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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

by 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.”
- ericmay 4y ago
  What would a non-harmful or less harmful (than what?) recommendation system look like? What's the end goal of a recommendation system?
  - eli 4y ago
    Pick any definition you like. If recommendation systems come with existential legal risks for a small company, then only the biggest companies can afford to run them. Or think of it this way: How is Mastodon supposed to take on larger social networks without recommending people to follow? Should every Mastodon server operator be legally liable for recommending someone harmful?
    - ericmay 4y ago
      My definition would be that they're all bad and there is no good use for them because the end results are harmful - more spend/engagements I view in the same way I would "more smoking". Any algorithm or curation excluding perhaps based on latest or "most views" or something similar would be a recommendation as far as I'm concerned. But I'm just not sure how or why online platforms get to have their cake and eat it too. If the NYTs publishes a story that eating Tidepods is healthy and encourages kids and parents to do so, they get sued. If Facebook creates an algorithm that causes the same or similar to happen they get a free pass. They either have to be a public speech platform where anyone can say anything as long as it isn't literally breaking the law, or they have to follow the same rules as other entities that curate content. If you want to say "why not both?" then that's fine but you have to apply that to all entities, not just online content.
      - eli 4y ago
        You don't use the algorithmically generated and ranked HN homepage? You scroll through pages and pages of every new submission? If you said something libelous about me on HN, I can sue HN for publishing and promoting the comment? A platform that "allows everything that isn't breaking the law" is a platform that is 99% spam.
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?

by causi 4y 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.”
ericmay 4y ago
What would a non-harmful or less harmful (than what?) recommendation system look like? What's the end goal of a recommendation system?
- eli 4y ago
  Pick any definition you like. If recommendation systems come with existential legal risks for a small company, then only the biggest companies can afford to run them. Or think of it this way: How is Mastodon supposed to take on larger social networks without recommending people to follow? Should every Mastodon server operator be legally liable for recommending someone harmful?
  - ericmay 4y ago
    My definition would be that they're all bad and there is no good use for them because the end results are harmful - more spend/engagements I view in the same way I would "more smoking". Any algorithm or curation excluding perhaps based on latest or "most views" or something similar would be a recommendation as far as I'm concerned. But I'm just not sure how or why online platforms get to have their cake and eat it too. If the NYTs publishes a story that eating Tidepods is healthy and encourages kids and parents to do so, they get sued. If Facebook creates an algorithm that causes the same or similar to happen they get a free pass. They either have to be a public speech platform where anyone can say anything as long as it isn't literally breaking the law, or they have to follow the same rules as other entities that curate content. If you want to say "why not both?" then that's fine but you have to apply that to all entities, not just online content.
    - eli 4y ago
      You don't use the algorithmically generated and ranked HN homepage? You scroll through pages and pages of every new submission? If you said something libelous about me on HN, I can sue HN for publishing and promoting the comment? A platform that "allows everything that isn't breaking the law" is a platform that is 99% spam.

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?