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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

by 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.
      - pgodzin 4y ago
        I'm very unclear about what "otherwise" means in "elevating when it otherwise wouldn't be elevated". There's no natural state of how content would be displayed, any choice of how to do it would result in a moderated list that elevates something that wouldn't have otherwise been elevated with a different approach. There is no distinction to me between what YouTube and HN do, and I certainly don't think the law should treat them any differently. Both should be legally protected regardless of which specific approach it takes.
fzeroracer 4y ago
> Hacker News does not directly promote content (aside from prioritizing content based on non-content factors [age, voting, etc.]) This, by many of the same arguments people say about Youtube, would absolutely constitute a recommendation. Even if it's primarily user driven, HN is responsible for the synthesis of all these values which results in content appearing on the front page and tuning which content appears or is downweighted. You can try to play word games but the reality is that should Section 230 go, no one's going to risk the cost of lawsuits to discover what the limits of promoted content / algorithms is.

by hrunt 4y ago

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.
    - pgodzin 4y ago
      I'm very unclear about what "otherwise" means in "elevating when it otherwise wouldn't be elevated". There's no natural state of how content would be displayed, any choice of how to do it would result in a moderated list that elevates something that wouldn't have otherwise been elevated with a different approach. There is no distinction to me between what YouTube and HN do, and I certainly don't think the law should treat them any differently. Both should be legally protected regardless of which specific approach it takes.

fzeroracer 4y ago

> Hacker News does not directly promote content (aside from prioritizing content based on non-content factors [age, voting, etc.]) This, by many of the same arguments people say about Youtube, would absolutely constitute a recommendation. Even if it's primarily user driven, HN is responsible for the synthesis of all these values which results in content appearing on the front page and tuning which content appears or is downweighted. You can try to play word games but the reality is that should Section 230 go, no one's going to risk the cost of lawsuits to discover what the limits of promoted content / algorithms is.