5 ms·

Dismissive article that misrepresents both why "normal" people out there are unhappy about section 230 and what the higher levels of conversation about changing

Dismissive article that misrepresents both why "normal" people out there are unhappy about section 230 and what the higher levels of conversation about changing it really look like right now[1]. Articles like this are read meat for Hacker News. You endlessly reassert your political bias while pretending you are "informing" some imaginary group of stupid people (who in reality isn't even here to be "informed"). [1] Here is a recent discussion about 320 from a few lawyers and an YouTuber who used to work for the mainstream media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a5H1A65wOM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a5H1A65wOM As you will see if you watch the video, it is much more nuanced than the aggregate straw-man set up by the article. ... The crux of the issue is that Section 320 was drafted with a lot of assumptions in mind. At the time the Web was a fledgling thing. At the time Section 230's practical effect was to empower emerging platforms to do some common-sense moderation without fear of being held liable for all content they distributed. Does the law still has this effect? Yes, it does. But that is no longer the primary effect in terms of how this law affect most of the people out there. Today its primary effect is to give an impenetrable legal shield to giant tech corporations that engage in deliberate society-wide manipulation of information. That is what most people out there are unhappy about, even if they don't quite know how to phrase it.

cjfd 6y ago
As such it seems this law makes sense but it also seems to do little about some other problems. I have started to think lately that what is best is a law to forbid espionage on people. Like, you cannot collect and/or store large portions of the peoples browser history. Also, it should be forbidden for the data of one service to be shared with another. Like the example of facebook and whatsapp sharing their data.
_yhdy 6y ago
I do not like people like you who are intelligent enough to be intentionally intellectually dishonest while being extremely malicious underneath. You fool people for sure. I do not know why you do it, though. There is no manipulation going on by “Big Tech”. Your fear mongering is unfounded. Pushing this sort of rhetoric is what created the insurrectionist events a few days ago.
- wtallis 6y ago
  > There is no manipulation going on by “Big Tech”. Your fear mongering is unfounded. Pushing this sort of rhetoric is what created the insurrectionist events a few days ago. There's definitely manipulation going on by "big tech". Social media has radically distorted political discourse and amplified some trends far beyond what Fox News style media alone could have accomplished. What's debatable (and perhaps straying into crackpot conspiracy theory territory) is the idea that "Big Tech" has done this deliberately, collectively, and with goals of steering society at large in any particular direction. This hypothesis is a lot more far-fetched than the default assumption that big tech has smaller, more localized concerns about maximizing profit, and cares little for the broader consequences of the interaction between their algorithms and society. (Analogously, it is absurd to suggest that US food companies have a goal of making everyone obese and giving them diabetes and heart disease. They simply want to make more money, and have found ways to optimize their product until it becomes addictive, and they don't care about the long-term or large-scale impact on the public because it's not their job to care.)
  - test001only 6y ago
    I agree that the manipulation is automated and intended to increase their profit. The effect seems to be that it creates really bubbles where you only see views that align with your existing world view. My own experience - I have my own YouTube profile filled with videos which reflect my political opinion and the feed of my friend who leans towards the other side of the political spectrum had videos reasserting his world views. I don't think the big tech is trying to steer socius towards one unified political view.
  - rhaksw 6y ago
    > There's definitely manipulation going on by "big tech". We do it to ourselves. I made this site [1] to review moderation on reddit. It works for accounts, subreddits, threads, and there is also a "top posts/comments" section [2]. When a userbase can review the moderation it becomes harder for manipulation to occur. [1] https://www.reveddit.com https://www.reveddit.com [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/reveddit/comments/kfdaj7/top_removed_comments_posts_per_subreddit/ https://www.reddit.com/r/reveddit/comments/kfdaj7/top_remove...
michaelmrose 6y ago
Can you explain the society wide manipulation of information and what positive results can be obtained by allowing the kind of actions that are currently blocked by 230 which could be brought were it to be repealed. Most users who want 230 repealed seem to believe that Facebook would have to give up moderation of their offensive comments/posts to be treated as a common carrier somehow to avoid liability. This is of course completely imaginary. Liability wouldn't be avoided by simply publishing everything. Others assert that Facebook has had a shitty net effect on society and could be punished if not for 230. This is a little closer to reality but provides no conceptual framework for deciding what obligations Facebook has or how it meets them. I don't believe that any reasonable solution starts with repealing 230 because fixing the internet one lawsuit at a time is horribly expensive, intractable, suffers from challenges as to jurisdiction and anonymity, unavailable to 90% of the planet. Instead if you do not like the current state figure out how to articulate Facebooks obligations to society.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  I believe the understanding is that without 230, facebook would be liable just like the rest of the press is, and thus be essentially forced to disallow free-for-all posting. This is a different mode of manipulation, where the people who own the media can shape the public discourse, but isn't that what the whole world had for decades and decades before social media?
  - ghaff 6y ago
    In general, the understanding (right or wrong) is that without 230, a platform has to choose one of two actions: No moderation (modulo moderating for illegal content--whatever that is exactly) or moderating all posts (which is clearly not an option in general). It may or may not make a big difference as a practical matter. Most things Twitter would moderate today are arguably threats, incitement to riot, etc., all of which could in principle be prosecuted as crimes. But it's at least a difference in principle. ADDED: On the other hand, there's all the SPAM, link SPAM, astroturfing etc. which isn't actually illegal. Arguably some things could be handled through Terms of Service. But it's worth remembering that Section 230 didn't come about to address purely theoretical concerns given that Prodigy did lose a legal case after all.
glasss 6y ago
>Today its primary effect is to give an impenetrable legal shield to giant tech corporations that engage in deliberate society-wide manipulation of information. I think this would be better phrased as "... legal shield to websites that only want to show certain content to its users." "[S]ociety-wide manipulation of information" would imply that everyone gets their news and information from Facebook, Twitter, etc which gets linked directly into their brain regardless if they want it. These giant tech corporations aren't holding a gun to anyone's head - they all started with zero users and they will end when they have zero users. If this is what "most people" are unhappy about, just wait until they read the TOS and realize what else they agreed to.
- karldcampbell 6y ago
  If one is following current events, it isn't possible to avoid Twitter, Facebook and even Reddit. Mainstream news outlets often report on content from those social media sites, so even if I'm not a user, social media still effects me.
  - Terretta 6y ago
    It’s helpful to use an algorithmic current events aggregator that assists in tracing original sources, such as: https://www.memeorandum.com/ https://www.memeorandum.com/ “memeorandum is an auto-generated summary of the stories that US political commentators are discussing online right now. Unlike sister sites Techmeme and Mediagazer, it is not a human-edited news outlet, but rather a media-monitoring tool for sophisticated news consumers.“
thewindowmovie5 6y ago
You complain of one thing in your first paragraph and proceed to do the exact same thing in your subsequent paragraphs :) . The incentive for big corporations is to make money, and they create pockets of bubble which align with user's existing political view. This has created the polarised society we see today. If big corporations were trying to create a society with unified political view, as conspiracy theorist on right and left are complaining about, looking at the current state of political landscape in US, I would do they have utterly failed.
gameswithgo 6y ago
So if 230 were repealed, and you posted about wanting to invade congress or how you want to send black people back to africa and moderators removed it, what legal recourse is now open to you, with 230 gone?
ajross 6y ago
Arrgh, you are repeating almost verbatim like half the nonsense that is debunked in the linked article! If, say, Twitter doesn't want republicans to talk on the Internet (to pick one ridiculous example), repealing section 320 would do nothing to stop them, nothing. No modification of section 320 would do anything, because nothing in section 320 deals with content moderation at all. It's only about liability. I mean, just to be blunt: if 320 was repealed right now Parler would be sued into jelly given all the violent right wing garbage on that site, but Twitter (which is trying to remove it) would still be around, and still (as per my ridiculous example) censoring republicans. Now, maybe you want some kind of new fairness doctrine law or something. And that would be interesting to discuss. But it's got nothing to do with liability protections for internet companies, nothing at all.
codazoda 6y ago
> Today its primary effect is to give an impenetrable legal shield to giant tech corporations that engage in deliberate society-wide manipulation of information. I work at a small (compared to Google and Facebook) classifieds site. I don't think we could exist without section 230, because it would have been too expensive to start without immunity for what our users posted. So, it still does it's initial purpose. I would also like to start a social network for my local community, but I can't afford the legal liability of what my neighbors might say on the platform I built. If 230 goes away, maybe I'll never be able to build that community. And don't forget, FB started at a single college. I'm also sure that the initial individuals posting things are exactly the correct individuals to be liable for the things they post.
- diebeforei485 6y ago
  I'm not sure this is true. Before Section 230 was a thing, companies were not liable for what users wrote on their platforms so long as they didn't moderate legal content [illegal content would be like housing ads with landlords specifying preferred race of tenants, or threats against the President]. A classifieds website could definitely exist post-230, and many did pre-230.
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    > or threats against the President It is very much legal to threaten the President. You might get a visit from the Secret Service if your threat is deemed credible enough, but otherwise, threatening the President is exactly the same as threatening anyone else (actually perhaps even less likely to result in sanction: I could eventually accuse you of harassment for repeatedly making threats against me, the President likely cannot).
    - krapp 6y ago
      >It is very much legal to threaten the President. Sorry, no[0]. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threatening_the_President_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threatening_the_President_of_t...
annoyingnoob 6y ago
I concur with your complaints about techdirt. Masnick comes across as self-righteous in most of the pieces on the web site that should be called the Daily Outrage. I think your first paragraph really describes techdirt and not HN.
- rpdillon 6y ago
  Interesting. I find Masnick's writing quite accomplished, and he is quite correct that there is a lot of misinformation (which he links to!) about Section 230. I agree he writes confidently about technology's intersection with the law, but I don't see that as a flaw: the Techdirt team seems to have a much better handle on these issues than the average journalist, and certainly a better understanding than the average blogger or internet commenter.
  - SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
    Agreed. This part... >If you said "Once a company like that starts moderating content, it's no longer a platform, but a publisher" I regret to inform you that you are wrong. That’s not the argument. Not really. The argument is that these companies are removing entirely legal content they just don’t like. Their TOS pages are interpretive depending how much they dislike the poster of the content. They do this intentionally and target specific views. They curate their bubble and that is publishing. The issue isn’t moderating content, it’s the selective enforcement. He starts with a complete strawman. >It protects all websites and all users of websites when there is content posted on the sites by someone else. That is the exact crux. I created the content, but EVERY one of these sites is clear they own it. Once I wrote it and hit send, I gave it to them and assumed ownership, they are clear about this. So they ARE publishing THEIR content.
    - Terretta 6y ago
      > clear they own it On the contrary, they tend to be clear you’re assigning them right to publish worldwide in any medium in perpetuity including make money off that, not ownership. For instance, you don’t have to get seek their permission to also publish your thoughts somewhere else, or use your own photo commercially, etc.

cjfd 6y ago

As such it seems this law makes sense but it also seems to do little about some other problems. I have started to think lately that what is best is a law to forbid espionage on people. Like, you cannot collect and/or store large portions of the peoples browser history. Also, it should be forbidden for the data of one service to be shared with another. Like the example of facebook and whatsapp sharing their data.

_yhdy 6y ago

I do not like people like you who are intelligent enough to be intentionally intellectually dishonest while being extremely malicious underneath. You fool people for sure. I do not know why you do it, though. There is no manipulation going on by “Big Tech”. Your fear mongering is unfounded. Pushing this sort of rhetoric is what created the insurrectionist events a few days ago.

wtallis 6y ago
> There is no manipulation going on by “Big Tech”. Your fear mongering is unfounded. Pushing this sort of rhetoric is what created the insurrectionist events a few days ago. There's definitely manipulation going on by "big tech". Social media has radically distorted political discourse and amplified some trends far beyond what Fox News style media alone could have accomplished. What's debatable (and perhaps straying into crackpot conspiracy theory territory) is the idea that "Big Tech" has done this deliberately, collectively, and with goals of steering society at large in any particular direction. This hypothesis is a lot more far-fetched than the default assumption that big tech has smaller, more localized concerns about maximizing profit, and cares little for the broader consequences of the interaction between their algorithms and society. (Analogously, it is absurd to suggest that US food companies have a goal of making everyone obese and giving them diabetes and heart disease. They simply want to make more money, and have found ways to optimize their product until it becomes addictive, and they don't care about the long-term or large-scale impact on the public because it's not their job to care.)
- test001only 6y ago
  I agree that the manipulation is automated and intended to increase their profit. The effect seems to be that it creates really bubbles where you only see views that align with your existing world view. My own experience - I have my own YouTube profile filled with videos which reflect my political opinion and the feed of my friend who leans towards the other side of the political spectrum had videos reasserting his world views. I don't think the big tech is trying to steer socius towards one unified political view.
- rhaksw 6y ago
  > There's definitely manipulation going on by "big tech". We do it to ourselves. I made this site [1] to review moderation on reddit. It works for accounts, subreddits, threads, and there is also a "top posts/comments" section [2]. When a userbase can review the moderation it becomes harder for manipulation to occur. [1] https://www.reveddit.com https://www.reveddit.com [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/reveddit/comments/kfdaj7/top_removed_comments_posts_per_subreddit/ https://www.reddit.com/r/reveddit/comments/kfdaj7/top_remove...

michaelmrose 6y ago

Can you explain the society wide manipulation of information and what positive results can be obtained by allowing the kind of actions that are currently blocked by 230 which could be brought were it to be repealed. Most users who want 230 repealed seem to believe that Facebook would have to give up moderation of their offensive comments/posts to be treated as a common carrier somehow to avoid liability. This is of course completely imaginary. Liability wouldn't be avoided by simply publishing everything. Others assert that Facebook has had a shitty net effect on society and could be punished if not for 230. This is a little closer to reality but provides no conceptual framework for deciding what obligations Facebook has or how it meets them. I don't believe that any reasonable solution starts with repealing 230 because fixing the internet one lawsuit at a time is horribly expensive, intractable, suffers from challenges as to jurisdiction and anonymity, unavailable to 90% of the planet. Instead if you do not like the current state figure out how to articulate Facebooks obligations to society.

cblconfederate 6y ago
I believe the understanding is that without 230, facebook would be liable just like the rest of the press is, and thus be essentially forced to disallow free-for-all posting. This is a different mode of manipulation, where the people who own the media can shape the public discourse, but isn't that what the whole world had for decades and decades before social media?
- ghaff 6y ago
  In general, the understanding (right or wrong) is that without 230, a platform has to choose one of two actions: No moderation (modulo moderating for illegal content--whatever that is exactly) or moderating all posts (which is clearly not an option in general). It may or may not make a big difference as a practical matter. Most things Twitter would moderate today are arguably threats, incitement to riot, etc., all of which could in principle be prosecuted as crimes. But it's at least a difference in principle. ADDED: On the other hand, there's all the SPAM, link SPAM, astroturfing etc. which isn't actually illegal. Arguably some things could be handled through Terms of Service. But it's worth remembering that Section 230 didn't come about to address purely theoretical concerns given that Prodigy did lose a legal case after all.

glasss 6y ago

>Today its primary effect is to give an impenetrable legal shield to giant tech corporations that engage in deliberate society-wide manipulation of information. I think this would be better phrased as "... legal shield to websites that only want to show certain content to its users." "[S]ociety-wide manipulation of information" would imply that everyone gets their news and information from Facebook, Twitter, etc which gets linked directly into their brain regardless if they want it. These giant tech corporations aren't holding a gun to anyone's head - they all started with zero users and they will end when they have zero users. If this is what "most people" are unhappy about, just wait until they read the TOS and realize what else they agreed to.

karldcampbell 6y ago
If one is following current events, it isn't possible to avoid Twitter, Facebook and even Reddit. Mainstream news outlets often report on content from those social media sites, so even if I'm not a user, social media still effects me.
- Terretta 6y ago
  It’s helpful to use an algorithmic current events aggregator that assists in tracing original sources, such as: https://www.memeorandum.com/ https://www.memeorandum.com/ “memeorandum is an auto-generated summary of the stories that US political commentators are discussing online right now. Unlike sister sites Techmeme and Mediagazer, it is not a human-edited news outlet, but rather a media-monitoring tool for sophisticated news consumers.“

thewindowmovie5 6y ago

You complain of one thing in your first paragraph and proceed to do the exact same thing in your subsequent paragraphs :) . The incentive for big corporations is to make money, and they create pockets of bubble which align with user's existing political view. This has created the polarised society we see today. If big corporations were trying to create a society with unified political view, as conspiracy theorist on right and left are complaining about, looking at the current state of political landscape in US, I would do they have utterly failed.

gameswithgo 6y ago

So if 230 were repealed, and you posted about wanting to invade congress or how you want to send black people back to africa and moderators removed it, what legal recourse is now open to you, with 230 gone?

ajross 6y ago

Arrgh, you are repeating almost verbatim like half the nonsense that is debunked in the linked article! If, say, Twitter doesn't want republicans to talk on the Internet (to pick one ridiculous example), repealing section 320 would do nothing to stop them, nothing. No modification of section 320 would do anything, because nothing in section 320 deals with content moderation at all. It's only about liability. I mean, just to be blunt: if 320 was repealed right now Parler would be sued into jelly given all the violent right wing garbage on that site, but Twitter (which is trying to remove it) would still be around, and still (as per my ridiculous example) censoring republicans. Now, maybe you want some kind of new fairness doctrine law or something. And that would be interesting to discuss. But it's got nothing to do with liability protections for internet companies, nothing at all.

codazoda 6y ago

> Today its primary effect is to give an impenetrable legal shield to giant tech corporations that engage in deliberate society-wide manipulation of information. I work at a small (compared to Google and Facebook) classifieds site. I don't think we could exist without section 230, because it would have been too expensive to start without immunity for what our users posted. So, it still does it's initial purpose. I would also like to start a social network for my local community, but I can't afford the legal liability of what my neighbors might say on the platform I built. If 230 goes away, maybe I'll never be able to build that community. And don't forget, FB started at a single college. I'm also sure that the initial individuals posting things are exactly the correct individuals to be liable for the things they post.

diebeforei485 6y ago
I'm not sure this is true. Before Section 230 was a thing, companies were not liable for what users wrote on their platforms so long as they didn't moderate legal content [illegal content would be like housing ads with landlords specifying preferred race of tenants, or threats against the President]. A classifieds website could definitely exist post-230, and many did pre-230.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  > or threats against the President It is very much legal to threaten the President. You might get a visit from the Secret Service if your threat is deemed credible enough, but otherwise, threatening the President is exactly the same as threatening anyone else (actually perhaps even less likely to result in sanction: I could eventually accuse you of harassment for repeatedly making threats against me, the President likely cannot).
  - krapp 6y ago
    >It is very much legal to threaten the President. Sorry, no[0]. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threatening_the_President_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threatening_the_President_of_t...

annoyingnoob 6y ago

I concur with your complaints about techdirt. Masnick comes across as self-righteous in most of the pieces on the web site that should be called the Daily Outrage. I think your first paragraph really describes techdirt and not HN.

rpdillon 6y ago
Interesting. I find Masnick's writing quite accomplished, and he is quite correct that there is a lot of misinformation (which he links to!) about Section 230. I agree he writes confidently about technology's intersection with the law, but I don't see that as a flaw: the Techdirt team seems to have a much better handle on these issues than the average journalist, and certainly a better understanding than the average blogger or internet commenter.
- SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
  Agreed. This part... >If you said "Once a company like that starts moderating content, it's no longer a platform, but a publisher" I regret to inform you that you are wrong. That’s not the argument. Not really. The argument is that these companies are removing entirely legal content they just don’t like. Their TOS pages are interpretive depending how much they dislike the poster of the content. They do this intentionally and target specific views. They curate their bubble and that is publishing. The issue isn’t moderating content, it’s the selective enforcement. He starts with a complete strawman. >It protects all websites and all users of websites when there is content posted on the sites by someone else. That is the exact crux. I created the content, but EVERY one of these sites is clear they own it. Once I wrote it and hit send, I gave it to them and assumed ownership, they are clear about this. So they ARE publishing THEIR content.
  - Terretta 6y ago
    > clear they own it On the contrary, they tend to be clear you’re assigning them right to publish worldwide in any medium in perpetuity including make money off that, not ownership. For instance, you don’t have to get seek their permission to also publish your thoughts somewhere else, or use your own photo commercially, etc.