7 ms·

I want to point out there really are two sides to Section 230. On one hand, it's absolutely crucial to have it if we want most of the online communications too

by ryan29 6y ago

I want to point out there really are two sides to Section 230. On one hand, it's absolutely crucial to have it if we want most of the online communications tools we've become accustomed to to exist. On the other hand I think some companies, like Facebook specifically, have massively abused the protections of Section 230 to benefit themselves at the expense of the general public. When you're to the point of hiring psychologists to manipulate your users into "engagement" regardless of the impact to mental health and public discourse, I think that's the point where everyone needs to recognize that _something_ needs to be done in terms of regulation. When regulation _does_ happen, I hope lawmakers around the world give no consideration to the impact on Facebook just as Facebook's given no consideration to the negatives they're creating for society. Let them fail if necessary IMO. And finally, the best middle-ground I've seen for Section 230 was here on Hacker News. I don't remember which user said it, so I'm sorry I can't attribute it, but the idea was solid. Things like reverse chronological data feeds that a user is specifically asking for should be protected under Section 230. Things like recommendation and engagement algorithms should be considered publishing and platforms should be liable for that content since they're surfacing it and putting it in peoples' faces. I've paraphrased that, but I really hope the general idea gains traction. I've been very anti-censorship my whole life, but there's no denying that social media can have a severe, negative impact if the platforms are susceptible to propaganda and misinformation, so I think it's time to talk about moderation.

BitwiseFool 6y ago
I would love a "Choose your algorithm" law for content recommendations. The default would be chronological order, and you can opt in to whatever other algorithms these platforms offer.
- btown 6y ago
  It would be hard to limit algorithmic internal promotion without limiting algorithmic external promotion, including the entire ad bidding ecosystem. And perhaps that’s a good thing - in addition to Facebook taking responsibility for Facebook links its non-opt-in algorithms promote, it should take responsibility for ad content. There are arguments that this could disadvantage smaller businesses in advertising. That’s a secondary concern to the deprogramming of a radicalized populace.
joshuamorton 6y ago
> Things like recommendation and engagement algorithms So, how does this work for something like a search engine? Does Google/Bing/DDG need to get an audit from the government that their recommendation algorithm is sufficiently non-creative so as to be not publishing?
- sanderjd 6y ago
  Seems like push rather than pull matters? Recommendations are pushed, search results are pulled.
  - labcomputer 6y ago
    You submit a query. The search engine then makes an editorial decision based on that query about the order in which to rank the results.
- ben_w 6y ago
  I hadn’t thought of that before, but you’re right. I’m not sure how to properly distinguish between the case of “I’m a veterinarian so when I search for ‘mouse’ I mean the animal not the peripheral” versus the case of “I click on all the conspiracy theories so when I search for ‘president’ I mean the Satanic space-lizard who kidnapped Elvis and eats babies”.
  - dsr_ 6y ago
    I am not against requiring people to put in more words to get better results. mouse => computer mouse | house mouse | feeder mice | common mouse diseases president => PTA president | US president | lizard president
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      This is, I'll note without any judgement, a surprisingly anticapitalist opinion. You're essentially saying that you don't want to allow companies to compete on how good the product is from a consumer perspective (as a consumer, I value not having to precisely describe my search queries, I don't want to have to write SQL in my search tool!).
sanderjd 6y ago
This makes a lot of sense to me. Recommendation algorithms are just curation (done by a machine), which is clearly not a neutral practice.
cjpearson 6y ago
I agree there needs to be some reform of Section 230 in that direction. The law simply can't handle what the internet and social media have become. When a platform is curating and recommending content to users, it should be treated more like a publisher and be held responsible for the content it promotes. It doesn't matter if the curation is done by hand or with algorithms. Providers that simply allow the hosting and basic browsing of content should be protected as long as they are willing to remove illegal content when it is found. Also, I wouldn't call it censorship at all. If a newspaper publishes an article they claim some responsibility for its content. The same should apply if Facebook highlights an article or YouTube recommends a video.
voldacar 6y ago
> it's absolutely crucial to have it if we want most of the online communications tools we've become accustomed to to exist do we?
dominotw 6y ago
> think some companies, like Facebook specifically Meta comment, Facebook seems to be the main go to comic villain. Things that were described in the comment like driving engagement is also done by platforms like Twitter. But twitter seems to be in peoples good graces for some reason.
- ryan29 6y ago
  I wouldn't say that Twitter is in my good graces, just that I think Facebook is worse. I don't have any empirical data to back that up, so it's just a general assessment from watching the industry. In my mind, Facebook pioneered a lot of the bad practices and has been the leader in unethical practices. For me, that makes Facebook worse than the others because increasing profits by being unethical is easy and as soon as one company in an industry starts doing it, others are left in an impossible situation. Either they become unethical to compete or they get outcompeted and fail. Facebook has also demonstrated they're not going to change until someone forces them. Even with all the pushback in the last couple years, they're still pulling anti-consumer stunts like the forced account tying / data collection with Oculus and Instagram. I tend to judge companies by their actions rather than their words and Facebook hasn't ever done anything to make me think they care even the tiniest little bit about the public good.
- grillvogel 6y ago
  twitter is pretty much the literal modern incarnation of pitchfork mobs
baumandm 6y ago
IANAL, but if you remove Section 230 protection from algorithmically-curated content, Facebook would have to switch entirely to manually curating everything to avoid accidentally including libelous user-submitted content they could be sued over. Even basic features like ordering new posts by people you follow to show the most popular ones first are algorithmically-driven. There's no way Facebook could manage to do anything individualized, so it would turn into a chronological feed + manually-curated, Taboola-style content (which I doubt anyone wants). I agree with your perspective on the negative impacts of social media, and I'm open to the idea of some kind of regulation to improve things. But I think effectively banning algorithms from internet services is going to hurt more than help.
- ryan29 6y ago
  My general reaction to that is "tough luck!" If a site algorithmically generated recipes, but accidentally created recipes that poison people once in a while we'd ban those algorithms without thought or, at the very least, make the algorithm owners liable. If social media is destabilizing the mental health and critical thinking skills of the general public to the point that a subset of the population is becoming dangerous (and violent), isn't that basically the same thing? I don't care if Mark Zuckerberg needs to buy a smaller mansion if that means my friends / neighbors / family aren't going to get brainwashed by propaganda.
  - root_axis 6y ago
    Your friends and family should take responsibility for their own media consumption rather than blaming a website.
    - ubertaco 6y ago
      Yeah, based on the really awful cases of my wife's family, the problem exists between the keyboard and the chair. When faced with fact-checking or truth that refutes their insane conspiracies, they double down and call the fact-checkers or truth-tellers liars and invent even more insane conspiracies about how the "real truth" (read: heinous virulent BS) is being suppressed because the clickbait article about how "liberals are planning to euthanize all whites!" now has a disclaimer under it that says "this claim is disputed" (a caveat so weak that it'd be almost funny if it weren't depressing how many psychos eat up the totally-untrue headline). It's the only thing that is starting to turn them on Fox News for example; though they still watch it religiously, the fact that the most feeble, CYA-grade questions were asked during their brief "news" segment that slightly challenged Trump's baseless "stolen election" narrative now means that they've moved from "only Fox is telling the truth" to "well, I don't like everything they say, bit they do a good job, like Tucker Carlson" (who is probably the most prominent disinformation propagandist on the whole festering network). In response, they've turned to just any old 2-hour-old "freedom eagle dot biz" site as their "real true sources", because Fox had a brief lapse of allegiance to the Trump cult. You can't fix that with an RFC, a law, or a moderation policy because they've rejected any possibility of accepting the truth. They're thoroughly deceived, most especially by themselves, and any attempt to un-deceive them is seen as a sinister plot. They refuse the truth outright because it's not what they want to believe. You can't fix it by shutting down or "breaking up" the site where they go to get their much-desired disinformation, because there's always another con artist with a Squarespace or WordPress license who'll gladly capitalize on having less competition in the "cult propaganda dissemination warehouse" market (like OANN capitalizing on Trump's brief lashing out at Fox, or Parler springing up because Republicans started getting "this might not be true" disclaimers on their lies). I've always seen "you can't fix stupid" as a harsh redneck insult, but I'm starting to believe a slight variant on it: "you can't fix willfully-ignorant." You'd have to change their thought patterns and their habits and often their motivations, and that kind of change doesn't come from outside but from the person themselves.

by ryan29 6y ago

BitwiseFool 6y ago

I would love a "Choose your algorithm" law for content recommendations. The default would be chronological order, and you can opt in to whatever other algorithms these platforms offer.

btown 6y ago
It would be hard to limit algorithmic internal promotion without limiting algorithmic external promotion, including the entire ad bidding ecosystem. And perhaps that’s a good thing - in addition to Facebook taking responsibility for Facebook links its non-opt-in algorithms promote, it should take responsibility for ad content. There are arguments that this could disadvantage smaller businesses in advertising. That’s a secondary concern to the deprogramming of a radicalized populace.

joshuamorton 6y ago

> Things like recommendation and engagement algorithms So, how does this work for something like a search engine? Does Google/Bing/DDG need to get an audit from the government that their recommendation algorithm is sufficiently non-creative so as to be not publishing?

sanderjd 6y ago
Seems like push rather than pull matters? Recommendations are pushed, search results are pulled.
- labcomputer 6y ago
  You submit a query. The search engine then makes an editorial decision based on that query about the order in which to rank the results.
ben_w 6y ago
I hadn’t thought of that before, but you’re right. I’m not sure how to properly distinguish between the case of “I’m a veterinarian so when I search for ‘mouse’ I mean the animal not the peripheral” versus the case of “I click on all the conspiracy theories so when I search for ‘president’ I mean the Satanic space-lizard who kidnapped Elvis and eats babies”.
- dsr_ 6y ago
  I am not against requiring people to put in more words to get better results. mouse => computer mouse | house mouse | feeder mice | common mouse diseases president => PTA president | US president | lizard president
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    This is, I'll note without any judgement, a surprisingly anticapitalist opinion. You're essentially saying that you don't want to allow companies to compete on how good the product is from a consumer perspective (as a consumer, I value not having to precisely describe my search queries, I don't want to have to write SQL in my search tool!).

sanderjd 6y ago

This makes a lot of sense to me. Recommendation algorithms are just curation (done by a machine), which is clearly not a neutral practice.

cjpearson 6y ago

I agree there needs to be some reform of Section 230 in that direction. The law simply can't handle what the internet and social media have become. When a platform is curating and recommending content to users, it should be treated more like a publisher and be held responsible for the content it promotes. It doesn't matter if the curation is done by hand or with algorithms. Providers that simply allow the hosting and basic browsing of content should be protected as long as they are willing to remove illegal content when it is found. Also, I wouldn't call it censorship at all. If a newspaper publishes an article they claim some responsibility for its content. The same should apply if Facebook highlights an article or YouTube recommends a video.

voldacar 6y ago

> it's absolutely crucial to have it if we want most of the online communications tools we've become accustomed to to exist do we?

dominotw 6y ago

> think some companies, like Facebook specifically Meta comment, Facebook seems to be the main go to comic villain. Things that were described in the comment like driving engagement is also done by platforms like Twitter. But twitter seems to be in peoples good graces for some reason.

ryan29 6y ago
I wouldn't say that Twitter is in my good graces, just that I think Facebook is worse. I don't have any empirical data to back that up, so it's just a general assessment from watching the industry. In my mind, Facebook pioneered a lot of the bad practices and has been the leader in unethical practices. For me, that makes Facebook worse than the others because increasing profits by being unethical is easy and as soon as one company in an industry starts doing it, others are left in an impossible situation. Either they become unethical to compete or they get outcompeted and fail. Facebook has also demonstrated they're not going to change until someone forces them. Even with all the pushback in the last couple years, they're still pulling anti-consumer stunts like the forced account tying / data collection with Oculus and Instagram. I tend to judge companies by their actions rather than their words and Facebook hasn't ever done anything to make me think they care even the tiniest little bit about the public good.
grillvogel 6y ago
twitter is pretty much the literal modern incarnation of pitchfork mobs

baumandm 6y ago

IANAL, but if you remove Section 230 protection from algorithmically-curated content, Facebook would have to switch entirely to manually curating everything to avoid accidentally including libelous user-submitted content they could be sued over. Even basic features like ordering new posts by people you follow to show the most popular ones first are algorithmically-driven. There's no way Facebook could manage to do anything individualized, so it would turn into a chronological feed + manually-curated, Taboola-style content (which I doubt anyone wants). I agree with your perspective on the negative impacts of social media, and I'm open to the idea of some kind of regulation to improve things. But I think effectively banning algorithms from internet services is going to hurt more than help.

ryan29 6y ago
My general reaction to that is "tough luck!" If a site algorithmically generated recipes, but accidentally created recipes that poison people once in a while we'd ban those algorithms without thought or, at the very least, make the algorithm owners liable. If social media is destabilizing the mental health and critical thinking skills of the general public to the point that a subset of the population is becoming dangerous (and violent), isn't that basically the same thing? I don't care if Mark Zuckerberg needs to buy a smaller mansion if that means my friends / neighbors / family aren't going to get brainwashed by propaganda.
- root_axis 6y ago
  Your friends and family should take responsibility for their own media consumption rather than blaming a website.
  - ubertaco 6y ago
    Yeah, based on the really awful cases of my wife's family, the problem exists between the keyboard and the chair. When faced with fact-checking or truth that refutes their insane conspiracies, they double down and call the fact-checkers or truth-tellers liars and invent even more insane conspiracies about how the "real truth" (read: heinous virulent BS) is being suppressed because the clickbait article about how "liberals are planning to euthanize all whites!" now has a disclaimer under it that says "this claim is disputed" (a caveat so weak that it'd be almost funny if it weren't depressing how many psychos eat up the totally-untrue headline). It's the only thing that is starting to turn them on Fox News for example; though they still watch it religiously, the fact that the most feeble, CYA-grade questions were asked during their brief "news" segment that slightly challenged Trump's baseless "stolen election" narrative now means that they've moved from "only Fox is telling the truth" to "well, I don't like everything they say, bit they do a good job, like Tucker Carlson" (who is probably the most prominent disinformation propagandist on the whole festering network). In response, they've turned to just any old 2-hour-old "freedom eagle dot biz" site as their "real true sources", because Fox had a brief lapse of allegiance to the Trump cult. You can't fix that with an RFC, a law, or a moderation policy because they've rejected any possibility of accepting the truth. They're thoroughly deceived, most especially by themselves, and any attempt to un-deceive them is seen as a sinister plot. They refuse the truth outright because it's not what they want to believe. You can't fix it by shutting down or "breaking up" the site where they go to get their much-desired disinformation, because there's always another con artist with a Squarespace or WordPress license who'll gladly capitalize on having less competition in the "cult propaganda dissemination warehouse" market (like OANN capitalizing on Trump's brief lashing out at Fox, or Parler springing up because Republicans started getting "this might not be true" disclaimers on their lies). I've always seen "you can't fix stupid" as a harsh redneck insult, but I'm starting to believe a slight variant on it: "you can't fix willfully-ignorant." You'd have to change their thought patterns and their habits and often their motivations, and that kind of change doesn't come from outside but from the person themselves.