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I haven't finished reading the decision yet (https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22417924/5th-circuit-netchoice-v-paxton.pdf https://s3.documentcloud.org/doc

by nkurz 4y ago

I haven't finished reading the decision yet (https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22417924/5th-circuit-netchoice-v-paxton.pdf https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22417924/5th-circuit-...) but it would seem to hinge on two distinct questions: 1) Should large internet communities be treated as common carriers? and 2) Should common carriers be allowed to censor/moderate at will? But then I wondered if both of these are really up for argument---maybe only the first is in dispute. Is there anyone here who feels that telephone companies (the classic example of a common carrier) should be allowed to prevent legal communication between individuals because they disagree with the political views being exchanged? If you do feel this way, could you please outline your argument?

manicdee 4y ago
Do you feel that telephone companies should take action when someone is using their services to harass a person, such as repeated prank calls or using SS7 signalling to capture calls that aren’t theirs?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- LinuxBender 4y ago
  I believe that is a divergence from free speech when it delves into malicious intent or intent to do harm or intent to defraud. If I swat your home and someone is harmed or property is damaged as a result, I should most certainly be held culpable for any and all damages.
  - freen 4y ago
    Intent to overthrow a free and fair election? Seditious conspiracy?
    - LinuxBender 4y ago
      Sure. If it can be proven that one has intent to commit a crime then law enforcement should step in to handle the situation. This is probably not appropriate for the platform to manage as they are not the executive branch. The platform should make a best-effort to provide enough information for law enforcement to take over and use verbiage that is compatible with the legal system.
      - dylan604 4y ago
        >This is probably not appropriate for the platform to manage as they are not the executive branch. Not siding for private corps, but what happens when it is the executive branch doing the deeds that you are expecting the executive to crack down on?
        LinuxBender 4y ago
        In my opinion that dilemma exists both inside and outside of tech. If my local Sheriff is abusing their authority then they must be removed and prosecuted. The same would be true for any branch of government. I accept that this is easier said than done, but it must be done.
      - jnwatson 4y ago
        The Cloudflare-like “we are not the executive branch” is so wrong-headed it is hard to know where to start. Imagine an effective executive branch that can handle all such enforcement. The size would be massive. You’re implicitly asking for a Chinese-government-like internet monitor capable of charging tens of thousands of people a day.
        LinuxBender 4y ago
        This is not an easy problem and I agree that I would not want a totalitarian style government to be put in place to solve this. Rather I believe there should be a group reporting mechanism that raises the visibility of content to law enforcement similar to Echelon [1] and give folks menu options and categories to route things to the correct organization. This system should also be transparent so that people can see their content is being reported or even see that their content is at risk. This system should dynamically adjust thresholds based on the number of agents signed on otherwise they could be overwhelmed by alert fatigue. So for example, if I create posts saying I am going to shoot up a place, people should be able to report that and based on my location the appropriate law enforcement agents should see a red light on their dashboard. Moderators should have votes with higher weight. Agents can then investigate the content and mark it is "false alert" or as "credible threat" thus raising visibility to partner agencies. False reporting must also have consequences or the system would be abused to DDoS the assorted agencies. People that do not wish to participate in such a system might in theory find some tech-savvy friends to host private servers for the conversations that would otherwise be flagged as inciting or committing a crime. This removes risk and liability from the platform, its investors and moves the liability to the people creating the risk. There are a myriad of self hosted platforms with varying degrees of complexity or simplicity. [1] - https://wikiless.tiekoetter.com/wiki/ECHELON?lang=en https://wikiless.tiekoetter.com/wiki/ECHELON?lang=en
    - api 4y ago
      People are indeed going to jail for that right now. More are likely to follow. Some politicians will likely be barred from office. Swatting is a serious felony too and can get you serious time.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    You should be held culpable for swatting,but the telephone company should not.
    - LinuxBender 4y ago
      I mostly agree. The telephone company did not commit a crime through inaction but rather they indirectly facilitated a crime by not fixing their architecture with known security gaps to prevent it from occurring in the first place. These gaps have existed since the first non-telco SS7 private links were permitted. I say this knowing full well that SS7 will never be fixed. I maintained SS7 switches and understand the international complexity this dated system brings. Its a full topic in and of itself but I believe it is time to move everything off SS7, to what exactly I am not sure.
      - s1artibartfast 4y ago
        Even that is subject to debate. Is the telco responsible for maintaining an architecture where swatting is impossible? I think not. I think this limited liability is part of being a commons. The city isn't liable if a bank robber uses a road to escape. The Forrest service shouldn't be liable if a hiker trips and breaks their leg. Full liability leads to full restriction and full oppression
- PubliusMI 4y ago
  >prevent legal communication https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/criminal-defense/can-prank-calls-get-you-arrested https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/criminal-defense/can-pran...
- kube-system 4y ago
  I don’t think common carriers are prohibited from discriminating against illegal uses of their services.
- zie 4y ago
  When Tito asks their cell phone provider to not allow calls from Tootie, it just blocks the known endpoint of Tootie's from being able to call Tito, but it doesn't make any assumptions that Tootie is bad, or that Tito's version of reality is correct. It also doesn't make Tootie unable to communicate with anyone else. That is a far cry from a telephone company deciding(rightly or wrongly) that Tootie is harassing Tito or that it rises to a legal level of harassment and just blocking Tootie from the platform entirely. They are not in the judgement game here, they are in the make it easy for Tito to decide for himself if Tootie should be able to reach him via $TelephoneCompany. As for SS7 signalling, that's clearly breaking laws, that's a totally different thing.
  - kevingadd 4y ago
    > As for SS7 signalling, that's clearly breaking laws, that's a totally different thing. Hate speech is illegal in many jurisdictions too. So are specific uses of phones for other purposes, aka "wire fraud." Of course, "you can only moderate speech that's illegal" is different from "you can moderate anything you want" but it's also incompatible with the ruling
    - throwaway09223 4y ago
      But the phone company won't cancel your phone if you commit fraud. Even a convicted fraudster can still have home telephone service. The courts are responsible for determining the correct course of action, post-conviction. A court may rule that a convict can't use a phone as a condition of parole, but a phone company will never refuse service. No one is complaining about the courts pursuing crimes. The issue is extra-judicial punishments enacted by corporations often under pressure from the government.
  - throwaway09223 4y ago
    Absolutely correct. The point many are missing is that phone companies do not ban people from having a telephone based on their conduct. If I use my phone to say terrible things or even to commit felony fraud the police will investigate me, arrest me, I'll be tried and convicted and so on. But at no point will the phone company cancel my telephone service. Fraudsters can get phone service. Murders can get phone service. The court will place limits on the person, but it's unheard of for the phone company to restrict access because of conduct. The problem we're facing is that modern communications platforms (including social media) have very different norms. Some of those norms are imposed because of direct governmental regulatory influence. We're dragging various social media companies to testify before congress and openly pressuring them to censor with overt threats to their business. This destroys the notion that these companies are somehow engaging in censorship entirely of their own volition. This 5th circuit court ruling isn't framed right, but the underlying issue here does need to be addressed.
- amluto 4y ago
  > Do you feel that telephone companies should take action when someone is using their services to harass a person In a functioning society, no. This power and responsibility belongs to the judicial system. > or using SS7 signalling to capture calls that aren’t theirs? If SS7 had a real security model, then carriers should enforce that security model. In cases where the protocol security does not help (many cases, AIUI), then I think carriers probably should be able to enforce correct use of the system. (The latter has nothing in particular to do with who the offending SS7 user’s customers are or what they’re saying.)
theobeers 4y ago
Re: your last point, bingo. It’s almost impossible to have a real debate on this issue because people—esp. those who favor censorship and think highly of themselves for understanding what Section 230 does and does not say—refuse to go to the crux of it. They’ll bury you in technicalities and side arguments before saying anything about what they believe.
- mint2 4y ago
  Did you enjoy the article? As you say “It’s almost impossible to have a real debate because people” know the main arguments of the side but intentionally hide them to instead present their own straw men while presenting the side they don’t like as outrageous and simply dismiss their main arguments as distracting side arguments.
  - theobeers 4y ago
    I’ve been reading Masnick for years; I’ve just gotten really tired of his shtick. It sounds like you’re also bored by this unproductive discourse, albeit from the other side. At least we can agree in one respect, as sad as it is…
  - frankharv 4y ago
    No I did not like the tone of the author.
- dpkirchner 4y ago
  I don't "favor censorship", I favor people not being forced to store and serve content they object to. It doesn't require technicalities or side arguments. If the government wants all speech to be available, it can provide a space for that itself.
  - bakugo 4y ago
    >people not being forced to store and serve content they object to Corporations are not people. I agree that small independent websites hosted in someone's basement should have the right to pick and choose what they host, but when your service becomes so popular and widely used that it's effectively a standard public communication platform (and is marketed as such), the rules should change.
jeffbee 4y ago
Telephone companies become common carriers when they offer their service indiscriminately to everyone. If a company is reserving its right to deny service based on its rules of conduct then it is by definition not a common carrier. You can’t just force common carrier status on a company when the facts don’t support that status.
- lokar 4y ago
  And they agreed to offer it to everyone (and common carrier status) when they accepted the use of the public (and compelled private) right of way.
- crazygringo 4y ago
  No, you've actually got it backwards. Common carrier isn't a descriptive term that applies based on behavior. It's a legal category that forces the behavior. Telephone companies are common carriers because the law requires them not to discriminate between customers. They don't "become" common carriers. They are required to be whether they like it or not. It's legislatively imposed. And whether with railroads or telephone lines, this constricting regulation is generally accompanied with benefits, often involving access to land and lack of competition.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    While various bodies have purported to force common carrier status on various companies, the actual jurisprudence is much more nuanced than what you have suggested. The legislative imposition is that the FCC is empowered to declare certain entities common carriers if in the public interest. Thus the status is administrative rather than legislative. Furthermore, last-mile ISPs are "information services" not common carriers (Mozilla vs. FCC). It is complete nonsense if YouTube is a "common carrier" and Comcast is an "information service"! Finally, whether a firm presents itself as indiscriminate or not is the main way that it comes to fall under common carriage regulation. See Nat. Ass'n of Regulatory Utility Com'rs v. FCC. "Moreover, the characteristic of holding oneself out to serve indiscriminately appears to be an essential element, if one is to draw a coherent line between common and private carriers. The cases make clear both that common carriers need not serve the whole public, and that private carriers may serve a significant clientele, apart from the carrier himself. Since given private and common carriers may therefore be indistinguishable in terms of the clientele actually served, it is difficult to envision a sensible line between them which does not turn on the manner and terms by which they approach and deal with their customers. The common law requirement of holding oneself out to serve the public indiscriminately draws such a logical and sensible line between the two types of carriers."
freen 4y ago
One person’s ham is another’s spam. Common carriers have a government sponsored monopoly. Does Facebook?
juve1996 4y ago
Phone calls and private emails are not available to the public at large. The comparison simply doesn't make sense. A tweet is more akin to a newspaper than a private phone call or email.
- lgleason 4y ago
  I would be fine with this argument if section 230 protections were not applied to companies that censor.
- idle_zealot 4y ago
  Twitter is a combined microblogging and messaging service. The messaging side is unambiguously more akin to email than a newspaper. Microblogging is akin to regular blogging, albeit shortform. Regular blogging is likewise more akin to a newspaper than an email. So this side of Twitter should be considered a hosting provider for people's blogs. Due to this hybrid hosting provider/chat service nature the question of what sort of moderation is permissible becomes complex, especially as users are prone to mixing their blog-like posts with chat-like ones. I personally would interpret a blogging platform provider as a sort of common carrier so this mixed status doesn't change my stance that Twitter ought to do only minimal moderation for spam removal platform stability. To prevent the UX from suffering users should be empowered with their own personal moderation tools to filter posts and users. Twitter already provides such tools.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - toofy 4y ago
    > twitter ought to do only minimal moderation for spam removal platform stability. i strongly strongly disagree, either we allow filtration or we don’t. on many forums i personally find some people’s almost obsessive shoehorning of conspiratorial ideas to be just as destructive to conversations, just as signal-to-noise destroying as spam for dick-pills. if every behavior is allowed to fuzz every conversation, then it isn’t clear to me how we can discriminate against someone loudly and often sharing with us about the amazing pill which grew their penis to horse-scale girth and length and where we should buy it. either we allow moderation to keep signal-to-noise manageable, or we don’t.
shadowgovt 4y ago
It'd be fine for Congress to pass some laws to treat American forum companies as common carriers, but they specifically have not done that and it'd be weird for a court to interpret them as one. For starters, they don't own the wires so if your signal isn't carried by Facebook, you can just go out if on Twitter or Tumblr or Rumble or HN, &c.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  You could say the same about the telephone. You can always send a telegram or a letter instead
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    True but telephone is a common carrier and therefore bound by different law regarding the requirement that they provide their service to all members of the public. The history of precisely how they ended up as common carriers I'm not entirely sure... But I think it has something to do with the fact that they had to get municipalities and communities to agree to let them run wires through their towns. Internet forum services did not have to make any such agreements because they're just sites on the internet.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  If the claim is that restricting tech companies ability to censor is against the 1st amendment, you are implicitly making the claim that no, Congress cannot pass laws to restrict tech companies ability to censor.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    They might be able to do so if they were reclassified as common carriers. Why? I'm not exactly sure, I am accepting the fact that common carriers are currently so constrained without understanding the deeper story of how.
mdasen 4y ago
Without moderation, we can't have an internet. I think a lot of people that haven't been involved in moderation don't really understand how important it is. I'm not talking about controlling people's opinions or censoring lots of viewpoints. Even algorithmically controlled things aren't just dumb pipes. Is anti-spam, anti-gaming censorship? HN doesn't let you downvote comments until you have a certain number of points. HN works to make voting rings ineffective. Both of these involve judgments. Are those two votes independent? Maybe they are independent votes and you (or your software) has decided they aren't independent and you've taken away their voting power and censored their input. Nobody wants that. However, the alternative is that someone will just create millions of bots and then the site loses all relevance. A common carrier is generally a company that will deliver something from one person to another person without discrimination. For example, AT&T takes your packet and delivers it to its destination. These websites are made to show things to people that it wasn't explicitly sent to. Do we compel sites to display everything posted to everyone? That would be impossible. Some content is spam and other content is simply unpopular. The usual response to this is that it would be ok to prioritize popular content - but only along the lines of rigid rules. However, everyone kinda recognizes Goodhart's Law - that every measure which becomes a target becomes a bad measure. What is legal communication? Is this any communication that a court hasn't convicted someone for saying? That would mean that they couldn't remove communication that's clearly illegal because there's always a chance that a court might disagree. That basically means that your site is going to become a cesspool. We've seen these cesspools on the internet. They're not places you want to go. Heck, you're here on HN because the moderation is generally good. I think what some people miss is that a lot of "censorship" is shutting down harassment, stalking, incitement to terrorism, etc. Sometimes it gets couched in ways where someone kinda denies that's their intent. "This person is a sicko. They must understand that thousands of people are going to harass them for this," knowing that their followers will then harass them since the poster pointed them out. Oh, they weren't inciting harassment, they were just noting it would happen to their followers who harass them. Maybe the answer is that law enforcement needs to put people in prison for these illegal acts of harassment, stalking, and terror. For example, Boston Children's Hospital has received many bmb threats lately. I'm sure that many sites have removed posts calling for people to threaten the hospital. Maybe the answer is that everyone who has posted something calling for threats against the hospital should get a few years in prison and a 6 or 7 figure fine rather than having their posts censored. This would somewhat eliminate the ability of websites to have a niche. If I have a subreddit about cats and you decide that you want to spam dogs onto it, am I a common carrier that must allow any speech on my subreddit? Maybe you'll say that's ok, but that reddit in general couldn't prevent a dog subreddit. Ok, but what if my site is an independent site and not a subreddit. Then am I a common carrier? With a common carrier, you're usually paying the carrier to deliver things for you. With social sites, you're usually getting to use them for free. As a social site, am I required to take your content, store, and deliver it for free even if I determine that your content won't make me money? In fact, almost everyone does* want common carriers to censor speech - find me a person who doesn't hate the SPAM texts and calls. Oh, I get it - but that's different. Common carriers are likely to limit people when their behavior becomes problematic. With someone like the USPS, that will happen because the usage charges are high enough to deter a lot of problematic usage. With someone like a telco, they might notice patterns of abuse and start filtering messages. I'd say it's also odd that we're focusing on these social sites and their moderation without talking about email. I can't just install postfix and start sending to Gmail without hitting the SPAM folder (or potentially not getting delivered at all). We've been living with this issue for decades and it's a little odd that they're going after YouTube, Facebook, etc. when out inboxes have been filtered for a while. I'm not saying that your inbox is a common carrier, but it feels closer than YouTube or Twitter. I think that what makes it hard is that there's a fine line between political speech and incitement to terrorism. If I say, "X is horrible and if the government doesn't do something about it, people will take justice into their own hands," is that an incitement to violence? Maybe I know that my followers just need to be pointed at a target with an implication that they should attack it (without me saying it so that I can deny it later). For people who go around generally not having to worry about being a victim of that, it doesn't feel like something at the forefront of the issue. For most people, the worry about having a post moderated is much more likely than the worry that someone will dox them, SWAT them, and harass them to the point that they can't live their life. Again, you'll say that those things are illegal, but unless we're prepared to put our law enforcement resources in that direction and put real consequences behind that, it's going to present a real problem for our society. And I don't think our society is ready to accept a lot of people (disproportionately white, male, and more upper-middle-class) getting charged with crimes for stuff like this. We're seeing that with the January 6th terrorists. They tried to overthrow the US government and are now complaining that they can't go to a renaissance faire. The penalties so far have been pretty light for people whose crimes were so severe. I think almost all of the people being investigated and charged probably wish they hadn't been able to make it into the Capitol and therefore wouldn't be facing consequences now - and I think that most people on these social sites would rather complain about their posts getting moderated than have those posts handed over to law enforcement for serious criminal charges. What makes this all feel in bad faith is that the Texas law is coming from the same group of people that are actively trying to censor everything. They're trying to ban books from schools. They're trying to restrict information around abortion and transgender issues. They're trying to censor information correctly stating that the Civil War was fought over slavery. The F-Your-Feelings group is screaming "BUT MY FEELINGS!" The "I should be allowed to discriminate however I want" group is screaming "HOW DARE THEY DISCRIMINATE AGAINST ME!" Should I be allowed to come into your store, harass your customers, scream my political views, and then tell you that you can't kick me out? No. The same is true of sites online. It's a tragedy that we've centralized the internet so much that a few companies have so much power, but the fact is that almost every site would decide to moderate things in a similar fashion - just as almost every store would kick you out for harassing their customers and screaming stuff in their store. People don't generally want to visit a place that's full of garbage. Heck, people here complain that Amazon doesn't moderate their listings enough and there's too much garbage there. The second that things are a free-for-all, the same people that complain about censorship then complain about the garbage. Amazon isn't close to a free-for-all and everyone complains that they can't trust anything - from fake reviews to fake products to whatever. People complain about Yelp all the time - from fake reviews to Yelp censoring their genuine review which got presumed as spam. Nobody wants to be in an unmoderated cesspool. Sometimes sites are small and people are good. When you become the size of Twitter or YouTube or Reddit, you just get a certain amount of garbage that makes your site not fun for 99.999% of the people who are trying to enjoy it. Do you want to see your investment die under a barrage of garbage or do you want to remove the problematic stuff? Even as people complain about Amazon, I'm sure Amazon is removing so much stuff from their site to try and keep it good enough that people are mostly happy. No one wants Gmail to remove SPAM filters. Ultimately, as much as people complain, they don't want to be allowed to do anything they want and face the consequences. Yes, sometimes sites get things wrong in their moderation. I'm sure Amazon removes legitimate products, Yelp removes legitimate reviews, and a Twitter moderator who maybe has 30 seconds to determine if a post is harassment hits the "yes" button when it's just political speech sometimes. However, the alternative would be living with an Amazon that would be unusable, living with a Twitter no one would ever open, and living with Gmail that would be a deluge of SPAM.
crazygringo 4y ago
I think you're right, it's only the first one in dispute, and even that I think is a false dispute. The distinction, of course, is that common carriers are about 1-to-1 or 1-to-few communication (analagous to writing letters back in the 1700's, or holding a small private gathering) while internet communications are about 1-to-many communication (analagous to submitting an article to the city newspaper back in the 1700's, which they may or may not publish). 1-to-many communication necessarily requires organization, filtering, ranking, rejection, etc. in order not to become an unusable firehose. None of these can be applied objectively or neutrally, they are all editorial in their most fundamental quality, so the idea that any public community could be treated as a common carrier is ludicrous simply at a practical level. Hence why I call it a false dispute -- it's trying to argue for something that isn't even achievable.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  This seems right, it's about reach but it's also about the actual mechanics of posting your message. You can't treat social media like the telephone. It's more like writing a letter to the editor of the newspaper. The newspaper receives the letter (post). The newspaper decides whether and how to print it (algorithm). The newspaper then prints it for all to see. That's how social media works. It's not like the telephone where the phone company sets up the circuit and then bows out of the relationship between the speaker and the audience.

by nkurz 4y ago

manicdee 4y ago

Do you feel that telephone companies should take action when someone is using their services to harass a person, such as repeated prank calls or using SS7 signalling to capture calls that aren’t theirs?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
LinuxBender 4y ago
I believe that is a divergence from free speech when it delves into malicious intent or intent to do harm or intent to defraud. If I swat your home and someone is harmed or property is damaged as a result, I should most certainly be held culpable for any and all damages.
- freen 4y ago
  Intent to overthrow a free and fair election? Seditious conspiracy?
  - LinuxBender 4y ago
    Sure. If it can be proven that one has intent to commit a crime then law enforcement should step in to handle the situation. This is probably not appropriate for the platform to manage as they are not the executive branch. The platform should make a best-effort to provide enough information for law enforcement to take over and use verbiage that is compatible with the legal system.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      >This is probably not appropriate for the platform to manage as they are not the executive branch. Not siding for private corps, but what happens when it is the executive branch doing the deeds that you are expecting the executive to crack down on?
      - LinuxBender 4y ago
        In my opinion that dilemma exists both inside and outside of tech. If my local Sheriff is abusing their authority then they must be removed and prosecuted. The same would be true for any branch of government. I accept that this is easier said than done, but it must be done.
    - jnwatson 4y ago
      The Cloudflare-like “we are not the executive branch” is so wrong-headed it is hard to know where to start. Imagine an effective executive branch that can handle all such enforcement. The size would be massive. You’re implicitly asking for a Chinese-government-like internet monitor capable of charging tens of thousands of people a day.
      - LinuxBender 4y ago
        This is not an easy problem and I agree that I would not want a totalitarian style government to be put in place to solve this. Rather I believe there should be a group reporting mechanism that raises the visibility of content to law enforcement similar to Echelon [1] and give folks menu options and categories to route things to the correct organization. This system should also be transparent so that people can see their content is being reported or even see that their content is at risk. This system should dynamically adjust thresholds based on the number of agents signed on otherwise they could be overwhelmed by alert fatigue. So for example, if I create posts saying I am going to shoot up a place, people should be able to report that and based on my location the appropriate law enforcement agents should see a red light on their dashboard. Moderators should have votes with higher weight. Agents can then investigate the content and mark it is "false alert" or as "credible threat" thus raising visibility to partner agencies. False reporting must also have consequences or the system would be abused to DDoS the assorted agencies. People that do not wish to participate in such a system might in theory find some tech-savvy friends to host private servers for the conversations that would otherwise be flagged as inciting or committing a crime. This removes risk and liability from the platform, its investors and moves the liability to the people creating the risk. There are a myriad of self hosted platforms with varying degrees of complexity or simplicity. [1] - https://wikiless.tiekoetter.com/wiki/ECHELON?lang=en https://wikiless.tiekoetter.com/wiki/ECHELON?lang=en
  - api 4y ago
    People are indeed going to jail for that right now. More are likely to follow. Some politicians will likely be barred from office. Swatting is a serious felony too and can get you serious time.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  You should be held culpable for swatting,but the telephone company should not.
  - LinuxBender 4y ago
    I mostly agree. The telephone company did not commit a crime through inaction but rather they indirectly facilitated a crime by not fixing their architecture with known security gaps to prevent it from occurring in the first place. These gaps have existed since the first non-telco SS7 private links were permitted. I say this knowing full well that SS7 will never be fixed. I maintained SS7 switches and understand the international complexity this dated system brings. Its a full topic in and of itself but I believe it is time to move everything off SS7, to what exactly I am not sure.
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      Even that is subject to debate. Is the telco responsible for maintaining an architecture where swatting is impossible? I think not. I think this limited liability is part of being a commons. The city isn't liable if a bank robber uses a road to escape. The Forrest service shouldn't be liable if a hiker trips and breaks their leg. Full liability leads to full restriction and full oppression
PubliusMI 4y ago
>prevent legal communication https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/criminal-defense/can-prank-calls-get-you-arrested https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/criminal-defense/can-pran...
kube-system 4y ago
I don’t think common carriers are prohibited from discriminating against illegal uses of their services.
zie 4y ago
When Tito asks their cell phone provider to not allow calls from Tootie, it just blocks the known endpoint of Tootie's from being able to call Tito, but it doesn't make any assumptions that Tootie is bad, or that Tito's version of reality is correct. It also doesn't make Tootie unable to communicate with anyone else. That is a far cry from a telephone company deciding(rightly or wrongly) that Tootie is harassing Tito or that it rises to a legal level of harassment and just blocking Tootie from the platform entirely. They are not in the judgement game here, they are in the make it easy for Tito to decide for himself if Tootie should be able to reach him via $TelephoneCompany. As for SS7 signalling, that's clearly breaking laws, that's a totally different thing.
- kevingadd 4y ago
  > As for SS7 signalling, that's clearly breaking laws, that's a totally different thing. Hate speech is illegal in many jurisdictions too. So are specific uses of phones for other purposes, aka "wire fraud." Of course, "you can only moderate speech that's illegal" is different from "you can moderate anything you want" but it's also incompatible with the ruling
  - throwaway09223 4y ago
    But the phone company won't cancel your phone if you commit fraud. Even a convicted fraudster can still have home telephone service. The courts are responsible for determining the correct course of action, post-conviction. A court may rule that a convict can't use a phone as a condition of parole, but a phone company will never refuse service. No one is complaining about the courts pursuing crimes. The issue is extra-judicial punishments enacted by corporations often under pressure from the government.
- throwaway09223 4y ago
  Absolutely correct. The point many are missing is that phone companies do not ban people from having a telephone based on their conduct. If I use my phone to say terrible things or even to commit felony fraud the police will investigate me, arrest me, I'll be tried and convicted and so on. But at no point will the phone company cancel my telephone service. Fraudsters can get phone service. Murders can get phone service. The court will place limits on the person, but it's unheard of for the phone company to restrict access because of conduct. The problem we're facing is that modern communications platforms (including social media) have very different norms. Some of those norms are imposed because of direct governmental regulatory influence. We're dragging various social media companies to testify before congress and openly pressuring them to censor with overt threats to their business. This destroys the notion that these companies are somehow engaging in censorship entirely of their own volition. This 5th circuit court ruling isn't framed right, but the underlying issue here does need to be addressed.
amluto 4y ago
> Do you feel that telephone companies should take action when someone is using their services to harass a person In a functioning society, no. This power and responsibility belongs to the judicial system. > or using SS7 signalling to capture calls that aren’t theirs? If SS7 had a real security model, then carriers should enforce that security model. In cases where the protocol security does not help (many cases, AIUI), then I think carriers probably should be able to enforce correct use of the system. (The latter has nothing in particular to do with who the offending SS7 user’s customers are or what they’re saying.)

theobeers 4y ago

Re: your last point, bingo. It’s almost impossible to have a real debate on this issue because people—esp. those who favor censorship and think highly of themselves for understanding what Section 230 does and does not say—refuse to go to the crux of it. They’ll bury you in technicalities and side arguments before saying anything about what they believe.

mint2 4y ago
Did you enjoy the article? As you say “It’s almost impossible to have a real debate because people” know the main arguments of the side but intentionally hide them to instead present their own straw men while presenting the side they don’t like as outrageous and simply dismiss their main arguments as distracting side arguments.
- theobeers 4y ago
  I’ve been reading Masnick for years; I’ve just gotten really tired of his shtick. It sounds like you’re also bored by this unproductive discourse, albeit from the other side. At least we can agree in one respect, as sad as it is…
- frankharv 4y ago
  No I did not like the tone of the author.
dpkirchner 4y ago
I don't "favor censorship", I favor people not being forced to store and serve content they object to. It doesn't require technicalities or side arguments. If the government wants all speech to be available, it can provide a space for that itself.
- bakugo 4y ago
  >people not being forced to store and serve content they object to Corporations are not people. I agree that small independent websites hosted in someone's basement should have the right to pick and choose what they host, but when your service becomes so popular and widely used that it's effectively a standard public communication platform (and is marketed as such), the rules should change.

jeffbee 4y ago

Telephone companies become common carriers when they offer their service indiscriminately to everyone. If a company is reserving its right to deny service based on its rules of conduct then it is by definition not a common carrier. You can’t just force common carrier status on a company when the facts don’t support that status.

lokar 4y ago
And they agreed to offer it to everyone (and common carrier status) when they accepted the use of the public (and compelled private) right of way.
crazygringo 4y ago
No, you've actually got it backwards. Common carrier isn't a descriptive term that applies based on behavior. It's a legal category that forces the behavior. Telephone companies are common carriers because the law requires them not to discriminate between customers. They don't "become" common carriers. They are required to be whether they like it or not. It's legislatively imposed. And whether with railroads or telephone lines, this constricting regulation is generally accompanied with benefits, often involving access to land and lack of competition.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  While various bodies have purported to force common carrier status on various companies, the actual jurisprudence is much more nuanced than what you have suggested. The legislative imposition is that the FCC is empowered to declare certain entities common carriers if in the public interest. Thus the status is administrative rather than legislative. Furthermore, last-mile ISPs are "information services" not common carriers (Mozilla vs. FCC). It is complete nonsense if YouTube is a "common carrier" and Comcast is an "information service"! Finally, whether a firm presents itself as indiscriminate or not is the main way that it comes to fall under common carriage regulation. See Nat. Ass'n of Regulatory Utility Com'rs v. FCC. "Moreover, the characteristic of holding oneself out to serve indiscriminately appears to be an essential element, if one is to draw a coherent line between common and private carriers. The cases make clear both that common carriers need not serve the whole public, and that private carriers may serve a significant clientele, apart from the carrier himself. Since given private and common carriers may therefore be indistinguishable in terms of the clientele actually served, it is difficult to envision a sensible line between them which does not turn on the manner and terms by which they approach and deal with their customers. The common law requirement of holding oneself out to serve the public indiscriminately draws such a logical and sensible line between the two types of carriers."

freen 4y ago

One person’s ham is another’s spam. Common carriers have a government sponsored monopoly. Does Facebook?

juve1996 4y ago

Phone calls and private emails are not available to the public at large. The comparison simply doesn't make sense. A tweet is more akin to a newspaper than a private phone call or email.

lgleason 4y ago
I would be fine with this argument if section 230 protections were not applied to companies that censor.
idle_zealot 4y ago
Twitter is a combined microblogging and messaging service. The messaging side is unambiguously more akin to email than a newspaper. Microblogging is akin to regular blogging, albeit shortform. Regular blogging is likewise more akin to a newspaper than an email. So this side of Twitter should be considered a hosting provider for people's blogs. Due to this hybrid hosting provider/chat service nature the question of what sort of moderation is permissible becomes complex, especially as users are prone to mixing their blog-like posts with chat-like ones. I personally would interpret a blogging platform provider as a sort of common carrier so this mixed status doesn't change my stance that Twitter ought to do only minimal moderation for spam removal platform stability. To prevent the UX from suffering users should be empowered with their own personal moderation tools to filter posts and users. Twitter already provides such tools.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- toofy 4y ago
  > twitter ought to do only minimal moderation for spam removal platform stability. i strongly strongly disagree, either we allow filtration or we don’t. on many forums i personally find some people’s almost obsessive shoehorning of conspiratorial ideas to be just as destructive to conversations, just as signal-to-noise destroying as spam for dick-pills. if every behavior is allowed to fuzz every conversation, then it isn’t clear to me how we can discriminate against someone loudly and often sharing with us about the amazing pill which grew their penis to horse-scale girth and length and where we should buy it. either we allow moderation to keep signal-to-noise manageable, or we don’t.

shadowgovt 4y ago

It'd be fine for Congress to pass some laws to treat American forum companies as common carriers, but they specifically have not done that and it'd be weird for a court to interpret them as one. For starters, they don't own the wires so if your signal isn't carried by Facebook, you can just go out if on Twitter or Tumblr or Rumble or HN, &c.

s1artibartfast 4y ago
You could say the same about the telephone. You can always send a telegram or a letter instead
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  True but telephone is a common carrier and therefore bound by different law regarding the requirement that they provide their service to all members of the public. The history of precisely how they ended up as common carriers I'm not entirely sure... But I think it has something to do with the fact that they had to get municipalities and communities to agree to let them run wires through their towns. Internet forum services did not have to make any such agreements because they're just sites on the internet.
whimsicalism 4y ago
If the claim is that restricting tech companies ability to censor is against the 1st amendment, you are implicitly making the claim that no, Congress cannot pass laws to restrict tech companies ability to censor.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  They might be able to do so if they were reclassified as common carriers. Why? I'm not exactly sure, I am accepting the fact that common carriers are currently so constrained without understanding the deeper story of how.

mdasen 4y ago

Without moderation, we can't have an internet. I think a lot of people that haven't been involved in moderation don't really understand how important it is. I'm not talking about controlling people's opinions or censoring lots of viewpoints. Even algorithmically controlled things aren't just dumb pipes. Is anti-spam, anti-gaming censorship? HN doesn't let you downvote comments until you have a certain number of points. HN works to make voting rings ineffective. Both of these involve judgments. Are those two votes independent? Maybe they are independent votes and you (or your software) has decided they aren't independent and you've taken away their voting power and censored their input. Nobody wants that. However, the alternative is that someone will just create millions of bots and then the site loses all relevance. A common carrier is generally a company that will deliver something from one person to another person without discrimination. For example, AT&T takes your packet and delivers it to its destination. These websites are made to show things to people that it wasn't explicitly sent to. Do we compel sites to display everything posted to everyone? That would be impossible. Some content is spam and other content is simply unpopular. The usual response to this is that it would be ok to prioritize popular content - but only along the lines of rigid rules. However, everyone kinda recognizes Goodhart's Law - that every measure which becomes a target becomes a bad measure. What is legal communication? Is this any communication that a court hasn't convicted someone for saying? That would mean that they couldn't remove communication that's clearly illegal because there's always a chance that a court might disagree. That basically means that your site is going to become a cesspool. We've seen these cesspools on the internet. They're not places you want to go. Heck, you're here on HN because the moderation is generally good. I think what some people miss is that a lot of "censorship" is shutting down harassment, stalking, incitement to terrorism, etc. Sometimes it gets couched in ways where someone kinda denies that's their intent. "This person is a sicko. They must understand that thousands of people are going to harass them for this," knowing that their followers will then harass them since the poster pointed them out. Oh, they weren't inciting harassment, they were just noting it would happen to their followers who harass them. Maybe the answer is that law enforcement needs to put people in prison for these illegal acts of harassment, stalking, and terror. For example, Boston Children's Hospital has received many bmb threats lately. I'm sure that many sites have removed posts calling for people to threaten the hospital. Maybe the answer is that everyone who has posted something calling for threats against the hospital should get a few years in prison and a 6 or 7 figure fine rather than having their posts censored. This would somewhat eliminate the ability of websites to have a niche. If I have a subreddit about cats and you decide that you want to spam dogs onto it, am I a common carrier that must allow any speech on my subreddit? Maybe you'll say that's ok, but that reddit in general couldn't prevent a dog subreddit. Ok, but what if my site is an independent site and not a subreddit. Then am I a common carrier? With a common carrier, you're usually paying the carrier to deliver things for you. With social sites, you're usually getting to use them for free. As a social site, am I required to take your content, store, and deliver it for free even if I determine that your content won't make me money? In fact, almost everyone does* want common carriers to censor speech - find me a person who doesn't hate the SPAM texts and calls. Oh, I get it - but that's different. Common carriers are likely to limit people when their behavior becomes problematic. With someone like the USPS, that will happen because the usage charges are high enough to deter a lot of problematic usage. With someone like a telco, they might notice patterns of abuse and start filtering messages. I'd say it's also odd that we're focusing on these social sites and their moderation without talking about email. I can't just install postfix and start sending to Gmail without hitting the SPAM folder (or potentially not getting delivered at all). We've been living with this issue for decades and it's a little odd that they're going after YouTube, Facebook, etc. when out inboxes have been filtered for a while. I'm not saying that your inbox is a common carrier, but it feels closer than YouTube or Twitter. I think that what makes it hard is that there's a fine line between political speech and incitement to terrorism. If I say, "X is horrible and if the government doesn't do something about it, people will take justice into their own hands," is that an incitement to violence? Maybe I know that my followers just need to be pointed at a target with an implication that they should attack it (without me saying it so that I can deny it later). For people who go around generally not having to worry about being a victim of that, it doesn't feel like something at the forefront of the issue. For most people, the worry about having a post moderated is much more likely than the worry that someone will dox them, SWAT them, and harass them to the point that they can't live their life. Again, you'll say that those things are illegal, but unless we're prepared to put our law enforcement resources in that direction and put real consequences behind that, it's going to present a real problem for our society. And I don't think our society is ready to accept a lot of people (disproportionately white, male, and more upper-middle-class) getting charged with crimes for stuff like this. We're seeing that with the January 6th terrorists. They tried to overthrow the US government and are now complaining that they can't go to a renaissance faire. The penalties so far have been pretty light for people whose crimes were so severe. I think almost all of the people being investigated and charged probably wish they hadn't been able to make it into the Capitol and therefore wouldn't be facing consequences now - and I think that most people on these social sites would rather complain about their posts getting moderated than have those posts handed over to law enforcement for serious criminal charges. What makes this all feel in bad faith is that the Texas law is coming from the same group of people that are actively trying to censor everything. They're trying to ban books from schools. They're trying to restrict information around abortion and transgender issues. They're trying to censor information correctly stating that the Civil War was fought over slavery. The F-Your-Feelings group is screaming "BUT MY FEELINGS!" The "I should be allowed to discriminate however I want" group is screaming "HOW DARE THEY DISCRIMINATE AGAINST ME!" Should I be allowed to come into your store, harass your customers, scream my political views, and then tell you that you can't kick me out? No. The same is true of sites online. It's a tragedy that we've centralized the internet so much that a few companies have so much power, but the fact is that almost every site would decide to moderate things in a similar fashion - just as almost every store would kick you out for harassing their customers and screaming stuff in their store. People don't generally want to visit a place that's full of garbage. Heck, people here complain that Amazon doesn't moderate their listings enough and there's too much garbage there. The second that things are a free-for-all, the same people that complain about censorship then complain about the garbage. Amazon isn't close to a free-for-all and everyone complains that they can't trust anything - from fake reviews to fake products to whatever. People complain about Yelp all the time - from fake reviews to Yelp censoring their genuine review which got presumed as spam. Nobody wants to be in an unmoderated cesspool. Sometimes sites are small and people are good. When you become the size of Twitter or YouTube or Reddit, you just get a certain amount of garbage that makes your site not fun for 99.999% of the people who are trying to enjoy it. Do you want to see your investment die under a barrage of garbage or do you want to remove the problematic stuff? Even as people complain about Amazon, I'm sure Amazon is removing so much stuff from their site to try and keep it good enough that people are mostly happy. No one wants Gmail to remove SPAM filters. Ultimately, as much as people complain, they don't want to be allowed to do anything they want and face the consequences. Yes, sometimes sites get things wrong in their moderation. I'm sure Amazon removes legitimate products, Yelp removes legitimate reviews, and a Twitter moderator who maybe has 30 seconds to determine if a post is harassment hits the "yes" button when it's just political speech sometimes. However, the alternative would be living with an Amazon that would be unusable, living with a Twitter no one would ever open, and living with Gmail that would be a deluge of SPAM.

crazygringo 4y ago

I think you're right, it's only the first one in dispute, and even that I think is a false dispute. The distinction, of course, is that common carriers are about 1-to-1 or 1-to-few communication (analagous to writing letters back in the 1700's, or holding a small private gathering) while internet communications are about 1-to-many communication (analagous to submitting an article to the city newspaper back in the 1700's, which they may or may not publish). 1-to-many communication necessarily requires organization, filtering, ranking, rejection, etc. in order not to become an unusable firehose. None of these can be applied objectively or neutrally, they are all editorial in their most fundamental quality, so the idea that any public community could be treated as a common carrier is ludicrous simply at a practical level. Hence why I call it a false dispute -- it's trying to argue for something that isn't even achievable.

ryandrake 4y ago
This seems right, it's about reach but it's also about the actual mechanics of posting your message. You can't treat social media like the telephone. It's more like writing a letter to the editor of the newspaper. The newspaper receives the letter (post). The newspaper decides whether and how to print it (algorithm). The newspaper then prints it for all to see. That's how social media works. It's not like the telephone where the phone company sets up the circuit and then bows out of the relationship between the speaker and the audience.