10 ms·

There is no bottom when it comes to Section 230 reform proposals

97 points by amadeuspagel 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ineedasername 5y ago
Justice Against Malicious Algorithms Act I thought the author was being sarcastic with that. As it turns out? Nope. That's the title of the bill.
- LurkingPenguin 5y ago
  Just be grateful it's not (yet) the Protecting Children Against Malicious Algorithms and Digital Terrorism Act.
  - mohanmcgeek 5y ago
    It'll never be called that because American acts are named in such a way that when they're abbreviated they will make a pronounceable word.
    - Talanes 5y ago
      While I'll agree that it's pronounceable, is JAMAA a word?
      - anticensor 5y ago
        Jama(ica) Act.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  It's hard to see how an algorithm could be judged "malicious". Can an algorithm be "well-meaning"? Is there such a thing as a "kind" algorithm? What kind of attitude does the Sieve of Eratosthenes have?
  - islon 5y ago
    Sure, because facebook, goggle, twitter, etc. are all run by the almighty algorithm and not by the crooks behind it who made it to do exactly what they expect.
    - denton-scratch 5y ago
      So make a law that says doing crooked things is forbidden (oh - hang on).
TameAntelope 5y ago
Two naive thoughts: 1) What are the rules for non-US sites that allow access to US based IP addresses? Does that count/is that enforceable? 2) I'd find it fairly amusing if sites with UGC would "shut off" access to US based IP addresses at 4.999m unique visitors (or whatever the limit ends up being) to stay in the "small service" exception window.
FFRefresh 5y ago
Good write-up. What I find most frightening is this is yet another attempt to expand the concept of harm in our laws. "such recommendation materially contributed to a physical or severe emotional injury to any person." What specifically is an 'emotional injury'? What's the legal bar for that? Does one merely need to say "I experienced trauma from reading that" and that flies? Or do I just need to go to a sympathetic doctor who can say I'm experiencing anxiety symptoms? Any lawyers here have color on how such loose ambiguous language around subjective harms will (or currently) get handled by the courts?
- torstenvl 5y ago
  The law generally defers to experts with recognized training and experience in the relevant field. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daubert_standard https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daubert_standard
  - tata71 5y ago
    One hop to a kangaroo court, then?
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      How does a court, with a judge appointed and confirmed by elected representatives, a jury of independent citizens, utilizing expert testimony and long-established rules of procedure, equate with a kangaroo court?
      - CamperBob2 5y ago
        For one thing, a law like this puts a staggering amount of power in the hands of whoever gets to define "emotional injury."
        kodah 5y ago
        I can see this going the way of bitemark analysis.
kcplate 5y ago
I stopped reading after this line: “You can imagine my shock when I learned that this bill was the Section 230 reform bill that the Democratic leaders on the House Energy & Commerce Committee chose to back…” It blows my mind that after all this time that people still operate under the assumption that one political party’s representatives are somehow less stupid than the other party and are actually surprised at the realization that their preferred party representatives don’t meet their expectations. Or, which is also likely in this case, don’t actually read the bills that they vote on and support.
- rebuilder 5y ago
  I took it to mean the author expected the bill to be backed by some no-consequence fringe representatives, not serious politicians with real clout.
wolverine876 5y ago
There Is No Bottom when it comes to sensational, alarmist blog posts. I've stopped reading them. Especially beware of those that agree with your suspicions or biases - you are the prey.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  If you had read it you might have derived value from the article which is simply factual. It's the reality of expecting senile old men born before widespread computers became the norm that is absurd not this piece.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    It is not at all simply factual! It is filled with hyperbole and rants.
lovecg 5y ago
This is a good write up on the perils of messing with a fine-tuned mechanism that is Section 230 and potential devastating effects it could have on the internet as we know it. If not carefully drafted, any such bill will open up internet companies to many many lawsuits that can no longer be easily dismissed. The article goes into some examples where not getting the language quite right can blow the whole thing up. I also found the following article a good starting point for learning about what Section 230 is and is not: 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...
- donmcronald 5y ago
  > The bill eliminates Section 230 for making a personalized recommendation of information that materially contributes to a physical or severe emotional injury. IMHO that’s purposely worded to limit the bypass to people, not companies. That’s why the SV rep supports it. It’ll allow people with no money or chance of winning to sue tech companies and that’s it. Paraphrasing someone that commented on HN once and I totally agree, services providing reverse chronological feeds should be considered platforms while services providing algorithmic feeds should be considered publishers. There should be no qualifier. Anything that’s a personalized feed should be considered publishing and companies should be liable for promoting that content.
  - krapp 5y ago
    >services providing reverse chronological feeds should be considered platforms while services providing algorithmic feeds should be considered publishers A reverse chronological feed is no more or less algorithmic than any other - any sort requires an algorithm. You're just criminalizing algorithmic complexity, which is insane. There's no reason the same n items in a list should expose a site owner to different degrees of legal liability because they're sorted one way versus another. What about cases when the user can choose a different sort? Is a company liable based on whether or not a user decided they wanted to see content in anything other than strict chronological order? Is Twitter publishing or promoting content as soon as users tag it? Does sorting by karma make Hacker News a "publisher" of content? Do downvotes and flags count as "promotion" of the downvoted content, or all non-downvoted content?
throw5321e 5y ago
I find this article unconvincing, in that it looks at this issue through the usual bias and superiority complex of HN folks. Politicians no longer want any company to be able to mass manipulate their constituents. The fact that operating a platform at scale relying on user submitted content would be impossible with this bill is precisely the outcome being sought. This requires tech companies to either change their business model or take editorial responsibility for the content promoted on their platform. I actually find this bill clever and elegant since it excludes search engines, discussion boards and more. Yes certain business models and startup dreams relying on making algorithmic recommendations without being accountable for the outcomes on individuals and society will die, but is this really a bad thing? To me this is a total positive, there are still plenty of opportunities to build large scale platforms with the web. Simply moving forward, this will require bringing more value to the table rather than just putting people in a walled garden and making money by poisoning their mind and society at the same time.
- lmm 5y ago
  > I actually find this bill clever and elegant since it excludes search engines, discussion boards and more. If you give a specific exemption for narrow classes of existing things, you're crushing all of the un-thought-of things that innovation would create. There's no reasonable boundary that permits search engines and discussion boards but disallows "algorithmic recommendation systems", because they're the same thing.
  - prox 5y ago
    I am not so sure. Laws are defined to be as limited in scope as possible. When cars were getting faster in the 20th century, we made speed limits. This didn’t hinder building faster cars, just that you needed to start speeding on race tracks and rallies. At some point we must define whats more harmful than beneficial. Ads driven models with algorithmic recommendation systems are not very beneficial, or so it seems.
    - lmm 5y ago
      We limited speed on public roads. We didn't make a blanket ban on going fast and then give specific exceptions for race tracks as they existed at the time. (If we had, rallying would probably never have been invented).
austincheney 5y ago
The intention of 230 is to prevent law suit against agents of connectivity for the contents conveyed by such connectivity. More specifically, prevent use of content as a legal weapon to deny access. The abuse of 230 is in what separates a content source from that which conveys such content. It’s not that drawing an objective separation is challenging it’s that nobody wants objectivity. For example some people don’t care that Facebook will be harmed, and perhaps they hope it will be harmed, but cry a river if it prevents equivalent access to cat videos on YouTube. That subjectivity is the only defense potential targets of reform, beneficiaries of online advertising, have and will exploit it to death irrespective of what any such specific reform contains or intends. As such any proposed reformed is going to make people angry no matter how toxic Facebook is. The quantity and directness of evidence towards vile, harmful, and catastrophic behavior doesn’t matter. As I see it there are only two paths forward for successful regulation and they will both make people very upset.
michaelmrose 5y ago
So in 5 years after they shoot the corpse of Facebook several times whilst spraying it's cohorts with gunfire shall we all install micro facebook serving boxes on our desks and plug them into our routers or cell towers as long as the party writing the software operates nothing or do they get a bullet too?
cblconfederate 5y ago
> This would dial the entire Internet ecosystem back to look a lot more like the 1990s. That would be wonderful. And while facebook could no longer aggregate and weaponize feeds from your friends against you, a browser or a downloadable RSS feed viewer could use any algorithm to fetch and sort the feeds of your friends, whether they are on facebook or on their blogs or anywhere. Which sounds to me the way the internet should have evolved, with personal computers instead of dumb terminals.
- cm2187 5y ago
  Agree. Though you wouldn’t be able to read comments on hackernews.
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    why not? even assuming that the ranking is removed it doesnt change much. I can't be the only one who reads all the comments. Plus it there is this phenomenon where everyone piles up on the top-ranking comment thread and it becomes enormous
    - the_pwner224 5y ago
      I don't follow your response to cm2187. He means very literally that you wouldn't be able to read comments on hacker news, because without section 230 it would be legally very dangerous for sites to host user-generated content, such as comments.
      - vintermann 5y ago
        Yet they did host comments, if not exactly in 1990 in hacker news form, then in many years before section 230 and the DMCA. Lawsuits happened, but they were de facto not very effective in getting information taken down (regardless of what they have since been ruled as having been entitled to).
        5y ago
zthrowaway 5y ago
Wasn’t Trump all about section 230 reform, and everyone was angry about that? And now there’s positive discussions around this concept. What changed?
- icebraining 5y ago
  No, not everyone was angry about it. Biden, for example, said in January 2020 that it should be "revoked immediately"[1]. There were also other proposals backed by some democrats to limit it, like the EARN IT Act. https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/17/21070403/joe-biden-president-election-section-230-communications-decency-act-revoke https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/17/21070403/joe-biden-presid...

97 points by amadeuspagel 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Justice Against Malicious Algorithms Act I thought the author was being sarcastic with that. As it turns out? Nope. That's the title of the bill.

LurkingPenguin 5y ago
Just be grateful it's not (yet) the Protecting Children Against Malicious Algorithms and Digital Terrorism Act.
- mohanmcgeek 5y ago
  It'll never be called that because American acts are named in such a way that when they're abbreviated they will make a pronounceable word.
  - Talanes 5y ago
    While I'll agree that it's pronounceable, is JAMAA a word?
    - anticensor 5y ago
      Jama(ica) Act.
denton-scratch 5y ago
It's hard to see how an algorithm could be judged "malicious". Can an algorithm be "well-meaning"? Is there such a thing as a "kind" algorithm? What kind of attitude does the Sieve of Eratosthenes have?
- islon 5y ago
  Sure, because facebook, goggle, twitter, etc. are all run by the almighty algorithm and not by the crooks behind it who made it to do exactly what they expect.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    So make a law that says doing crooked things is forbidden (oh - hang on).

TameAntelope 5y ago

Two naive thoughts: 1) What are the rules for non-US sites that allow access to US based IP addresses? Does that count/is that enforceable? 2) I'd find it fairly amusing if sites with UGC would "shut off" access to US based IP addresses at 4.999m unique visitors (or whatever the limit ends up being) to stay in the "small service" exception window.

FFRefresh 5y ago

Good write-up. What I find most frightening is this is yet another attempt to expand the concept of harm in our laws. "such recommendation materially contributed to a physical or severe emotional injury to any person." What specifically is an 'emotional injury'? What's the legal bar for that? Does one merely need to say "I experienced trauma from reading that" and that flies? Or do I just need to go to a sympathetic doctor who can say I'm experiencing anxiety symptoms? Any lawyers here have color on how such loose ambiguous language around subjective harms will (or currently) get handled by the courts?

torstenvl 5y ago
The law generally defers to experts with recognized training and experience in the relevant field. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daubert_standard https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daubert_standard
- tata71 5y ago
  One hop to a kangaroo court, then?
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    How does a court, with a judge appointed and confirmed by elected representatives, a jury of independent citizens, utilizing expert testimony and long-established rules of procedure, equate with a kangaroo court?
    - CamperBob2 5y ago
      For one thing, a law like this puts a staggering amount of power in the hands of whoever gets to define "emotional injury."
      - kodah 5y ago
        I can see this going the way of bitemark analysis.

kcplate 5y ago

I stopped reading after this line: “You can imagine my shock when I learned that this bill was the Section 230 reform bill that the Democratic leaders on the House Energy & Commerce Committee chose to back…” It blows my mind that after all this time that people still operate under the assumption that one political party’s representatives are somehow less stupid than the other party and are actually surprised at the realization that their preferred party representatives don’t meet their expectations. Or, which is also likely in this case, don’t actually read the bills that they vote on and support.

rebuilder 5y ago
I took it to mean the author expected the bill to be backed by some no-consequence fringe representatives, not serious politicians with real clout.

wolverine876 5y ago

There Is No Bottom when it comes to sensational, alarmist blog posts. I've stopped reading them. Especially beware of those that agree with your suspicions or biases - you are the prey.

michaelmrose 5y ago
If you had read it you might have derived value from the article which is simply factual. It's the reality of expecting senile old men born before widespread computers became the norm that is absurd not this piece.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  It is not at all simply factual! It is filled with hyperbole and rants.

lovecg 5y ago

This is a good write up on the perils of messing with a fine-tuned mechanism that is Section 230 and potential devastating effects it could have on the internet as we know it. If not carefully drafted, any such bill will open up internet companies to many many lawsuits that can no longer be easily dismissed. The article goes into some examples where not getting the language quite right can blow the whole thing up. I also found the following article a good starting point for learning about what Section 230 is and is not: 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...

donmcronald 5y ago
> The bill eliminates Section 230 for making a personalized recommendation of information that materially contributes to a physical or severe emotional injury. IMHO that’s purposely worded to limit the bypass to people, not companies. That’s why the SV rep supports it. It’ll allow people with no money or chance of winning to sue tech companies and that’s it. Paraphrasing someone that commented on HN once and I totally agree, services providing reverse chronological feeds should be considered platforms while services providing algorithmic feeds should be considered publishers. There should be no qualifier. Anything that’s a personalized feed should be considered publishing and companies should be liable for promoting that content.
- krapp 5y ago
  >services providing reverse chronological feeds should be considered platforms while services providing algorithmic feeds should be considered publishers A reverse chronological feed is no more or less algorithmic than any other - any sort requires an algorithm. You're just criminalizing algorithmic complexity, which is insane. There's no reason the same n items in a list should expose a site owner to different degrees of legal liability because they're sorted one way versus another. What about cases when the user can choose a different sort? Is a company liable based on whether or not a user decided they wanted to see content in anything other than strict chronological order? Is Twitter publishing or promoting content as soon as users tag it? Does sorting by karma make Hacker News a "publisher" of content? Do downvotes and flags count as "promotion" of the downvoted content, or all non-downvoted content?

throw5321e 5y ago

I find this article unconvincing, in that it looks at this issue through the usual bias and superiority complex of HN folks. Politicians no longer want any company to be able to mass manipulate their constituents. The fact that operating a platform at scale relying on user submitted content would be impossible with this bill is precisely the outcome being sought. This requires tech companies to either change their business model or take editorial responsibility for the content promoted on their platform. I actually find this bill clever and elegant since it excludes search engines, discussion boards and more. Yes certain business models and startup dreams relying on making algorithmic recommendations without being accountable for the outcomes on individuals and society will die, but is this really a bad thing? To me this is a total positive, there are still plenty of opportunities to build large scale platforms with the web. Simply moving forward, this will require bringing more value to the table rather than just putting people in a walled garden and making money by poisoning their mind and society at the same time.

lmm 5y ago
> I actually find this bill clever and elegant since it excludes search engines, discussion boards and more. If you give a specific exemption for narrow classes of existing things, you're crushing all of the un-thought-of things that innovation would create. There's no reasonable boundary that permits search engines and discussion boards but disallows "algorithmic recommendation systems", because they're the same thing.
- prox 5y ago
  I am not so sure. Laws are defined to be as limited in scope as possible. When cars were getting faster in the 20th century, we made speed limits. This didn’t hinder building faster cars, just that you needed to start speeding on race tracks and rallies. At some point we must define whats more harmful than beneficial. Ads driven models with algorithmic recommendation systems are not very beneficial, or so it seems.
  - lmm 5y ago
    We limited speed on public roads. We didn't make a blanket ban on going fast and then give specific exceptions for race tracks as they existed at the time. (If we had, rallying would probably never have been invented).

austincheney 5y ago

The intention of 230 is to prevent law suit against agents of connectivity for the contents conveyed by such connectivity. More specifically, prevent use of content as a legal weapon to deny access. The abuse of 230 is in what separates a content source from that which conveys such content. It’s not that drawing an objective separation is challenging it’s that nobody wants objectivity. For example some people don’t care that Facebook will be harmed, and perhaps they hope it will be harmed, but cry a river if it prevents equivalent access to cat videos on YouTube. That subjectivity is the only defense potential targets of reform, beneficiaries of online advertising, have and will exploit it to death irrespective of what any such specific reform contains or intends. As such any proposed reformed is going to make people angry no matter how toxic Facebook is. The quantity and directness of evidence towards vile, harmful, and catastrophic behavior doesn’t matter. As I see it there are only two paths forward for successful regulation and they will both make people very upset.

michaelmrose 5y ago

So in 5 years after they shoot the corpse of Facebook several times whilst spraying it's cohorts with gunfire shall we all install micro facebook serving boxes on our desks and plug them into our routers or cell towers as long as the party writing the software operates nothing or do they get a bullet too?

cblconfederate 5y ago

> This would dial the entire Internet ecosystem back to look a lot more like the 1990s. That would be wonderful. And while facebook could no longer aggregate and weaponize feeds from your friends against you, a browser or a downloadable RSS feed viewer could use any algorithm to fetch and sort the feeds of your friends, whether they are on facebook or on their blogs or anywhere. Which sounds to me the way the internet should have evolved, with personal computers instead of dumb terminals.

cm2187 5y ago
Agree. Though you wouldn’t be able to read comments on hackernews.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  why not? even assuming that the ranking is removed it doesnt change much. I can't be the only one who reads all the comments. Plus it there is this phenomenon where everyone piles up on the top-ranking comment thread and it becomes enormous
  - the_pwner224 5y ago
    I don't follow your response to cm2187. He means very literally that you wouldn't be able to read comments on hacker news, because without section 230 it would be legally very dangerous for sites to host user-generated content, such as comments.
    - vintermann 5y ago
      Yet they did host comments, if not exactly in 1990 in hacker news form, then in many years before section 230 and the DMCA. Lawsuits happened, but they were de facto not very effective in getting information taken down (regardless of what they have since been ruled as having been entitled to).
      - 5y ago

zthrowaway 5y ago

Wasn’t Trump all about section 230 reform, and everyone was angry about that? And now there’s positive discussions around this concept. What changed?

icebraining 5y ago
No, not everyone was angry about it. Biden, for example, said in January 2020 that it should be "revoked immediately"[1]. There were also other proposals backed by some democrats to limit it, like the EARN IT Act. https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/17/21070403/joe-biden-president-election-section-230-communications-decency-act-revoke https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/17/21070403/joe-biden-presid...