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Is it a bad time to mention that sites like stack overflow, discord, sub stack, medium, Reddit, hacker news, GitHub, YouTube, and so forth have the same traits
by falcolas 4y ago
Is it a bad time to mention that sites like stack overflow, discord, sub stack, medium, Reddit, hacker news, GitHub, YouTube, and so forth have the same traits - the same identifying markers - as what we consider traditional social media sites?
How the bill defines social media:
10) (a) "Social media platform" means an online forum that a social media company
160 makes available for an account holder to:
161 (i) create a profile;
162 (ii) upload posts;
163 (iii) view the posts of other account holders; and
164 (iv) interact with other account holders or users.
There’s exceptions for email, Netflix, Amazon, news, traditional media kinds of sites.
https://le.utah.gov/~2023/bills/static/HB0311.html https://le.utah.gov/~2023/bills/static/HB0311.html
- MBCook 4y agoJust more of the unintended consequences we all know will come from this.
- falcolas 4y agoGiven how the government reps talked (hah) to the TikTok CEO, and some of the speeches leading up to that farce, I’m pretty convinced it’s entirely intentional. It gives power and eyeballs back to the entrenched traditional media moguls.
- Spivak 4y agoThere won’t be any. Look, it’s fun to imagine these shitty lawmakers getting bit by their own laws applied to the letter but that’s not how it will go. The law will only ever be enforced against social media platforms they see as threatening their ability to shelter their kids. I think it says a lot about any politician that pushes for laws that are meant to be selectively enforced.
- falcolas 4y agoIt’s not the lawmakers who will be bit, that’s true. It’s any company, and their users who are targeted by an incensed enough Karen. Picture a GitHub.io site that hosts images of nude art.
- dragonwriter 4y ago> Look, it’s fun to imagine these shitty lawmakers getting bit by their own laws applied to the letter but that’s not how it will go. The law will only ever be enforced against social media platforms they see as threatening their ability to shelter their kids. It’ll be enforced against whoever individual citizens decide to enforce it against; its a purely private right of action.
- pjc50 4y agoAh, that's the carveout against the 1st amendment. Conservatives have discovered that the constitution only binds the state, so if they delegate enforcement to private lawsuits they can completely bypass protections. Edit: see https://theintercept.com/2023/03/24/texas-bounty-hunter-drag-bill/ https://theintercept.com/2023/03/24/texas-bounty-hunter-drag... and https://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-abortion-law-bounty-hunters-citizens/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-abortion-law-bounty-hunte...
- anonymouskimmer 4y agoI don't understand how any court allows this interpretation to exist. If a state deputizes a person to act against the rights of others, that person is acting as the state, and should be bound as the state is bound. Otherwise the state can abrogate all limitations on its powers by deputizing people or companies.
- mrguyorama 4y agoBecause it turns out a lot of the higher courts in the US are absolutely captured by people who let their religion and or ideology and or private opinion affect their judicial decrees. This has been the case since even before Dread Scott though so I don't know why we have ever pretended otherwise
- themitigating 4y agoJust like Texas did with abortion. Allow citizens, who I'm sure contain some number who want to enforce their morality on others, to enforce the law. This is fascism. that's it
- throwayyy479087 4y agoYes, and a 13 year old should absolutely not use any of those services. Discord in particular has become known as “groomercord” for it’s open pedophilia.
- holmesworcester 4y agoI haven't read the bills yet but according to the article it applies to children under 18. 17-year-old me would have considered this draconian bullsh*t, for the same reasons I would now. (So does dad me, incidentally. My kid's messages have always been her business, not mine.)
- raincole 4y agoI'm sure many of us wouldn't have been a programmer if we hadn't had access to SO/Github around 17.
- jay_kyburz 4y agoNow I feel old.
- Spivak 4y agoAbsolutely zero chance, SO was the only resource on the internet that had simple enough explanations for me when I started out programming at 11. I was making PRs to oss projects on Github and churning through Project Euler by 15. I literally owe my entire career to SO which is weird to say typing it out now.
- folkrav 4y agoReading these comments about people relying on SO - a site founded in 2008 - at age 11, doesn't make me feel any younger, and I'm not even that old (inching closer and closer to my mid-30s). I got into Linux and bash/Python scripting by following tutorials on random shady sites and reading official documentation and manpages. Let's just say it wasn't as seamless as Googling an issue and having a SO thread directly answer my question. Yes, I do realize I now sound like I just said "back in my day, we walked to school, uphill both ways".
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 4y agoStack overflow and github are the only ones that feel out of place there.
- falcolas 4y agoStack overflow and GitHub both allow you to make public posts and interact with others. The text targets public user posts and interactions between users explicitly. Whether the consequences are intentional or not is still to be determined.
- ask_b123 4y agobut are they made available by a "social media company"? and should that be relevant?
- falcolas 4y agoWell, here’s their definition of such a company (from the same link): 155 (9) "Social media company" means a person or entity that: 156 (a) provides a social media platform that has at least 5,000,000 account holders 157 worldwide; and 158 (b) is an interactive computer service. So, size is really the only relevant discriminator.
- dragonwriter 4y ago> So, size is really the only relevant discriminator. No, its not, see the vast horde of use/function based exclusions starting at line 165 comprising code section 13-63-101(10)(b).
- falcolas 4y agoNone of which clearly protect GH or SO, the subjects of this thread branch.
- 4y ago
- judge2020 4y ago> There’s exceptions for email, Netflix, Amazon, news, traditional media kinds of sites. The fact that there are 20 categories of services exempted shows that this is a terrible bill that is based on punishing specific actors and not regulating data privacy or child wellbeing in a meaningful way. for reference, line 165 to 224 of that link are the exceptions: "Social media platform" does not include an online service, website, or application: (i) where the predominant or exclusive function is: (A) electronic mail; (B) direct messaging [only between two users], (C) a streaming service, (D) news, sports, entertainment, or other content that is preselected by the provider and not user generated, (E) online shopping or e-commerce [when limited to posting reviews and wish lists], (F) interactive gaming, virtual gaming, or an online service, that allows the creation and uploading of content for the purpose of interactive gaming, edutainment, or associated entertainment, (G) photo editing that has an associated photo hosting service, if the interaction with other users or account holders is generally limited to liking or commenting, (H) a professional creative network for showcasing and discovering artistic content, (J) providing career development opportunities, including professional networking, job skills, learning certifications, and job posting and application services, (K) business to business software, (L) a teleconferencing or videoconferencing service, (M) cloud storage, (N) shared document collaboration, (O) cloud computing services, (P) providing access to or interacting with data visualization platforms, libraries, (Q) to permit comments on a digital news website, if the news content is posted only by the provider of the digital news website, (R) providing or obtaining technical support for a platform, product, or service, (S) academic or scholarly research, (T) genealogical research (J) is a carve-out for linkedin, wonderful.
- bawolff 4y agoFacebook starts a career networking subfeature in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1
- hackmiester 4y agoYou can already apply for jobs on Facebook. (J) already applies to Facebook. edit: This is false as of 22 Feb, when Facebook Jobs was discontinued. I didn't realize.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- irrational 4y agoI don’t consider Reddit, HN, etc. to be social media, at all. There might be media, but there is no social. Social requires a network of real people. You can’t prove that anyone on these sites is a real person, other than yourself. Maybe I, and everyone else on here, is a bot. When everyone is anonymous, there is no network. And, not only is everyone anonymous, but there are no connections. To the best of my knowledge I have never read a post or comment from the same “person” twice. Every single interaction might as well be (and probably is) our first interaction on the site, ever. Complete strangers passing in the dark.
- CapstanRoller 4y agoInteresting argument. Can a site without discrete named accounts, where everyone is called 'Anonymous', claim that there's no way to verify whether the content is generated by humans? It's basically the 4chan model.
- wincy 4y agoThank goodness teeangers will still be able to frequent 4chan just like I did when I was a teen.
- systoll 4y agoNo need to even do that. The law defines 'social media platform' in terms of what account holders can do, and 'social media company' in terms of the number of account holders. It really goes out of its way to distinguish 'users' and 'account holders', and if there are no account holders, it’s not social media. Apparently.
- tstrimple 4y agoSo kids can visit 4chan, but not TikTok. Makes sense.
- CapstanRoller 4y agoIf we ignore the content associated with them, 4chan and other imageboards are actually a nice low-speed format for casual online interaction: the content is divided into threads, the board catalog can only hold some amount of active threads, threads have a finite lifespan measured by post count, threads are auto-pruned after a while, there's no secret sauce algorithm to game your attention span (catalog has simple rules for sorting by thread activity and such), visual content is limited, etc.
- nodemaker 4y agoThere is a point to be made that anything coming from Meta is just designed by its makers to destroy your mental health for ad clicks. Other companies do not have such toxic business model even Tiktok.
- boppo1 4y agoOddly enough, 4chan is not part of that definition. There's an edgy 12 year old somewhere in my head cackling and gleefully shouting 'Let the good times roll!'