8 ms·

Whether Section 230(c)(1) of the Communications Decency Act immunizes interactive computer services when they make targeted recommendations of information provi

• ladyattis 4y ago
  The thing is that the law as written allows them to do just that. If they don't like your content on YouTube, they can punt it instantly. And it can be for ANY REASON. And that's not even including their first amendment right to refuse distributing or listing your content.
  • causi 4y ago
    If they don't like your content on YouTube, they can punt it instantly. And it can be for ANY REASON Certainly. But Section 230, at least from my reading, does not protect them for the promotion of content. I could be wrong about that. The Supreme Court will decide. Personally I'd find it delightful if the rage-engine got smashed with a legal hammer and my Youtube recommendations were as useful as they were fifteen years ago.
    • eli 4y ago
      Wouldn't that also make it incredibly difficult for a new startup to invent a better and less harmful recommendation system?
      • dsfyu404ed 4y ago
        I'm not sure. If the incumbents were barred from doing a thing they currently have invested a lot of time and money and effort into or such thing was made legally riskier I think that would open the door to competition.
      • causi 4y ago
        Sure. The fact you can't knowingly do business with known criminals and stolen money also makes it harder to start a new bank.
        • eli 4y ago
          Google knowingly promoted extremist videos? Or did they take them down when made aware?
          • burkaman 4y ago
            Knowingly: https://www.propublica.org/article/youtube-promised-to-label-state-sponsored-videos-but-doesnt-always-do-so https://www.propublica.org/article/youtube-promised-to-label... > YouTube decided against labeling 22 channels identified by ProPublica, but it's not entirely clear why. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-china-uses-youtube-and-twitter-to-spread-its-propaganda-version-of-life-for-uyghurs-in-xinjiang https://www.propublica.org/article/how-china-uses-youtube-an... > YouTube said the clips did not violate its community guidelines. > The warehouse accounts on YouTube have attracted more than 480,000 views in total. People on YouTube, TikTok and other platforms have cited the testimonials to argue that all is well in Xinjiang — and received hundreds of thousands of additional views. https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2021/04/08/google-youtube-hate-videos-ad-keywords-blocklist-failures https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2021/04/08/google-you... > [YouTube] even suggested videos for campaigns with terms that it clearly finds problematic, such as “great replacement.” YouTube slaps Wikipedia boxes on videos about the “the great replacement,” noting that it’s “a white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory.” > Some of the hundreds of millions of videos that the company suggested for ad placements related to these hate terms contained overt racism and bigotry, including multiple videos featuring re-posted content from the neo-Nazi podcast The Daily Shoah, whose official channel was suspended by YouTube in 2019 for hate speech. Google’s top video suggestions for these hate terms returned many news videos and some anti-hate content—but also dozens of videos from channels that researchers labeled as espousing hate or White nationalist views. > Even after [Google spokesperson Christopher Lawton] made that statement, 14 of the hate terms on our list—about one in six of them—remained available to search for videos for ad placements on Google Ads, including the anti-Black meme “we wuz kangz”; the neo-Nazi appropriated symbol “black sun”; “red ice tv,” a White nationalist media outlet that YouTube banned from its platform in 2019; and the White nationalist slogans “you will not replace us” and “diversity is a code word for anti-white.”
    • spaced-out 4y ago
      >Personally I'd find it delightful if the rage-engine got smashed with a legal hammer and my Youtube recommendations were as useful as they were fifteen years ago. Why would it be safe for them to use an older recommendation system? It doesn't solve the problem, if their older system recommends a terrorism video, even if it only did so because that video came up chronologically, they're still liable. I would think they would need to just stop allowing the general public to upload videos anymore and only permit trusted media companies and influencers (ones known to not create controversial content) to do so. Probably after being approved through a vetting process where their lawyers can look through at least some of the content first.
      • freejazz 4y ago
        >Why would it be safe for them to use an older recommendation system? It doesn't solve the problem, if their older system recommends a terrorism video, even if it only did so because that video came up chronologically, they're still liable. A system that keyword matches isn't making recommendations, it's just keyword matching based upon the user's request. The law actually cares about intent and how things function, not just hypothetical possibilities that can occur, i.e. the law cares about what does happen and why it happens that way. So it's pointless to characterize a non-recommendation system as a recommendation system as a means of end-running an argument.
        • bskap 4y ago
          If there are 150,000 results that match your keyword, which results show up first?
          • freejazz 4y ago
            The most recent, the oldest, the closest match? That doesn't make it a recommendation system. Maybe try and read my post and make an effort to understand it rather than just responding with the first thing that comes to mind, because it is as if you have not understood my post at all and you seem to have not made any effort thereto.
    • rgbrenner 4y ago
      Is the intention of the algo promotion or matching user interest to videos. There's a big difference to saying: I want you to watch this.. and I think you want to watch this. The later is just sorting by additional attributes (video length, keywords in content, likelihood of clicking->watching, keywords of past content watched, ...). Youtube doesnt care what you watch... as long as they match what you want to watch to a list of videos, you stay on the site. If they dont, then you leave. The actual content of the videos doesnt matter to youtube. In this way, the page that displays the feed is very similar to showing search engine results sorted by best match, where the keywords are pulled from your past videos. If sorting is now promotion and prohibited by 230, then the internet is f'd. Search engines are going to be completely useless.
    • saynay 4y ago
      I am curious which clause of 230 you think would not cover recommendation systems?
  • freejazz 4y ago
    What does that have to do with the affirmative act they undertake of promoting certain materials? That's the issue - not that they punt thing, but that they promote things and that promoting things isn't the same as just hosting third party uploaded content. They take that third party content and show it to people to generate interest and advertising revenue. That's not the same thing as blindly hosting.
  • mistermann 4y ago
    > The thing is that the law as written allows them to do just that. If they don't like your content on YouTube, they can punt it instantly. And it can be for ANY REASON. And that's not even including their first amendment right to refuse distributing or listing your content. You're not wrong, but in addition to the leeway afforded to the rich and powerful by "the law", there is also substantial leeway afforded to every individual under "reality", and one option available is that it is technically possible to behave however one likes, including in a manner that is not compliant with "the law" or "the social contract", neither of which I or most anyone else was consulted on, despite living in a country governed by "democracy". Interestingly, it seems like it is those who are classically "less intelligent" who are most likely to realize that this powerful exploit exists, buffoonery like January 6, anti-vaxx, and shooting power stations with an off the shelf rifle being prime examples of this. I sometimes wonder if like corporations or most any other organization on the planet, it might be prudent to review our governmental and legal standard operating procedures from time to time to ensure they are working as intended (underlying, actual intent (as opposed to proclaimed intent) being another matter that more than a few people are starting to become rather dangerously curious about).
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
    Perhaps it would be useful to separate these functionalities into two categories: User-initiated (searches) and passive (sidebar garbage, play next video trash, etc). Giving the user the ability to search doesn't mean you're curating content with a recommendation engine.
    • basch 4y ago
      Search is absolutely a recommendation engine. It’s sorting by relevancy whether or not it’s keywords, similar videos, or play next.
• montagg 4y ago
  I think by the logic of "either you're a neutral party or you are not" no provider, big or small, is a neutral party, but I don't think this would produce the best outcome. It's a very good thing if we have lots of sites making different editorial decisions about what is and isn't allowed from users in a community—whether it's a search engine, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc—and let the competition of different rulesets in a market determine who gets traffic, attention, and revenue. But making editorial decisions downstream—what it chooses to show to users first vs last—doesn't change what people contribute, and this is where Section 230 is trying to provide a balance. People can contribute whatever great or terrible things they contribute, and Section 230s stance is, the provider just has to remove it if it's actually out of bounds. That allows sites to have their own editorial decision-making downstream while allowing user-generated content to flourish upstream, so those decisions matter at all. If the burden of moderation is moved farther upstream, to the point at which people contribute, you've increased the barrier to creating content entirely, you've turned every social network into a newspaper, and you get none of the benefits of the scale, low barrier to entry, and low marginal cost of the Internet to content creation. In my view, an algorithm is no different than the downstream moderation decisions every website makes with or without an algorithm. Of course an algorithm has values. That's the point! They should have values, and people should choose which sites to use based on how well those design decisions translate into value for the user. Rather than the existence of out-of-bounds content in their systems at all, we should be judging YouTube and others on how well they identify and how quickly they remove that content and how quickly they update their policies (which is just another word for algorithm) to reflect those new values. This is explicitly a tradeoff for making mistakes in the interest of making progress versus safety, because what I'm advocating here does mean you get terrible stuff posted to places where it can get a lot of reach, and it's more likely to get that reach than with a system that moderates farther upstream. Where I think we should be coming down stronger is in regulating reach, not access (at least not entirely). The speed of the stream—the speed of virility—should be slowed to allow for reason to re-enter the conversation. That's where I think regulating content on the Internet needs updating, but not so far upstream that you stop it from getting any kind of reach at all. The practical framework for regulation that I'd suggest is, if something hits a threshold of reach, it gets moderated more heavily and judged more heavily by authorities. Related: Deciding on what counts as "out of bounds" content is also extremely hard, but we can put that side for a second, because I think the main issues here are 1) if a moderation decision is required, and 2) where the moderation decision occurs.
• shadowgovt 4y ago
  There's a good breakdown of the situation and arguments here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzNo5lZCq5M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzNo5lZCq5M). The tl;dr is that it may not be possible to split a hair as thin as the difference between an automated recommendation algorithm and automated (or manual) moderation (if the system chooses not to put your tweets in the Trending Topics, are we refraining from up-signalling you or down-signalling you? Is "signal" on a continuous real number line or two separate number lines?). If the Court rules narrowly against Google, it'll be a major change to the function of much of the Internet (we can expect companies to respond to the new liability by switching off their recommendation systems completely), but the fundamental way-of-life we know today will continue. If the Court rules broadly against Google, it functionally kills S230 and opens the entire Internet up to massive liability lawsuits in a way that may end online fora for all but the "judgment proof" of the world. Not even HN would likely be able to afford to operate if anyone posting a controversial idea slips through the moderation cracks and gets seen. The site would have to go to moderate-all-by-default, not post-and-then-moderate.
  • anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    I presume that non-profit forums would be judgement proof (literal first amendment grounds). Possibly even including non-profit forums attached to a for-profit entity. With regard to Hacker News in particular the only possibly problematic element would be the YC-linked advertisement posts. Of course I'm not a lawyer. But section 230 is not the only protection here.
    • tsimionescu 4y ago
      For-profit or non-profit seems to make 0 difference to any of the discussed arguments. Also, the first amendment doesn't protect you from accusations of libel or defamation etc. There are limits to it, and a company that is knowingly spreading either could be on the hook for huge lawsuits if not under section 230 protections. For example, if a newspaper published a reader letter that accused some rich dude of having defrauded them, the newspaper itself would probably be liable just as much as the reader whose letter was sent. Apply this same logic to any HN comment and you'll get a huge issue - and being a non-profit is entirely irrelevant to this.
• falcolas 4y ago
  > Youtube would be in no danger if all it was doing was keyword-matching with recommended videos. What order should those keyword matching videos come back in? By total views, by 30 day views, popularity, by upvotes, by downvotes, by keywords in the title, the description, the comments, the video itself? Any choice made would be effectively indistinguishable from "designing the [search] to maximize engagement" as it comes to the law, since search itself is a method of surfacing new videos, and the order (even if only the default order) would matter.
  • kelnos 4y ago
    > "designing the [search] to maximize engagement" as it comes to the law I don't think the law has a definition for that term. I think it's -- probably correctly -- up to judges (and/or juries, depending on the type of case) to weigh intent and decide if a search engine to be liable for the results it produces. This idea that "doing literally anything is an evil engagement maximizer" seems too simplistic for how the world actually works.
• pgodzin 4y ago
  Choosing keyword matching as the algorithm is explicitly a way to target recommendations of information provided by another information content provider. As is sorting by most recently updated, as is using a machine learning model that optimizes for engagement. All of those approaches can lead to illegal content, and the entire point of Section 230 is that regardless of which they choose, they are immune from any legal repercussions of surfacing that content.
• njharman 4y ago
  Newsstands, bookstores recommend items. Ones they put on front, at eye level, on the "look at this" table as you walk in. We don't typically hold them liable. In meatspace we don't generally hold those making recommendations liable for the 3rd party content. We shouldn't online either.
  • kelnos 4y ago
    If a newsstand was promoting ISIS recruitment propaganda, you better believe we'd hold that newsstand responsible for harm caused by that recommendation. As we should, IMO.
  • pchristensen 4y ago
    And those recommendations are the same for every person that shops there. So they would pay a stiff penalty in the market if they promoted extreme content, whereas YT and social media can present a customized "bookstore" for each person, without the consequences of everyone else seeing what it's recommending.
• indymike 4y ago
  I remember when DCMA passed, and everyone assumed that "safe harbor" meant that if a provider moderated or policed the content, then that service would be liable. If they just allowed things to pass through, not unlike the phone company, then the company could claim safe harbor. The law was designed to shield ISPs and online services from liability for what their users did with the service, not to enable content filtering and moderation... and in many ways it is the opposite of the intent of congress, which was just trying to make it so you wouldn't be sued into oblivion because a user of your service did something bad.
  • singleshot_ 4y ago
    “Section 230 was intended to clarify that the government would not impose liability on internet companies even if they moderated their content.” -Jeff Kosseff How come you and Jeff Kosseff seem to think opposite ideas about whether 230 was intended to enable content providers to moderate content? I wonder who is right.
    • indymike 4y ago
      Safe harbor is 512 not 230. 230 was added to DMCA as part of the Communications Decency Act as I recall
      • singleshot_ 4y ago
        Oh, my bad. I stand corrected. Thank you for your patience.
• Sai_ 4y ago
  I came the opposite conclusion as you. Say your friend looks great in a piece of clothing. Based on just this, the next time they ask you what they should buy, you suggest the style and brand they looked good in before. A day later, you discover that the brand in question clubs baby seals. Does this suddenly make you liable for all the atrocities the brand commits? Superficially, a YT recommendation is based on metadata - video length? Did the user watch the video beyond threshold values? Did they comment or react to a video? Where do this user’s metrics like in comparison to metrics of other users who watched the same video? I concluded that since the algorithms aren’t moderating the content, just your access to it, they are not afoul of S230. Maybe the answer is to require all social media to provide a strictly timeline based view. Even here, the submission time stamp is purely metadata about the content, as is the watch duration or “comment/react?” flags.
• Nasrudith 4y ago
  That is a complete non-sequitur and yet people take that propaganda seriously. Section 230 says nothing about being neutral. The "whole question" is like asking if your driver's license is still valid when you are wearing a purple necktie, then asserting that drivers licenses aren't valid then because a purple tie excludes green and yellow and that ruins society and promotes pollution for the sake of privilege because purple was reserved for royals. If you ignore the emotional manipulation sophistry and look at the logical content it looks a lot more like a thought disorder than anything else.