5 ms·

Okay, so this is going to be super controversial to some people, but I firmly believe that we are basically trying to bypass the law (at the very least in spiri

Okay, so this is going to be super controversial to some people, but I firmly believe that we are basically trying to bypass the law (at the very least in spirit) when we agree for the big companies to limit free speech in that way. We should either make it illegal to post that kind of information (or rather - try and fail) or enforce fair treatment of people from the big tech companies. They cannot be both a "mere conduit" and a "censor/publisher" at the same time.

edandersen 5y ago
I think at this point its clear that there is a legal risk to the platforms themselves if content contrary to the official narrative is left up. Like "sued and held accountable for all Covid damage" levels of legal risk. A family who lost a loved one who didn't take the vaccine because they read something on Twitter would have a very good case today to take them to the cleaners. And given the political climate they would probably win.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  IANAL, but I think the legal danger runs the other way. If they don't police content, they're covered by Section 230. But if they do police content, and they miss some, then... are they liable for the part that they miss? Does Section 230 still cover them if they're picking and choosing what they're going to carry?
  - edandersen 5y ago
    They are still technically carrying it.
  - jakelazaroff 5y ago
    They're covered by Section 230 no matter what. The entire point of the law is to indemnify them for third-party content, even if they moderate. There's a (mildly sarcastic) article on TechDirt that's pretty comprehensive: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
  - donw 5y ago
    Depends on Twitter’s campaign contributions.
  - ThrustVectoring 5y ago
    Yes. Moderation actions are actually explicitly called out for greater protection under section 230. The "publisher" exception is a lot narrower than people think - it's for when the purported "third party" making the statements isn't actually a third party.
  - xoa 5y ago
    >Does Section 230 still cover them if they're picking and choosing what they're going to carry? Holy shit. 230 is LITERALLY ABOUT PROTECTING PICKING AND CHOOSING. That's the entire point!! Carrying everything in common is called a "common carrier". Putting out your own personal speech is publishing. Moderation exists in between and can never be perfect. Section 230 was created so that forums could moderate, imperfectly, however they wish without being liable for stuff that other people wrote. It is what makes the internet as we know it possible, including Hacker News itself. Seriously, how do these memes get started and gain so much traction!? Why has nobody apparently actually read 230? It's TWENTY-SIX WORDS. That's it. Here: "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." Does anyone see the word "neutral" or anything like that in there? Any qualifications on "both sides"? No. Because it doesn't exist. Stop.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - dlp211 5y ago
    > Does Section 230 still cover them if they're picking and choosing what they're going to carry? Section 230 does not prohibit imperfect moderation. In fact, Section 230 exists for mostly this reason, so that platforms can moderate on a best effort and not be held liable as publishers.
    - lp0_on_fire 5y ago
      It's clear that Twitter is not making a best or even good faith effort.
- ThrustVectoring 5y ago
  I don't think there's a legal theory that gives legs to any sort civil lawsuit, but retaliatory lawmaking from congress definitely is a risk. That's a big part of the point of hauling in tech CEOs to testify to congress about their disinformation concerns; it's a veiled threat to pass legislation against their interest unless something is done about the problem. And because it's merely a veiled threat, there's no basis for a 1st Amendment lawsuit alleging censorship by the government.
judge2020 5y ago
We're trying to bypass the law because nobody can determine exactly what is misleading/incorrect information without taking in every bit of nuance and context concerning a tweet/social post, much less some law. If you solve that by having some oversight/review board make the rules and review violations you just get to the problem of government workers determining the rules and what general information is false, which nobody in the US public would trust after $x decades. If you're paying for the servers that run the conduit, the least you should be able to do is decide who can add to it and what you allow through it.
- donw 5y ago
  Then you should be held liable for what you allow through.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    Liable for what? They already are liable if they enable things like CP if they don't proactively scan and remove it, and other crimes like distribution or sale of illegal substances is something they have to work closely with police on if they don't want to be held for aiding & abetting such crimes. They just aren't going to be the defendant if someone wants to bring a libel suit that originates from a false statement in a tweet, because Twitter isn't omnipotent and can't verify everything someone states to be true.
smt88 5y ago
Enforcing "fair treatment" (meaning forcing companies to publish anything that's sent to them) is flagrantly unconstitutional and not even consistent with the First Amendment. Free speech is the US is freedom from censorship by the govt only, and it isn't unlimited. It only applies to ideological speech. No consumer wants an unrestricted platform anyway. There are no platforms with zero moderation.
- dvdkon 5y ago
  People probably don't want an unmoderated community, but a community is usually smaller than a social media behemoth/"platform". Twitter is actually the one site that doesn't try to divide its userbase into groups/communities, but pretty much all other platforms I know either have a very prominent "friend" or "group" mechanism. Even on Twitter there are many subcultures, not just homogenous "Twitter users", they're just not organised as such. One-size-fits-all moderation of whole platforms is the problem, in my opinion. Imagine if all PhpBB forums were moderated by a central team and you might see why some are against Facebook/Reddit/Twitter regulating their corner of the platform.
  - smt88 5y ago
    I agree that private communities are better. You see only who you choose to see. But I disagree that Twitter is an outlier in that regard. Facebook, YouTube, and reddit (mostly) are spaces that technically have groups, but you're still flooded with algorithmically-chosen content made by strangers.
convery 5y ago
Remember during the 2016 election when Dems wrote a public letter to Google (while anti-trust was on the table) strongly advising them to remove what they considered 'misinformation' (e.g. Wikileaks)? Ye.. totally not in favour of censorship though as it was only an innocent 'suggestion'..
- lp0_on_fire 5y ago
  Remember when the sitting Press Secretary admitted they were "flagging problematic posts" for facebook?
chmsky00 5y ago
Yeah they can because social laws are not beholden to the kind of logic used in science. Laws are thought ending semantic games invented by aristocrats to manipulate the masses. Read James Madison; government exists to protect the opulent minority from the poor majority. Laws as our society knows them are aristocratic obligations put in people. Our social meme obliges us to kowtow to the owners, just as religion obliged us to kowtow to the masters of the sacred texts.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  I'd like to subscribe to James Madison's newsletter... can you recommend a starting point?
  - mikepurvis 5y ago
    This is the common starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Federalist_Papers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Federalist_Papers
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  That sounds rather unlike Madison. Where, specifically, did he say that?
  - chmsky00 5y ago
    My bad; he wrote the Senate not “government”, should protect the opulent minority. Aristocratic protectionism is built into the American political system. https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/8793/what-did-james-madison-try-to-say-when-talking-about-agrarian-reform https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/8793/what-did-j...
  - throwawaysea 5y ago
    The actual quote referenced is: > Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body. This quote comes from a statement Madison made at the Federal Convention of 1787 (https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0044 https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-004...), and is basically pointing out that a Democracy is susceptible to a Tyranny of the Majority (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority), and needs a balancing force (the Senate). The comment you are replying to is from a user named "chmsky00" which gives a hint about how some, in particular Noam Chomsky, have interpreted this quote by Noam Chomsky (https://chomsky.info/commongood02/ https://chomsky.info/commongood02/).
jazzyjackson 5y ago
Would you also agree that a coffee shop that pulls down objectionable flyers from their wall/window is circumventing free speech? Maybe you can say more about why a business can't be both a publisher and a distributor? A newspaper publishes original content and classifieds, and they certainly have discretion over which classifieds to distribute in their paper, what makes social media any different?
- alexanderchr 5y ago
  The scale?
  - davidw 5y ago
    Where do you draw the line? Honest question. I think this is an interesting topic, as so much is online these days. These are companies, not the government, so they should have some more leeway... but given their size, it's also kind of scary. What if someone with a lot of money buys, say, Twitter and clamps down on all right of center, or left of center or whatever content? It's also incredibly easy to spread pure garbage with social media. Debunking it takes real work. I am going to a funeral in a few hours for an unvaccinated friend who died of COVID.
    - meltedcapacitor 5y ago
      Someone buying Twitter and banning a whole (normalish) category would be wonderful: it would make space for alternative platforms. As it is everybody is too lazy to fight the network effect. Maybe regulators should force dominant platforms to kick out a section of their user base every so often to keep the ecosystem diversified.
- kansface 5y ago
  > Would you also agree that a coffee shop that pulls down objectionable flyers from their wall/window is circumventing free speech? No coffee shop has 1/4 of the human population visit each day.
- l33tbro 5y ago
oehtXRwMkIs 5y ago
What law?
ramesh31 5y ago
>Okay, so this is going to be super controversial to some people, but I firmly believe that we are basically trying to bypass the law (at the very least in spirit) when we agree for the big companies to limit free speech in that way. Use IRC. Use free forum software. Write a blog. Go stand on a soapbox in Times Square and shout it at the top of your lungs. Do whatever you want. But free speech has precisely nothing to do with having free reign to violate a company's terms of service. You have the constitutional right to say whatever you want. You do not have the constitutional right to have your nonsense amplified by billions of dollars worth of privately owned technical infrastructure.
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  What happens when the public mostly occupies spaces/services that are owned or outsourced to private corporations? Do you agree that the spirit of the law would be violated by their imposition of censorship? Or that shouting on a soapbox is roughly the same as doing nothing at all when almost all the important parts of our democratic process that precede voting are taking place on platforms owned by large tech companies?
  - anoonmoose 5y ago
    If you're asking what happens when public spaces are mostly owned by private corporations, I'd suggest you need to be a bit more clear on what you consider a public space.
NikolaNovak 5y ago
Which law do we feel is being bypassed? I believe in marketplace of ideas ; I believe we should let stupid and wrong opinions be voiced rather than simmer in darkness; I dislike censorship in virtually every way and situation; but I'm not aware of what law is being broken. You might persuade me to vote for a new one but I don't know which law prohibits private company on their own private infra to do as they please. (Please don't say "section 230" without reading it first, that gets tiring, not "controversial". See #1 etc etc ad infinitum ad nauseum) [1]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
tw04 5y ago
How are we violating the spirt of the law? Freedom of speech means freedom from government intervention. The founding fathers never said or intended that: newspapers must publish anything a private citizen wants to put in the paper. You are saying the equivalent of: if this were 150 years ago, and your crazy uncle thought that the moon was made of cheese, the New York Times would legally be required to put that on the front page of the paper. That's insane.
- jdavis703 5y ago
  This is the problem with invoking “spirt of the law.” US lawyers can barely agree on what basic constitutional laws mean. We should only invoke the spirit of a law when it’s a decision of last resort. But we’ve been talking about public vs. private speech for decades now. If Congress had a different spirit in mind, the constitution would’ve been amended or the Supreme Court would’ve issued a definitive decision.
- tehjoker 5y ago
  NYT has hiring process and editorial standards, FB/Twitter is a town message board. I think people pick on the government/private distinction too much. When the government is leaning on private monopolies to implement public policy that would be illegal to do directly, I don't think this traditional analysis holds up. Tech CEOs are getting hauled before congress constantly these days, there's a revolving door of government officials. The public/private separation is very superficial. Under conditions of monopoly, the private companies act much like a government, but unaccountable and undemocratic. It violates the spirit of 1776 to be subjected to the will of an unelected minority and be silenced. That said, I find the opinions being suppressed despicable, but that doesn't mean I'm going to line up behind government censorship and private monopoly.
  - poszlem 5y ago
    That is essentially my point and you expressed it much better that I could (sorry, English as a second language). Facebook is not a newspaper. Twitter is not a newspaper. In this example Facebok/Twitter ARE PAPER. They are part of the infrastructure of the internet.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

edandersen 5y ago

I think at this point its clear that there is a legal risk to the platforms themselves if content contrary to the official narrative is left up. Like "sued and held accountable for all Covid damage" levels of legal risk. A family who lost a loved one who didn't take the vaccine because they read something on Twitter would have a very good case today to take them to the cleaners. And given the political climate they would probably win.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
IANAL, but I think the legal danger runs the other way. If they don't police content, they're covered by Section 230. But if they do police content, and they miss some, then... are they liable for the part that they miss? Does Section 230 still cover them if they're picking and choosing what they're going to carry?
- edandersen 5y ago
  They are still technically carrying it.
- jakelazaroff 5y ago
  They're covered by Section 230 no matter what. The entire point of the law is to indemnify them for third-party content, even if they moderate. There's a (mildly sarcastic) article on TechDirt that's pretty comprehensive: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
- donw 5y ago
  Depends on Twitter’s campaign contributions.
- ThrustVectoring 5y ago
  Yes. Moderation actions are actually explicitly called out for greater protection under section 230. The "publisher" exception is a lot narrower than people think - it's for when the purported "third party" making the statements isn't actually a third party.
- xoa 5y ago
  >Does Section 230 still cover them if they're picking and choosing what they're going to carry? Holy shit. 230 is LITERALLY ABOUT PROTECTING PICKING AND CHOOSING. That's the entire point!! Carrying everything in common is called a "common carrier". Putting out your own personal speech is publishing. Moderation exists in between and can never be perfect. Section 230 was created so that forums could moderate, imperfectly, however they wish without being liable for stuff that other people wrote. It is what makes the internet as we know it possible, including Hacker News itself. Seriously, how do these memes get started and gain so much traction!? Why has nobody apparently actually read 230? It's TWENTY-SIX WORDS. That's it. Here: "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." Does anyone see the word "neutral" or anything like that in there? Any qualifications on "both sides"? No. Because it doesn't exist. Stop.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- dlp211 5y ago
  > Does Section 230 still cover them if they're picking and choosing what they're going to carry? Section 230 does not prohibit imperfect moderation. In fact, Section 230 exists for mostly this reason, so that platforms can moderate on a best effort and not be held liable as publishers.
  - lp0_on_fire 5y ago
    It's clear that Twitter is not making a best or even good faith effort.
ThrustVectoring 5y ago
I don't think there's a legal theory that gives legs to any sort civil lawsuit, but retaliatory lawmaking from congress definitely is a risk. That's a big part of the point of hauling in tech CEOs to testify to congress about their disinformation concerns; it's a veiled threat to pass legislation against their interest unless something is done about the problem. And because it's merely a veiled threat, there's no basis for a 1st Amendment lawsuit alleging censorship by the government.

judge2020 5y ago

We're trying to bypass the law because nobody can determine exactly what is misleading/incorrect information without taking in every bit of nuance and context concerning a tweet/social post, much less some law. If you solve that by having some oversight/review board make the rules and review violations you just get to the problem of government workers determining the rules and what general information is false, which nobody in the US public would trust after $x decades. If you're paying for the servers that run the conduit, the least you should be able to do is decide who can add to it and what you allow through it.

donw 5y ago
Then you should be held liable for what you allow through.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Liable for what? They already are liable if they enable things like CP if they don't proactively scan and remove it, and other crimes like distribution or sale of illegal substances is something they have to work closely with police on if they don't want to be held for aiding & abetting such crimes. They just aren't going to be the defendant if someone wants to bring a libel suit that originates from a false statement in a tweet, because Twitter isn't omnipotent and can't verify everything someone states to be true.

smt88 5y ago

Enforcing "fair treatment" (meaning forcing companies to publish anything that's sent to them) is flagrantly unconstitutional and not even consistent with the First Amendment. Free speech is the US is freedom from censorship by the govt only, and it isn't unlimited. It only applies to ideological speech. No consumer wants an unrestricted platform anyway. There are no platforms with zero moderation.

dvdkon 5y ago
People probably don't want an unmoderated community, but a community is usually smaller than a social media behemoth/"platform". Twitter is actually the one site that doesn't try to divide its userbase into groups/communities, but pretty much all other platforms I know either have a very prominent "friend" or "group" mechanism. Even on Twitter there are many subcultures, not just homogenous "Twitter users", they're just not organised as such. One-size-fits-all moderation of whole platforms is the problem, in my opinion. Imagine if all PhpBB forums were moderated by a central team and you might see why some are against Facebook/Reddit/Twitter regulating their corner of the platform.
- smt88 5y ago
  I agree that private communities are better. You see only who you choose to see. But I disagree that Twitter is an outlier in that regard. Facebook, YouTube, and reddit (mostly) are spaces that technically have groups, but you're still flooded with algorithmically-chosen content made by strangers.

convery 5y ago

Remember during the 2016 election when Dems wrote a public letter to Google (while anti-trust was on the table) strongly advising them to remove what they considered 'misinformation' (e.g. Wikileaks)? Ye.. totally not in favour of censorship though as it was only an innocent 'suggestion'..

lp0_on_fire 5y ago
Remember when the sitting Press Secretary admitted they were "flagging problematic posts" for facebook?

chmsky00 5y ago

Yeah they can because social laws are not beholden to the kind of logic used in science. Laws are thought ending semantic games invented by aristocrats to manipulate the masses. Read James Madison; government exists to protect the opulent minority from the poor majority. Laws as our society knows them are aristocratic obligations put in people. Our social meme obliges us to kowtow to the owners, just as religion obliged us to kowtow to the masters of the sacred texts.

jazzyjackson 5y ago
I'd like to subscribe to James Madison's newsletter... can you recommend a starting point?
- mikepurvis 5y ago
  This is the common starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Federalist_Papers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Federalist_Papers
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
That sounds rather unlike Madison. Where, specifically, did he say that?
- chmsky00 5y ago
  My bad; he wrote the Senate not “government”, should protect the opulent minority. Aristocratic protectionism is built into the American political system. https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/8793/what-did-james-madison-try-to-say-when-talking-about-agrarian-reform https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/8793/what-did-j...
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  The actual quote referenced is: > Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body. This quote comes from a statement Madison made at the Federal Convention of 1787 (https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0044 https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-004...), and is basically pointing out that a Democracy is susceptible to a Tyranny of the Majority (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority), and needs a balancing force (the Senate). The comment you are replying to is from a user named "chmsky00" which gives a hint about how some, in particular Noam Chomsky, have interpreted this quote by Noam Chomsky (https://chomsky.info/commongood02/ https://chomsky.info/commongood02/).

jazzyjackson 5y ago

Would you also agree that a coffee shop that pulls down objectionable flyers from their wall/window is circumventing free speech? Maybe you can say more about why a business can't be both a publisher and a distributor? A newspaper publishes original content and classifieds, and they certainly have discretion over which classifieds to distribute in their paper, what makes social media any different?

alexanderchr 5y ago
The scale?
- davidw 5y ago
  Where do you draw the line? Honest question. I think this is an interesting topic, as so much is online these days. These are companies, not the government, so they should have some more leeway... but given their size, it's also kind of scary. What if someone with a lot of money buys, say, Twitter and clamps down on all right of center, or left of center or whatever content? It's also incredibly easy to spread pure garbage with social media. Debunking it takes real work. I am going to a funeral in a few hours for an unvaccinated friend who died of COVID.
  - meltedcapacitor 5y ago
    Someone buying Twitter and banning a whole (normalish) category would be wonderful: it would make space for alternative platforms. As it is everybody is too lazy to fight the network effect. Maybe regulators should force dominant platforms to kick out a section of their user base every so often to keep the ecosystem diversified.
kansface 5y ago
> Would you also agree that a coffee shop that pulls down objectionable flyers from their wall/window is circumventing free speech? No coffee shop has 1/4 of the human population visit each day.
l33tbro 5y ago

oehtXRwMkIs 5y ago

What law?

ramesh31 5y ago

>Okay, so this is going to be super controversial to some people, but I firmly believe that we are basically trying to bypass the law (at the very least in spirit) when we agree for the big companies to limit free speech in that way. Use IRC. Use free forum software. Write a blog. Go stand on a soapbox in Times Square and shout it at the top of your lungs. Do whatever you want. But free speech has precisely nothing to do with having free reign to violate a company's terms of service. You have the constitutional right to say whatever you want. You do not have the constitutional right to have your nonsense amplified by billions of dollars worth of privately owned technical infrastructure.

throwawaysea 5y ago
What happens when the public mostly occupies spaces/services that are owned or outsourced to private corporations? Do you agree that the spirit of the law would be violated by their imposition of censorship? Or that shouting on a soapbox is roughly the same as doing nothing at all when almost all the important parts of our democratic process that precede voting are taking place on platforms owned by large tech companies?
- anoonmoose 5y ago
  If you're asking what happens when public spaces are mostly owned by private corporations, I'd suggest you need to be a bit more clear on what you consider a public space.

NikolaNovak 5y ago

Which law do we feel is being bypassed? I believe in marketplace of ideas ; I believe we should let stupid and wrong opinions be voiced rather than simmer in darkness; I dislike censorship in virtually every way and situation; but I'm not aware of what law is being broken. You might persuade me to vote for a new one but I don't know which law prohibits private company on their own private infra to do as they please. (Please don't say "section 230" without reading it first, that gets tiring, not "controversial". See #1 etc etc ad infinitum ad nauseum) [1]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...

tw04 5y ago

How are we violating the spirt of the law? Freedom of speech means freedom from government intervention. The founding fathers never said or intended that: newspapers must publish anything a private citizen wants to put in the paper. You are saying the equivalent of: if this were 150 years ago, and your crazy uncle thought that the moon was made of cheese, the New York Times would legally be required to put that on the front page of the paper. That's insane.

jdavis703 5y ago
This is the problem with invoking “spirt of the law.” US lawyers can barely agree on what basic constitutional laws mean. We should only invoke the spirit of a law when it’s a decision of last resort. But we’ve been talking about public vs. private speech for decades now. If Congress had a different spirit in mind, the constitution would’ve been amended or the Supreme Court would’ve issued a definitive decision.
tehjoker 5y ago
NYT has hiring process and editorial standards, FB/Twitter is a town message board. I think people pick on the government/private distinction too much. When the government is leaning on private monopolies to implement public policy that would be illegal to do directly, I don't think this traditional analysis holds up. Tech CEOs are getting hauled before congress constantly these days, there's a revolving door of government officials. The public/private separation is very superficial. Under conditions of monopoly, the private companies act much like a government, but unaccountable and undemocratic. It violates the spirit of 1776 to be subjected to the will of an unelected minority and be silenced. That said, I find the opinions being suppressed despicable, but that doesn't mean I'm going to line up behind government censorship and private monopoly.
- poszlem 5y ago
  That is essentially my point and you expressed it much better that I could (sorry, English as a second language). Facebook is not a newspaper. Twitter is not a newspaper. In this example Facebok/Twitter ARE PAPER. They are part of the infrastructure of the internet.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]