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The current comments seem to say this is rings the death knell of social media and that this just leads to government censorship. I'm not so sure. I think the

The current comments seem to say this is rings the death knell of social media and that this just leads to government censorship. I'm not so sure. I think the ultimate problem is that social media is not unbiased — it curates what people are shown. In that role they are no longer an impartial party merely hosting content. It seems this ruling is saying that the curation being algorithmic does not absolve the companies from liability. In a very general sense, this ruling could be seen as a form of net neutrality. Currently social media platforms favor certain content, while down weighting others. Sure, it might be at a different level than peer agreements between ISPs and websites, but it amounts to a similar phenomenon when most people interact on social media through the feed. Honestly, I think I'd love to see what changes this ruling brings about. HN is quite literally the only social media site (loosely interpreted) I even have an account on anymore, mainly because of how truly awful all the sites have become. Maybe this will make social media more palatable again? Maybe not, but I'm inclined to see what shakes out.

WCSTombs 2y ago
Yeah, pretty much. What's not clear to me though is how non-targeted content curation, like simply "trending videos" or "related videos" on YouTube, is impacted. IMO that's not nearly as problematic and can be useful.
whatshisface 2y ago
The diverse biases of newspapers or social media sites are preferable to the monolithic bias a legal solution will impress.
- nick238 2y ago
  So the solution is "more speech?" I don't know how that will unhook minors from the feedback loop of recommendation algorithms and their plastic brains. It's like saying 'we don't need to put laws in place to combat heroin use, those people could go enjoy a good book instead!'.
  - nostrademons 2y ago
    Yes, the solution is more speech. Teach your kids critical thinking or they will be fodder for somebody else who has it. That happens regardless of who's in charge, government or private companies. If you can't think for yourself and synthesize lots of disparate information, somebody else will do the thinking for you.
    - kelnos 2y ago
      Solution that require everyone to do a thing, and do it well, are doomed to fail. Yes, it would be great if parents would, universally, parent better, but getting all of them (or a large enough portion of them for it to make a difference) to do so is essentially impossible.
      - nostrademons 2y ago
        Government controls aren't a solution either though. The people with critical thinking skills, who can effectively tell others what to think, simply capture the government. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
    - jrockway 2y ago
      I agree with this. Kids are already subject to an agenda; for example, never once in my K-12 education did I learn anything about sex. This was because it was politically controversial at the time (and maybe it still is now), so my school district just avoided the issue entirely. I remember my mom being so mad about the curriculum in general that she ran for the school board and won. (I believe it was more of a math and science type thing. She was upset with how many coloring assignments I had. Frankly, I completely agreed with her then and I do now.)
      - nostrademons 2y ago
        I was lucky enough to go to a charter school where my teachers encouraged me to read books like "People's History of the U.S" and "Lies My Teacher Told Me". They have an agenda too, but understanding that there's a whole world of disagreement out there and that I should seek out multiple information sources and triangulate between them has been a huge superpower since. It's pretty shocking to understand the history of public education and realize that it wasn't created to benefit the student, but to benefit the future employers of those students.
- mathgradthrow 2y ago
  Seems like the bias will be against manipulative algorithms. How does tiktok escape liability here? They give control of what is promoted to users to users.
- danaris 2y ago
  Unfortunately, the biases of newspapers and social media sites are only diverse if they are not all under the strong influence of the wealthy. Even if they may have different skews on some issues, under a system where all such entities are operated entirely for-profit, they will tend to converge on other issues, largely related to maintaining the rights of capital over labor and over government.
- itsdrewmiller 2y ago
  Newspaper biases are more diverse despite being subject to the liability social media companies are trying to escape.
kstrauser 2y ago
"Social media" is a broad brush though. I operate a Mastodon instance with a few thousand users. Our content timeline algorithm is "newest on top". Our moderation is heavily tailored to the users on my instance, and if a user says something grossly out of line with our general vibe, we'll remove them. That user is free to create an account on any other server who'll have them. We're not limiting their access to Mastodon. We're saying that we don't want their stuff on our own server. What are the legal ramifications for the many thousands of similar operators which are much closer in feel to a message board than to Facebook or Twitter? Does a server run by Republicans have to accept Communist Party USA members and their posts? Does a vegan instance have to allow beef farmers? A PlayStation fan server host pro-PC content?
- dudus 2y ago
  You are directly responsible for everything they say and legally liable for any damages it may cause. Or not IANAL
tboyd47 2y ago
It all comes down to the assertion made by the author: > There is no way to run a targeted ad social media company with 40% margins if you have to make sure children aren’t harmed by your product.
- philippejara 2y ago
  I find it hard to see a way to run a targeted ad social media company at all if you have to make sure children aren't harmed by your product.
  - stevenicr 2y ago
    don't let children use? In TN it that will be illegal Jan 1 - unless social media creates a method for parents to provide ID and opt out of them being blocked I think? Wouldn't that put the responsibility back on the parents? The state told you XYZ was bad for your kids and it's illegal for them to use, but then you bypassed that restriction and put the sugar back into their hands with an access-blocker-blocker.. Random wondering
    - ghaff 2y ago
      Age limitations for things are pretty widespread. Of course, they can be bypassed to various degrees but, depending upon how draconian you want to be, you can presumably be seen as doing the best you reasonably can in a virtual world.
- aftbit 2y ago
  What about 0% margins? Is there actually enough money in social media to pay for moderation even with no profit?
  - Ajedi32 2y ago
    At the scale social media companies operate at, absolutely perfect moderation with zero false negatives is unavailable at any price. Even if they had a highly trained human expert manually review every single post (which is obviously way too expensive to be viable) some bad stuff would still get through due to mistakes or laziness. Without at least some form of Section 230, the internet as we know it cannot exist.
ein0p 2y ago
These are some interesting mental gymnastics. Zuckerberg literally publicly admitted the other day that he was forced by the government to censor things without a legal basis. Musk disclosed a whole trove of emails about the same at Twitter. And you’re still “not so sure”? What would it take for you to gain more certainty in such an outcome?
- vundercind 2y ago
  Haven’t looked into the Zuckerberg thing yet but everything I’ve seen of the “Twitter Files” has done more to convince me that nothing inappropriate or bad was happening, than that it was. And if those selective-releases were supposed to be the worst of it? Doubly so. Where’s the bad bit (that doesn’t immediately stop looking bad if you read the surrounding context whoever’s saying it’s bad left out)?
  - ein0p 2y ago
    Means you haven’t really looked into the Twitter files. They were literally holding meetings with the government officials and were told what to censor and who to ban. That’s plainly unconstitutional and heads should roll for this.
    - kstrauser 2y ago
      How did the government force Facebook to comply with their demands, as opposed to going along with them voluntarily?
      - ein0p 2y ago
        This is obviously not a real question, so instead of answering I propose we conduct a thought experiment. The year is 2028, and Zuck had a change of heart and fully switched sides. Facebook, Threads, and Instagram now block the news of Barron Trump’s drug use, of his lavishly compensated board seat on the board of Russia’s Gazprom, and bans the dominant electoral candidate off social media. In addition it allows the spread of a made up dossier (funded by the RNC) about Kamala Harris’ embarrassing behavior with male escorts in China. What you should ask yourself is this: irrespective of whether compliance is voluntary or not, is political censorship on social media OK? And what kind of a logical knot one must contort one’s mind into to suggest that this is the second coming of net neutrality? Personally I think the mere fact that the government is able to lean on a private company like that is damning AF.
nox101 2y ago
I'm probably mis-understanding the implications but, IIUC, as it is, HN is moderated by dang (and others?) but still falls under 230 meaning HN is not responsible for what other users post here. With this ruling, HN is suddenly responsibly for all posts here specifically because of the moderation. So they have 2 options. (1) Stop the moderation so they can be safe under 230. Result, HN turns to 4chan. (2) enforce the moderation to a much higher degree by say, requiring non-anon accounts and TOS that make each poster responsible for their own content and/or manually approve every comment. I'm not even sure how you'd run a website with user content if you wanted to moderate that content and still avoid being liable for illegal content.
- jtriangle 2y ago
  (1) 4chin is too dumb to use HN, and there's no image posting so, I doubt they'd even be interested in raiding us (2) I've never seen anything illegal here, I'm sure it happens, and it gets dealt with quickly enough that it's not really ever going to be a problem if things continue as they have been. They may lose 230 protection, sure, but probably not really a problem here. For Facebook et al, it's going to be an issue, no doubt. I suppose they could drop their algos and bring back the chronological feeds, but, my guess is that wouldn't be profitable given that ad-tech and content feeds are one in the same at this point. I'd also assume that "curation" is the sticking point here, if a platform can claim that they do not curate content, they probably keep 230 protection.
  - wredue 2y ago
    Certain boards most definitely raid various HN threads. Specifically, every political or science thread that makes it, is raided by 4chan. 4chan also regularly pushes anti/science and anti-education agenda threads to the top here, along with posts from various alt-right figures on occasion.
    - jtriangle 2y ago
      search: site:4chan.org news.ycombinator.com Seems pretty sparse to me, and from a casual perusal, I haven't seen any actual calls to raiding anything here, it's more of a reference where articles/posts have happened, and people talking about them. Remember, not everyone who you disagree with comes from 4chan, some of them probably work with you, you might even be friends with them, and they're perfectly serviceable people with lives, hopes, dreams, same as yours, they simply think differently than you.
ryandrake 2y ago
I look at forums and social media as analogous to writing a "Letter to the Editor" to a newspaper: In the newspaper case, you write your post, send it to the newspaper, and some editor at the newspaper decides whether or not to publish it. In Social Media, the same thing happens, but it's just super fast and algorithmic: You write your post, send it to the Social Media site (or forum), an algorithm (or moderator) at the Social Media site decides whether or not to publish it. I feel like it's reasonable to interpret this kind of editorial selection as "promotion" and "recommendation" of that comment, particularly if the social media company's algorithm deliberately places that content into someone's feed.
- jay_kyburz 2y ago
  I agree. I think if social media companies relayed communication between it's users with no moderation at all, then they should be entitled to carrier protections. As soon as they start making any moderation decisions, they are implicitly endorsing all other content, and should therefore be held responsible for it. There are two things social media can do. Firstly, they should accurately identify its users before allowing them to post, so they can counter sue that person if post harms them, and secondly, they can moderate every post. Everybody says this will kill social media as we know it, but I say the world will be a better place as a result.
immibis 2y ago
Refusal to moderate, though, is also a bias. It produces a bias where the actors who post the most have their posts seen the most. Usually these posts are Nigerian princes, Viagra vendors, and the like. Nowadays they'll also include massive quantities of LLM-generated cryptofascist propaganda (but not cryptomarxist propaganda because cryptomarxists are incompetent at propaganda). If you moderate the spam, you're biasing the site away from these groups.
- itsdrewmiller 2y ago
  You can't just pick anything and call it a "bias" - absolutely unmoderated content may not (will not) represent the median viewpoint, but it's not the hosting provider "bias" doing so. Moderating spam is also not "bias" as long as you're applying content-neutral rules for how you do that.
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> I think the ultimate problem is that social media is not unbiased — it curates what people are shown. This is literally the purpose of Section 230. It's Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The purpose was to change the law so platforms could moderate content without incurring liability, because the law was previously that doing any moderation made you liable for whatever users posted, and you don't want a world where removing/downranking spam or pornography or trolling causes you to get sued for unrelated things you didn't remove.
- samrus 2y ago
  Yeah but they're not just removing spam and porn. They're picking out things that makes them money even if it harms people. That was never in the spirit of the law
  - habinero 2y ago
    Yes, it is. Section 230 doesn't replace the 1A, and deciding what you want to show or not show is classic 1A activity.
    - singleshot_ 2y ago
      It's also classic commercial activity. Because 230 exists, we are able to have many intentionally different social networks and web tools. If there was no moderation -- for example, if you couldn't delete porn from linkedin -- all social networks would be the same. Likely there would only be one large one. If all moderation was pushed to the client side, it might seem like we could retain what we have but it seems very possible we could lose the diverse ecosystem of Online and end up with something like Walmart. This would be the worst outcome of a rollback of 230.
- zahlman 2y ago
  > The purpose was to change the law so platforms could moderate content What part of deliberately showing political content to people algorithmically expected to agree with it, constitutes "moderation"? What part of deliberately showing political content to people algorithmically expected to disagree with it, constitutes "moderation"? What part of deliberately suppressing or promoting political content based on the opinions of those in charge of the platform, constitutes "moderation"? What part of suppressing "misinformation" on the basis of what's said in "reliable sources" (rather than any independent investigation - but really the point would still stand), constitutes "moderation"? What part of favouring content from already popular content creators because it brings in more ad revenue, constitutes "moderation"? What part of algorithmically associating content with ads for specific products or services, constitutes "moderation"?
bsder 2y ago
> I think the ultimate problem is that social media is not unbiased — it curates what people are shown. It is not only biased but also biased for maximum engagement. People come to these services for various reasons but then have this specifically biased stuff jammed down their throats in a way to induce specific behavior. I personally don't understand why we don't hammer these social media sites for conducting psychological experiments without consent.
shadowgovt 2y ago
HN also has an algorithm. I'll have to read the third circuit's ruling in detail to figure out whether they are trying to draw a line in the Sand on whether an algorithm satisfies the requirements for section 230 protection or falls outside of it. If that's what they're doing, I wouldn't assume a priori that a site like Hacker News won't also fall afoul of the law.
EasyMark 2y ago
I think HN sees this as just more activist judges trying to overrule the will of the people (via Congress). This judge is attempting to interject his opinion on the way things should be vs what a law passed by the highest legislative body in the nation as if that doesn’t count. He is also doing it on very shaky ground, but I wouldn’t expect anything less of the 3rd circuit (much like the 5th)
smrtinsert 2y ago
This is a much needed regulation. If anything it will probably spur innovation to solve safety in algorithms. I think of this more along the lines of preventing a factoring from polluting a water supply or requiring a bank to have minimum reserves.
cbsmith 2y ago
The rise of social media was largely predicated on the curation it provided. People, and particularly advertisers, wanted a curated environment. That was the key differentiator to the wild west of the world wide web. The idea that curation is a problem with social media is always a head scratcher for me. The option to just directly publish to the world wide web without social media is always available, but time and again, that option is largely not chosen... this ruling could well narrow it down that being the only option. Now, in practice, I don't think that will happen. This will raise the costs of operating social media, and those costs will be reflected in prices advertisers pay to advertise on social media. That may shrink the social media ecosystem, but what it will definitely do is raise the draw bridge over the moat around the major social media players. You're going to see less competition.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  >The option to just directly publish to the world wide web without social media is always available, Not exactly. You still have to procure web hosting somewhere, and that hosting provider might choose to refuse your money and kick you off. You might also have to procure the services of Cloudflare if you face significant traffic, and Cloudflare might choose to refuse your money and kick you off. >that option is largely not chosen... That's because most people do not have neither the time nor the will to learn and speak computer. Social media and immediate predecessors like Wordpress were and are successful because they brought down the lowest common denominator to "Smack keys and tap Submit". HTML? CSS? Nobody has time for our pig latin.
  - cbsmith 2y ago
    > You still have to procure web hosting somewhere, and that hosting provider might choose to refuse your money and kick you off. Who says you need to procure a web hosting provider? But yes, if you connect your computer up to other computers, the other computers may decide they don't want any part of what you have to offer. Without that, I wouldn't want to be in the Internet. I don't want to be forced to ingest bytes from anyone who would send them my way. That's just not a good value proposition for me. > That's because most people do not have neither the time nor the will to learn and speak computer. I'm sorry, but no. You can literally type in to a word processor or any number of other tools and select "save as web content", and then use any number of products to take a web page and serve it up to the world wide web. It's been that way for the better part of 25 years. No HTML or CSS knowledge needed. If you can't handle that you can just record a video, save it to a file, and serve it up over a web server. Yes, you need to be able to use a computer to participate on the world wide web, but no more than you do to use social media. Now, what you won't get is a distribution platform that gets your content up in front of people who never asked for it. That is what social media provides. It lowers the effort for the people receiving the content, as in exactly the curation process that the judge was ruling about.
__loam 2y ago
Threads is actually pretty good if you ruthlessly block people that you dislike.
IG_Semmelweiss 2y ago
I always wondered why Section 230 does not have a carve-out exemption to deal with the censorship issue. I think we'd all agree that most websites are better off with curation and moderation of some kind. If you don't like it, you are free to leave the forum, website, etc. The problem is that Big Tech fails to work in the same way, because those properties are becoming effectively the "public highways" where everyone must pass by. This is not dissimilar from say, public utilities. So, why not define how a tech company becomes a Big Tech "utility", and therefore, cannot hide behind 230 exception for things that it willingly does, like censorship ?
- itsdrewmiller 2y ago
  Wonder no longer! It's Section 230 of the communications "decency" act, not the communication freedoms and regulations act. It doesn't talk about censorship because that wasn't in the scope of the bill. (And actually it does talk about censorship of obscene material in order to explicitly encourage it.)
gorgoiler 2y ago
For the case in question the major problem seems to be, specifically, what content do we allow children to access. There’s an enormous difference in the debate between what should be prohibited and what should be prohibited for children.
hungie 2y ago
> social media is not unbiased ... Media, generally, social or otherwise, is not unbiased. All media has bias. The human act of editing, selecting stories, framing those stories, authoring or retelling them... it's all biased. I wish we would stop seeking unbiased media as some sort of ideal, and instead seek open biases -- tell me enough about yourself and where your biases lie, so I can make informed decisions. This reasoning is not far off from the court's thinking: editing is speech. A for you page is edited, and is TikTok's own speech. That said, I do agree with your meta point. Social media (hn not excluded) is a generally unpleasant place to be.
amarant 2y ago
But what are the implications? No more moderation? This seems bad. No more recommendation/personalization? This could go either way, I'm also willing to see where this one goes. No more public comment sections? Arstechnica claimed back in the day when section 230 was under fire last time that this would be the result if it was ever taken away. This seems bad. I'm not sure what will happen, I see 2 possible outcomes that are bad and one that is maybe good. At first glance this seems like bad odds. Actually there's a fourth possibility, and that's holding Google responsible for whatever links they find for you. This is the nuclear option. If this happens, the internet will have to shut all of its American offices to get around this law.
- CuriousCosmic 2y ago
  Would bluesky not solve this issue? The underlying hosted service is nearly completely unmoderated and unpersonalised. It's just streams of bits and data routing. You can scan for/limit the propagation of CSAM or DMCA content to some degree as an infrastructure provider but that's really about it and even then you can only really do so to fairly limited degrees and that doesn't stop other providers (or self hosted participants) from propagating that anyways. Then you provide custom feed algorithms, labelling services, moderation services, etc on top of that but none of them change or control the underlying data streams. They just annotate on top or provide options to the client. Then the user's client is the one that directly consumes all these different services on top of the base service to produce the end result. It's a true, unbiased section 230 compatible protocol (under even the strictest interpretation) that the user then can optionally combine with any number of secondary services and addons that they use to craft their personalised social media experience.
gigatexal 2y ago
If it is a reckoning for social media then so be it. Social media net-net was probably a mistake. But I doubt this gets held on appeal. Given how fickle this Supreme Court is they’ll probably overrule themselves to fit their agenda since they don’t seem to think precedent is worth a damn.
raxxorraxor 2y ago
> In a very general sense, this ruling could be seen as a form of net neutrality In reality this will not be the case and instead it will introduce the bias of regulators to replace the bias companies want there to be. And even with their motivation to sell users attention, I cannot see this as an improvement. No, the result will probably be worse.
amelius 2y ago
We should just ditch advertisements as a monetization model, and see what happens.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
commandlinefan 2y ago
> is that social media is not unbiased That's how I read it, too. Section 230 doesn't say you can't get in trouble for failure to moderate, it says that you can't get in trouble for moderating one thing but not something else (in other words, the government can't say, "if you moderated this, you could have moderated that"). They seem to be going back on that now. Real freedom from censorship - you cannot be held liable for content you hosted - has never been tried. The US government got away with a lot of COVID-era soft censorship by just strong-arming social media sites into suppressing content because there were no first-amendment style protections against that sort of soft censorship. I'd love to see that, but there's no reason to think that our government is going in that direction.

WCSTombs 2y ago

Yeah, pretty much. What's not clear to me though is how non-targeted content curation, like simply "trending videos" or "related videos" on YouTube, is impacted. IMO that's not nearly as problematic and can be useful.

whatshisface 2y ago

The diverse biases of newspapers or social media sites are preferable to the monolithic bias a legal solution will impress.

nick238 2y ago
So the solution is "more speech?" I don't know how that will unhook minors from the feedback loop of recommendation algorithms and their plastic brains. It's like saying 'we don't need to put laws in place to combat heroin use, those people could go enjoy a good book instead!'.
- nostrademons 2y ago
  Yes, the solution is more speech. Teach your kids critical thinking or they will be fodder for somebody else who has it. That happens regardless of who's in charge, government or private companies. If you can't think for yourself and synthesize lots of disparate information, somebody else will do the thinking for you.
  - kelnos 2y ago
    Solution that require everyone to do a thing, and do it well, are doomed to fail. Yes, it would be great if parents would, universally, parent better, but getting all of them (or a large enough portion of them for it to make a difference) to do so is essentially impossible.
    - nostrademons 2y ago
      Government controls aren't a solution either though. The people with critical thinking skills, who can effectively tell others what to think, simply capture the government. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
  - jrockway 2y ago
    I agree with this. Kids are already subject to an agenda; for example, never once in my K-12 education did I learn anything about sex. This was because it was politically controversial at the time (and maybe it still is now), so my school district just avoided the issue entirely. I remember my mom being so mad about the curriculum in general that she ran for the school board and won. (I believe it was more of a math and science type thing. She was upset with how many coloring assignments I had. Frankly, I completely agreed with her then and I do now.)
    - nostrademons 2y ago
      I was lucky enough to go to a charter school where my teachers encouraged me to read books like "People's History of the U.S" and "Lies My Teacher Told Me". They have an agenda too, but understanding that there's a whole world of disagreement out there and that I should seek out multiple information sources and triangulate between them has been a huge superpower since. It's pretty shocking to understand the history of public education and realize that it wasn't created to benefit the student, but to benefit the future employers of those students.
mathgradthrow 2y ago
Seems like the bias will be against manipulative algorithms. How does tiktok escape liability here? They give control of what is promoted to users to users.
danaris 2y ago
Unfortunately, the biases of newspapers and social media sites are only diverse if they are not all under the strong influence of the wealthy. Even if they may have different skews on some issues, under a system where all such entities are operated entirely for-profit, they will tend to converge on other issues, largely related to maintaining the rights of capital over labor and over government.
itsdrewmiller 2y ago
Newspaper biases are more diverse despite being subject to the liability social media companies are trying to escape.

kstrauser 2y ago

"Social media" is a broad brush though. I operate a Mastodon instance with a few thousand users. Our content timeline algorithm is "newest on top". Our moderation is heavily tailored to the users on my instance, and if a user says something grossly out of line with our general vibe, we'll remove them. That user is free to create an account on any other server who'll have them. We're not limiting their access to Mastodon. We're saying that we don't want their stuff on our own server. What are the legal ramifications for the many thousands of similar operators which are much closer in feel to a message board than to Facebook or Twitter? Does a server run by Republicans have to accept Communist Party USA members and their posts? Does a vegan instance have to allow beef farmers? A PlayStation fan server host pro-PC content?

dudus 2y ago
You are directly responsible for everything they say and legally liable for any damages it may cause. Or not IANAL

tboyd47 2y ago

It all comes down to the assertion made by the author: > There is no way to run a targeted ad social media company with 40% margins if you have to make sure children aren’t harmed by your product.

philippejara 2y ago
I find it hard to see a way to run a targeted ad social media company at all if you have to make sure children aren't harmed by your product.
- stevenicr 2y ago
  don't let children use? In TN it that will be illegal Jan 1 - unless social media creates a method for parents to provide ID and opt out of them being blocked I think? Wouldn't that put the responsibility back on the parents? The state told you XYZ was bad for your kids and it's illegal for them to use, but then you bypassed that restriction and put the sugar back into their hands with an access-blocker-blocker.. Random wondering
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Age limitations for things are pretty widespread. Of course, they can be bypassed to various degrees but, depending upon how draconian you want to be, you can presumably be seen as doing the best you reasonably can in a virtual world.
aftbit 2y ago
What about 0% margins? Is there actually enough money in social media to pay for moderation even with no profit?
- Ajedi32 2y ago
  At the scale social media companies operate at, absolutely perfect moderation with zero false negatives is unavailable at any price. Even if they had a highly trained human expert manually review every single post (which is obviously way too expensive to be viable) some bad stuff would still get through due to mistakes or laziness. Without at least some form of Section 230, the internet as we know it cannot exist.

ein0p 2y ago

These are some interesting mental gymnastics. Zuckerberg literally publicly admitted the other day that he was forced by the government to censor things without a legal basis. Musk disclosed a whole trove of emails about the same at Twitter. And you’re still “not so sure”? What would it take for you to gain more certainty in such an outcome?

vundercind 2y ago
Haven’t looked into the Zuckerberg thing yet but everything I’ve seen of the “Twitter Files” has done more to convince me that nothing inappropriate or bad was happening, than that it was. And if those selective-releases were supposed to be the worst of it? Doubly so. Where’s the bad bit (that doesn’t immediately stop looking bad if you read the surrounding context whoever’s saying it’s bad left out)?
- ein0p 2y ago
  Means you haven’t really looked into the Twitter files. They were literally holding meetings with the government officials and were told what to censor and who to ban. That’s plainly unconstitutional and heads should roll for this.
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    How did the government force Facebook to comply with their demands, as opposed to going along with them voluntarily?
    - ein0p 2y ago
      This is obviously not a real question, so instead of answering I propose we conduct a thought experiment. The year is 2028, and Zuck had a change of heart and fully switched sides. Facebook, Threads, and Instagram now block the news of Barron Trump’s drug use, of his lavishly compensated board seat on the board of Russia’s Gazprom, and bans the dominant electoral candidate off social media. In addition it allows the spread of a made up dossier (funded by the RNC) about Kamala Harris’ embarrassing behavior with male escorts in China. What you should ask yourself is this: irrespective of whether compliance is voluntary or not, is political censorship on social media OK? And what kind of a logical knot one must contort one’s mind into to suggest that this is the second coming of net neutrality? Personally I think the mere fact that the government is able to lean on a private company like that is damning AF.

nox101 2y ago

I'm probably mis-understanding the implications but, IIUC, as it is, HN is moderated by dang (and others?) but still falls under 230 meaning HN is not responsible for what other users post here. With this ruling, HN is suddenly responsibly for all posts here specifically because of the moderation. So they have 2 options. (1) Stop the moderation so they can be safe under 230. Result, HN turns to 4chan. (2) enforce the moderation to a much higher degree by say, requiring non-anon accounts and TOS that make each poster responsible for their own content and/or manually approve every comment. I'm not even sure how you'd run a website with user content if you wanted to moderate that content and still avoid being liable for illegal content.

jtriangle 2y ago
(1) 4chin is too dumb to use HN, and there's no image posting so, I doubt they'd even be interested in raiding us (2) I've never seen anything illegal here, I'm sure it happens, and it gets dealt with quickly enough that it's not really ever going to be a problem if things continue as they have been. They may lose 230 protection, sure, but probably not really a problem here. For Facebook et al, it's going to be an issue, no doubt. I suppose they could drop their algos and bring back the chronological feeds, but, my guess is that wouldn't be profitable given that ad-tech and content feeds are one in the same at this point. I'd also assume that "curation" is the sticking point here, if a platform can claim that they do not curate content, they probably keep 230 protection.
- wredue 2y ago
  Certain boards most definitely raid various HN threads. Specifically, every political or science thread that makes it, is raided by 4chan. 4chan also regularly pushes anti/science and anti-education agenda threads to the top here, along with posts from various alt-right figures on occasion.
  - jtriangle 2y ago
    search: site:4chan.org news.ycombinator.com Seems pretty sparse to me, and from a casual perusal, I haven't seen any actual calls to raiding anything here, it's more of a reference where articles/posts have happened, and people talking about them. Remember, not everyone who you disagree with comes from 4chan, some of them probably work with you, you might even be friends with them, and they're perfectly serviceable people with lives, hopes, dreams, same as yours, they simply think differently than you.

ryandrake 2y ago

I look at forums and social media as analogous to writing a "Letter to the Editor" to a newspaper: In the newspaper case, you write your post, send it to the newspaper, and some editor at the newspaper decides whether or not to publish it. In Social Media, the same thing happens, but it's just super fast and algorithmic: You write your post, send it to the Social Media site (or forum), an algorithm (or moderator) at the Social Media site decides whether or not to publish it. I feel like it's reasonable to interpret this kind of editorial selection as "promotion" and "recommendation" of that comment, particularly if the social media company's algorithm deliberately places that content into someone's feed.

jay_kyburz 2y ago
I agree. I think if social media companies relayed communication between it's users with no moderation at all, then they should be entitled to carrier protections. As soon as they start making any moderation decisions, they are implicitly endorsing all other content, and should therefore be held responsible for it. There are two things social media can do. Firstly, they should accurately identify its users before allowing them to post, so they can counter sue that person if post harms them, and secondly, they can moderate every post. Everybody says this will kill social media as we know it, but I say the world will be a better place as a result.

immibis 2y ago

Refusal to moderate, though, is also a bias. It produces a bias where the actors who post the most have their posts seen the most. Usually these posts are Nigerian princes, Viagra vendors, and the like. Nowadays they'll also include massive quantities of LLM-generated cryptofascist propaganda (but not cryptomarxist propaganda because cryptomarxists are incompetent at propaganda). If you moderate the spam, you're biasing the site away from these groups.

itsdrewmiller 2y ago
You can't just pick anything and call it a "bias" - absolutely unmoderated content may not (will not) represent the median viewpoint, but it's not the hosting provider "bias" doing so. Moderating spam is also not "bias" as long as you're applying content-neutral rules for how you do that.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago

> I think the ultimate problem is that social media is not unbiased — it curates what people are shown. This is literally the purpose of Section 230. It's Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The purpose was to change the law so platforms could moderate content without incurring liability, because the law was previously that doing any moderation made you liable for whatever users posted, and you don't want a world where removing/downranking spam or pornography or trolling causes you to get sued for unrelated things you didn't remove.

samrus 2y ago
Yeah but they're not just removing spam and porn. They're picking out things that makes them money even if it harms people. That was never in the spirit of the law
- habinero 2y ago
  Yes, it is. Section 230 doesn't replace the 1A, and deciding what you want to show or not show is classic 1A activity.
  - singleshot_ 2y ago
    It's also classic commercial activity. Because 230 exists, we are able to have many intentionally different social networks and web tools. If there was no moderation -- for example, if you couldn't delete porn from linkedin -- all social networks would be the same. Likely there would only be one large one. If all moderation was pushed to the client side, it might seem like we could retain what we have but it seems very possible we could lose the diverse ecosystem of Online and end up with something like Walmart. This would be the worst outcome of a rollback of 230.
zahlman 2y ago
> The purpose was to change the law so platforms could moderate content What part of deliberately showing political content to people algorithmically expected to agree with it, constitutes "moderation"? What part of deliberately showing political content to people algorithmically expected to disagree with it, constitutes "moderation"? What part of deliberately suppressing or promoting political content based on the opinions of those in charge of the platform, constitutes "moderation"? What part of suppressing "misinformation" on the basis of what's said in "reliable sources" (rather than any independent investigation - but really the point would still stand), constitutes "moderation"? What part of favouring content from already popular content creators because it brings in more ad revenue, constitutes "moderation"? What part of algorithmically associating content with ads for specific products or services, constitutes "moderation"?

bsder 2y ago

> I think the ultimate problem is that social media is not unbiased — it curates what people are shown. It is not only biased but also biased for maximum engagement. People come to these services for various reasons but then have this specifically biased stuff jammed down their throats in a way to induce specific behavior. I personally don't understand why we don't hammer these social media sites for conducting psychological experiments without consent.

shadowgovt 2y ago

HN also has an algorithm. I'll have to read the third circuit's ruling in detail to figure out whether they are trying to draw a line in the Sand on whether an algorithm satisfies the requirements for section 230 protection or falls outside of it. If that's what they're doing, I wouldn't assume a priori that a site like Hacker News won't also fall afoul of the law.

EasyMark 2y ago

I think HN sees this as just more activist judges trying to overrule the will of the people (via Congress). This judge is attempting to interject his opinion on the way things should be vs what a law passed by the highest legislative body in the nation as if that doesn’t count. He is also doing it on very shaky ground, but I wouldn’t expect anything less of the 3rd circuit (much like the 5th)

smrtinsert 2y ago

This is a much needed regulation. If anything it will probably spur innovation to solve safety in algorithms. I think of this more along the lines of preventing a factoring from polluting a water supply or requiring a bank to have minimum reserves.

cbsmith 2y ago

The rise of social media was largely predicated on the curation it provided. People, and particularly advertisers, wanted a curated environment. That was the key differentiator to the wild west of the world wide web. The idea that curation is a problem with social media is always a head scratcher for me. The option to just directly publish to the world wide web without social media is always available, but time and again, that option is largely not chosen... this ruling could well narrow it down that being the only option. Now, in practice, I don't think that will happen. This will raise the costs of operating social media, and those costs will be reflected in prices advertisers pay to advertise on social media. That may shrink the social media ecosystem, but what it will definitely do is raise the draw bridge over the moat around the major social media players. You're going to see less competition.

Dalewyn 2y ago
>The option to just directly publish to the world wide web without social media is always available, Not exactly. You still have to procure web hosting somewhere, and that hosting provider might choose to refuse your money and kick you off. You might also have to procure the services of Cloudflare if you face significant traffic, and Cloudflare might choose to refuse your money and kick you off. >that option is largely not chosen... That's because most people do not have neither the time nor the will to learn and speak computer. Social media and immediate predecessors like Wordpress were and are successful because they brought down the lowest common denominator to "Smack keys and tap Submit". HTML? CSS? Nobody has time for our pig latin.
- cbsmith 2y ago
  > You still have to procure web hosting somewhere, and that hosting provider might choose to refuse your money and kick you off. Who says you need to procure a web hosting provider? But yes, if you connect your computer up to other computers, the other computers may decide they don't want any part of what you have to offer. Without that, I wouldn't want to be in the Internet. I don't want to be forced to ingest bytes from anyone who would send them my way. That's just not a good value proposition for me. > That's because most people do not have neither the time nor the will to learn and speak computer. I'm sorry, but no. You can literally type in to a word processor or any number of other tools and select "save as web content", and then use any number of products to take a web page and serve it up to the world wide web. It's been that way for the better part of 25 years. No HTML or CSS knowledge needed. If you can't handle that you can just record a video, save it to a file, and serve it up over a web server. Yes, you need to be able to use a computer to participate on the world wide web, but no more than you do to use social media. Now, what you won't get is a distribution platform that gets your content up in front of people who never asked for it. That is what social media provides. It lowers the effort for the people receiving the content, as in exactly the curation process that the judge was ruling about.

__loam 2y ago

Threads is actually pretty good if you ruthlessly block people that you dislike.

IG_Semmelweiss 2y ago

I always wondered why Section 230 does not have a carve-out exemption to deal with the censorship issue. I think we'd all agree that most websites are better off with curation and moderation of some kind. If you don't like it, you are free to leave the forum, website, etc. The problem is that Big Tech fails to work in the same way, because those properties are becoming effectively the "public highways" where everyone must pass by. This is not dissimilar from say, public utilities. So, why not define how a tech company becomes a Big Tech "utility", and therefore, cannot hide behind 230 exception for things that it willingly does, like censorship ?

itsdrewmiller 2y ago
Wonder no longer! It's Section 230 of the communications "decency" act, not the communication freedoms and regulations act. It doesn't talk about censorship because that wasn't in the scope of the bill. (And actually it does talk about censorship of obscene material in order to explicitly encourage it.)

gorgoiler 2y ago

For the case in question the major problem seems to be, specifically, what content do we allow children to access. There’s an enormous difference in the debate between what should be prohibited and what should be prohibited for children.

hungie 2y ago

> social media is not unbiased ... Media, generally, social or otherwise, is not unbiased. All media has bias. The human act of editing, selecting stories, framing those stories, authoring or retelling them... it's all biased. I wish we would stop seeking unbiased media as some sort of ideal, and instead seek open biases -- tell me enough about yourself and where your biases lie, so I can make informed decisions. This reasoning is not far off from the court's thinking: editing is speech. A for you page is edited, and is TikTok's own speech. That said, I do agree with your meta point. Social media (hn not excluded) is a generally unpleasant place to be.

amarant 2y ago

But what are the implications? No more moderation? This seems bad. No more recommendation/personalization? This could go either way, I'm also willing to see where this one goes. No more public comment sections? Arstechnica claimed back in the day when section 230 was under fire last time that this would be the result if it was ever taken away. This seems bad. I'm not sure what will happen, I see 2 possible outcomes that are bad and one that is maybe good. At first glance this seems like bad odds. Actually there's a fourth possibility, and that's holding Google responsible for whatever links they find for you. This is the nuclear option. If this happens, the internet will have to shut all of its American offices to get around this law.

CuriousCosmic 2y ago
Would bluesky not solve this issue? The underlying hosted service is nearly completely unmoderated and unpersonalised. It's just streams of bits and data routing. You can scan for/limit the propagation of CSAM or DMCA content to some degree as an infrastructure provider but that's really about it and even then you can only really do so to fairly limited degrees and that doesn't stop other providers (or self hosted participants) from propagating that anyways. Then you provide custom feed algorithms, labelling services, moderation services, etc on top of that but none of them change or control the underlying data streams. They just annotate on top or provide options to the client. Then the user's client is the one that directly consumes all these different services on top of the base service to produce the end result. It's a true, unbiased section 230 compatible protocol (under even the strictest interpretation) that the user then can optionally combine with any number of secondary services and addons that they use to craft their personalised social media experience.

gigatexal 2y ago

If it is a reckoning for social media then so be it. Social media net-net was probably a mistake. But I doubt this gets held on appeal. Given how fickle this Supreme Court is they’ll probably overrule themselves to fit their agenda since they don’t seem to think precedent is worth a damn.

raxxorraxor 2y ago

> In a very general sense, this ruling could be seen as a form of net neutrality In reality this will not be the case and instead it will introduce the bias of regulators to replace the bias companies want there to be. And even with their motivation to sell users attention, I cannot see this as an improvement. No, the result will probably be worse.

amelius 2y ago

We should just ditch advertisements as a monetization model, and see what happens.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

commandlinefan 2y ago

> is that social media is not unbiased That's how I read it, too. Section 230 doesn't say you can't get in trouble for failure to moderate, it says that you can't get in trouble for moderating one thing but not something else (in other words, the government can't say, "if you moderated this, you could have moderated that"). They seem to be going back on that now. Real freedom from censorship - you cannot be held liable for content you hosted - has never been tried. The US government got away with a lot of COVID-era soft censorship by just strong-arming social media sites into suppressing content because there were no first-amendment style protections against that sort of soft censorship. I'd love to see that, but there's no reason to think that our government is going in that direction.