3 ms·

I suspect Section 230 will need to be revamped or at least more thoroughly defined. Some interpretations suggest that any editorial action by a platform (aside

by mikece 4y ago

I suspect Section 230 will need to be revamped or at least more thoroughly defined. Some interpretations suggest that any editorial action by a platform (aside from those required by law) changes them from being a common carrier to a publisher with all of the liability that goes with it. It only makes sense that there should be an intermediate zone where a platform provider can engage in editorialism/content restriction without falling under the liability of being a publisher.

Retric 4y ago
The problem isn’t the definition it’s that companies want the common carrier status without actually acting like one. The phone company doesn’t editorialize and we would think it insane if they started doing so.
- pwinnski 4y ago
  The phone company doesn't fill your line 24/7 with unsolicited and illegal content, either, which any unmoderated comment section does.
- eli 4y ago
  You would want Hacker News or any other forum to be legally responsible for comments posted by users?
  - hrunt 4y ago
    No, I would not want HN legally responsible for comments posted by users. Hacker News does not directly promote content (aside from prioritizing content based on non-content factors [age, voting, etc.]). It does moderate, but that is not the same as promotion. The crux of the argument in this case is that the plaintiffs want Google held liable for promoting content, not hosting it. The difficulty the Supreme Court seems to have is understanding what the boundaries are between promoting content and simply delivering a usable view of content choices to consumers, and whether Congress intended for that difference to matter with regards to Section 230. Is Hacker News default feed that promotes highly-upvoted, newer stories to the front of the list and example of HN promoting those stories? If so, should HN be held liable if that algorithm pushes content that harms others?
    - eli 4y ago
      I genuinely do not understand your definition of "promote"? Is the difference that Youtube recommendations are personalized? Of course HN promotes content. There's much more content submitted than can fit on a screen. Automated filtering, human moderation, and signals from other users decide what to show you -- on both sites.
      - hrunt 4y ago
        I think your comment shows the difficulty SCOTUS is having with this case. What's the difference between "promotion" (in my definition, that means putting an influence behind it to improve its standing with the viewer) and other actions commonly necessary to display information, and is that difference enough to eliminate the Section 230 protections for the defendants? In my language, I say HN does not "promote" content because the view for me is substantially the same as the view for everyone else. Contrast that with YouTube, where Google's algorithms elevate content specific to individual users, thus leading me to conclude that Google thinks I "should" watch the content. I would argue that far more than automated filtering, signals from other users, and human moderation goes into YouTube's recommendations -- particularly a calculation of the revneue to Google of you watching the video. But again, this concept that Google "promoted" the content that harmed the plaintiffs and should thus be liable for that action is the heart of the case, not that Google should be liable for the content itself.
        pgodzin 4y ago
        So if YouTube used the same deep learning models to push people to more extremist content but without using any user signals so that everyone has the same recommendations that's no longer promotion? Fundamentally any decisions a site makes to filter and sort content to show, including HN ordering by vote count and mixing in new content to allow it to make the top page, is an explicit choice they are making that cannot be differentiated from "promotion"
        hrunt 4y ago
        > So if YouTube used the same deep learning models to push people to more extremist content but without using any user signals so that everyone has the same recommendations that's no longer promotion? I don't want to respond to part of your comment and not the other, so I'll just say: I don't know, because exactly defining the specifics is not my goal. > Fundamentally any decisions a site makes to filter and sort content to show, including HN ordering by vote count and mixing in new content to allow it to make the top page, is an explicit choice they are making that cannot be differentiated from "promotion" This is the part of your comment that actually matters to me. This statement is so definitive, and yet there are people arguing just as definitively that some ways of prioritizing content for users create liability while others do not. I think there is a difference between "elevating when it otherwise wouldn't be elevated" and "providing a moderated list", but those two states are probably separated by a grey area, not a bright line. I think how YouTube identifies content for users is distinguishable from what HN does, but I also don't know if that difference matters with regard to liability, especially with regards to Section 230, which makes no attempt to legislate HOW content is made discoverable.
  - commandlinefan 4y ago
    Personally, I would want nobody to be "legally responsible" for comments posted by anybody or rather, I disagree that there should ever be any legal repercussions of any kind for something somebody just said.
    - freejazz 4y ago
      So you'd have no problems if someone defamed you?
      - commandlinefan 4y ago
        Well, you guys are nothing if not predictable, I knew this would be the first response. But you're living in a fantasy world if you think that I, personally, could ever recover meaningful damages from somebody with enough reach to meaningfully defame me. Rather, defamation laws are being successfully (ab)used to silence politically inconvenient people like Alex Jones.
        freejazz 4y ago
        So you won't respond whether or not you'd care that you were defamed, and instead offered some ridiculous made up scenario where there is no way you'd recover from defamation? Do you do defamation litigation? Oh, you don't? >Rather, defamation laws are being successfully (ab)used to silence politically inconvenient people like Alex Jones. LOL. Strong disagree there. He's not being silenced by any means. He's free to engage in whatever speech he wants, be it defamatory. He only need pay for the damages he causes in doing so. I cannot imagine what's more libertarian than that.
        commandlinefan 4y ago
        > whether or not you'd care I'd just defame him right back.
        freejazz 4y ago
  - kube-system 4y ago
    I do think that any site which believes it is too burdensome to be legally responsible for their content should not be permitted to market their content as safe for children.
    - wnoise 4y ago
      So, banning marketing lies, and fraud? No need to touch 230.
      - kube-system 4y ago
        I might go one step further and say that platforms with children users should not get 230 protections. Or maybe not under some conditions.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  Except we are right now screaming that the phone companies should be responsible for eliminating spam from the phone system! That exact moderation should not cause them to lose their common carrier status, and that moderation should be expected, and that moderation should not cause them to be responsible if someone uses their phone network to call in a bomb threat. All section 230 does is make clear that if you don't have people signing off on each and every bit of content on your platform, but respond with a good effort to reports of illegal content, then you will not be held responsible for someone using your platform as a way to do illegal things. If all these weird people that misunderstand this get what they want, it doesn't mean youtube recommends their conservative creators more, what it means is that youtube stops doing any personalized recommendations, and all you are going to see on youtube is Logan Paul, Mr Beast, and the other mega creators that little children love.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Retric 4y ago
    I think we would rather have the tools to eliminate phone spam such as a working caller ID system rather than a phone company that monitors content a deprioritize people who curse excessively etc.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Humans don't work like formal logic processors and are capable of navigating the ambiguity between "ban spammers" and "editorialize" without much difficulty. > All section 230 does is make clear that if you don't have people signing off on each and every bit of content on your platform, but respond with a good effort to reports of illegal content, then you will not be held responsible for someone using your platform as a way to do illegal things. Web hosts that just serve content when a client requests it should definitely have this protection. Great idea. YouTube promoting outrage bait because it makes them more money? God no, no protection beyond what any other business doing that would have, not on the Internet. The line's somewhere between those.
mmcconnell1618 4y ago
I wonder of scale of distribution would be a reasonable way to scope liability. For example, if you create a post and 50 of your friends see it, immunity for the platform. If you create a post and the platform distributes it to 1 million people, they now have publisher liability.
- warner25 4y ago
  I think this is really smart. It reminds me of something I read within the last few months, but can't find right now, that described the descent from "social networking" (a nearly forgotten term, despite being the term for websites like Facebook just a decade ago) into the hell of modern "social media." The key difference is that social networking was about connecting with people you actually knew (realistically up to a couple hundred people), and social media is about broadcasting to the masses (measured in thousands or millions) with the help of these algorithms to promote engagement at any cost. That's where everything just went off the rails, from my perspective. I don't know why your comment got down-voted. Edited to add: It seems like this is what distinguishes a telephone company from a television broadcaster too.
ajross 4y ago
> Some interpretations suggest that any editorial action by a platform [...] changes them from being a common carrier to a publisher None that have been made with a straight face before a real court, that I'm aware of. That's the spin that the activists put on this, not something that anyone thinks SCOTUS is going to rule on. You're absolutely right that 230 as written doesn't really speak well to the modern semi-automated echo chamber. But improperly written laws are congress's job to fix, not the courts. Courts step in when laws conflict, they aren't there to figure out how to solve problems with new laws. The simplest way to look at the spirit of this law is: Congress said that internet companies shouldn't be punished just for hosting other people's opinions. And at the end of the day, TikTok and YouTube and Facebook are still just hosting this data. They didn't write it. They don't curate it. Anyone can post. Anyone can read. Arguments about "recommendation algorithms" are legitimate, but not really in scope of the first amendment and liability issues envisioned by the original law. They're just not. It's not something congress thought about. And if congress didn't have a clue, why should the courts?
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  >You're absolutely right that 230 as written doesn't really speak well to the modern semi-automated echo chamber. Section 230 does not speak about this because section 230 wasn't supposed to care about this. Section 230 was entirely about protecting large companies from legal harm when, say, the christchurch shooter posts their spree on your platform, or someone uploads literal child porn to your platform, as long as you attempt to remove such content when it appears. Section 230 is simply a legal admission that moderation is hard but necessary, and a single failure should not doom your platform. If we think the way large platforms recommend content is harmful, we should write legislation for that, instead of yet again fucking with a working law to hammer it into something it wasn't meant to do. The USA loves to do that and all it does is give us really shitty legislation.
  - freejazz 4y ago
    This isn't a case about turning 230 into a law that it isn't supposed to be... this is a case wondering whether 230 serves as an exception to another law which does create liability here...
pessimizer 4y ago
> It only makes sense that there should be an intermediate zone Care to share any of that sense?
- koboll 4y ago
  Any Web 2.0 system's basic premise is that it provides a space where humans can be humans. The bedrock assumption is that people can POST things that a server will instantly and automatically display publicly, and that the server owner will not instantly become legally liable for what they post. This mirrors pretty well how the rest of the world operates. If I walk into a Macy's and start screaming libel or inciting a riot, the Macy's Corporation is not liable for that speech. Why should a 'digital property' like a social media site work differently? Of course, it doesn't totally erase the server owner's liability. If someone posts child pornography that my server displays, it is my responsibility to remove it as soon as I become aware of it, just as it is Macy's responsibility to escort the libel-screamer off the premises. Failure to do that can confer liability onto me. To break this consensus is to break the ability to foster human interactions on the internet that mirror how humans interact in the real world.

by mikece 4y ago

Retric 4y ago

The problem isn’t the definition it’s that companies want the common carrier status without actually acting like one. The phone company doesn’t editorialize and we would think it insane if they started doing so.

pwinnski 4y ago
The phone company doesn't fill your line 24/7 with unsolicited and illegal content, either, which any unmoderated comment section does.
eli 4y ago
You would want Hacker News or any other forum to be legally responsible for comments posted by users?
- hrunt 4y ago
  No, I would not want HN legally responsible for comments posted by users. Hacker News does not directly promote content (aside from prioritizing content based on non-content factors [age, voting, etc.]). It does moderate, but that is not the same as promotion. The crux of the argument in this case is that the plaintiffs want Google held liable for promoting content, not hosting it. The difficulty the Supreme Court seems to have is understanding what the boundaries are between promoting content and simply delivering a usable view of content choices to consumers, and whether Congress intended for that difference to matter with regards to Section 230. Is Hacker News default feed that promotes highly-upvoted, newer stories to the front of the list and example of HN promoting those stories? If so, should HN be held liable if that algorithm pushes content that harms others?
  - eli 4y ago
    I genuinely do not understand your definition of "promote"? Is the difference that Youtube recommendations are personalized? Of course HN promotes content. There's much more content submitted than can fit on a screen. Automated filtering, human moderation, and signals from other users decide what to show you -- on both sites.
    - hrunt 4y ago
      I think your comment shows the difficulty SCOTUS is having with this case. What's the difference between "promotion" (in my definition, that means putting an influence behind it to improve its standing with the viewer) and other actions commonly necessary to display information, and is that difference enough to eliminate the Section 230 protections for the defendants? In my language, I say HN does not "promote" content because the view for me is substantially the same as the view for everyone else. Contrast that with YouTube, where Google's algorithms elevate content specific to individual users, thus leading me to conclude that Google thinks I "should" watch the content. I would argue that far more than automated filtering, signals from other users, and human moderation goes into YouTube's recommendations -- particularly a calculation of the revneue to Google of you watching the video. But again, this concept that Google "promoted" the content that harmed the plaintiffs and should thus be liable for that action is the heart of the case, not that Google should be liable for the content itself.
      - pgodzin 4y ago
        So if YouTube used the same deep learning models to push people to more extremist content but without using any user signals so that everyone has the same recommendations that's no longer promotion? Fundamentally any decisions a site makes to filter and sort content to show, including HN ordering by vote count and mixing in new content to allow it to make the top page, is an explicit choice they are making that cannot be differentiated from "promotion"
        hrunt 4y ago
        > So if YouTube used the same deep learning models to push people to more extremist content but without using any user signals so that everyone has the same recommendations that's no longer promotion? I don't want to respond to part of your comment and not the other, so I'll just say: I don't know, because exactly defining the specifics is not my goal. > Fundamentally any decisions a site makes to filter and sort content to show, including HN ordering by vote count and mixing in new content to allow it to make the top page, is an explicit choice they are making that cannot be differentiated from "promotion" This is the part of your comment that actually matters to me. This statement is so definitive, and yet there are people arguing just as definitively that some ways of prioritizing content for users create liability while others do not. I think there is a difference between "elevating when it otherwise wouldn't be elevated" and "providing a moderated list", but those two states are probably separated by a grey area, not a bright line. I think how YouTube identifies content for users is distinguishable from what HN does, but I also don't know if that difference matters with regard to liability, especially with regards to Section 230, which makes no attempt to legislate HOW content is made discoverable.
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  Personally, I would want nobody to be "legally responsible" for comments posted by anybody or rather, I disagree that there should ever be any legal repercussions of any kind for something somebody just said.
  - freejazz 4y ago
    So you'd have no problems if someone defamed you?
    - commandlinefan 4y ago
      Well, you guys are nothing if not predictable, I knew this would be the first response. But you're living in a fantasy world if you think that I, personally, could ever recover meaningful damages from somebody with enough reach to meaningfully defame me. Rather, defamation laws are being successfully (ab)used to silence politically inconvenient people like Alex Jones.
      - freejazz 4y ago
        So you won't respond whether or not you'd care that you were defamed, and instead offered some ridiculous made up scenario where there is no way you'd recover from defamation? Do you do defamation litigation? Oh, you don't? >Rather, defamation laws are being successfully (ab)used to silence politically inconvenient people like Alex Jones. LOL. Strong disagree there. He's not being silenced by any means. He's free to engage in whatever speech he wants, be it defamatory. He only need pay for the damages he causes in doing so. I cannot imagine what's more libertarian than that.
        commandlinefan 4y ago
        > whether or not you'd care I'd just defame him right back.
        freejazz 4y ago
- kube-system 4y ago
  I do think that any site which believes it is too burdensome to be legally responsible for their content should not be permitted to market their content as safe for children.
  - wnoise 4y ago
    So, banning marketing lies, and fraud? No need to touch 230.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      I might go one step further and say that platforms with children users should not get 230 protections. Or maybe not under some conditions.
mrguyorama 4y ago
Except we are right now screaming that the phone companies should be responsible for eliminating spam from the phone system! That exact moderation should not cause them to lose their common carrier status, and that moderation should be expected, and that moderation should not cause them to be responsible if someone uses their phone network to call in a bomb threat. All section 230 does is make clear that if you don't have people signing off on each and every bit of content on your platform, but respond with a good effort to reports of illegal content, then you will not be held responsible for someone using your platform as a way to do illegal things. If all these weird people that misunderstand this get what they want, it doesn't mean youtube recommends their conservative creators more, what it means is that youtube stops doing any personalized recommendations, and all you are going to see on youtube is Logan Paul, Mr Beast, and the other mega creators that little children love.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Retric 4y ago
  I think we would rather have the tools to eliminate phone spam such as a working caller ID system rather than a phone company that monitors content a deprioritize people who curse excessively etc.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Humans don't work like formal logic processors and are capable of navigating the ambiguity between "ban spammers" and "editorialize" without much difficulty. > All section 230 does is make clear that if you don't have people signing off on each and every bit of content on your platform, but respond with a good effort to reports of illegal content, then you will not be held responsible for someone using your platform as a way to do illegal things. Web hosts that just serve content when a client requests it should definitely have this protection. Great idea. YouTube promoting outrage bait because it makes them more money? God no, no protection beyond what any other business doing that would have, not on the Internet. The line's somewhere between those.

mmcconnell1618 4y ago

I wonder of scale of distribution would be a reasonable way to scope liability. For example, if you create a post and 50 of your friends see it, immunity for the platform. If you create a post and the platform distributes it to 1 million people, they now have publisher liability.

warner25 4y ago
I think this is really smart. It reminds me of something I read within the last few months, but can't find right now, that described the descent from "social networking" (a nearly forgotten term, despite being the term for websites like Facebook just a decade ago) into the hell of modern "social media." The key difference is that social networking was about connecting with people you actually knew (realistically up to a couple hundred people), and social media is about broadcasting to the masses (measured in thousands or millions) with the help of these algorithms to promote engagement at any cost. That's where everything just went off the rails, from my perspective. I don't know why your comment got down-voted. Edited to add: It seems like this is what distinguishes a telephone company from a television broadcaster too.

ajross 4y ago

> Some interpretations suggest that any editorial action by a platform [...] changes them from being a common carrier to a publisher None that have been made with a straight face before a real court, that I'm aware of. That's the spin that the activists put on this, not something that anyone thinks SCOTUS is going to rule on. You're absolutely right that 230 as written doesn't really speak well to the modern semi-automated echo chamber. But improperly written laws are congress's job to fix, not the courts. Courts step in when laws conflict, they aren't there to figure out how to solve problems with new laws. The simplest way to look at the spirit of this law is: Congress said that internet companies shouldn't be punished just for hosting other people's opinions. And at the end of the day, TikTok and YouTube and Facebook are still just hosting this data. They didn't write it. They don't curate it. Anyone can post. Anyone can read. Arguments about "recommendation algorithms" are legitimate, but not really in scope of the first amendment and liability issues envisioned by the original law. They're just not. It's not something congress thought about. And if congress didn't have a clue, why should the courts?

mrguyorama 4y ago
>You're absolutely right that 230 as written doesn't really speak well to the modern semi-automated echo chamber. Section 230 does not speak about this because section 230 wasn't supposed to care about this. Section 230 was entirely about protecting large companies from legal harm when, say, the christchurch shooter posts their spree on your platform, or someone uploads literal child porn to your platform, as long as you attempt to remove such content when it appears. Section 230 is simply a legal admission that moderation is hard but necessary, and a single failure should not doom your platform. If we think the way large platforms recommend content is harmful, we should write legislation for that, instead of yet again fucking with a working law to hammer it into something it wasn't meant to do. The USA loves to do that and all it does is give us really shitty legislation.
- freejazz 4y ago
  This isn't a case about turning 230 into a law that it isn't supposed to be... this is a case wondering whether 230 serves as an exception to another law which does create liability here...

pessimizer 4y ago

> It only makes sense that there should be an intermediate zone Care to share any of that sense?

koboll 4y ago
Any Web 2.0 system's basic premise is that it provides a space where humans can be humans. The bedrock assumption is that people can POST things that a server will instantly and automatically display publicly, and that the server owner will not instantly become legally liable for what they post. This mirrors pretty well how the rest of the world operates. If I walk into a Macy's and start screaming libel or inciting a riot, the Macy's Corporation is not liable for that speech. Why should a 'digital property' like a social media site work differently? Of course, it doesn't totally erase the server owner's liability. If someone posts child pornography that my server displays, it is my responsibility to remove it as soon as I become aware of it, just as it is Macy's responsibility to escort the libel-screamer off the premises. Failure to do that can confer liability onto me. To break this consensus is to break the ability to foster human interactions on the internet that mirror how humans interact in the real world.