

GordonS 6y ago

I don't want to turn this into a political rant, but a reminder about the main reason we are even arguing why we should not repeal an act designed to protect freedom of speech: Trump, the ostensible leader of the free world, was furious about #DiaperDon trending on Twitter, declaring it a threat against national security. Hopefully in a couple of months this ludicrous furore over curtailing freedom of speech will be a non-issue again.

the-dude 6y ago
You are carefully neglecting he called out the partisanship from the very beginning of his term?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pavlov 6y ago
  He is currently threatening to veto the military funding bill if it doesn’t include a rider for repealing Section 230. I think most people would agree that has nothing to do with the military and shouldn’t be in the bill. We can only speculate on the real reasons he’s doing this now, but the timing feels like revenge for the fact-checking applied to his election claims.
  - the-dude 6y ago
    Slipping in unrelated stuff into bills has been par for the course for ages now if I am not mistaken. What about he is trying to get as much stuff through in the time he has left? For example, the various troop pullouts : as a non-US citizen I am very pleased with the past 4 years of foreign policy.

tphyahoo2 6y ago

what if there was a section 230 carveout where you are not liable for comments on your blog, say, as long as they are 1) digitally signed (can be by anonymous identity) 2) content is id-filterable by id, by user agents (aka browsers + user controlled software), easily enough, following a reasonable man test. so users can moderate their own content following blacklists and whitelists, if they want. law enforcement and gov can of course have their own white and blacklists. 3) you take illegal content down when notified with reasonable latency period. This can be automated for mom and pops with limited resoures, if you follow illegal content blacklists maintained by gov. If someone wants to fight the blacklist, ok, the eff can go to court, supreme court if necessary. This isn't going to happen as long as black lists aren't abused. This puts your private blog on the same footing as social media giants. Everybody follows the same rules. If government blacklist is too aggressive, society debate can go to there, where it should be. Sue the government, in court, for doing black lists too aggressively. Mom and pop isps and blog owners aren't at risk. This also forces social media giants to make their sites content filterable by user agents. They call it a user agent for a reason... There doesn't have to be a government blacklist for this to work, either. I'm just saying there could be. And if there was, this should be the focus of litigation, not 230. IE, if the blacklist was truly used only for child porn, I don't think this would go to court. But government and "powers that be" can't hide behind social media giants for censorship enforcement. They make themselves directly responsible, and it better be in a way that society finds acceptable.

xxpor 6y ago
So.... 4chan where everyone uses a tripcode.
- tphyahoo2 6y ago
  interesting, never heard of tripcodes. but anyway, I would say more like 4chan with killfiles.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

nomdep 6y ago

> "Without Section 230, sites that removed sexual content could be held legally responsible for that action (...) even if they wanted to create online spaces free of sexual content." The old "think of the children!". Shame on you EFF.

Spivak 6y ago
This really isn’t “think of the children” so much as it is wanting to create SFW online platforms. HN is a SFW space free of sexual content. It’s just an example of moderation that most people already understand. It’s the same if people wanted to create a woodworking forum and remove off-topic posts about goulash.
- nomdep 6y ago
  Is using an example everybody agrees on to justify supression of free speech on platform that are de-facto public spaces. There is a lot of middle ground bewtween moderation in a small forum and a complete digital exile of dissenting opinions. For example, imagine how could you be affected if Zuckerberg really hated you. Not just Facebook/Instagram/Whastapp. It wouldn't be too difficult to him to convince other companies to also ban you, including cloudfront protected sites and credit card companies. I realize that five years ago it would have sounded completely insane, but the precedents for those kind of bans are growing fast.
542458 6y ago
That’s not “think of the children”. That’s “not everybody feels like running a porn site” - for which there are completely legitimate reasons (more challenging legally, creates issues in some overseas markets, work-safe-ness, and yes - family friendliness).

mindvirus 6y ago

There has to be a third way. Online harassment is a huge problem for pretty much everyone, and it's only going to get worse. Companies have limited financial incentive to deal with it robustly. The other side of it is spreading false information - why are companies not liable for lies spread widely on their platform? And it they were, would it make for better tools and policies?

GreenWatermelon 6y ago
You can't define lies and misinformation. If every community only allowed what they think is true you get Echo chambers, which are already prevalent for said reasons. Someone's misinformation os another's hard truth. A Flat Earther considers any evidence of a round earth to be false.

carapace 6y ago

> "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." What about "laundering" of responsibility? In other words, if a service like Twitter makes it easy to dodge your personal liability for your speech, isn't that problematic? Can I write anything I want and then say "Gary provided the information." and I'm okay? Even if I can't tell you who Gary is?

jedimastert 6y ago

I'm reminded of the library of babel: an "infinite" library of every combination of characters. To write a book, all you have you do is "write" a book is find the correct one, already sitting on the shelf. If you consider that basically any opinion on a subject is recorded somewhere on YouTube, then YouTube doesn't have to "write" a thing. If they wanted to make a statement, all they have to do is sort the right thing to the top. I personally agree with section 230, but there's a fine line between curation and moderation, and it's difficult to square with the scale of the internet. There are approximately 500 hours of video uploaded every minute on YouTube. That's 30,000 every hour, or 720,000 hours every day. No matter how infinite YouTube's resources might be, there is simply no way to human moderate all of it. Do I think YouTube is toe-ing the line between moderation and curation effectively? Honestly, no. For myself, maybe, but not for the internet as a whole. But I don't think removing section 230 is the way to fix it.

tertius 6y ago
30,000 hours of video per hour. That's not that much. We can do a lot with speech to text as a starting point. And you can easily detect if speech to text isn't working very well. And for those that are graphic you can do image detection. It's not out of reach.
- jedimastert 6y ago
  > We can do a lot with speech to text as a starting point. And you can easily detect if speech to text isn't working very well. > And for those that are graphic you can do image detection. It's not out of reach. YouTube does both of those things already. How well is it working out? Honestly, surprisingly well. But many, probably most, would argue not nearly enough, especially if you're legally liable for every frame of that video
  - tertius 6y ago
    I'm just arguing that it's not as big of a problem as some make it seem.