[HN Gopher] Section 230 Explained
___________________________________________________________________
Section 230 Explained
Author : gok
Score : 139 points
Date : 2020-10-16 19:11 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| [deleted]
| throwawaysea wrote:
| This is one take, but another take is what Section 230 _should_
| be, putting aside legal technicalities. We have expectations on
| how big tech companies should operate, and they are not being
| met. Facebook is bigger than any country. Twitter is bigger than
| most. They are the digital public square.
|
| Even if US law permits them to act as they will, it is dangerous
| for our society to have organizations that are essentially
| utilities provide a non-neutral platform. It doesn't make a
| difference if a private company is censoring you - the
| distinction is just cosmetic. The impact is as real as a
| government censoring you, since any alternative avenue of speech
| is significantly less effective and for most intents and
| purposes, simply doesn't exist.
| esoterica wrote:
| Facebook and Twitter are absolutely not even close to being
| utilities. Utilities are essential services AND have monopoly
| power. Facebook and Twitter are neither essential services nor
| do they have monopoly power (there are a billion other websites
| you can post on, and the barrier to entry to creating your own
| website is close to zero).
|
| Being big is not the same as being a monopoly. McDonald's is
| big, but they are not a monopoly because they have a lot of
| competitors. Regulating Facebook or Twitter as utilities would
| be as dumb as regulating Mcdonald's as if it were a utility.
| j4nt4b wrote:
| I think that Twitter and Facebook are a lot closer to the
| United States Postal Service than they are to McDonald's.
| Imagine getting banned from sending/receiving mail and having
| your home or business address "delisted" by a private
| company, and then you get closer to what is going on.
| esoterica wrote:
| The USPS is
|
| 1. A government organization
|
| 2. An essential service
|
| 3. A de facto monopoly in many rural areas that are not
| profitable for private companies to serve.
|
| Facebook/Twitter are none of these things.
|
| HN: Facebook and Twitter are a stupid, pointless waste of
| time and you should delete your account and leave those
| platforms.
|
| Also HN: Facebook and Twitter are essential services and
| banning people from Facebook and Twitter is a fundamental
| violation of their human rights.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| If you get banned from Twitter, you can go to Facebook,
| just like if you get banned from McDonald's you can go to
| Burger King.
|
| If you make a habit of shitting in the dining rooms, you'll
| likely find yourself banned from _all_ the restaurants
| eventually.
| j4nt4b wrote:
| The false equivalence between the right to due process in
| accessing the world's de-facto global communication
| platform and eating junk food is honestly sickening to
| me. The power to say anything you want to anybody in the
| world has fundamentally different consequences for every
| society on Earth than the power to slowly poison yourself
| in the colorfully branded plastic seat of your choosing.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > the world's de-facto global communication platform
|
| Sorry, was that Twitter? Or Facebook?
|
| It's kinda hard to argue it's a monopoly when I can't
| figure out which one you're referring to and you're
| saying "Twitter _and_ Facebook ".
|
| Meanwhile, this is why the USPS isn't a great comparison:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Express_Statutes
| typenil wrote:
| If the person you responded to had said "monopoly," your
| comment would only be pedantic (and maybe bad faith), but
| they didn't say that - it's easy to argue with a straw
| man. Don't demean yourself.
| coldpie wrote:
| If your problem is the power and reach that these
| companies have, then _fix that problem._ Break them up;
| mandate open communications protocols; create a gov
| 't-owned communications platform. Destroying UGC on the
| Internet, or passing blatantly unconstitutional laws,
| isn't going to fix the problem.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| > Section 230 should be revoked immediately
|
| No, instead it should be expanded to every publication.
| cwhiz wrote:
| I genuinely don't mind if the internet is fundamentally reset. I
| am completely unconvinced that Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and
| other such services are net benefit for humanity. Being able to
| yell at each other in giant anonymous forums is not something
| that I think worth protecting. Perhaps we should go back to peer
| to peer communication.
|
| So to those who keep saying "the internet as we know it as at
| stake", I say... so what? Maybe we got it wrong.
| EdJiang wrote:
| If you haven't read Section 230, go do so now. It's enabled the
| development of the modern internet as we know it, and the meat is
| only 3 sentences. The rest is preamble or interactions with other
| laws.
|
| > (c) Protection for "Good Samaritan" blocking and screening of
| offensive material
|
| > (1) Treatment of publisher or speaker
|
| > No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be
| treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided
| by another information content provider.
|
| > (2) Civil liability
|
| > No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be
| held liable on account of-
|
| > (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict
| access to or availability of material that the provider or user
| considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively
| violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not
| such material is constitutionally protected; or
|
| > (B) any action taken to enable or make available to information
| content providers or others the technical means to restrict
| access to material described in paragraph (1).
|
| https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title:47%20section:...
| gowld wrote:
| Are anonymous trolls "information content providers"?
|
| An easy fix is to say that an "information content provider"
| must be a legal person who is liable for their content. Then
| it's easy to find where the buck stops for a Tweet or a Rip-off
| Report or a Revenge Porn.
| makomk wrote:
| What makes Section 230 a complicated and contentious issue
| isn't the actual details of the law - as you say, that's quite
| simple - it's the consequences of such a broad, powerful,
| simple, thing as protecting "interactive computer services"
| from almost all kinds of legal action for content created by
| others that they keep up, regardless of what they remove, with
| few caveats, across a vast swathe of causes for action,
| business models, moderation policies, etc.
|
| For example, suppose you're an online service Twitbook used by
| a vast swathe of the world to communicate, and you decide that
| you want to allow calls to murder politicians you dislike but
| not (obviously) ones you like. Section 230 gives you pretty
| good protection from liability over your decisions as to which
| political figures get threatened with murder. Probably even if
| one of your users gets inspired and puts a bullet in the head
| of someone you'd like to see dead.
|
| Or suppose you've got a nice legalized extortion racket seeking
| out negative claims about people or businesses, getting them to
| rank highly in Google, not allowing the original posters to
| remove them, and demanding money from the targets to take them
| down. Section 230 offers pretty much ironclad protection for
| your business model by making it nearly impossible to get a
| court order forcing you to take the content down, meaning you
| can ensure the only way to make it go away is to pay up, and
| you can even literally call the fee a charge to remove
| libellous or defamatory content and there's not a damn thing
| the court system will do about it. There's a long-running
| website Ripoff Report that has this as their business model,
| and they've won every case trying to get them to remove
| defamatory content without paying them money for the privilege
| thanks to Section 230. There's also plenty of imitators going
| after individuals, seeking out (say) claims they've cheated on
| their partners and charging money to remove them - again,
| solidly protected by Section 230.
| gowld wrote:
| Why wasn't backpage.com projected by section 230?
| curryst wrote:
| e(5) of Section 230 is a specific carve out that the
| protections don't apply to sex trafficking content. I
| believe they used that to argue that Backpage wasn't
| protected by section 230.
| curryst wrote:
| > For example, suppose you're an online service Twitbook used
| by a vast swathe of the world to communicate, and you decide
| that you want to allow calls to murder politicians you
| dislike but not (obviously) ones you like. Section 230 gives
| you pretty good protection from liability over your decisions
| as to which political figures get threatened with murder
|
| That's not true on 2 fronts. First, Section 230 requires good
| faith. That would almost certainly fail to pass the good
| faith muster, assuming they can demonstrate that it was done
| intentionally. So civilly, they would likely still be liable.
| In addition, Section 230 has no bearing on criminal law (it's
| specifically called out in subsection e). So in the event
| someone was killed, there would likely be a host of people
| from Twitter facing charges for being complicit in the death.
| They are effectively Charles Manson in this scenario, and I
| think they would have a hard time arguing that selectively
| filtering messages to expose users to messages encouraging
| them to kill someone does not count as speech.
|
| I don't see why the second is a terrible issue. They're
| effectively a tabloid at that point, well known for spreading
| libelous content. I would be surprised if Queen Elizabeth is
| overly concerned that the tabloids say she's a lizard person.
| And also, RipoffReport is the wrong person to sue here, which
| is why that isn't working. If the content is libelous and you
| want it taken down, sue the person who wrote it, and have the
| judge issue a takedown order to Ripoff Report. Section 230
| only protects them from civil liability, it doesn't make them
| immune to takedown requests.
|
| In a funny idea, I wonder if you could upload a copyrighted
| image and then file a DMCA request against the page and have
| it delisted by Google. Their terms say you grant them a
| copyright, but if you upload a work that you don't own the
| copyright for you can't give them a copyright. Technically
| you're violating DMCA for the upload, and again by lying on
| the DMCA form you fill out (since you have to own the
| copyright) but as long as you pick something nobody is likely
| to sue you for, it should be fine (copy the credits from a
| book or something). Or if you want to get clever, you could
| have a friend make a painting of a stick figure in Paint and
| slap a copyright logo on it, then upload it and have your
| friend file the DMCA complaint. For bonus points, do it to
| every single page. They aren't liable because of section 230,
| but you could probably still force them to play a game of
| whack-a-mole with Google.
| TimPC wrote:
| There is good reason to reform section 230. Right now courts
| are applying the liability so broadly that companies aren't
| liable even after they are notified about illegal behaviours on
| their site. In a court case involving Grindr refusing to take
| down a profile created by someone's ex-bf that was being used
| to harass him, their refusing to so even after contact by
| lawyers was protected under section 230 and the case was thrown
| out. I'd be all for a modified version of section 230 that
| required sites to have a contact email and made them liable if
| they don't address certain issues in an appropriate time
| period.
|
| It's also worth mentioning that before section 230 if you
| didn't moderate you weren't liable so in certain senses it's a
| censorship bill rather than a free speech one since it protects
| removing speech. That being said I do understand the need to
| moderate sites and remove some content, hence my proposal of
| the modified version rather than a call for its elimination
| entirely.
| s__s wrote:
| To me that problem can be dealt with between the user, their
| ex-bf and local law enforcement. Grindr need not be involved,
| and no special internet laws need apply.
|
| That's a case of harassment and possibly some form of
| identity theft.
|
| I don't find your proposal tenable and it would obviously be
| prone to abuse.
| gowld wrote:
| That's only true of Grinder is obligated to positively ID a
| US resident who provided the content.
| curryst wrote:
| Grindr didn't refuse to take them down; the ex-bf kept
| creating new ones. That's a whole different problem. Grindr
| claims they were monitoring for new profiles, but that some
| slipped through their checks.
|
| In that scenario, I don't know what a reasonable level of
| effort for Grindr to exert is. It seems infinitely
| unreasonable to make them liable for any failure; there is a
| determined person on the other end that will probably
| eventually find some way of adding spaces or using symbols
| instead of letters, or using weird UTF-8 symbols or
| something.
|
| I don't see Grindr as failing there; while they probably
| could have done more, they seem to have made a best faith
| effort to stop it. The police should have intervened and
| filed charges against the boyfriend for stalking and
| harassment. Even failing that, I would have filed a civil
| case so I could subpoena the logs from Grindr and used them
| as evidence in a restraining order.
|
| Grindr is not the appropriate party to resolve this. I don't
| call Ford when people drive their trucks like assholes. I
| don't call Glock when somebody shoots someone. If you're
| going to call Grindr, you might as well call their ISP and
| Google too, see if you can get the ISP to block Grindr or get
| Google to route Grinder to localhost. They're complicit in
| enabling this too.
|
| > Right now courts are applying the liability so broadly that
| companies aren't liable even after they are notified about
| illegal behaviours on their site
|
| This, to a degree, makes sense. They haven't been notified
| about illegal behavior on their site, they have been notified
| of allegedly illegal behavior on their site. Grindr is well
| within their rights to say that they don't believe that the
| profile violates any laws. For example, it says that he
| attempted to file for a restraining order and was denied. So
| that court either found that what the ex-bf was doing wasn't
| illegal, or that he failed to meet the requirement of a
| preponderance of evidence. So he failed to convince a judge
| that his ex was more likely than not stalking him. Should
| Grindr be required to take action on a claim that is more
| likely false than true?
|
| > I'd be all for a modified version of section 230 that
| required sites to have a contact email and made them liable
| if they don't address certain issues in an appropriate time
| period.
|
| That's fraught with issues. What counts as addressing the
| issue? Is it banning the profiles as people identify them? Is
| it banning the personal info from appearing in profiles? Do
| they have to hire a group of people to memorize all the bits
| of bad data, and check new profiles and profile updates for
| those snippets, as well as any clever encodings that a
| computer wouldn't recognize?
|
| What is an appropriate time period? Is it some flat period,
| like a week, regardless of what changes are required? Does it
| vary, and if so, who decides what's a reasonable amount of
| time?
|
| This is not to mention that literally none of this goes
| through a court, which is terrifying and exceptionally prone
| to abuse. Of course, it could go through a court, but we
| already have laws and remedies for this situation in court.
|
| Cases like that make it seem really cut and dry, like there
| would never be a grey area. Even ignoring cases of outright
| fraud, what do you do in situations where one side feels
| victimized but it doesn't actually meet any legal standards?
| Like if person A always replies and argues with person Bs
| tweets. When person B blocks person A, they make a new
| account. Person B says they feel harassed and wants to force
| Twitter to do something about it. Person A says that Twitter
| is a public forum, and that if people don't want other people
| to disagree, they should use a more private forum. It never
| goes further than that. No threats, no doxxing, no real life
| interactions. Person A is probably an asshole, sure, but I
| don't think section 230 grants you immunity from assholes. I
| don't think it counts as stalking or harassment either
| (though I could certainly be wrong, not a lawyer). Should we
| really allow Person B to force Twitter to do something
| without having a judge involved? I would really rather not
| give the Twitter lynchmobs yet another way to dispense their
| own vigilante justice.
| eli wrote:
| _> a modified version of section 230 that required sites to
| have a contact email and made them liable if they don't
| address certain issues in an appropriate time period._
|
| So recreate the DMCA Takedown process but for speech? Do you
| think the DMCA is working well for copyright holders and
| users?
|
| The abuse of this would be massive. Let's say I don't like
| the comments you wrote so I email the host of the forum
| they're on and say they're defamatory. Now the host has to
| decide if they are defamatory (which is often a tough call
| even for lawyers) and also weigh the risk that I might file a
| costly lawsuit anyway. Or they just delete the comment.
| wahern wrote:
| I don't think it would be world ending to get rid of Section
| 230. I _almost_ would like to see it happen, if only because it
| would have precisely the opposite effect expected by all the
| people whining about being censored. Though, I suppose you can
| 't be censored if the channel itself is extinguished.
|
| More practically, the technically literate would go back to the
| world of Usenet, mailing-lists, and minimalistic forums like
| HN, hopefully inventing distributed reputation systems in the
| process. I have this vague idea for PGP web of trust-like
| signing of Usenet posts (published as hidden posts when readers
| +1/-1) which are then SPAM scored based on the depth of the
| attestation chain to the reader's own trusted posters, which
| may have been seeded from one or more centralized databases of
| group maintainers, similar to the current registration system
| for moderated Usenet groups except you could freely choose
| alternative registrars.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _I don 't think it would be world ending to get rid of
| Section 230_
|
| If you're running a start up, how would you feel knowing that
| if a user uploaded illegal content to your servers, you could
| be raided in the middle of the night and imprisoned for it?
|
| Only those with billions of dollars to throw at moderation
| would be able to comply with the law. Everyone else would
| need to block user content by necessity, or risk having their
| lives ruined by malicious users.
|
| The net result is that hosting free speech on the internet
| would be too risky for anyone other than giant corporations.
| The liability to host users' speech would be far too high for
| anyone else.
| [deleted]
| rrobukef wrote:
| Interesting. However, any manual action (choosing trusted
| posters, maintained database) is bad for adoption. Facebook
| and twitter take care of it, you should too.
|
| Perhaps you should use karma and comment interactions to
| automatically attest the people you interact with. Add a
| "report" button to disavow certain users. Now there is a
| positive and negative feedback loop to reduce the workload of
| attestation.
|
| Caveat: attestation must be stabilized. The existing
| hierarchies of admin/(super-)moderator work well as trusted
| posters. On the other hand, picking and choosing your
| moderator(s) is interesting and will birth new flame-wars and
| division.
|
| Caveat (2): Adding more crypto explodes the amount of data
| which must be handled. Especially when every comment and
| upvote is signed.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| The plan is not to repeal Section 230. The plan is to make
| protection contingent on appeasing political appointees at
| the FTC.
|
| Whoever controls the FTC will be able to (and will) pressure
| the major social media networks into acting as a propaganda
| arm for their political party.
|
| As dystopian as FB and Twitter are today, in this case, the
| medicine is poison.
|
| See https://www.hawley.senate.gov/senator-hawley-introduces-
| legi...
| zalkota wrote:
| Well it's either Facebook chooses their party or the
| government chooses it for them...
| eli wrote:
| Hawley's plan is just one of them.
|
| Some people, including both Joe Biden and Donald Trump,
| have called for a complete repeal of Section 230 at various
| times in the last year.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Some people, including both Joe Biden and Donald Trump,
| have called for a complete repeal of Section 230 at
| various times in the last year
|
| AFAICT, that characterization of Biden's position is
| based entirely on a single oral interview response, which
| quite arguably was not saying that the law should be
| repeated but that, on the facts of Facebook's specific
| conduct, and that of some unspecified other platforms,
| their conduct should be excluded from Section 230
| protections because they were knowingly engaging in
| misinformation.
|
| Note that Section 230 protections in case law are broader
| than what is provided on the face of the statute; in
| addition to the "publisher or speaker" protection in
| Section 230(c)(1); courts have extended it to also
| prevent liability as a distributor for content, IIRC by
| synthesizing 230(c)(1) and the good-faith blocking rule
| in Section 230(c)(2) and some legislative history to add
| the not-express-in-statute rule that sites are also not
| liable even as a distributor for the material they don't
| block, with some exceptions. Biden's statement is consist
| with restricting Section 230 to what is says on the face,
| which would be _only_ removing publisher /speaker
| liability, not distributor liability (which comes about
| when the distributor has knowledge or legal notice of the
| legal problem with the content.)
| eli wrote:
| I think that's a very generous reading of what Biden
| said, especially considering the followup question and
| the fact that he's declined to clarify his position in
| the intervening 8 months. Search "230" on this page to
| see it https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/17/opi
| nion/joe-b...
|
| Anyway my point was that there have been calls to repeal
| 230 from across the ideological spectrum.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I think that's a very generous reading of what Biden
| said, especially considering the followup question
|
| In the followup, Biden reiterates the conduct condition
| and the knowing falsehood criteria, which reinforces
| rather than weakens the impression that he is calling for
| the protections of Section 230 to be inapplicable to the
| actor/action in question due to their knowledge, a
| distributor-like standard, and not for the law itself to
| be repealed generally.
|
| I suppose you could read the first line of his response
| to the second followup ("He should be submitted to civil
| liability and his company to civil liability, just like
| you would be here at The New York Times") as calling for
| publisher-like liability if you ignore the _explicit_
| references to actual knowledge as the basis for
| nonprotection in both the original response and the first
| followup, but I do think that that is the _more_ strained
| interpretation, not the less strained.
|
| > and the fact that he's declined to clarify his position
| in the intervening 8 months.
|
| Why would you assume that he doesn't want to clarify
| because he wants a full repeal? Its not as if there isn't
| a constituency for a full repeal, especially on the
| right, and a key part of Biden's strategy is holding
| together a Bernie Sanders-to-Bill Kristol left-right
| alliance against Trump. Keeping disagreements the details
| of his position on the issue (which is clearly peripheral
| to his platform, on the grand scheme of things) out of
| the reasons for people to not feel comfortable with him
| is as plausible a motivation for that _regardless_ of
| which side of the full-repeal-vs.-reform his preference
| on 230 sits on.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| Do you have links to actual plans from other folks?
| Hawley's is the only one I can find an actual draft bill
| for.
| eli wrote:
| Brian Schatz and John Thune have one:
| https://www.schatz.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/OLL20612.pdf
|
| The DOJ has one: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-
| department-unveils-pr...
|
| The Whitehouse has a somewhat bogus EO
| https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-
| actions/executive-or...
|
| There have been a bunch of attempts to rewrite and at
| least a few attempts to just repeal it from both
| Democrats and Republicans.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| Thanks.
| adamiscool8 wrote:
| That's nonsense. Showing "their algorithms and content-
| removal practices are politically neutral" is not an
| insurmountable bar. It's just inconvenient for Big Tech's
| supporting interests.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| Really? You think we can here in this thread all agree to
| what it means for an algorithm or content-removal
| practice to be "politically neutral"?
|
| If so, please go ahead! But I seriously doubt it. This is
| a thing political philosophers argue about in journals to
| this day, that lawyers argue about in SCOTUS cases to
| this day, and that has been litigated to death in
| thousands of HN threads over the years.
|
| The question of what "politically neutral" means is
| perhaps the MOST political question there is. The
| delineation of political speech from non-political speech
| defines the playing field.
|
| And even setting aside genuine disagreement, politics
| does not operate on good faith. It operates on power. In
| practice, the bill does not outline specific criteria. So
| "politically neutral" will mean whatever the FTC wants it
| to mean. Which means it will mean whatever the appointees
| of the FTC chair want it to mean.
|
| Josh Hawley, of course, knows and understands how power
| works. He would not be proposing this bill if the big
| tech companies were right-biased. Democrats also
| understand how power works. So, in this counter-factual
| world of right-biased social media, it would be Democrats
| clamoring for federal intervention and Hawley decrying
| the "Democrat attack on the most successful American
| companies". Do you really believe otherwise?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > You think we can here in this thread all agree to what
| it means for an algorithm or content-removal practice to
| be "politically neutral"?
|
| Well, there's a simple answer, but I doubt we'll agree on
| it. It is impossible for a content-removal practice,
| algorithmic or otherwise, to be politically neutral. Any
| such practice will involve (whether implemented case-by-
| case or encoded into the design of the algorthm)
| judgements of a political nature and with political
| impacts.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| _> It is impossible for a content-removal practice,
| algorithmic or otherwise, to be politically neutral._
|
| Right. My point is that Hawley's whole premise of a
| "politically appointed political neutrality committee" is
| absurdly transparent.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Exactly. Imagine a republican-backed FCC arguing that,
| because more voters in the US are democrat, it's not
| politically neutral to try to show a news article to
| everyone in the US and the algorithm should try to show
| it only to an equal number of republicans and democrats.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Exactly. Also, people have a stronger uncomfortable
| negative reaction to news they don't like than a positive
| reaction to news they agree with, and extremists think
| even neutral descriptions of reality are biased against
| them, so if you show a neutral selection to a non-neutral
| person they're likely to see it as biased because it
| doesn't align with their perception of what the
| proportions _should_ be. Nobody will _ever_ agree on what
| "neutral" means, which means most likely it'll mean
| "biased in favor of who currently has political power".
| adamiscool8 wrote:
| Very simple. No primary moderation action should be made
| based on human input. Automated moderation should look
| for identifiable harms (i.e. illicit content, directed
| threats, terrorism), and absolutely nothing should be
| removed or blocked based on vague and nebulously defined
| concerns over "misinformation". Voila -- political
| neutrality in moderation.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| _> No primary moderation action should be made based on
| human input_
|
| 1. That means no HN.
|
| 2. I normally don't have to remind people of this at
| places like HN, but... algorithms are written by...
| humans! Supervised algos use data labeled by... humans!
|
| _> Automated moderation should look for identifiable
| harms (i.e. illicit content, directed threats,
| terrorism)_
|
| Why do you list terrorism separately from directed
| threats?
|
| What is the line/difference between "terrorism" and an
| "undirected threat"?
|
| Are militia groups that don't make directed threats
| terrorists? Are radical religious groups that don't make
| directed threats terrorists? What if they are run by
| actual terrorists but none of the speech amounts to a
| directed threat?
|
| Speaking of which, what is a terrorist organization? Is
| the KKK? What about small white nationalist or black
| power militia groups? What about QAnon? What about
| antifa? What about BLM? What about Westboro Baptist? What
| about the Black Panthers?
|
| There are people -- elected officials -- who think each
| of those is a terror organization.
|
| So, defining terrorist organization is absolutely a
| political fight. Maybe we avoid that and just talk about
| directed threats/ Ok. Does that mean that Al Qaeda
| allowed to operate on FB as long as they don't make
| directed threats? In fact, that FB is prohibited from not
| allowing Al Qaeda on as long as they don't make directed
| threats? That seems like not a solution anyone is going
| to get behind.
|
| We haven't even gotten past the "obviously terrorism=bad"
| and we already have to declare whether BLM, QAnon,
| Westboro, or militia groups are "terrorists". Which some
| senators believe is the case and is a 100% political
| question.
|
| _> illicit content_
|
| Is Ginsberg's _Howl_ illicit? Is a picture of two women
| kissing illicit? What about non-sexualized nude breasts?
| What about nude male bodies? What about an erect penis
| but in a non-erotic context? Will the dominant answers to
| these questions be the same in 50 years?
|
| Lots of people would say a site that allows pictures of
| heterosexual kissing but not not pictures of homosexual
| kissing is obviously taking a political position, but
| that was outside the realm of "political opinion" when I
| entered adulthood! Any public homosexual display of
| affection was _obviously_ illicit.
|
| _> absolutely nothing should be removed or blocked based
| on vague and nebulously defined concerns over
| "misinformation"._
|
| What does vague mean? What does nebulously defined mean?
| What is the difference between misinformation and libel?
| What is the difference between misinformation and
| dangerous information? Is it impressible to remove a
| video that's targeted at kids and encourages huffing glue
| as a fun and harm-free activity?
|
| Anyone who has moderated a forum knows that such an
| algorithm is going to have all sorts of holes and
| perceived biases. I've _never_ written an automod that
| some user doesn 't get pissed off about.
|
| More generally: that's just straight-up moderation, it
| has nothing to do with tweaks to recommendation algos.
|
| What if Twitter realizes that people leave the site if
| they see stuff about abortion but stay if they see stuff
| about LGBT rights? Again, viewpoint-neutral, Americans
| just one day start yawning about abortion and really
| polarize on LGBT stuff. Can they prioritize posts about
| LGBT rights over posts about abortion as long as the
| content served up on the preferred topic is viewpoint-
| neutral and the only algorithmic goal is more lingering
| eyeballs?
|
| If no to that, how about sports news vs. SCOTUS decision
| news?
|
| If yes to that, what about COVID case counts vs. Jobs
| Report numbers?
|
| Even more generally: anyone who's stayed up to date on
| robust machine learning knows that defining good notions
| of robustness -- and political neutrality is a type of
| robustness -- is very much an open problem. So even if we
| had a precise definition of political neutrality, which I
| don't think we do, "simply create an algorithm that has
| that property" is very much an open algorithmic problem.
|
| In fact, there are even some impossibility theorems in
| this space. So even if we can define neutrality in a
| perfectly neutral way -- which we can't -- this might be
| like passing a constitutional amendment that demands a
| voting system has all of: Non-dictatorship, unrestricted
| domain, monotonicity, IIA, and non-imposition. You can
| legislatively demand "the perfect voting system", but the
| universe is not obliged to ensure the existence of such a
| thing. Same for some types of robust ML, and no one knows
| which side of an impossibility theorem some precise-
| enough-to-code notion of political neutrality might fall
| on.
|
| Which also brings up the REAL question: are tweaks to
| recommendation algorithms allowed? Obviously we can't ask
| FB/Twitter to freeze their recommendation algos -- it's
| their core product. So. If they notice an "obvious bias"
| and tweak the algorithm to correct for it, who decides
| whether that was a biased human intervention or a totally
| appropriate bug fix? Oh, right, a politically appointed
| FTC.
|
| I think that "politically neutral" is impossible to
| formalize in code because it is a fundamental
| contradiction in terms. But even if it does, I suspect
| that any reasonable lists of formal specifications might
| be either mathematically impossible to train a classifier
| to respect or else at least AGI-complete to actually
| implement. But if you disagree, I'm happy to clone the
| Github repo and mess around with your proposal.
| adamiscool8 wrote:
| >1. That means no HN.
|
| No, it means less 230 protection for HN. Stop conflating
| this with destruction of the platform, it's becoming like
| "net neutrality". Remember when tweaking that killed the
| internet?
|
| >What is the line/difference between "terrorism" and an
| "undirected threat"? Speaking of which, what is a
| terrorist organization?
|
| The government has a clear processes to designate foreign
| and domestic terrorist organizations. [0] Let the actual
| politicians engage in that political fight. Social media
| companies can use the result.
|
| >What is the difference between misinformation and libel?
|
| Actual malice? If the standard works for newspapers, why
| can't it work for social media companies?
|
| >More generally: that's just straight-up moderation, it
| has nothing to do with tweaks to recommendation algos.
| [...] If they notice an "obvious bias" and tweak the
| algorithm to correct for it, who decides whether that was
| a biased human intervention or a totally appropriate bug
| fix?
|
| None of this relates. Content should not be removed or
| suppressed based on any political preference or
| designation, and that includes a fig leaf of facial
| neutrality. Whether it's recommended to some and not
| others != suppression, and it's trivial to show that your
| systems are based on user action not partisan interest.
|
| These aren't sticky questions at all, they're just ways
| to navel gaze and avoid the obvious solutions that are
| inconvenient to certain actors.
|
| [0] https://www.state.gov/terrorist-designations-and-
| state-spons...
| throwawaygh wrote:
| _> >> No primary moderation action should be made based
| on human input_
|
| _> > 1. That means no HN._
|
| _> No, it means less 230 protection for HN._
|
| I'd be fascinated to hear what dang thinks about HN's
| future existence if this hypothetical law where "No
| primary moderation action should be made based on human
| input" applied to HN.
|
| It seems impossible to (a) run a healthy forum or (b)
| avoid lawsuits or even jail. E.g., can you link me to a
| github repo that automatically catches 100% of libel? Or
| even 100% of child porn (or I guess actual porn as a
| proxy for that problem)? Removing libel and other illegal
| content without "primary moderation action"s that are
| based on "human input" is not currently possible.
|
| (BTW: that's NOT what Hawley's bill does! It allows human
| moderation, you just have to keep the political
| appointees happy.)
|
| _> > What is the difference between misinformation and
| libel?_
|
| _> Actual malice? If the standard works for newspapers,
| why can 't it work for social media companies?_
|
| Because newpapers have a few journalists. Not hundreds of
| millions of users.
|
| This has to be done arithmetically or it's financially
| reckless to allow free-form comments at all. If it's so
| easy to algorithmically identify libel with 100.00%
| accuracy, _go do it!_
|
| Given that there are regularly court cases that hinge on
| whether some statement raised to the level of libel --
| cases that even get appealed and where highly trained
| judges disagree -- I'm willing to bet the problem is AGI-
| complete. And then some.
|
| _> The government has a clear processes to designate
| foreign and domestic terrorist organizations. [0] Let the
| actual politicians engage in that political fight. Social
| media companies can use the result._
|
| _> Content should not be removed or suppressed based on
| any political preference or designation_
|
| So politicians get to define what terrorism means and
| companies should suck it up and implement whatever the
| politicians in power decide.
|
| So, if some powerful GOP senator designates BLM a
| terrorist organization, and social media companies then
| remove all BLM content, is that not "removing or
| suppressing based on political preference"? What about
| pro-2A militias? What about QAnon?
|
| By the way, what about "illicit content"? If some hard
| core right-winger takes over Twitter tomorrow, can they
| ban pictures of homosexuals kissing as "illicit content"?
|
| Hawley -- whose bill doesn't even do what you suggest --
| is just shifting power over content moderation decisions
| from companies to political appointees. That's all. It's
| not neutral, it is based on human input, and it's
| primarily just a shift in decision making power.
|
| Dressing this up as "neutral" is obvious bullshit. Hawley
| wants Twitter to understand that his political party is
| their ultimate master when they choose which speech to
| amplify on their platform. This is his explicit and
| openly stated goal. It is about power, not neutrality.
|
| But anyways, this argument is easy to resolve in your
| favor. You propose not Hawley's bill, but a hypothetical
| different one where human input can't be a primary
| consideration. So, you're claiming that a formal
| specification of the political neturality of an NLP
| classifier exists. I've build a lot of classifiers, and I
| don't believe you. Show me the code.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I'm not a republican, nor a Trump supporter, but I
| disagree. I think the courts would be able to create a
| body of case law over whether a removal was due to a post
| being "violent, obscene or harassing" or for some other
| reason.
|
| We can't be terrified of regulating platforms that have
| massive amounts of control over what most people see or
| hear about.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| _> I think the courts would be able to create a body of
| case law over whether a removal was due to a post being
| "violent, obscene or harassing" or for some other
| reason._
|
| 1. Maybe, but that's not what Hawley's bill does.
|
| 2. Leaving inherently political questions up to the
| courts invites politicizing the courts -- something
| that's already happened and that, if it continues apace,
| threatens to delegitimize and gridlock the entire federal
| legal system.
|
| 3. Given that you're not a Trump supporter or Republican,
| perhaps you should review the last 20 years of federal
| judicial appointments before placing so much faith in the
| courts...
|
| _> We can 't be terrified of regulating platforms that
| have massive amounts of control over what most people see
| or hear about._
|
| Agreed. I think there are lots of reasonable approaches
| toward regulation and/or self-regulation. The ability of
| customers to choose from a marketplace of recommendation
| algos (or implement their own) is the obvious market-
| based solution.
|
| However, I do not think a politically appointed committee
| whose job is to define political neutrality is a
| reasonable approach. And I think that leaving inherently
| political moderation choices up to the courts would be
| even worse -- at least FTC chairs aren't lifetime
| appointments, and at least politicizing the FTC won't
| deteriorate public trust in the one portion of the
| federal government that is not yet perceived as nakedly
| partisan.
| untog wrote:
| > Showing "their algorithms and content-removal practices
| are politically neutral" is not an insurmountable bar.
|
| It is when political appointees are the ones who judge if
| you've cleared the bar.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| It seems pretty insurmountable to me. Can you go into
| more detail about how they'd do it? I've seen a _lot_ of
| fights where one side says "putting this post up is
| biased against me" and another says "taking this post
| down is biased against me", and I'm not sure how Facebook
| could resolve those disputes with confidence the FCC
| won't say they did it wrong.
| jcranmer wrote:
| I think that's the point of this bill. They force
| Facebook et al. to get certified bias-free in a manner
| that basically makes it impossible to get that
| certification. So then they get the headlines saying "FCC
| finds Facebook is biased!!!111"
|
| The bill would be more palatable to me if they simply
| dropped the immunity, without any certification process.
| But then demonstrating bias would require winning civil
| lawsuits, which requires demonstrating damage suffered by
| the bias and also convincing 12 members of the jury in a
| unanimous vote... which is unlikely to happen, I think.
|
| (Addendum: actually, the real point of the bill may be to
| just say "Facebook/Twitter/Google is biased, and I'm
| doing something about it!" and ignore any actual chance
| of it making law or being reasonable. It's not like many
| people actually read details of bills to understand what
| it does and doesn't say.)
| throwawaygh wrote:
| _> The bill would be more palatable to me if they simply
| dropped the immunity, without any certification process.
| But then demonstrating bias would require winning civil
| lawsuits, which requires demonstrating damage suffered by
| the bias and also convincing 12 members of the jury in a
| unanimous vote... which is unlikely to happen, I think._
|
| No. Killing 230 entirely would allow Twitter and Facebook
| to be as politically biased as they want.
|
| However, if one of their users libels you, then you could
| sue Facebook in addition to that user.
|
| And if any Facebook user posts child porn, even for a
| short period of time, relevant parties at Facebook could
| face criminal charges for distribution.
|
| You couldn't sue Facebook for being politically biased,
| but Facebook would be responsible for actual crimes that
| its users commit.
|
| Hawley's bill says "you won't be responsible for the
| illegal stuff your users do (i.e., you get 230
| protections), but only as long as you keep my political
| appointees happy."
| bosswipe wrote:
| The hypocrisy of the same FCC that said that network
| neutrality was too much regulation to now demand
| "political neutrality" is outrageous.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Note that the test actually proposed (not the press
| release blurb) says:
|
| > The moderation practices of a provider of interactive
| computer services are politically biased if the provider
| moderates information provided by information content
| providers in a manner that [...] disproportionately
| restricts or promotes access to, or the availability of,
| information from a political party, political candidate,
| or political viewpoint
|
| That means that any service that chooses to do something
| like suppress known conspiracy theories is going to fall
| afoul of the proposed changes.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| For that matter, a policy of restricting hate speech will
| currently restrict one party more than another. A policy
| of prohibiting disinformation that could lead to voter
| suppression will currently restrict one party more than
| another. A policy of prohibiting misinformation about the
| ongoing pandemic will currently restrict one party more
| than another.
| klyrs wrote:
| What does "politically neutral" mean, anyway? What
| happens if I establish a political party whose solitary
| goal is to torture babies, kittens and puppies to death?
| Is that suddenly a "political opinion" which must be
| protected?
| NationalPark wrote:
| Would forums like HN survive? I can think of a few incidents
| where malicious information about people made the front page
| then turned out to be false. Is HN prepared to defend against
| lawsuits about that? Is HN prepared to _lose_ lawsuits about
| that?
|
| It sounds like you're basically suggesting that making the
| internet useless is a good thing, because maybe something
| something cool will come out of the ashes and there's a
| chance it could be even better after a bunch of extremely
| hard and broad problems are solved. I don't like those odds.
| ColanR wrote:
| I think the odds are pretty good. There's a lot of smart &
| motivated people who really like the internet, who would
| probably go a long way to replace it.
| gowld wrote:
| Why aren't those people interested in working on that
| today?
| wahern wrote:
| HN already has moderators who do a very good job of
| filtering posts in a timely manner. HN's exposure to
| liability for libel would be rather minimal. People and
| companies are exposed to legal risk all the time,
| everywhere they go, and somehow they don't curl up into a
| ball and die of starvation in their basements.
|
| Big, diverse sites like Facebook and Twitter need Section
| 230 because they can't effectively use human moderators to
| sift through the content. They have to rely on machine
| learning, which has false negative rates magnitudes higher
| than a human. Yet at the same time, they're constantly
| trying to shape and edit and, basically, narrate the user
| content, as part of their monetization strategy. That's
| their dilemma.
|
| Moreover, the distinction between publisher and distributor
| will still exist. The alternative to strong moderation is
| _no_ moderation--you 're just a distributor, like a Usenet
| node or the telephone company. But that's more difficult to
| monetize. (Of course, the legal landscape would be more
| nuanced than that--traditional libel law wouldn't demand a
| simple dichotomy between moderation and no moderation.)
|
| Without Section 230 companies would have a more difficult
| time trading profit potential for legal liability, but it
| would still be done. Newspapers, write-in columns, bulletin
| boards, and other forums were around for centuries, all the
| same exposed to libel law. Even the internet was around for
| decades prior to Section 230.
| eli wrote:
| _> HN 's exposure to liability for libel would be rather
| minimal._
|
| I don't understand how you reached that conclusion. They
| could be sued over any comment that appears for any
| amount of time. There are definitely comments that have
| appeared on HN that are libelous.
|
| Moreover even if they pre-screened every comment before
| it was posted with a team of lawyers who never make any
| mistakes, they'd STILL have to worry about defending
| against frivolous lawsuits. Would it even be possible to
| buy liability insurance for a forum in this world? It
| would cost a fortune.
|
| And this is for a site that has the resources to have
| full time moderators. Smaller sites are even worse off.
|
| I don't see how anyone could practically operate any
| forum or discussion board or comments section that
| allowed people to post messages in real time.
|
| _> Even the internet was around for decades prior to
| Section 230._
|
| Sure and sometimes your ISP got successfully sued because
| someone didn't like a comment posted on a message board
| they hosted.
| nullc wrote:
| > have appeared on HN that are libelous
|
| Not just have appeared, but which are still on display.
|
| Sometimes the difference between libellous and a critical
| statement protecting the public is purely the difference
| of the statement being true or not.
|
| This is not something a moderator is necessarily in a
| position to be able to judge but it's critically
| important to a community that its members can communicate
| true negative facts about other members.
| eli wrote:
| Worse yet: sometimes the difference is just who happens
| to be on your jury that day!
| [deleted]
| NationalPark wrote:
| We won't know the actual exposure until it ends up in the
| courts. Remember, we're talking about removing the good
| faith liability protections. Maybe a few thousand views
| of a libelous comment is enough, even if it was
| eventually removed. Either way, someone has to hire
| lawyers to go defend this, so it's not free.
|
| We should also expect new bad actors to take advantage of
| this. As long as they can spam libel faster than
| moderators can delete it, they can force the site to shut
| down or risk the lawsuits. While I'm sure YC has its
| share of enemies deserved or not, even perfectly innocent
| people are attacked online every day for no reason at
| all.
| gowld wrote:
| There's no reason to assume that an operator would be
| liable for libel spam, since they lack mens rea intent.
| Libel would only be in play if they intentionally refused
| to take down content or tried to extort people with it.
| jb775 wrote:
| I feel like this guy still doesn't get the actual point why
| politicians are talking about section 230. They aren't directly
| rebutting the language of the law, they're threatening to
| amend/repeal section 230 since they know social media giants
| depend it to exist in their current form.
| bosswipe wrote:
| They're using revocation of 230 as extortion to try to abridge
| the freedom of the press.
| splintercell wrote:
| Do you think conservatives are being censored by the big tech
| platforms? Would your answer pass the veil of ignorance?
| bosswipe wrote:
| Everybody is being censored on all these platforms, it's
| called moderation. Most people appreciate it, including you
| or you would be commenting on 4chan instead of the heavily
| moderated HN.
| pyronik19 wrote:
| That's really a manipulation of the term "moderation". They
| aren't removing swear words or nipples... They are deciding
| what is the "correct" information and then decide what we
| all get to see. If they got out of business because they
| abused the immunity grant they were given so be it. I won't
| miss them. All of social media can burn for all I care.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Can we leave section 230 as is for non profits and small
| businesses and treat FAANGs differently with different rules.
| Scale matters.
| eli wrote:
| How about we leave Section 230 completely alone and if we have
| problems with FAANG we pass new laws to address those problems
| directly.
| dilly_li wrote:
| Why are so many replies under this post shown in faded gray?
| eranimo wrote:
| Because there are a lot of conservative Trump-supporting HN
| posters in these comments downvoting everybody who doesn't want
| the Internet destroyed.
| judge2020 wrote:
| This is from other users (with a certain amount of karma)
| voting down these comments. See "Why don't I see down arrows?"
| on
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#:~:text=Why%20don'...
| jb775 wrote:
| Those are comments from non-democrats
| kibwen wrote:
| Comments with net negative votes get faded out. Remember that
| HN is just as much of a political battleground as any other
| forum (don't fall into the common trap of thinking that tech
| folks are "above politics"), and that those who benefit from
| the exceedingly effective propaganda mentioned in the OP aren't
| going to quietly yield control of the narrative.
| chemeng wrote:
| Though the law makes no distinction of publisher vs platform, I
| think people's intuitive sense that something is "wrong" is valid
| even though they may not be able to express it clearly. Publisher
| vs platform is just the easiest/closest way to express it for
| them.
|
| For me, the problematic/key question and example is Facebook's
| (News) Feed. When content is collected, curated (algorithmically)
| with specific intent, published/presented in a particular order
| and layout to communicate and derive revenue, at what point is it
| a creative work with authorship?
|
| If I prompt 100 people to comment on a topic by placing
| information in front of them, and then take portions of those
| comments, reorder and present them to you shaped by an
| overarching narrative of "what you may find interesting related
| to this topic" and place it on the front page of my website, in
| what way is this different than a newspaper?
|
| A newspaper can be sued for defamation, however, Section 230
| (c)(1) shields Facebook from any liability in the case where this
| selective curation and display of information contains known
| falsehoods or defamations. If any reasonable curator of facts
| (reporter) or newspaper editorial board would identify and reject
| these falsehoods or otherwise be sued, does Facebook get a pass
| because it was a computer curating?
|
| *Edit: The reason I think this may be problematic is that it
| removes any check on purposeful misinformation that has
| traditionally existed on our previous methods of speech
| amplification (newspapers, tv, radio). Facebook has no incentive
| not to publish the most engaging information even if it is false,
| as it cannot be sued. If it could be, you would see it actively
| prevent misinformation. The standard would be what the courts
| would find it responsible for under existing libel laws, which is
| a difficult bar to clear, particularly for public persons, but is
| the only restraint on yellow journalism we've traditionally had.
| partiallypro wrote:
| I have not yet read this piece, but Ken has turned into a
| completely different person since ~2016 and I'm not sure he's
| quite an unbiased legal source at this point.
|
| Edit: I read the piece and generally agree, but Ken has become
| increasingly partisan over the past few years to the point where
| I have had to stop following him.
| zaroth wrote:
| The problem is not that Section 230 clearly requires platforms to
| be neutral. The problem is that it doesn't.
|
| Section 230 isn't in the Bill of Rights. It's a legislative gift
| that was given to internet companies to help them grow by
| granting them a special legal shield for all the highly
| problematic content that they host and monetize.
|
| If they want to editorialize on the back of that content, then I
| don't see why they should have such special status.
|
| We do not need to eliminate Section 230. But the definition of
| 'Good Samaritan' blocking and 'good faith efforts' should
| explicitly not include the editorial decisions of a publisher.
| klyrs wrote:
| Would you also advocate that we bring back the FCC's Fairness
| Doctrine, so that news sources would be required to present
| contrasting viewpoints? Arguments against that were based on
| the first amendment; that a free press should have complete
| editorial control over the content that they distribute.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > that news sources would be required to present contrasting
| viewpoints
|
| Personally, I don't have a problem with publishers engaging
| in publishing. So I wouldn't support that.
|
| But there is a large, philosophical difference, IMO, between
| a publisher and a platform.
|
| And our laws need to be changed to further clarify this.
| klyrs wrote:
| I'd love to see the Citizens United ruling overturned. It
| would be _great_ for our society to not treat corporations
| as people. But as it stands, corporations are found to have
| free speech rights. Social media companies are both
| publishers _and_ platforms. Many news sites now have
| comments sections, too -- they 're both publishers _and_
| platforms. What is the large, philosophical difference that
| separates them?
| stale2002 wrote:
| > But as it stands, corporations are found to have free
| speech rights
|
| Sure. They have those right, just like a newspaper has
| those rights.
|
| But these companies and newspapers are also liable for
| their speech.
|
| And the companies that are not liable for the speech, are
| companies like phone companies.
|
| Phone companies are required to follow certain
| restrictions, and the courts have found them to be
| perfectly legal.
|
| > What is the large, philosophical difference that
| separates them?
|
| Take the phone network, as an example. The courts already
| treated the phone network, differently than they do a
| newspaper.
| zaroth wrote:
| I think that libel laws could be eased just a bit. As it
| stands, to sue a newspaper for libel you need to prove that
| they knew what they were reporting was false, or that they
| showed a "reckless disregard" for the truth. It's a very high
| standard, but occasionally you will see cases settle (e.g.
| Covington High student).
|
| I do not think the government should be intervening on
| content decisions. I think;
|
| (1) publishers & platforms should be legally responsible for
| content they host if they are going to editorialize on it
|
| (2) from a 'net neutrality' standpoint, that utilities and
| platforms should be mostly blind and entirely blameless for
| the packets they carry, and
|
| (3) we should allow some level of packet and/or content
| classification in the middle of #1 and #2 without making the
| utility/platform fully liable for the packets/content they
| are carrying, if that classification is based on fairly
| protecting the network/platform from "attack".
|
| The only reason I can see for a fairness doctrine would be
| based on a theory of anti-trust. To the extent that Twitter,
| Facebook, Apple, Google, etc. are monopolies, their ability
| to censor non-obscene viewpoints on their platforms _should_
| be limited... and that 's a spectrum not a binary switch.
| tzs wrote:
| > If they want to editorialize on the back of that content,
| then I don't see why they should have such special status.
|
| They don't have special status for their editorializing. If
| Facebook or Twitter or any other interactive computer service
| produces editorial content that, say, libels someone, they
| could be sued over that and would not have a section 230
| defense.
| Karunamon wrote:
| Would you consider "this is dangerous" or "this is
| misinformation" to be editorializing? What about "adding
| context"[1], as Jack Dorsey has promised to do at twitter?
|
| Given that all are judgement calls, I'd say it's impossible
| for it to not be. There's a difference between merely
| removing something and giving your opinion on the contents.
|
| [1]: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1317081843443912706
| tzs wrote:
| If they give their opinion on the content, they would be
| liable for that, because (1) it is not information provided
| by another information content provider, and so is out of
| scope for section 230, and (2) even if it were in scope
| they would be liable as the author--230 essentially says
| "go after the author, not the host" and in this case they
| would be sued as the author, not as the host.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > should explicitly not include the editorial decisions of a
| publisher
|
| what happens when I want to run CatTalk.com and, and its
| against the rules to talk about Dogs, and someone comes in
| talking about Dogs? Shouldnt you have the ability to run and
| moderate and host the content on your site that you decide?
| zaroth wrote:
| Of _course_ the have the ability and the right to host and
| moderate your own content! You just do it without Section 230
| protection.
|
| That means you have a responsibility for that content; the
| same legal liability that newspapers and magazines have when
| publishing articles and editorials.
| nullc wrote:
| In practice this means that it would be extremely
| irrational to run a not-for-profit or nearly not-for-profit
| venue that accepted posts from anything but close friends.
|
| Is that the world you want?
| tzs wrote:
| Newspapers and magazines run each article past editorial
| review before publishing it, and usually fact check
| anything that looks like it might be libelous or
| controversial. They don't just accept what the writer
| submitted and go to press.
|
| It's hard to see how you could run a site that provided
| near real time broadcast communication to the general
| public if you had to do that level of vetting of each post
| to make sure nothing slipped through that might get you
| sued.
| eli wrote:
| Newspapers and magazines have a staff of editors (and
| sometimes lawyers!) review each issue before it's
| published. That's the standard you want to apply to anyone
| running any forum anywhere on the internet? That every
| comment has to be carefully prescreened for legal
| compliance? And even then you have to operate under a
| substantially increased risk of lawsuit.
|
| Maybe you prescreen every comment but you make a bad call
| and something defamatory gets through. Or maybe someone
| sues you under bad faith and you have to pay to defend it
| or settle.
|
| This is a very bad future for the internet. It's an
| internet where the powerful, who have the full support of
| publishers, will get to have their voices heard loudly. And
| the less powerful, who do not have teams of lawyers willing
| to fight on their behalf, will have a very hard time
| getting their voices heard.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > It's a legislative gift that was given to internet companies
| to help them grow by granting them a special legal shield for
| all the highly problematic content that they host and monetize.
|
| No, it was given to them to encourage them to engage in "good-
| faith" censorship of things that the government doesn't like by
| not making such censorship move them from the relatively weak
| distributor-liability regime where they were only liable based
| on a responsibility to stop distributing content once they had
| notice of its unlawfulness to the any-oversight-is-on-you
| publisher liability regime.
|
| It wasn't to "help them grow", which it was assumed they would
| do anyway, it was to encourage them to try to restrict "bad"
| content as they grew (it is the one surviving part of the
| internet censorship Communications Decency Act, and like the
| rest of that act was, in fact, directed at promoting internet
| censorship.)
| roywiggins wrote:
| If you tried to enforce a "neutrality" requirement, you'd slam
| face-first into the First Amendment. It would be government
| mandated viewpoint discrimination.
| LegitShady wrote:
| which is why the legal exemption should be tossed entirely,
| and new publishers like twitter and facebook who have
| demonstrated control of what gets seen on their platform,
| should be liable for the content on their platforms.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| You're aware that this will result in _more_ content from
| being moderated off the sites, right?
| Karunamon wrote:
| Full devils advocate mode here.. I think it would likely
| result in a severe scaling back of the operations of
| Facebook and Twitter (and Reddit and [...]). There are
| simply not enough people to hire as moderators and
| coordinate at the scales they're running at right now to
| operate in a manner that won't get them sued on the
| regular.
|
| I also think this would result in a mad dash for
| anonymous, distributed, decentralized communication
| methods, i.e. things that can't be the target of a
| subpoena.
|
| Given the toxic influence of both social media on
| society, and the severe centralization we're operating
| under... both of those things look _very_ tempting.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I think it would be a net negative for the internet,
| attacking the very thing that let it get to this place.
| roywiggins wrote:
| That would make Hacker News liable for any defamation
| posted in the comments section. Well done, you just killed
| HN.
| LegitShady wrote:
| shrug if thats the cost of stopping technocratic control
| of the flow of information in society and openly
| censoring, its cheap.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Throwing out all online discussion fora is rather
| throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The replacement
| would be centralized media companies that have total and
| absolute control over information flow.
|
| Goodbye Mastodon (every Mastodon instance is liable for
| all toots). Goodbye Internet Archive (can't host content
| that might be defamatory, they'll be liable). Goodbye
| GitHub pull requests (Git would be liable for any
| defamation contained in them). And so on.
| LegitShady wrote:
| I would happily see all of those things go away to make
| sure Silicon Valley can't control who sees what.
|
| It's not that I don't understand the value of those
| things, its that I see the value of not having
| information in society be controlled by a few companies
| as having far larger value.
| roywiggins wrote:
| If you choke off user-generated content, the remaining
| content will be directly produced by Disney and other
| media conglomerates. That's not better, that's worse.
|
| The only people able to blog, for instance, would be
| people who have the technical chops to completely self-
| host. Everyone else would be reduced to handing out
| flyers on the corner like the bad old days.
|
| The behemoth old-media companies would be fine, because
| they can afford lawyers to go over everything they
| publish.
|
| Not only would it not be worth it, repealing section 230
| would _consolidate_ behemoth media companies ' control,
| not break it. It would do the absolute opposite of what
| you want.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| Not if you have a 6-3 majority on the court... 1A is whatever
| SCOTUS says it is.
| ardy42 wrote:
| > Not if you have a 6-3 majority on the court... 1A is
| whatever SCOTUS says it is.
|
| That's true. Like much of the Constitution, the text is
| pithy and doesn't specify its definitions. The current
| legal interpretation of the First Amendment and free speech
| rest on a particular philosophical traditions that the
| court adopted in the last century, and especially after the
| 60s.
|
| A lot of people have absolute faith in the functioning of a
| "marketplace of ideas," but it's not at all clear to me
| that a such a market can work well when it's flooded by
| disinformation, just like a market of goods can't work well
| when it's flooded by counterfeits.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/magazine/free-
| speech.html
| nahtnam wrote:
| I agree with this. From a libertarian stand point, the gov
| stepped in to help (rightfully, sometimes we need it) but it
| was originally written in a way that is now being abused. I
| don't see a problem changing it so that if you a companies gets
| to decide what they want to show and not show, they should be
| liable just like news sites.
|
| I'm open to hearing the opposite side if anyone has any
| arguments on why it shouldn't change
| dlp211 wrote:
| Well they aren't news sites. They are private entities
| providing general platforms. Speech, per the US legal system,
| is more than just what one says, but also the actions one
| takes. These companies have not only a right, but a duty as
| publicly traded companies to protect their platforms as they
| see fit.
|
| I fail to see how moderators on vBulletin boards in 2002 are
| any different then moderators/admins/algorithms on Twitter,
| Facebook, YouTube, etc in 2020. The scale is different, sure,
| but you are not entitled to the amplification of these
| platforms just because they are bigger the same way you
| weren't entitled to the amplification on those old vBulletin
| board systems.
| triceratops wrote:
| From a libertarian standpoint forced "neutrality" (scare
| quotes intended) is an infringement on the property and free
| speech rights of the platforms. You are not entitled to use
| my property against my will to endorse viewpoints that I
| disagree with, and the government should not force me to
| comply.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Can you help me understand why selectively removing content
| from a privately owned website is considered "abuse"?
| roywiggins wrote:
| From a libertarian standpoint, the government regulating
| "neutrality" is a nightmare.
|
| Should Hacker News be required to treat all links the same?
| If not, exactly how do you think a government "neutrality"
| mandate would work?
|
| Because such a mandate means that if the HN moderators are a
| little biased, the whole shebang would become liable for any
| defamatory comments posted here. That's a government-mandated
| sword of Damocles hanging over every single moderation
| decision made here.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Neutral is very much in the eye of the beholder. To start
| considering this scenario, we'd have to ask "Who will be the
| arbiter of whether a site's content is 'neutral?'"
| kyleblarson wrote:
| Seems like a pretty easy call if the site in question blocks
| peoples' accounts for posting an article from the 4th largest
| print news publication in the USA.
| eranimo wrote:
| It's actually the 8th largest, not 4th largest.
| bananabreakfast wrote:
| It was an article that blatantly violated the posting
| medium's terms.
|
| Doesn't matter if the government itself posted that
| article. Doxxing info is immoral and should be blocked.
| mthoms wrote:
| It's only "a pretty easy call" when you cherry pick
| extremely easy, outlying examples.
|
| What about more nuanced cases? Who will be arbiter of
| "neutral" then?
| joshuaheard wrote:
| Follow the First Amendment.
| kodablah wrote:
| But the first amendment prevents the government from
| telling me or my company that I have to follow the first
| amendment like they do.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Precisely. Enforcing "neutrality" on private parties
| would be unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.
| eli wrote:
| The First Amendment is in conflict with the government
| regulating what viewpoints companies allow on their
| platforms.
| nomdep wrote:
| They don't even need to be "neutral", just to have written
| rules that apply to everyone. eg: no spam.
|
| That rules could include biases like "no news that favor Trump
| reelection", but they should be in their terms of service
| explicitly.
| root_axis wrote:
| Explicit deliberate bias is protected speech.
| convery wrote:
| You can't claim you're not a publisher when you start promoting
| stories that push one narrative while blacklisting stories
| questioning that narrative. Imagine a news site that accepts
| submissions from the public, but filter which content is visible
| based on their own views, claiming no responsibility for the BS
| they allow on the frontpage.
| basch wrote:
| yes you can, thats what 230 protects. a private companies
| ability to censor reach does not turn it into a speaker. you
| can selectively choose what to allow and what to deny on your
| platform. like a spam filter, but for anything.
| LegitShady wrote:
| right, which is why section 230 should be repealed, because
| they're censoring politically and control what people see,
| shaping public opinion in large ways. They should be liable
| for the content of their platforms since they demonstrated
| the ability to control whats on them.
|
| They'd get freedom to control their platform, just without a
| special legal exemption that gives them immunity from the
| results of their control on of their platform.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| The results of the control of their platform are... that
| you can choose not to use it.
|
| Section 230 says you have a right to speech, not a right to
| a platform giving you reach.
| LegitShady wrote:
| I don't use it, I just dont want them to have legal
| exemptions other publishers don't get while they control
| what information people are or aren't allowed to see.
| basch wrote:
| >They'd get freedom to control their platform, just without
| a special legal exemption that gives them immunity from the
| results of their control on of their platform.
|
| Exactly, thats the point. It's a market economy of
| platforms.
|
| >they're censoring politically and control what people see,
| shaping public opinion in large ways.
|
| Companies are allowed to choose what they say and project
| outward.
|
| The problem here is a lack of interoperability between
| platforms, institutional silos. Standardized data exports
| and imports. Cross platform messaging and subscription.
|
| 230 exists precisely to prevent the world you are
| advocating. It's not an accidentally careless law that had
| a loophole, it's intent is to protect private companies
| first amendment rights.
|
| >They should be liable for the content of their platforms
| since they demonstrated the ability to control whats on
| them.
|
| Says who? I dont think they have at all demonstrated they
| are good at controlling whats on their platforms. They are
| ok at at, at best.
| h2odragon wrote:
| one of his links (EFF) mentions "Fair and transparent moderation"
| ... I'd be happy to see that, but aside from it being something
| societies have had problems with in the past; can anyone actually
| suggest that's what's happening now?
|
| Are twitter and facebook being fair and transparent?
|
| Isn't the very fact we're having the argument evidence that it's
| such a difficult problem we need some interim solution while the
| perfect AI algorithm gets worked out? Some solution that can last
| for a while if the perfect AI moderators never come.
| jtchang wrote:
| Having read it over and thought about it I don't think I'd want
| to give up all the freedoms we have on posting whatever the heck
| we want. If it means Facebook ends up with hate speech and
| antivax groups so be it. I think the alternative is worse: where
| if I were going to build some type of new forum I'd have to be
| liable for everything anyone posts. I want to see new ideas being
| tried without fear of litigation.
| originalvichy wrote:
| That scary thought is the reason why I sympathize with big tech
| even though they don't always do the right thing with bans and
| restrictions. They are literally in new grounds. We haven't had
| this world of technological discussion available to us ever
| before. Most things are being done for the first time ever
| right now.
|
| I remember how tought it was to moderate IRC channels that were
| larger than a certain amount of users. Imagine having to
| wrangle HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of users by trying to outmaneuver
| all the bad faith, harmful actors.
|
| I'd rather live in a world where people can create websites and
| moderate them as they wish, since the alternative is probably
| no website at all since you are bound to run into bad faith
| actors in life.
|
| As long as we can still freely create websites online there
| should not be people who are against moderation.
| iron0013 wrote:
| Moderators, stop editorializing via title manipulation! The title
| of this article is "Section 230 Is The Subject of The Most
| Effective Legal Propaganda I've Ever Seen", and the article only
| makes sense if read in light of its actual title as given by the
| author, not the edited manipulated title you have given it on HN!
| judge2020 wrote:
| Not sure if this is satirical, but HN aims to prevent clickbait
| and other 'spam' - see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572466
| dang wrote:
| It was an obviously baity title and that is bog standard HN
| moderation. More at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24805143
|
| We've since changed the URL (and the title) in keeping with
| another HN principle, of favoring original sources. The Popehat
| article is really just a list of links with a bunch of extra
| Popehatness.
| reggieband wrote:
| I'm having a moment here where I am considering this from another
| viewpoint. While I hate the idea of siding with Ted Cruz on
| literally anything I want to take a moment to really consider
| something.
|
| Section 230 makes sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Youtube,
| Instagram and even Hacker News possible. Revoking Section 230
| could expose those platforms to the possibility of liability for
| content posted on them. This might cause a re-shaping of the
| Internet in general.
|
| Part of me seriously wonders - would that necessarily be a bad
| thing? I am not convinced, by any stretch of the imagination,
| that these social media opinion aggregation platforms are
| universally positive. Everyone keeps acting like the existence of
| Facebook somehow democratizes content publishing for the masses,
| even when we are faced with clear evidence that this isn't the
| case. The centralized nature of Facebook actually allows for
| larger scale manipulation of the narrative.
|
| And how would this affect Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, Netflix and other
| sites? I suppose opening them up to liability for negative
| reviews could be a problem.
|
| I'm thinking on the fly here, but if Facebook just disappeared
| off of the Internet tomorrow - I'm not really sure I would mourn
| that. And if new Internet companies were burdened with stricter
| moderation requirements (or the need to stand behind every piece
| of content posted onto their site), maybe that would actually be
| good? Maybe that would drive people to create their own websites
| once again.
|
| I'm sure I haven't thought deeply enough on this but I definitely
| feel the tide here is a knee-jerk protection of Section 230. Yet
| the companies it protects the most are the ones I feel are the
| worst.
| originalvichy wrote:
| >Section 230 makes sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit,
| Youtube, Instagram and even Hacker News possible. Revoking
| Section 230 could expose those platforms to the possibility of
| liability for content posted on them. This might cause a re-
| shaping of the Internet in general.
|
| >Part of me seriously wonders - would that necessarily be a bad
| thing? I am not convinced, by any stretch of the imagination,
| that these social media opinion aggregation platforms are
| universally positive.
|
| Here's where you are wrong to think this. It doesn't protect
| social media giants, Hacker News and news websites. It protects
| literally everyone on the internet in the USA.
|
| Thanks to this law you can't be held liable if you have a blog
| with a comment section. Anyone can post anything there and you
| could be at serious risk of legal trouble if someone posted
| something that breaks the law on your website. Any communal
| website would either a) move out of the US and b) probably
| require some very strict controls on who can post and what.
|
| The law doesn't protect American giants, it protects everyone
| that uses the internet to discuss.
|
| I suggest you read this blog post on the issue, especially this
| part:
|
| ""If you said "Section 230 is a massive gift to big tech!"
|
| Once again, I must inform you that you are very, very wrong.
| There is nothing in Section 230 that applies solely to big
| tech. Indeed, it applies to every website on the internet and
| every user of those websites.""
|
| https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
| cfmcdonald wrote:
| > Thanks to this law you can't be held liable if you have a
| blog with a comment section.
|
| Even absent a comment section, most blogs are hosted by
| someone else (e.g. WordPress), who does not vet the content
| on that blog. That won't be possible anymore in a post-
| Section 230 world.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Right. So WordPress has no protections if you post bad
| content. So probably WordPress goes away.
|
| No problem, you say, I'll self-host my content on AWS and
| use CloudFlare as a CDN. But AWS and CF also have no
| section 230 protections any more either and probably won't
| do business with you unless you indemnify under some kind
| of insurance policy (which you won't be able to afford as a
| small blog).
|
| Even if you run your own server and install it at home, the
| lack of section 230 protections will probably make your ISP
| responsible for content you publish (remember: your ISP is
| not a common carrier - thanks FCC) so you're probably going
| to find that all consumer ISPs are going to have terms of
| service that prohibit publication, and technical
| implementations that enforce that.
|
| I mean, in the non-Internet world, if I want to make a
| newsletter and mail it out to a subscriber list; I can at
| least do that. All I need is a laser printer, and a stack
| of stamped envelopes. The postal service is a common
| carrier, at least.
|
| Today's internet is a composition of platforms, all of
| which are really only possible due to the existence of
| section 230. It blows my mind that people are so blase
| about the idea of tossing it out or reworking it in a naive
| way.
| reggieband wrote:
| > It protects literally everyone on the internet in the USA.
|
| I think this is the kind of knee-jerk hyperbole I want people
| to really think deeply about.
|
| > Thanks to this law you can't be held liable if you have a
| blog with a comment section.
|
| Maybe that should not be protected. If I am unable/unwilling
| to moderate the comment section of a blog I host then maybe I
| should't have one. I do not believe a completely open free-
| speech comment section is a requirement of a good or
| successful blog. Also, there is a business opportunity for
| those who want comment sections to pay for moderation
| services.
|
| > I must inform you that you are very, very wrong.
|
| This kind of patronizing is neither useful nor conducive to
| mature discussion. Aggregate user-generated-content sites
| aren't some kind of holy thing, forums, comment sections or
| otherwise. I want people to consider the fact that we may all
| be fine without them at all. Nothing stops people from
| posting whatever content they want on their own site. It just
| discourages aggregation of other people's content.
| originalvichy wrote:
| >Maybe that should not be protected. If I am
| unable/unwilling to moderate the comment section of a blog
| I host then maybe I should't have one. I do not believe a
| completely open free-speech comment section is a
| requirement of a good or successful blog.
|
| It's not about having to moderate a completely free speech
| comment section. It's about being able to even have one and
| to be able to host good people and good comments without
| having to be liable for the time when people act terribly.
|
| Where I'm from I don't think a bar owner can be held liable
| if a patron starts a fight and wounds another patron. You
| don't open a bar with the explicit intent of it being an
| amateur boxing arena, but a nice place for people to enjoy
| drinks and conversation.
|
| If a user online decides to breach trust and common
| courtesy by posting vile stuff on my site I shouldn't be
| held liable for their actions as I did not force or coerce
| them to do it.
|
| >Nothing stops people from posting whatever content they
| want on their own site. It just discourages aggregation of
| other people's content.
|
| Yes, nothing is stopping them. But 230 is allowing you to
| do more with the internet other than just post things on
| your own site. That blog even describes an instance where
| replying/forwarding an email - in which you are repeating
| what rule/law breaking thing another person said to be able
| to reply/comment on said thing - you are protected against
| liability.
|
| If you dismiss these liability rules you are effectively
| removing everything from chatrooms to comment sections from
| the internet, effectively making the internet into a
| snailmail/bulletin board service.
| reggieband wrote:
| > If you dismiss these liability rules you are
| effectively removing everything from chatrooms to comment
| sections from the internet, effectively making the
| internet into a snailmail/bulletin board service.
|
| Yes, I am pondering exactly this. How much of the
| Internet do I consider valuable that would be lost? I
| mean, lost in the sense it would be completely
| irreplaceable without Section 230 protection. To be fair
| to my position, the vacuum of unmoderated spaces would be
| filled one way or another.
|
| Maybe people are surprised by such a position, but I
| don't actually see enough inherent value in unmoderated
| comment sections on private blogs or even all of the
| 1990's era phpbb forums to worry about their loss. In
| fact, when I consider the negative effects of the massive
| companies hiding behind Section 230 they really seem to
| heavily outweigh whatever positive effect comments on my
| personal blog could ever bring.
|
| It seems these things keep coming up: public comments on
| personal blogs and anonymous forums. I want people to
| deeply think about whether or not these things are really
| valuable and even more so whether or not the are
| irreplaceable without Section 230.
| save_ferris wrote:
| > If I am unable/unwilling to moderate the comment section
| of a blog I host then maybe I should't have one.
|
| I completely agree, it's clear that a successful business
| model around content moderation cannot exist in the
| internet's current form, and there are very few
| consequences for people who post malicious content.
| klyrs wrote:
| Would the forums of yesteryear survive? The early 2000s saw a
| veritable utopia of information sharing, as people with special
| interests came online and formed groups to discuss and
| collaborate on those interests.
|
| Would the open source software community survive? My world
| revolves around github more than any other site; would ticket
| discussions be forced back to mailing lists? Would mail readers
| pick that slack up, and re-implement social media over email?
| reggieband wrote:
| > Would the forums of yesteryear survive?
|
| I know this is questioning some fundamental assumptions of
| most of our moral principals, but I am literally questioning:
| should they survive? It seems everyone is assuming that they
| should. Some seem to suggest they should for abstract "free
| speech at all costs" philosophy. Others are assuming they
| have some kind of positive effect, either on personal growth
| or economic activity.
|
| > Would the open source software community survive?
|
| I'm not sure how Section 230 applies to code but I don't
| think public forums like Facebook, Twitter or Youtube are
| necessary for open source software to continue (any more than
| they were necessary for it to start, which happened long
| before they existed).
|
| Besides, what I'm pondering is the centralized aggregation
| points. People could still host blogs, they are just directly
| liable for the content they post (as they likely are now).
| giantrobot wrote:
| You keep harping on Facebook et al but you're ignoring
| everyone pointing out that Section 230 protects everyone at
| all scales. Without Section 230 exceptions there's no
| protection for _any_ type of user generated content.
|
| That means no user reviews of _anything_. No user
| contributed information so no more Wikipedia or
| OpenStreetMaps. No Wikis of any kind in fact. No hosting of
| public data sets for ML research. Forums would be a
| liability nightmare so they would go away.
|
| Not only would current/new instances of user generated
| content make sites liable but hosting any historical co
| rent as well. So to avoid liability the web would have to
| be scraped clean of user generated content.
|
| Facebook and other large sites would be the _only_ ones to
| survive because they could afford a moderator army. Your
| extremely short sighted position would basically leave only
| large content producers. The Internet would regress to the
| curated Online Service model but worse because user
| communication would need to be disallowed over heavily
| moderated.
|
| You're advocating for the Internet to turn into broadcast
| television. It's sad that you either can't or won't accept
| that implication.
| eli wrote:
| I promise you that there are options between "do nothing" and
| "remove the legal foundation crucial to the development of the
| participatory internet."
| cwhiz wrote:
| I'm with you. I think we would all be better off without forums
| for people to anonymously yell at each other.
|
| If Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit all disappeared tomorrow it
| would be an enormous win for American citizens. The path to
| unification and healing does not run through big tech.
|
| And yes, I understand that it would also be the end of HN. I
| accept that.
| spiffytech wrote:
| Remember that Section 230 isn't just about the big, centralized
| services. It protects everybody who's ever run a phpBB forum
| for their little community, or allowed comments on their blog,
| or set up a Mastodon instance they share with others. If you
| host content written by someone else, Section 230 is what
| allows you to moderate it, and what prevents you from being
| legally liable for it. Proposals requiring "political
| neutrality" even add new burdens to be compliant with; your
| friend on your Mastodon ranting about "that politician"
| probably isn't "neutral" publishing.
|
| Facebook et al. could be big enough to wrangle the regulatory
| burden of existing without these protections. But many proposed
| 230 "reforms" could scare off anyone smaller, creating a
| regulatory moat that keeps Facebook at the top in perpetuity.
| reggieband wrote:
| Yes, believe it or not I am questioning whether or not I
| should be free from liability if I host a public forum. And
| my conclusion is: perhaps I should be liable if I stand up a
| public forum.
|
| You may suggest that would prevent me from creating a user-
| generated-content application of massive scale without the
| resources to sufficiently moderate it. And again, yes - maybe
| that should be a requirement of me doing such a thing.
|
| It isn't like the only kind of business a person could create
| on the internet is one that surrounds the aggregation of user
| generated content. If it killed that entire class of business
| ... I am not sure we would lose very much of value that
| couldn't be replaced by individuals hosting their own
| content.
| spiffytech wrote:
| > of massive scale
|
| Of even tiny, microscopic scale. Even your personal blog's
| comments, or the forum for your local club.
|
| And it _still_ won't stop Facebook. It'll only stop _you_.
| That outcome doesn't sound like the outcome you're saying
| you may be comfortable with. It sounds like the opposite.
| reggieband wrote:
| > That outcome doesn't sound like the outcome you're
| saying you may be comfortable with.
|
| Oh no, I'm considering exactly that. I am saying: if my
| tiny personal blog has a comment section I would be
| liable for comments posted there. If that is a burden I
| can't handle then I should turn off comments. At least in
| my experience those comment sections are a complete waste
| of space anyway and the trend I've noticed from the large
| blogs that are still around (e.g. daringfireball, kottke)
| is that their comment sections are long gone anyway.
|
| What I am pondering is: would this ruin the Internet? If
| I couldn't host a public forum if it got beyond my
| limited means to moderate? If I couldn't have a public
| comment section? It doesn't seem clear to me the Internet
| breaks if I am forced to own the responsibility for those
| things that I allow to be made public through sites I
| control.
| eli wrote:
| It's somewhat ironic that HN's moderators apparently changed the
| title of this submission from "Section 230 Is The Subject of The
| Most Effective Legal Propaganda I've Ever Seen" to the apparently
| less objectionable "What Section 230 really means"
| dang wrote:
| That's just bog standard HN moderation to make titles less
| baity. If we didn't do that, HN would be a completely different
| site--and not in a way that most HN users would appreciate.
| Having the titles on the front page be 'bookish' (to use pg's
| original term) is one of the core principles here.
|
| We've since changed both the URL and the title.
| eli wrote:
| Fair enough! It just feels like a funny meta example of why
| one might want to "editorialize" content without also being
| forced to moderate every single thing posted.
| iron0013 wrote:
| In case you haven't noticed, the willful misinterpretation of
| section 230 that popehat is describing is so common on HN that it
| has effectively become the party line, and any attempts to
| correct such "misunderstandings" (lies) are met with heavy
| downvoting.
| ry454 wrote:
| I believe that the debate around Section 230 is a sign of the
| growing consensus among the ruling class that Project Internet is
| complete, that it's successfully deployed a world wide
| surveillance framework, and that no further growth for the sake
| of the growth, which could destabilize the said framework, is
| needed, and thus it's time to close the gates and fortify the
| site from competitors. One fact supporting this stance is the
| rapidly growing popularity of the so called "end-to-end
| encryption" idea, that could crack the foundation of
| surveillance, unless hard measures are taken right now.
| dionian wrote:
| If platforms are going to start acting like publishers, they
| should no longer get special treatment when compared to other
| publishers.
|
| Remember, if the info platform monopolies help the democrats
| today, they can help the republicans tomorrow.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I'd suggest reading through some of the resources linked in the
| article. The idea that Section 230 gives special treatment to
| "platforms" as opposed to "publishers" is common but false. The
| Techdirt one (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/233254
| 44617/hello...) in particular I think helps clear up the
| confusion.
| luckylion wrote:
| > No provider or user of an interactive computer service
| shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any
| information provided by another information content provider.
|
| If they don't get special treatment as opposed to publishers,
| why is explicitly mentioned that they shall not be treated as
| the publisher? If there's no difference, what's the point in
| that?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| "Publisher" here doesn't refer to a special legal status.
| This sentence just means that, if you post something on a
| website, it's still you and not the website who said it.
| This law is applicable to any website, even ones which make
| no attempt to be a neutral platform.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Probably because publishers are, by default, more liable
| (as liable as any other legal entity) and thus the law aims
| to reduce liability for the parties in question (the
| platform creators like twitter, facebook) so that the
| positive economic impact attributed to these platforms
| isn't burdened by the law.
| tim44 wrote:
| > _To be a bit more explicit: at no point in any court case
| regarding Section 230 is there a need to determine whether or
| not a particular website is a "platform" or a 'publisher.'
| What matters is solely the content in question. If that
| content is created by someone else, the website hosting it
| cannot be sued over it._
|
| > _Really, this is the simplest, most basic understanding of
| Section 230: it is about placing the liability for content
| online on whoever created that content, and not on whoever is
| hosting it. If you understand that one thing, you 'll
| understand most of the most important things about Section
| 230._
|
| The way I understand it, these big sites aren't simply
| hosting content, they are themselves creators through
| editorializing content and so should not enjoy a blanket
| immunity.
| jhayward wrote:
| > _Remember, if the info platform monopolies help the democrats
| today, they can help the republicans tomorrow._
|
| Facebook has had its thumb on the 'balance' scale in favor of
| ultra-right-wing sites for half a decade, at least.
|
| - Zuckerberg calling a group of non-profit news sites "not real
| news" [1]
|
| - Zuckerberg ordering the algorithm of the news feed to be
| biased toward promoting Breitbart et. al. [2]
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/mathewi/status/1317124357873860609
|
| [2] https://twitter.com/dnvolz/status/1317160066047479809
|
| [3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-mark-zuckerberg-learned-
| pol...
| formerly_proven wrote:
| > Remember, if the info platform monopolies help the democrats
| today, they can help the republicans tomorrow.
|
| They do?
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| Case in point: two town halls yesterday. One gets asked about
| their most current scandal (tax returns), another doesn't get
| a single question about their scandal (burisima). The media
| is undoubtably carrying water for Joe Biden. That isn't even
| arguable anymore. The question is why?
| srdev wrote:
| That just demonstrates that there isn't an easily definable
| political neutral. From my point of view, the "Burisma
| scandal" got all the attention it deserved. The reason the
| media isn't harping on it is because it wasn't a scandal,
| and one political party was desperately trying to make it
| so.
|
| In the same way, a lot of people would say it would be
| neutral for media to present arguments that global warming
| is not man-made, but people who care about scientific fact
| would claim that even presenting the skeptic argument is
| non-neutral, sense you are signal boosting an argument with
| no basis in reality.
| ChrisClark wrote:
| I think this comes down to the fact that removing lies and fake
| news hurts Republicans at this point in time.
|
| If in the future the Democrats are the lying ones, then those
| lies deserve to be removed too.
| jedmeyers wrote:
| How do you know who is actually lying if half the information
| is removed from the sources you usually read?
| ardy42 wrote:
| > How do you know who is actually lying if half the
| information is removed from the sources that you usually
| read?
|
| As far as I know, they're not broadly removing "half the
| information" (which I'm taking to refer to conservative
| viewpoints), but disinformation related to QAnon, voting,
| covid, etc.
|
| Disinformation is not something that will help anyone make
| better judgements.
|
| https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-media-social-
| media-...
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54443878
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/08/11/facebo
| o...
|
| https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-twitter-block-trump-
| post-...
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-election-
| exclusi...
|
| https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/us-politics/article-
| fa...
| ojnabieoot wrote:
| This tidbit from a WSJ story is rather revealing of the
| actual issue going on here[1]:
|
| > In late 2017, when Facebook tweaked its newsfeed algorithm
| to minimize the presence of political news, policy executives
| were concerned about the outsize impact of the changes on the
| right, including the Daily Wire, people familiar with the
| matter said. Engineers redesigned their intended changes so
| that left-leaning sites like Mother Jones were affected more
| than previously planned, the people said. Mr. Zuckerberg
| approved the plans.
|
| That is: Facebook decided to intervene to benefit the right.
| I don't think this is just because of right-wingers at
| Facebook: surely a large part of it is bad-faith attacks from
| people like Ted Cruz.
|
| The idea that Twitter and Facebook are conspiring to suppress
| legitimate criticism of Biden and thereby defeat Trump is
| plain ridiculous.
|
| [1] Story is here: https://t.co/sjOYrLQdc3?amp=1 but I got
| the blurb from this tweet:
| https://twitter.com/patcaldwell/status/1317140564169625600
| ChrisClark wrote:
| Platforms and publishers are no different under Section 230.
| Platforms are not getting anything special.
| jtbayly wrote:
| False. "No provider or user of an interactive computer
| service shall be treated as the publisher..."
|
| The whole point is that the provider of the interactive
| computer service (ie "the platform") is not to be treated as
| the publisher of anything anybody says on the platform.
| ojnabieoot wrote:
| From Popehat's post:
|
| > Among the most common lies: Section 230 requires sites to
| choose between being a "platform" or "publisher"
|
| The idea that Twitter moderating its users' posts means it's
| acting like a "publisher" is nothing but Republican
| propaganda[1]:
|
| >Furthermore, a number of senators have prominently criticized
| Section 230. For example, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) repeatedly
| (but completely falsely) claims that Section 230 only applies
| to "neutral public forums."
|
| Threatening Twitter and Facebook with liability for their
| users' content is authoritarian suppression of free speech. The
| US government should not be forcing Twitter or any other social
| media service to carry the president's re-election propaganda -
| _even if the propaganda is factual,_ let alone if it 's full of
| holes and lies like the NY Post story.
|
| [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3306737
| luckylion wrote:
| From the comment:
|
| > If platforms are going to start acting like publishers,
| they _should_ no longer get special treatment when compared
| to other publishers.
|
| The GP doesn't argue that Section 230 says this or that,
| they're arguing that internet companies who act like news
| sites should be subject to the same laws as news sites.
| typenil wrote:
| The fact that you're being downvoted just shows the
| partisan reflexes of those that did it.
|
| Making a factual correction without any additional
| commentary. Down the memory hole.
| ojnabieoot wrote:
| The problem is that Twitter and Facebook are not acting
| like news sites because
|
| 1) they don't write the stories or in any way pay the
| journalists
|
| 2) news is a minority of the content
|
| 3) moderation is not the same thing as curation
|
| 4) hosting a story is not the same thing as publishing it.
|
| If I post an NBC News article to Twitter, NBC is the
| publisher. If that article contains libel, NBC is the one
| on the hook in court, not Twitter. (However, if Twitter
| discovered the article was very likely libelous then it
| would be both reasonable and responsible to restrict
| sharing the article).
|
| GP is really making one of two authoritarian arguments:
|
| a) Platforms are not allowed to make broad decisions about
| what sorts of content they want to host. Presumably GP
| would then also agree that YouTube's ban on pornography
| means that YouTube is a "publisher," and that every time
| Reddit remove a racist subreddit that it is acting like a
| "publisher."
|
| b) If a platform does not want to host the president's
| dishonest re-election propaganda, they should expect to
| face financial and legal consequences.
|
| Of course nobody would really say "b" out loud, hence the
| word games about "you see, Mastadon is a _platform_ but
| Twitter is a _publisher._ "
| Analemma_ wrote:
| This is exactly the misconception that Ken is trying to
| correct. There is _no_ difference between platforms and
| publishers according to Section 230, and there is no "special
| treatment". This meme has sprung up out of nowhere because
| people are angry at the social media companies and want to
| think that anger has legal backing, but it doesn't.
| jtbayly wrote:
| No. It's not what Ken is trying to correct, because this is
| an _opinion,_ not an interpretation of the law.
|
| Furthermore, as for the law, there _is_ a difference between
| platforms and publishers. Section 230 says that platforms
| will _not_ be treated as publishers.
| jtbayly wrote:
| For the people downvoting my comment, please note the
| following from Section 230:
|
| "No provider or user of an interactive computer service
| shall be treated as the publisher..."
|
| FB and Twitter are interactive computer services in this
| case, and we call them "platforms." The law says they are
| _not_ to be treated as the _publisher_ of the content that
| users post on their site. Thus, there is a big difference
| between a platform and a publisher. That 's the whole
| _point_ of the law.
|
| Downvote all you want, but... that's the law.
| coldpie wrote:
| You have to read the whole sentence:
|
| > No provider or user of an interactive computer service
| shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any
| information provided by another information content
| provider.
|
| The law doesn't establish two categories, called
| "publisher" and "platform." It says, if User writes
| something on Website, then Website will not be treated as
| the publisher of whatever User wrote. Instead, User will
| be treated as the publisher. It defines who is
| responsible for the content that is served by Website:
| the User who wrote it, not the Website that served it. At
| no point does it create a category called "publisher" who
| is subject to different rules from a category called
| "platform."
| iron0013 wrote:
| The text is very clear. It protects the rights of an
| owner of a website to control that website, which is
| their private property. It does not in any way heap
| additional responsibilities or legal vulnerabilities upon
| "publishers". It's straightforward if read and
| interpreted in good faith.
| InfiniteRand wrote:
| How does this work for a "Letters to the Editor" type section in
| a newspaper?
|
| Or what separates a heavily moderated online forum from a
| volunteer run online magazine? Is it the asking for submissions
| part?
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Newspapers are publishers. They've never tried pretending
| they're platforms. They have editorial control because they are
| clear and forthright about who they are and what they do.
| klyrs wrote:
| There is no difference between a "publisher" and a "platform"
| under section 230.
| Karunamon wrote:
| We're talking about amending section 230. Maybe there
| should be.
| dang wrote:
| Url changed from https://popehat.substack.com/p/section-230-is-
| the-subject-of..., which points to this and a bunch of other
| articles, and doesn't add much otherwise (other than Popehat-
| style snark).
|
| If one of the other URLs is a better fit, we can change it again.
| revnode wrote:
| Isn't this an example of what we're talking about? Even if this
| change is objectively better, there were many comments posted
| here with the original URL as the intended target and now their
| comments are directed at a different URL, all done without
| their explicit consent?
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