8 ms·

During all the recent debates regarding Parler, much was said about how Parler needed effective moderation like Twitter. This article is an important reminder

During all the recent debates regarding Parler, much was said about how Parler needed effective moderation like Twitter. This article is an important reminder that there is a lot more room for improvement in the moderation space and even companies that "do it right" are still making glaring mistakes. > We’ve reviewed the content, and didn’t find a violation of our policies, so no action will be taken at this time This is totally unacceptable. I wonder if there is some kind of legal liability that could apply here? Taken at face value, this message seems to indicate that a Twitter representative reviewed content and chose to not remove it which sounds a lot to me like knowingly and willfully distributing cp.... (edited to fix spelling of "Parler")

na85 6y ago
>This is totally unacceptable. And yet not at all surprising. These huge companies have a reputation for being faceless because they skimp on staffing their support teams and until the so-called "tech reckoning" have operated with virtual impunity.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> This article is an important reminder The only facts being reported in this article is that someone made claims in a lawsuit. > This is totally unacceptable. I wonder if there is some kind of legal liability that could apply here? Yes. Both civil liability (under the fairly recent exceptions relating sex trafficking to 230 protection) and criminal liability (section 230 has never applied to criminal liability) are possible, for the kinds of things claimed in the lawsuit. That civil liability is possible is, of course, almost certainly a factor in why the lawsuit was filed; while you can file a lawsuit where there is no available liability, it tends to be a waste of effort. Of course, one would also do well to take claims made in a lawsuit with some skepticism. If those didn't often turn out to be untrue, we wouldn't need courts nearly as much as we do.
toss1 6y ago
Exactly, aside from the civil liability already being pursued in the reported lawsuit, there should also be criminal liability for people making those editorial judgements, as far up the management chain as it goes. This is not some algorithmic failure that no human saw -it was specifically examined by a human with managers setting policy, and deemed to be acceptable to distribute. At that point, they are willfully distributing the material, and should be held accountable. Yes, the result may be harsh. Ideally, there would be advance notice of the potential legal jeopardy, but ignorance of the law is never an excuse, and child porn distribution is widely known to be illegal. Standard pull in the workers and get them to flip on the managers, repeat all the way up the chain as far as it goes. It should now be obvious to anyone that internet discussions are either moderated/edited, or will descend into toxic cesspools when any of a variety of bad actors are allowed to run unchecked. The hosts need to be responsible for their editing decisions, which are made at far larger scale than any newspaper or broadcaster.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > This is not some algorithmic failure that no human saw -it was specifically examined by a human with managers setting policy, and deemed to be acceptable to distribute. Or, you know, the claims in the lawsuit are false. This wouldn't be the first time that happened.
  - dragontamer 6y ago
    Considering that this is NYPost, its quite possible. I don't really consider NYPost to be a very respectable institution.
    - stretchcat 6y ago
      Do you think the NYPost fabricated the existence of the lawsuit? As far as I can tell, the lawsuit really does exist. Given the nature of the lawsuit, concerning material that is illegal to view, I don't think any journalists, whether from a fishwrapper like the NYPost or a venerable institution like the NYTimes, would be able to verify the claims made by the lawsuit.
      - ardy42 6y ago
        > Do you think the NYPost fabricated the existence of the lawsuit? As far as I can tell, the lawsuit really does exist. Straight up fabrication is not the only way to disinform, and it's in fact it's a pretty shitty way to do it, since it means your disinformation collapses at the slightest scrutiny. To make fabrication effective, the fabrication needs to be laundered to give it credibility (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR_6dibpDfo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR_6dibpDfo), which takes time and effort. A more effective way to disinform is to pluck out a true story that's not representative and amplify or twist it. That will seem more credible to those who give it just a little scrutiny, even if it's just as wrong as a fabrication in some ways. In this case, if the NY Post has a bone to pick with Twitter, it could troll through lawsuits against it until it found one that made scandalous claims, then report those as hard facts.
RandallBrown 6y ago
I think you're talking about Parler, not Parlor which is a very different app.
- jlkuester7 6y ago
  Shoot, you are right. Fixed!
BryanBeshore 6y ago
Here’s the lawsuit brought by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation: https://www.scribd.com/document/491614044/Doe-v-Twitter https://www.scribd.com/document/491614044/Doe-v-Twitter
- Hello71 6y ago
  It's worth noting that the NCSE (formerly known as Morality in Media) is completely against pornography of any type.
  - stretchcat 6y ago
    Why is that worth noting?
    - trianglem 6y ago
      Because if they are biased against pornography they have a motive to call things child pornography even when it’s not.
      - stretchcat 6y ago
        Why would they waste their time in court bringing a lawsuit that would immediately get tossed? They'd hardly be able to conceal the age of a child from the court. The court will know who the child is, even though journalists will (of course!) not be told.
        manicdee 6y ago
        They would “waste their time” because they are here to claim that Twitter is distributing porn. They are not here to win the case. By the time the case is won or lost the public will have long forgotten about it. Moral crusaders are only interested in the immediate attention the case will bring to their cause, along with the donation from people concerned about Twitter being a corrupt den of wickedness and evil.
      - 6y ago
IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
Maybe it's the headline that is misleading you, or it's a symptom of our times. In any case: it should be blatantly obvious that the Twitter representative did not know or agree that the person in the video was a minor. The insinuation that it's Twitter policy to distribute child pornography is laughable. They have absolutely nothing to gain from it. As to liability: Section 230 is about exactly that situation: trying to limit damaging material on your platform does not create any liability even if you fail. Because the alternative, where you either allow your platform to be flooded with swastikas and pornography or get sued for every single mistake you make, is unworkable.
- kenjackson 6y ago
  The article is from the NY Post. This makes me question it right out the gate. And I just find it hard to believe that Twitter would want to keep something like this up, since it is illegal content. There is no incentive for them to do so, and the NY Post isn't the publication to dive into this at all.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  > Because the alternative, where you either allow your platform to be flooded with swastikas and pornography or get sued for every single mistake you make, is unworkable. The current model isn't workable either. Social media networks and their ad-driven models have hollowed out our democracies by sowing outrage and division at every opportunity. If one believes "The Social Dilemma", these networks have a dial for tuning public opinion that can even steer election outcomes (if you subscribe to the "Russia used bots to hack the 2016 election" theory, then you must agree). Maybe we should rethink the role of social media networks. Perhaps they monopolize too much communication to trust them to curate which voices are amplified and which are suppressed. The discourse around this issue has been really strange, with the usual critics of corporate power rallying to defend social media giants and their rights and qualifications to curate such an enormous portion of our collective speech. Perhaps we should consider these networks to be more "dumb pipes" rather than "curators", and instead we should expect these networks to provide us with our own curation/moderation mechanisms. If there really is no workable social media model--that is, if they really can't deliver some net-positive social good (or at least some smaller net harm, like sex work, drugs/alcohol, tobacco, etc), then maybe we should regulate them out of existence?

na85 6y ago

>This is totally unacceptable. And yet not at all surprising. These huge companies have a reputation for being faceless because they skimp on staffing their support teams and until the so-called "tech reckoning" have operated with virtual impunity.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> This article is an important reminder The only facts being reported in this article is that someone made claims in a lawsuit. > This is totally unacceptable. I wonder if there is some kind of legal liability that could apply here? Yes. Both civil liability (under the fairly recent exceptions relating sex trafficking to 230 protection) and criminal liability (section 230 has never applied to criminal liability) are possible, for the kinds of things claimed in the lawsuit. That civil liability is possible is, of course, almost certainly a factor in why the lawsuit was filed; while you can file a lawsuit where there is no available liability, it tends to be a waste of effort. Of course, one would also do well to take claims made in a lawsuit with some skepticism. If those didn't often turn out to be untrue, we wouldn't need courts nearly as much as we do.

toss1 6y ago

Exactly, aside from the civil liability already being pursued in the reported lawsuit, there should also be criminal liability for people making those editorial judgements, as far up the management chain as it goes. This is not some algorithmic failure that no human saw -it was specifically examined by a human with managers setting policy, and deemed to be acceptable to distribute. At that point, they are willfully distributing the material, and should be held accountable. Yes, the result may be harsh. Ideally, there would be advance notice of the potential legal jeopardy, but ignorance of the law is never an excuse, and child porn distribution is widely known to be illegal. Standard pull in the workers and get them to flip on the managers, repeat all the way up the chain as far as it goes. It should now be obvious to anyone that internet discussions are either moderated/edited, or will descend into toxic cesspools when any of a variety of bad actors are allowed to run unchecked. The hosts need to be responsible for their editing decisions, which are made at far larger scale than any newspaper or broadcaster.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> This is not some algorithmic failure that no human saw -it was specifically examined by a human with managers setting policy, and deemed to be acceptable to distribute. Or, you know, the claims in the lawsuit are false. This wouldn't be the first time that happened.
- dragontamer 6y ago
  Considering that this is NYPost, its quite possible. I don't really consider NYPost to be a very respectable institution.
  - stretchcat 6y ago
    Do you think the NYPost fabricated the existence of the lawsuit? As far as I can tell, the lawsuit really does exist. Given the nature of the lawsuit, concerning material that is illegal to view, I don't think any journalists, whether from a fishwrapper like the NYPost or a venerable institution like the NYTimes, would be able to verify the claims made by the lawsuit.
    - ardy42 6y ago
      > Do you think the NYPost fabricated the existence of the lawsuit? As far as I can tell, the lawsuit really does exist. Straight up fabrication is not the only way to disinform, and it's in fact it's a pretty shitty way to do it, since it means your disinformation collapses at the slightest scrutiny. To make fabrication effective, the fabrication needs to be laundered to give it credibility (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR_6dibpDfo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR_6dibpDfo), which takes time and effort. A more effective way to disinform is to pluck out a true story that's not representative and amplify or twist it. That will seem more credible to those who give it just a little scrutiny, even if it's just as wrong as a fabrication in some ways. In this case, if the NY Post has a bone to pick with Twitter, it could troll through lawsuits against it until it found one that made scandalous claims, then report those as hard facts.

RandallBrown 6y ago

I think you're talking about Parler, not Parlor which is a very different app.

jlkuester7 6y ago
Shoot, you are right. Fixed!

BryanBeshore 6y ago

Here’s the lawsuit brought by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation: https://www.scribd.com/document/491614044/Doe-v-Twitter https://www.scribd.com/document/491614044/Doe-v-Twitter

Hello71 6y ago
It's worth noting that the NCSE (formerly known as Morality in Media) is completely against pornography of any type.
- stretchcat 6y ago
  Why is that worth noting?
  - trianglem 6y ago
    Because if they are biased against pornography they have a motive to call things child pornography even when it’s not.
    - stretchcat 6y ago
      Why would they waste their time in court bringing a lawsuit that would immediately get tossed? They'd hardly be able to conceal the age of a child from the court. The court will know who the child is, even though journalists will (of course!) not be told.
      - manicdee 6y ago
        They would “waste their time” because they are here to claim that Twitter is distributing porn. They are not here to win the case. By the time the case is won or lost the public will have long forgotten about it. Moral crusaders are only interested in the immediate attention the case will bring to their cause, along with the donation from people concerned about Twitter being a corrupt den of wickedness and evil.
    - 6y ago

IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago

Maybe it's the headline that is misleading you, or it's a symptom of our times. In any case: it should be blatantly obvious that the Twitter representative did not know or agree that the person in the video was a minor. The insinuation that it's Twitter policy to distribute child pornography is laughable. They have absolutely nothing to gain from it. As to liability: Section 230 is about exactly that situation: trying to limit damaging material on your platform does not create any liability even if you fail. Because the alternative, where you either allow your platform to be flooded with swastikas and pornography or get sued for every single mistake you make, is unworkable.

kenjackson 6y ago
The article is from the NY Post. This makes me question it right out the gate. And I just find it hard to believe that Twitter would want to keep something like this up, since it is illegal content. There is no incentive for them to do so, and the NY Post isn't the publication to dive into this at all.
throwaway894345 6y ago
> Because the alternative, where you either allow your platform to be flooded with swastikas and pornography or get sued for every single mistake you make, is unworkable. The current model isn't workable either. Social media networks and their ad-driven models have hollowed out our democracies by sowing outrage and division at every opportunity. If one believes "The Social Dilemma", these networks have a dial for tuning public opinion that can even steer election outcomes (if you subscribe to the "Russia used bots to hack the 2016 election" theory, then you must agree). Maybe we should rethink the role of social media networks. Perhaps they monopolize too much communication to trust them to curate which voices are amplified and which are suppressed. The discourse around this issue has been really strange, with the usual critics of corporate power rallying to defend social media giants and their rights and qualifications to curate such an enormous portion of our collective speech. Perhaps we should consider these networks to be more "dumb pipes" rather than "curators", and instead we should expect these networks to provide us with our own curation/moderation mechanisms. If there really is no workable social media model--that is, if they really can't deliver some net-positive social good (or at least some smaller net harm, like sex work, drugs/alcohol, tobacco, etc), then maybe we should regulate them out of existence?