> “No longer are tech companies the underdog upstarts. They have become titans,” Barr said at a public meeting held by the Justice Department to examine the future of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
> “Given this changing technological landscape, valid questions have been raised about whether Section 230’s broad immunity is necessary at least in its current form,” he said.
...all I can think of is “well, here comes the state-sponsored moat.”
If they weaken these protections, the big four will just hire a few more entire buildings of minimum wage content moderators (like most of them already have running) and it’s curtains for small entrants.
It makes me really sad to see the US thinking about shooting its only real growth industry in the foot.
Edit:
> while a few Democratic leaders have said the law allows the services to escape punishment for harboring misinformation and extremist content.
It’s also terrifying to think that parts of our government want to explicitly punish people for hosting legal content that they don’t like to read.
My big Q is what problem they are trying to solve here. As a not entirely impartial observer, it seems like what's actually happening is that Barr wants a way to punish tech companies for declining to broadcast certain far right voices. Like, does anyone actually believe the world is going to be a better place because these companies have to defend themselves against an infinite stream of proxy libel and tort lawsuits? Is user generated content viable at all in a world where the hosting provider takes on liability? Could this site exist in a world where these rules are implemented fairly?
Well, it’s not just far right stuff they’re censoring in bulk, so in a weird way I can see where he’s coming from.
For example, YouTube has been taking down legal instructional gunsmithing videos (one of my hobbies) because guns. Other things that scare people but aren’t associated with a US political axis position, like the lockpicking lawyer, stay up.
They are absolutely editorializing (see also: Apple’s squirt gun emoji, which I would find unconscionable even if I weren’t a firearms enthusiast because I am an accurate communications enthusiast first and foremost) and their behavior needs to change before it hurts our society even more.
My friend, for example, lost a meme page he ran on Facebook with hundreds of thousands of readers for posting a male nipple (the man was wearing makeup). The censorship is not just political. They are burning books and destroying value: art, teaching, literature. It’s not okay.
I just don’t think this is the right approach to it.
Censorship on Facebook and YouTube also goes beyond simply removing content.
If the almighty algorithm decides your stuff shouldn't be seen, it won't appear in peoples feeds, drastically reducing your reach. That's another huge problem.
I am not a gun enthusiast like the grandparent commenter. However, the toy gun emoji is an act of editorialization and politicization. Apple (and some others) took an emoji that had a particular intent and changed it to something else, to better suit their ideological views.
The harm is that it disallows citizens from expressing themselves precisely and accurately. It makes it harder to send communication involving guns (for example reacting to a comment with a gun emoji) and it sends guns to a less visible medium (full text). This change is a political stance on guns and therefore editorialization, since it diminishes the opinions of those who back the 2nd amendment. Likewise, taking a hotly debated politicized topic like transgender people, and adding gender neutral emojis, is also editorialization. And likewise, Apple fighting back to prevent a rifle emoji (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/20/apple-rif...) is editorialization.
I’m talking about censorship of legal content. These companies serve as sort of a web host, but also an application service provider.
I have friends and acquaintances who have worked hard to build audiences, and then these platforms took that away from them via censorship. Of course, you can make the argument that it was really Facebook’s audience the whole time, but that ignores the content being generated by my friends which drove the whole thing.
Useful instructional videos and webpages I liked watching/reading and wanted to revisit had been deleted in the intervening time.
It’s destroying value, because these sites function as content-neutral hosting... until suddenly they don’t one day as the censorship hammer comes down. I have been telling people to start hosting on their own domains instead. This is the only way we can disintermediate our audience we work so hard to build.
The gun emoji one is more subtle. Emoji are, recall, plain text. Changing the rendering of plain text to alter its meaning is really, really bad. Here’s an example scenario as to why such ambiguity is harmful:
Imagine you’re a parent. It’s summer, and it’s hot. You have a squirt gun battle with your child. The next morning, you take them to school. (You’re a parent in the southern hemisphere, probably.)
An hour later you get a text from them: johnny brought a (gun emoji) to school
The rendering of this image is platform-specific. Their message is either harmless context-referencing fun, or cause for the most major of alarm. Which is it?
Depending on the sender’s device, they could be indicating a toy gun or a real one. Depending on the receiver’s device, it could render the same or differently.
Regardless of how you feel about weapons, surely you can recognize that introducing that communications ambiguity introduces a safety issue because it just impaired communications.
Now realize that they did so as a political statement.
That’s not okay, any more than changing the rendering of any other letter of plain text. I really, really do not want my text handling and rendering systems editorializing to me. Ever.
In case people think that your "text message with gun emoji" hypothetical is too contrived, it is worth remembering that software systems making assumptions about how to render characters, even with the most innocent of intentions, can occasionally result in disastrously unintended consequences:
User-generated content can be viable if the users host/publish it themselves. That's usually the response when tech companies boot pages or accounts (ie. private companies exercising their rights)
Maybe we should just get rid of liability for authors and publishers, then, also?
It's fair to ask how big of a problem libel is. It's hardly enforced now, anyway. False accusations fly, with no consequences. Reporters at major outlets repeat accusations with no evidence ("sources say that ... did ...").
The reason to connect liabilities to publishers is that publishers have the ability to respond to those incentives. This is not like UGC websites. UGC websites can't practically respond to content liability proactively in their current economic model, since the marginal unit of content has such low value but imposes such high risk.
Therefore, if we tried to connect liability to the UGC business, the semi-democratized form it currently has would have to die. Instead, you'd have a situation much more like the broadcast model where producers and content would need to be vetted beforehand. Small-time producers without much economic value would not be permitted onto UGC sites because the risk of liability would outweigh the benefits of hosting.
(I don't see YouTube going in the direction of 8chan. It would be too damaging to the brand. So the idea that there should be no moderation is right out the window.)
That's the reason why these provisions exist: without them, the businesses cannot exist. Now if you think it's a problem that teens and mommy bloggers and small time streamers can upload home movies to YouTube, you might applaud this result. But personally I don't think there's a problem with that segment existing on UGC sites, so I think it's a terrible idea to connect liability to UGC sites.
> sad to see the US thinking about shooting its only real growth industry in the foot.
It appears you are not from the US. Can you elaborate more on your perspective on why you think this to be the case? I am genuinely curious. (Just for full disclosure, the top 10 industries experiencing large growth at the moment are mostly related to construction or engineering in the traditional sense, not much hyper growth coming from web apps these days)
I was born in the US, and I spend about half each year there.
I think it is tradition in the US that whenever there is a new market or opportunity, to both celebrate the early entrants (in the case of tech, the persistent “two founders in a suburban garage” meme) and then also ignore the fact that it’s routine to make it as difficult as possible to replicate the conditions that lead to new companies or new people having wealth creation opportunities. I’ve heard it described as “pulling the ladder up behind you”.
A lot of people play the game as if it’s zero-sum.
It could also just be that I’m somewhat bitter because I have about five great ideas for companies that would make the world markedly better and more useful, and they have all recently been made either de facto or de jure illegal.
I hate that we’re almost always stuck with large incumbents who rent-seek based on their position, or seek for the government to make it harder/illegal for others to use the same general wealth-creation methods that they did.
Witnessing that level of selfishness hurts my soul, especially leveled against those who are most able and willing to build new businesses, cool products and services, and jobs.
FAANG will need to decide if they're platforms or publishers. They currently moderate the communities, albeit selectively, while enjoying the protections granted by being a platform. This can lead to abuse of power where only select viewpoints are moderated out because unaccountable corporate leadership says so.
It's correct to be thinking about this, notwithstanding the fact that I place little faith in the federal government to produce the correct outcome.
I think they have to move to purely mechanical moderation. It's the only way. Keyword and user reporting. Everything else is a mess politically (and that will end up being a political mess).
That has never worked, and never will work. Keywords are meaningless without understanding the surrounding context. User reporting fails when activist users engage in brigading to flag posts that they don't like even when those posts don't violate any laws or terms of service.
I imagine Netflix considers themselves a publisher, Amazon is the most interesting test case imo- with both their content and physical goods marketplace.
Let’s be clear. The “conservative” voices that have been moderated out not because of the PC police, but because of obvious reasons that violate ToS (spreading racism, inciting violence, etc). Look over [1] and show me this consistent “abuse of power”.
I don’t work for twitter so I can’t speak for them. Trump is still on twitter saying all kinds of horrible things, and I can only presume many others are as well. I’m not sure what triggers crossing a line, but I don’t agree with this accusation of some great anti-conservative conspiracy. I see this often in reaction to Alex Jones who spreads all kinds of false lies that have lead to violence.
Note it’s not like there are humans evaluating each and every tweet so it’s going to be inconsistency applied.
I also find it interesting that since posting on HN someone is trying to reset my Facebook account. Talk about censorship...
Google are also taking down educational gunsmithing and hacking videos, and remixes of music videos and music that people have made—fair use.
Reddit has been censoring their less mainstream-friendly BDSM porn subreddits. To appear on most of the site your subreddit has to be whitelisted, now.
It’s not just politics. They are defining broad guidelines of what categories of (legal) things you are allowed to publish or not.
Where did people unearth this "platforms" vs. "publishers" argument from? It looks like a political tool someone with a dark agenda diged out of some dark swampy corner of polytics...
Everything is both!
Of course you'll have more and more proprietary-algos / blackbox-ML/AI-systems filtering content. And of course the content can't be manually reviewed (because SIZE) and you can't have the platform be responsible for it (what does it even mean to "be responsible for content"?!).
It's sad there's not much we can do to regulate away some of the toxic infos (like the "platform vs publisher" meme currently floating around...), but here it's actually a case where doing nothing and stomacking some of the bad consequences is 1000% better that doing something! Because that "something" whatever it may be will limit fundamental freedoms simply by having something exists in this space!
It really seems like this article is a bit off on the reasoning they ascribe to people. The biggest objections I have heard is that Facebook / YouTube / Twitter should now be classed as "publishers" and not "providers" because of the perceived bias in their removal of individuals and content.
That is a clever legal argument. Of course to distinguish a traditional newspaper or publication from social media posts are the editorializing exercised by the tech companies occurs after publication/posting; whereas, traditional media exercises their editorial powers prior to publication.
In practice, say I set up an anonymous social media account and publish false/defamatory statements about myself, then I sue the tech company and john doe (as the poster), what exactly can/could the tech company do to have prevented liability? Seemly they would have to somehow change their systems so posts are reviewed by editors prior to publication to minimize legal risk and potential liability.
That is the type of situation that 230 was meant to stop. It would be impossible to be Twitter, etc. without the protection of 230 and that is why it was created. It carries over from not being able to sue the telephone or telegraph company because someone sent something defamatory about you over their system.
The argument is that the services desire to keep the protections of 230 but act like publishers that are not afforded the same protections.
And you generally know the person who is on both ends. This leads to a sense of history and consequence which is most commonly not available on the internet.
It isn't a legal arguement but a propaganda push. There is no publisher/platform duality. The concept is pure unadultered bullshit. There is no legal precedent for that concept but a later invention.
This is not pointed out nearly enough.
Do you also object to HN moderation? Why should dang be allowed to ban people but not twitter? Do you think dang should accept legal liability for everything people post on HN?
It's good to ask those questions, of course small companies are affected too.
But, for example, if Dang selectively removed posts such that the remaining posts slandered someone in a way that none of the individual posters intended, I believe Dang would be the only one in the chain liable for the resulting slander, not the posters. But under current law, Dang has protection under 230, so no one could get charged for the resulting slander
I only object that they get both the rights of platform and publisher. they are free to moderate however they wish but once they do they should be liable for the content of their platform. No other publishers are not held liable.
Pretty much every forum, reddit and social media network goes away including HN in that case, the only way any of it works is because they have it both ways.
Alternately there would be open forums and corporate forums and they would be very different. But tech companies wouldn't own speech and would be liable since they can police their platforms as they demonstrate.
Common carriers (like a telephone company) are content-neutral (unbiased) and have no legal responsibility for what is said. If someone mails you a threatening letter, you can't sue USPS.
Publishers can publish (or decline to publish) whatever they want, but they do have some responsibility for what they say. Libel, copyright infringement, and threats all carry consequences even if the publisher is not the author. Publishers can be as biased as they want.
Is FB a publisher or a common carrier? What about Google? Youtube? Instagram? Twitter?
(The answer is that they are kind of either depending on the exact part of the organization. And they are having it both ways: control without responsibility.)
Here is section 230, the law protecting websites from liability for things published on them by third parties. [0] I do not see anything about a provider needing to be content neutral. In fact, part c2a seems to be explicitly saying the opposite. IANAL. Where does this legal concept of a distinction between a "carrier" and a "publisher" appear?
>Publishers can publish (or decline to publish) whatever they want, but they do have some responsibility for what they say.
It is abjectly insane to label a tweet as something Twitter, the company, is "saying". If we're retooling the law to orient it toward that definition, then the inevitable endgame, after the avalanche of litigation, will be that the concept of posting text on social media or blogging platforms is dead. It kills Web 2.0 in its entirety. It regresses the United States back to the dark ages of a completely one-directional media, where the best you can do as an outsider is to submit a letter to the editor.
Well, by the fact they are allowing some voices and silencing others, largely in one political direction, it would seem they are expressing an opinion indirectly.
I don't think anyone wants Twitter to be responsible for every tweet. What most people want them to do is be more like they used to claim to be "We are the free speech wing of the free speech party"
> It is abjectly insane to label a tweet as something Twitter, the company, is "saying"
If there were a company printing and distributing, to any passing person on the street, fliers with content provided by the company's clients, would they have any legal liability for what their clients put in the fliers? That seems very similar to what Twitter does. Certainly closer than their being treated like a phone company or mail carrier, which they don't much resemble (email provider? Yeah, sure, they do). Perhaps in that situation the printing & distribution company would also have no liability, I don't know.
If I invent a machine that passes out six thousand flyers per second, and allow people to feed text into it at will, then yes, it is insane to describe these as my "speech". I may provide a mechanism for the words to get onto a page, but I have zero agency in the process of thinking them up, drafting them, and enacting their distribution. I am providing a mechanism for others to say things.
However, you would probably say I start to become liable if I erect a giant wall on which all of these flyers are posted, and allow illegal content to remain hanging there even when I'm informed of it and aware it's illegal. This gray area is exactly what Section 230 is designed around.
It's totally unreasonable to expect a platform operator to act as the speaker of a post the moment it is posted. But after becoming aware of a post and the reasons it may be objectionable, they start to gain a sort of post-hoc liability.
If someone prints out child porn, glues it to a yard sign, and plants it on your front lawn, you should probably not be liable for arrest starting that instant. But if, after coming and going and seeing it over and over for a week, you make no efforts to remove it or report it, then you should probably be liable for arrest. This is exactly the logic behind Section 230.
> If I invent a machine that passes out six thousand flyers per second, and allow people to feed text into it at will, then yes, it is insane to describe these as my "speech".
I'm not following how having a machine do the work absolves the owner of responsibility. It seems like the same kind of "normal thing, but with a computer!" that folks in tech circles usually mock when it shows up on patent applications or when someone decides we need a new law to cover something that's already covered by existing laws, simply because now it's with a computer.
If you manage to replace all the components of an ordinary publisher with robots, seems to me the owner of those robots ought to be treated just like an ordinary publisher. Accepting, storing, reproducing, and distributing as broadly as possible (oh and don't forget slapping your own ads on) others' work sure seems like publishing to me.
>I'm not following how having a machine do the work absolves the owner of responsibility. It seems like the same kind of "normal thing, but with a computer!" that folks in tech circles usually mock when it shows up on patent applications or when someone decides we need a new law to cover something that's already covered by existing laws, simply because now it's with a computer.
The fact that it's happening on a computer isn't the important part, and indeed if that were the only difference it would be a ridiculous argument. The important part is that the operator of the machine has never seen the content.
It's unreasonable to be liable for content you aren't aware of, and thankfully the status quo is still that you are not (outside of a few unfortunate cases). Effectively most of the internet couldn't exist if this protection were eliminated. Hacker News might not be able to exist. If you were liable for everything any user might possibly say, regardless of whether or not you notice it, would you run a discussion forum like this? A web host? A messaging app?
Once you're aware of e.g. illegal content, of course you should be liable.
If you designed a machine that passed out six thousand flyers per second, and only allowed certain people to distribute certain messages, you might reasonable be considered liable for the content you've approved.
There's nothing insane about it. Twitter used to be highly supportive of free speech. However they now actively ban users and censor tweets which don't conform to Twitter's ideology. The content they are banning isn't illegal (at least not in the USA), they just don't like it. And the criteria for banning is only vaguely defined and constantly shifting based on the whims of a few employees. Thus any tweets they leave up are implicitly endorsed by Twitter.
Twitter also acts as a publisher by exercising editorial control over if and where tweets actually appear to each user.
Twitter would have a stronger legal and moral argument against further regulation if they acted as a neutral intermediary. For example, they could establish a policy of only removing content if required to do so by law.
Hacker news also bans people merely for being rude, even if they don’t post illegal content. If you have a principled objection to this act you should delete your HN account and leave.
You misunderstand. As a strong supporter of private property rights I have no objection to Y Combinator or Twitter banning users or removing content from their services. But if they're going to exercise that degree of control then for regulation and legal liability purposes they should expect to be treated more like publishers than like common carriers.
Should we be able to sue HN over any comment or post that gets made in this website? Do you not realize that HN would be forced to shut down overnight since the legal liability would be completely untenable? Your legal regime would effectively make internet moderation impossible. It would, without a single trace
of exaggeration, instantly kill almost every single internet community in existence.
> It would, without a single trace of exaggeration, instantly kill almost every single internet community in existence.
Only the ones that act like publishers, curating the content they allow and disallow. The ones that behave more like the telephone or postal system would not have the liability, right?
You're exaggerating. I don't know why you immediately jump to the assumption that any regulatory change would be all or nothing. A more likely political outcome will be some sort of compromise.
For example, Internet services which host user-generated content might be able to retain liability protection only if they also provide some reasonable degree of transparency and accountability. Clearly document their editorial policies and algorithms, and provide a formal appeals process for users who were censored.
Should the person whose content is blocked be able to face their accuser, know precisely what line they crossed over, and have recourse against arbitrary, malicious, incompetent ... moderation? As it now stands, one entity is judge, jury, and executioner, which is a recipe for abuse of power.
No parcel carrier will allow me to mail my cardboard box full of loose fish guts. They turn me away because the box is wet and falling apart and smells terrible. They find the content I want them to ship to be objectionable, and it would negatively affect their ability to provide service to their other customers.
I'm not sure if that is a great analogy for what Twitter et al. are doing in regards to content policing, but there is some kind of argument there.
FB is a publisher because they don't allow everyone on their platform.
Edit:
We try to make Facebook broadly available to everyone, but you cannot use Facebook if:
You are under 13 years old.
You are a convicted sex offender.
We've previously disabled your account for violations of our Terms or Policies.
You are prohibited from receiving our products, services, or software under applicable laws.
They should be allowed to have it both ways. If I run a video game forum, I should be allowed to ban trolls and remove off-topic posts without accepting legal responsibility for any illegal content that gets posted on my forum by third parties without my prior knowledge or consent. Forcing people to choose between being a publisher and being a utility would completely and instantly kill every single internet community dead in its tracks.
I don’t understand how people can post on a heavily moderated forum like HN while demanding that moderation be effectively made illegal. It’s like people hate Facebook and Google so much that they mindlessly get onboard with any form of retaliation against them regardless of the actual consequences.
There should be a line somewhere between curbing abuse, curating content, and promoting ideology. But I personally don’t feel comfortable or qualified to decide where that line should be drawn. There must be some point between USENET and the NYT editorial section where the publisher becomes liable for the content they promote.
FWIW, it doesn't sound insane to me that you should have "legal responsibility for any illegal content that gets posted on my forum by third parties without my prior knowledge or consent." You're the one who chose to set your forum up that way, eh? (We're not talking about hackers defacing your site, yeah?)
As much as I find the idea of "illegal content" galling (I love freedom) I'm not so idealistic that I fail to recognize that freedom of speech cannot be an absolute. ("Fire" in theaters; revealing national security secrets; doxxing; there are limits. I'm glad I'm not on the hot seat when it comes to nailing them down: I don't run open internet forums, for example.)
If you don't have a way to pass that responsibility onto the actual speakers then you must shoulder it yourself, no?
Whether or not current systems can survive that is less important to me than the establishment of formal responsibility for one's speech.
Completely wrong with regard to current US law. First Amendment rights apply to corporations without distinguishing based any attribute. There is no such legal concept as a publisher or a platform. No legal scholar has argued that publisher/platform exists in current law, the academic community speculated it might be nice to change the law to make the distinction and then it gets misreported.
You are correct, publishers don't have a legal requirement to be unbiased, but publishers can be sued. Service Providers cannot be sued for what appears on their service[1]. The argument is that "biased" decisions on what to publish makes them publishers and not service providers.
1) ok, in the US anyone can get sued and there seem to be some specific things people can sue and win on, but that is outside the scope of 230.
This has been my understanding for many years. And so it's ironic how increased moderation to increase marketability brings immunity of service providers under 230 into question.
It's almost like 230 has been a bait and switch ploy. With 230, mega social media corps developed, with nothing else to protect them against liability.
But instead, we could have had decentralized systems that made liability impossible. And if stuff like this goes forward, maybe we can. Someday, anyway.
> This has been my understanding for many years. And so it's ironic how increased moderation to increase marketability brings immunity of service providers under 230 into question.
Especially since allowing providers to increase (automated and best-effort, but not comprehensive human) moderation withour incurring general liability for content was the explicit and overt justification for Section 230, because the kind of complete human editorial control expected of publishers in traditional media was viewed as preventing scalable systems on the internet (where traditional media had other scaling limits that make content liability far from the limiting factor.)
> But instead, we could have had decentralized systems that made liability impossible.
Decentralized systems probably wouldn't have made liability impossible, just ineffective at it's objectives, because no matter how many operators were ruined by liability. the content would still thrive and you'd never hit enough operators.
Do you think many users will be willing to adjust to the complexity and unpredictability of that environment compared to what they experience now? Just because it's mostly way better in terms of issues of freedom and power?
> I don't tend to think tinkering with intermediaries' incentives about content is the thing that will get us there, because there are so many other practical advantages that people have perceived in the more centralized services.
I do understand why loss of §230 protection is dangerous, both directly and as precedent. Threatened intermediaries would just do whatever needed to avoid liability. And incentives for alternatives would likely remain inadequate.
Also, I'm not advocating any "tinkering". I'm just not optimistic about relying long term on legal protection. Even for the US, it's been fragile, and not anywhere near effective enough.
I was just being wistful, speculating that, without §230 protection, we'd have ended up with a system that didn't need such protections. With intermediaries that were totally isolated from content, with absolute anonymity for users. That is what I was imagining in the mid 90s.
I can imagine more or less centralized services that could handle content which was otherwise end-to-end encrypted and anonymized. And could make money doing it, as VPN providers get paid by Orchid users via an Etherium-based currency.
Users would have the tools to filter what they see. But nothing could be removed, and nobody could be prosecuted (or persecuted).
How we might get there from current social media, I have no clue.
So sites would not incur liability unless they are directly selling access to the published content? I could agree with that, assuming there were any merit to the concept of "illegal content" in the first place. Which, of course, would run directly counter to the 1st Amendment, freedom of speech, and proportionality.
Yes absolutely. They exercise editorial control even if they attempt to disguise it behind “algorithms”. Everything posted on Facebook should be treated as if it was a newspaper article, for all legal purposes.
Yeah, easy yes from me too. "Oh but we won't be able to make a business out of exploiting user data and exposing hundreds of low-paid workers to psychologically damaging material anymore" right, yes, exactly, that's the point.
If they're treated like any other publisher, probably having that many workers manually vetting everything won't be viable. Which is fine, because it shouldn't be. It confuses me how every time we have one of those posts about how horrible that work is for the people doing it, most posters kinda throw up their hands and go "well whatcha gonna do" when the obvious answer is... simply not do it? If your business requires that, the easy answer to how to not cause that harm is to not have the business.
If the survival of their company depended on it, they would absolutely figure out a way to pre-moderate content, and almost certainly that would include significantly more low-paid moderators.
They had something like $18 billion dollars in profit last year, you don't think they could afford to hire an army of moderators?
I reckon they can afford 150,000-200,000 more moderators, moderator-managers, workers on and managers of tools for same, et c. before that profit margin starts getting mighty thin. Is that enough? I don't know, maybe it is. How long before profit hit zero would investing in Facebook start to be considered a poor use of capital, since that's the actual tipping point? Also not sure.
Then maybe you should propose and support a law that addresses that very point instead of taking a hammer to it and completely breaking any Internet forum out there, especially those that won't have the money and size to afford to deal with this.
Rather, it seems there may be room for a law to carve out an exception for those, rather than also including a bunch of things that clearly are publishing in the exception.
Meanwhile, what about mailing lists? "But those aren't (necessarily) public! What if we want to put our proceedings on a web site?" Well, luckily there's precedent for that, and the word you're looking for rather than "put" is "publish", and you can absolutely do that, but, naturally, it's publishing, just like if you were to publish a private physical mail mailing list.
Either physical publishing needs to get the same protections certain kinds of web publishing have now, or we need to rethink what we've done with web publishing. Unless there's reason to believe we don't need those laws around traditional publishing anymore, the latter seems like the better idea to me.
So any Internet forum which has to moderate content (because there is illegal content for which the law doesn't provide immunity from) is a publisher now and has to be able to fully vet everything everyone posts?
Employees produce content/products/sales/projects for the Company.
Social media users create the content that give value to social networks, thus social media users are, in a way, employees of the company. The Company has the requirements of limiting and being liable for the content that exists on their platform.
> escape punishment for harboring misinformation and extremist content
its so bananas that statements like this are glossed over and unqualified. this is not a solved problem, and its not even being treated like its a problem at all.
this perception that there are a set of correct facts and incorrect facts is just so meaingless. what does it even mean to be true? $Person is on $Video saying $Statement. True or false? Well, it depends. It ALWAYS depends. are you asking if $Video.Words = $Statement.Words? almost never. You are not investigating $Video.Soundwaves and $Person.VocalCords, you are making a case for $Person.Beliefs. What if $Person.Beliefs @ $Video.TimeStamp != $Person.Beliefs @ $Today? Is it true but meaningless, or are you trying to imply conclusions contextually - but guess what, different people interpret the same context differently!
an example suitable for HN is talking about security. Is your company secure? You cant answer the question because _the question is bad_. the answer to security is ALWAYS it depends. Are you talking about physically secure against a wandering drunk trying to pee on your server, or physically secure against a disgruntled employee building a killdozer and driving through your building? Are you talking about secure from some kid who finds LOIC and tries to DoS you or from a long term campaign from a nation-state APT? The discussion _requires_ framing, and so does discussing "misinformation and extremist content"
Sure, there's no black or white answer to what is misinformation or extreemist. But regulation and the courts aren't black and white. We regulate the content of broadcast media just fine without hand-wringing about the grey areas.
Compared to internet UGC, the flow of new content into broadcast media minuscule. According to a random Google search, three hundred hours of new video are added to YouTube each minute. It's unlikely that much new broadcast media is created each hour. And YouTube is just one of many sites. It wouldn't surprise me at all to find that UGC is created at a rate of more than 1000x that of broadcast media. That difference in scale, and the difference in economic value per unit of content, makes a solved problem in one medium an tricky challenge in the other.
I agree with you. But it is encouraging that there are adults in the room:
> Kate Klonick, a law professor at St. John’s University in New York, urged caution.
> “This is a massive norm-setting period,” she said, with any alterations to one of the internet’s key legal frameworks likely to draw unexpected consequences. “It’s hard to know exactly what the ramifications might be.”
> his perception that there are a set of correct facts and incorrect facts is just so meaingless
Yes, there are facts. In your example, if I say "person X said Y" and have a video of them saying it, I am stating a fact. I am not dealing in beliefs and I don't give a fuck whether or not the person still supports the statements they made or not. I am saying that at some point in time T, person X said Y and this fact is on record.
There is still the challenge of the context of "person X said Y" Were they saying it sarcastically? Were they quoting someone else? Does Y include the content said before or after? That can meaningfully change the "fact"
On the extreme end, a video can be totally fake. Slightly less extreme, a video might be "fake" in that it's an actor playing a role, and the words they're saying belong to the character and not the actor. More commonly, a video might be taken out of context, so that the apparent meaning of a statement in isolation is the opposite of what it originally meant. (Compare "I hate group X" to "I think people who say 'I hate group X' are jerks.") Modern politics is effectively a distributed indexing system for exactly these most ambiguous cases, coupled with large media apparatuses for broadcasting them.
And these are the problems with the simplest sort of fact, "A said B." That's not even the majority of misinformation out there. We usually have to contend with even worse ambiguities, like whether A "caused" B, or whether A "supported" B, or whether A "criticized" B.
In everyday life of course, these problems are solvable. We find ways to punish people for acting in bad faith, and the incentives mostly line up. But that is very much not how things work in politics or in law. People have large incentives to seek out ambiguous cases. These edge cases become the typical case.
Sure. And either you can prove it or not. But that is not what I am arguing against. The way things seem to be working today, is that you say "person X cures cancer" and I say "person X eats babies", neither one of us has any proof whatsoever, but that is OK because nobody ever asks for proof because "hey, there is no such thing as facts anymore"
That's fair. It's definitely possible to go too far with this. I guess what I want to argue is more like this: The problem here is sufficiently hard that, even though we can make definitive judgments about facts and misinformation in some cases, the value of doing so in practice will be low. But of course that's a pretty vague blanket statement that I'm making without any concrete support, and it would probably be better to look at the pros and cons of some specific idea about what the rules should be.
> Yes, there are facts. In your example, if I say "person X said Y" and have a video of them saying it, I am stating a fact. I am not dealing in beliefs and I don't give a fuck whether or not the person still supports the statements they made or not. I am saying that at some point in time T, person X said Y and this fact is on record.
There are clearly facts. But people don't spend a lot of time arguing over whether "person X said Y". Rather, we argue over the meaning of Y and the context in which it was said.
Political discourse has almost nothing to do with facts. That's just an observation, not necessarily a criticism.
You are correct, there are literal truths. Some person factually used some set of words in a particular order. The part that people care about is how we interpret those words. It being fact does not make the implication incorrect.
In an extreme example, if someone says "There are extremists in the world, and I am not going to be one of them", I can quote that as "There are extremists in the world, and I am ... one of them", which is factually true, that is a portion of what was said. The interpretation is the polar opposite, but it is factually true.
Likewise, there are facts that are misleading, but true. "The Earth is at the center of our solar system". It's a perfectly valid statement; the rotation of planets can be modeled where the Earth is at a fixed point and the other planets moved around it. It's messy, and the movements look extremely erratic, but it's perfectly valid to be modeled that way.
There are also facts that are true, given a set of circumstances. "I weigh 7 pounds". It's not true on Earth, but in the correct gravitational field, I do weigh 7 pounds. Determining whether that statement is true depends on the implication; was I implying that it is true on Earth or not? That depends on the context of that statement, and on how you interpret the context.
> In an extreme example, if someone says "There are extremists in the world, and I am not going to be one of them", I can quote that as "There are extremists in the world, and I am ... one of them", which is factually true, that is a portion of what was said. The interpretation is the polar opposite, but it is factually true.
Not so extreme considering this kind of editing is basically what led to Count Dankula's court case and conviction.
> Why is it wrong to say explicitly offensive things
Because they are offensive
> and why should someone be legally punished for it
Because that is what legal systems are for. Punishing people who do things we, as a society, find objectionable
> Who gets to decide what is and isn't offensive and to what degree?
That is a rather general question, but generally speaking, the law makers and the legal system decide things like that.
Now, mind you, personally, I support a rather radical version of freedom of expression. I think almost every kind of censorship is ultimately detrimental to society, but I am not naive enough to ask "but who gets to decide" or "but why cannot I"
It wasn't satire; sharing and reporting on it removed the joke context, leading some people to infer satire and others to infer he actually held nazi beliefs.
The original video started with him saying something like "my girlfriend thinks her pug is the cutest thing in the world, so I'm going to turn it into the worst thing I can think of".
You might be saying "they said this", but what your audience reads is "this is true".
To take a recent example:
"A renowned firefighter says that bushfires have mostly been caused by arsonists, exacerbated by conservationists protesting harm reduction burns, resulting in an exceptional fire season this year."
"A renowned firefighter says that climate change has reduced the safe period to perform harm reduction burns, and has contributed to drought conditions, resulting in an exceptional fire season this year."
These are both facts. But which one you report on will give your audience an entirely differently picture of the situation.
> Yes, there are facts. In your example, if I say "person X said Y" and have a video of them saying it, I am stating a fact.
assuming you actually do this - which i dont believe you do but will accept for argument's sake - it is entirely meaningless. mouth-sounds are not important in and of themselves; you hear the mouth-sounds and interpret them to try and guess how that person will act in the future. you are building a predictive model of that person.
lets say there is a video of a politician (clumsily) saying "i am a rapist hater. i will increase the punishment to try and dissuade these awful crimes and make all our lives safer". You argue it is a true fact that politician is on video saying "i am a rapist". My point is that "true" in this sense is nonsense, and furthermore "true" in any absolute sense is always nonsense.
if your head is a list of quotes people have said that simply don't feed into your impression of them, then you are in a minority so small its effectively 0 on a global scale.
You are willfully conflating abstract concepts with known and provable facts. Whether you are doing this due to ignorance or malice, stop it.
"Is your company secure?" has no factual answer, as you state.
"LIBRULZ KILL AND EAT BABIES ON COURTHOUSE STEPS WHILE THE JESUS CRIES" Well... that's pretty damn easy to fact check. Oh, wait, there was nobody on the courthouse steps eating babies? Well shit, I guess that's a LIE.
Determining truth from lies is hard, that's true. Doesn't mean we should accept blatant lies and ignore sound truths. That's the problem with "conservative" politics in general.
> his perception that there are a set of correct facts and incorrect facts is just so meaingless.
While there are large grey areas in the middle where subject opinion, context, and fuzzy word definitions make truth values complicated, there are also some very clear black and white areas for blatantly false concrete claims are being made and spread that have no basis in reality. I think there are ways to regulate and pushing blatant disinformation while leaving the greyer borders up to individual discretion and discernment.
Perhaps. But who gets to decide which side of the line any given statement is on? Imagine, for example, that the person appointed to decide that is an anti-vaxxer. Or that they just left a gig at Monsanto/Bayer, and feel like all claims that Roundup/glyphosate might cause some harm to someone are blatantly false. Or the person appointed was a Democratic activist. Or a Republican activist. Pick your poison. And now this person is given the power to decide which claims are blatantly false, as opposed to grey.
While there are claims that are black and white, and claims that are grey, empowering someone to enforce that clearly-false claims cannot be published is going to bite you, because that person is going to have their own perspectives, biases, and (probably) agenda. It takes something close to a saint to not inflict their own agenda, and saints are in short supply.
> Perhaps. But who gets to decide which side of the line any given statement is on?
Umm... we have an existing legal system already does this. It certainly isn't perfect, but your argument seems to boil down to: we don't have a perfect legal system, so we shouldn't have any laws.
I don't see any reason why we can't have laws that make it illegal to run around and hand out pamphlets that deliberately misinform people about if / when they can vote.
> Roundup/glyphosate might cause some harm to someone
You seem to be using an inherently grey claim to make your point. Of course glyphosate might cause harm to someone, there is almost literally nothing that has no possibility to cause harm to someone. This is exactly the sort of claim whose truth value depends on the context and meaning with which you interpret it.
This is different from a claim like "I have a bachelor's degree from UC Davis" or "You cannot vote without a drivers license"
That is not at all what my argument boils down to. My argument boils down to this: Having some anointed authority that gets to decide such things without having to follow the due process of the court system is a dangerous thing.
The point about glyphosate et al is this: Sure, those are definitely grey. But the authority could claim that they are black and white at his own discretion. If he decides against you, you then have to go to court, with the default decision being against you, in order to be able to be heard.
Several posts upthread, you said: "I think there are ways to regulate and pushing blatant disinformation while leaving the greyer borders up to individual discretion and discernment." So, who gets to regulate? That's your authority that is "other than the courts".
> The discussion _requires_ framing, and so does discussing "misinformation and extremist content"
The framing is usually implied instead of spelled out precisely. At the same time, I don't see you arguing against this (probably shitty) implied framing and instead just pretending there is none. This makes it hard for me to take seriously, since it looks so similar to the "there is no perfect security so why even try" line of arguing.
And yes, my alarm bells also went off by AG Barr talking about "misinformation and extremist content", even though I actually do think we should carefully observe whether current online platforms / communication changes our societies and if in a favorable way.
> since it looks so similar to the "there is no perfect security so why even try" line of arguing.
What does "misinformation and extremist content" mean? Because that is the first point. Remember that the GOP called out large companies for "silencing the right" when they enacted policies that reduced misinformation and extremist content in the past. "Misinformation and extremist content" is thus itself an illdefined thing as different people consider different things to fall under it.
The framing usually used is that "if the big companies are liable the content won't be there" which history has shown is only true in so far as "if the big companies are liable user made content won't be there" effectively as huge restrictive filters need to be put in place to avoid the liability.
> even though I actually do think we should carefully observe whether current online platforms / communication changes our societies and if in a favorable way
Feel free to talk about it, you are not trying to enact policy. AG Barr is involved in creating policy and thus should be careful about exactly what he suggests rather than invoking the same liability boogieman that hasn't served us in the past.
It's clearly a complex legal issue, but is there any logical reason why the internet should be treated differently from print and broadcast media in that regard?
The only reasons I've heard are related to how -current- internet content providers' business models work. Those companies' business models are heavily enabled by the CDA itself, so isn't it sort of begging the question?
Huh? Are you saying Google and Facebook don't exercise editorial control? They definitely do, and the whole point of Section 230 is to give these companies editorial control without the legal liability that goes with it.
If I'm publishing a newspaper, I decide which articles run and which ones don't. I decide on every article. I decide on every editorial. I decide on every letter to the editor. So, I'm responsible for every word.
Is Facebook responsible for every word of every Facebook post? Have they decided whether to publish it or not? No. (Yes, they do have certain filters that try to exclude certain things, but that's all. A newspaper would be different if it published every letter to the editor it received, so long as it didn't contain the words "child porn", for example.)
I should have realized this in my first reply, but your argument is exactly what I mean by begging the question.
Facebook and Google occupy a legal grey area between publisher and common carrier that was literally created by the CDA. So your argument is like saying, "Vaping has to be legal because how else is Juul going to stay in business?", or "Loot boxes have to be legal because they're so important to EA's and Activision's business model." These companies only exist because of a certain legal environment, so how can their existence be used to justify that same environment? Are Google and Facebook now considered inalienable human rights used to derive laws?
Maybe Google and Facebook would be able to survive a change to the CDA, or maybe not. Who cares? The internet ran just fine before the CDA and the technology hasn't really changed much at all. Heck, the two of us are conversing right now without Google and Facebook involved.
Everyone gets so bent out of shape these days about Google and Facebook but no one is willing to even imagine an internet without them. Present company excluded, of course -- at this point I'm just ranting.
> A newspaper would be different if it published every letter to the editor it received, so long as it didn't contain the words "child porn", for example.
This is not true. It has nothing to do with the choices of the editor and everything to do with the medium used. The CDA carves out a specific immunity for internet companies that does not apply to print and broadcast media and that's what Barr is putting on the table here.
I was thinking more about it and the Juul/EA comparisons aren't quite right. A better comparison would be saying in 2006, "of course Glass-Steagall should have been repealed, because how else would these huge banks be possible?" That's another case where the business model was truly enabled by a legislation change like Google's and Facebook's models were enabled by the CDA.
I think the problem of determining whether a company is secure, given a particular attacker, is one that needs to be worked on.
Unfortunately I haven't made any progress in discovering a solution that would accurately determine if a company is secure or not.
Given that an org's security team, or even the world (in case of zero days), may not be aware of vulnerabilities that exist in a company's infrastructure, how do you solve this problem?
If anyone wants to chat about this, I'm at veeralpatel4@gmail.com
While I'm sympathetic to your point, sometimes appeals to complexity like this are asinine. There are plenty of complex problems which yield, to at least a degree, to effort.
Historically cultures have modulated themselves in a variety of ways, including censorship of objectionable speech. Even the United States has maintained, in the past, sweeping norms which controlled what kind of rhetoric entered the public sphere. No one would suggest that these norms were always well applied, coherent, good. But its equally challenging to make the case that because of that ambiguity we should simply do nothing at all.
The ability of companies like Youtube or Facebook to shift culture is probably real and thus probably demands a response, imperfect as it may be.
The protections designed for phone companies, etc., make perfect sense: the phone company is just facilitating communication in a content-neutral way. Phone companies should not be responsible for knowing or caring what content is shared, even if it's some kind of slander or treasonous plot being discussed.
But does that apply to web platforms that aren't content-neutral? I think probably not. There is such a huge volume of communication that they should have some protections built in, but not blanket protection.
> Phone companies should not be responsible for knowing or caring what content is shared, even if it's some kind of slander or treasonous plot being discussed.
What if they influenced the content that each side hears, e.g. add strategic gaps where they leave out key noises, to make the phone call go on for the maximum amount of time (because they charge by second)?
Will every post need to be pre-moderated to ensure that nothing objectionable is published? I wonder how this would affect sites like Hacker News and Reddit, or any forum sites really.
I don't think the big tech companies should get blanket common carrier protections because they aren't common carriers. They have knowledge and control over content, and therefore should be responsible for it to some degree.
But that doesn't mean they should have no protections or that thry should be treated like a book publisher. There can be some reasonable processes amd limits of liability in place.
That all sounds nice but what does it mean? What knowledge do they have that common carriers don’t? Responsible for what to what degree? What is a reasonable process and what does that look like?
These kinds of generalities and hand waving doesn’t really get us very far.
Are you suggesting that there should be a size requirement before a site has to pre-moderate their UGC? What metric would you use? Revenue? Taxable Income? Impressions? Volume of UGC? # of employees?
If there's a blanket repeal of liability protection for UGC, it's going to have a much larger impact on smaller forums.
It says there is no need for an arguement because there is nothing to justify it.
"Should it be legal for the government to kill and harvest the organs of underperforming schoolchildren?".
"No. Full stop." Is a stance that there is nothing to even argue.
The question I have for people who advocate for "platform liability" is, at what size should they become liable for user generated content? Facebook & Google definitely seem big enough to most people, and maybe Twitter & Reddit. But what about Y Combinator?
Liability should not be black-and-white. HN has a process for flagging and burying content, and they employ moderators. If some kind of libel is buried in a greyed-out user comment or a flagged post, then no harm. If the libel sits on the front page in the title of a post for two days, there's a real issue there.
It's interesting that you mention HN, because it's basically not a problem here.
That kind of goes to my question though. It seems that people are suggesting that by offering a process to flag & bury content and by employing moderators, HN becomes a publisher and therefore should be liable for our posts.
I could easily post a libelous but interesting comment here that I'm sure that no moderator or no HN user would recognize as libelous, so it isn't going to get buried.
I don't think it's a good precedence to make companies liable for the posts of users. I do think it's reasonable to examine the ways Google and Facebook profit off of extremist views and surface extremist views algorithmically.
As soon as Google and Facebook moved to having an opinionated queue of content (Youtube's suggested videos and Facebooks timeline) based on things like engagement, I could see the argument made that they have both ceased being mere conduits of information and became publishers themselves.
I don't know how Barr expects to have a civil discussion about any topic in the midst of what he did with the Roger Stone prosecution, and in the midst of this presidency.
The public and his own Justice Department cannot have a reasonable discussion with him, when his behavior and actions up to this point have almost all appeared to be for one purpose - to help the President and his supporters in criminal issues.
The question we all find ourselves asking is: "So how is this going to benefit the President at everyone else's expense?" and even if it doesn't benefit him, it colors the entire discussion in a bad light.
There’s such a thing as professional compartmentalization. If you don’t like a colleague‘s/vendor’s/customer’s/government’s behavior you can(but not necessarily should) quarrel about that and that only, when you start to act as if a slight(however large you perceive it to be) is enough to blockade all relations in everything you do together, the initiator looks weak. A decision to halt all relations has far reaching impacts, if you are a business it almost always effects your employees and could easily effect your customers. If you are a government it effects both country’s citizens and possibly others as well. If it is between colleagues it effects everyone below you.
In the case of Barr or Trump, we are talking about effectively shuttering government progress/modernization. What does this serve? We don’t get these months/years back, the beat of progress marches on regardless. It’s unreasonable to think that we are just a few years away from a sweeping blue tide of progressives(or a red tide of conservatives under Obama) that are going to have the whole of congress on their side to make huge reforms, or whatever it is that would make the USG quickly modernize. Our system of governance stalls with sort of behavior, and it only really serves entrenched interests, if anyone.
So don't end the discussion. What I said is still true, the discussion is colored in a bad light because of his behavior.
In that light, it is impossible to think about the issue objectively, without legitimately worrying about what Barr in particular going to do with it. It's not hard to imagine how he can abuse new powers over Facebook and Google to benefit Trump in the 2020 election.
If he's already selectively applying criminal justice against opponents and not allies, do you think he'll apply fair and objective justice against Facebook and Google?
His actions call into question all his professional judgment, that's not compartmentalizable.
Considering the gravity of this issue, reasonable people can conclude that we'd be better off "wasting" these years and months and to return to the idea later when someone with more judicial independence is in the position.
His department is recommending a multi year sentence for one of the president’s closest allies, while declining to even prosecute some of the president’s adversaries (Comey, McCabe) for a similar offense. Not sure exactly what you want from Barr here.
Since Facebook and Google shape the information that is seen using a proprietary algorithm, they have become publishers. Perhaps if their algorithm's were open and available, they may have an argument in their defense.
Until then, it is entirely possible they are shaping a narrative based on whatever model they want.
I don't buy the argument made by Barr that the scale of the platform reaches a point that it therefore requires regulation. This seems to be a simple money grab where large tech companies need to tithe to lawmakers.
They want to shape the content and do whatever curation or editorializing via human or algorithmic means, yet be seen an an open forum of user-generated content. Have it and eat it too scenario.
Not to mention adding paid content that blends in in a way that is indistinguishable from user submissions. This further complicates the intentions of the platform.
Yes, they most definitely want the cake and eat it too but there are lots of good arguments to make for that, arguments that have nothing to do with sustaining the business model of multi-billion dollar Internet companies.
The Trump administration complaining about "harboring misinformatioN". The ironing [sic] is delicious [1].
There is no universal objective truth. Specifically there are things that reasonable people can disagree about and the same set of facts can be used to argue different positions. This fact is abused by the mentally challenged to argue ridiculous positions (eg anti-vaxxers, the Moon landings are fake, that sort of thing).
Likewise, as seen here, one side will argue those who disagree are engaging is misinformation (and in the Trump administration's case, from the President down there are multiple claims per day that are demonstrably false such that no one can really keep up). The agenda is to silence the opposition and undermine confidence in any sort of news.
ISPs were given safe harbor from liability for traffic on their network, for good reason. They just need to comply with certain standards. Tech companies really are no different and to argue otherwise would set an incredibly dangerous precedent (IMHO).
>with any alterations to one of the internet’s key legal frameworks likely to draw unexpected consequences. “It’s hard to know exactly what the ramifications might be.”
Since there is no direct bridge to the digital money, power and influence, analog types will wreck the whole thing trying to implement legislation to give them any kind of foothold on all of that easy profit.
The lack of influence/sway will eventually drive the traditional powers to contrive the shortest-term solutions to destabilize the ecosystem. Its more than a "war of words" at play.
This is such a disingenuous framing from the AG as well from media outlets who keep misrepresenting section 230.
That law isn't about protecting Facebook or Google it's about ensuring that anyone can express themselves online without needing a highly paid lawyer and a protracted trial to do so.
It also isn't about publisher vs. platform, section 230 protects the Times from being sued for comments on their website same as for any bigger or smaller operation.
It's tragic how the powers that be in this country are trying to insert a lawyer into every transaction like it's a jobs program, and the infuriating part is that they are trying to convince people that it's for their own benefit.
The cynic in me says this is intentional. The more control over facts there are from any source the more limits there are in general to the spread of information and general discourse. From the governments perspective this is probably desired.
> That law isn't about protecting Facebook or Google it's about ensuring that anyone can express themselves online without needing a highly paid lawyer and a protracted trial to do so.
If you post something defamatory on Facebook, you can be sued, but under Section 230 Facebook cannot. I happen to think that's a good arrangement, but it's definitely about "protecting Facebook or Google," and not about protecting the individuals "express[ing] themselves online."
If Facebook were liable they wouldn't allow the posting or even the possibility of posting in the first place, the law protects individual rights by keeping the liability onus on the author as opposed to the "publisher".
I think a couple big concepts are being conflated. There are a couple really important questions:
1. Should Google, Facebook, etc. be responsible for user generated content hosted on their websites (i.e., should they not be treated as “public square”)?
2. Should the government have any hand in telling any company or any person what they can or cannot say, as long as they are not making threats or publishing illegal materials?
I am of the personal opinion that most (all?) of the major tech companies have engaged in censorship and even politically driven enforcement of their content policies, and therefore should have lost their “public square” status a long time ago, making them responsible for illegal content posted by their users.
Pertaining the second question, there simply is no question; the government does not and should never have any authority here, because the Constitution protects free speech, regardless of what kind of Ministry of Truth they would like to implement.
I think question 1 should really be: should Google, Facebook, etc, be responsible for the user generated content that they algorithmically focus presentation on? It’s one thing to have, say, an early 2000’s forum where users search for and consume information. It’s another to ignore timelines and present content that will likely generate the most engagement. The latter to me is editorialization of the content.
Tech, Aviation and Agriculture are some of the areas where Americans are the world leaders by far and yet the American government is totally set to hurt these very industries (we'' break the evil google) and so on.
The Section 230 saga just shows how dangerous it is for the government to interfere in industry.
The CDA was passed when people were scared of the internet and looked to government to protect them from its evils. Section 230 was added to save "the little guy" from becoming collateral damage of this legislation.
Fast forward 30 years and these "little guys" have grown into the scary forces that everyone wants the government to protect them from!
Imagine if ordinary people had been allowed to sue Google and Facebook over this time. There's good reason to think that no one would have been able to monetize the internet in such a way as Google, Facebook, etc. if not for Section 230.
I don't think anyone in Congress is interested in repealing Section 230 but I'm glad people in Washington are at least talking about it.
I have no idea what Barr's exact problem is he's trying to solve? And if I run a web forum/mailing list/etc. I am now liable for anything users say on these services?
It seems like he's unhappy that facebook/google/et al. are shaping (or trying to shape) a narrative... I mean, he's not wrong. But everyone is: businesses, politicians, cia, hacker news.
Opening up people to easier liability for running a web forum, just means fewer will be able to provide this type of service; not to mention, this favors those with lots of money and time to spend on a lawsuit of such nature e.g. the gov't and large businesses... hmmm, maybe that's the point, only the gov't and monied interests should shape the narrative.
As you stated, everyone is already shaping the narrative. But right now nearly all of the power to do so is highly centralized at a very short list of companies. You already mentioned some tech companies, but I'd certainly also add a bunch of classical media/news orgs like e.g. FOX and Disney.
We could now discuss if democracy can work with so much centralized power. But the result we'll see is those powers fighting each others. It might be more obvious than before thanks to our current polarized times and such simple to identify targets.
287 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 266 ms ] threadNo pun intended; the man should be in prison.
> “No longer are tech companies the underdog upstarts. They have become titans,” Barr said at a public meeting held by the Justice Department to examine the future of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
> “Given this changing technological landscape, valid questions have been raised about whether Section 230’s broad immunity is necessary at least in its current form,” he said.
...all I can think of is “well, here comes the state-sponsored moat.”
If they weaken these protections, the big four will just hire a few more entire buildings of minimum wage content moderators (like most of them already have running) and it’s curtains for small entrants.
It makes me really sad to see the US thinking about shooting its only real growth industry in the foot.
Edit:
> while a few Democratic leaders have said the law allows the services to escape punishment for harboring misinformation and extremist content.
It’s also terrifying to think that parts of our government want to explicitly punish people for hosting legal content that they don’t like to read.
For example, YouTube has been taking down legal instructional gunsmithing videos (one of my hobbies) because guns. Other things that scare people but aren’t associated with a US political axis position, like the lockpicking lawyer, stay up.
They are absolutely editorializing (see also: Apple’s squirt gun emoji, which I would find unconscionable even if I weren’t a firearms enthusiast because I am an accurate communications enthusiast first and foremost) and their behavior needs to change before it hurts our society even more.
My friend, for example, lost a meme page he ran on Facebook with hundreds of thousands of readers for posting a male nipple (the man was wearing makeup). The censorship is not just political. They are burning books and destroying value: art, teaching, literature. It’s not okay.
I just don’t think this is the right approach to it.
If the almighty algorithm decides your stuff shouldn't be seen, it won't appear in peoples feeds, drastically reducing your reach. That's another huge problem.
https://sneak.berlin/20200211/instagram/
What are you referring to, specifically?
“ their behavior needs to change before it hurts our society even more.”
What specific harm to society occurs when using a toy gun for an emoji?
The harm is that it disallows citizens from expressing themselves precisely and accurately. It makes it harder to send communication involving guns (for example reacting to a comment with a gun emoji) and it sends guns to a less visible medium (full text). This change is a political stance on guns and therefore editorialization, since it diminishes the opinions of those who back the 2nd amendment. Likewise, taking a hotly debated politicized topic like transgender people, and adding gender neutral emojis, is also editorialization. And likewise, Apple fighting back to prevent a rifle emoji (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/20/apple-rif...) is editorialization.
It's not just me noting that these changes are politically motivated. It's pretty clear to everyone. See https://www.wired.com/2016/08/apples-new-squirt-gun-emoji-hi...
I have friends and acquaintances who have worked hard to build audiences, and then these platforms took that away from them via censorship. Of course, you can make the argument that it was really Facebook’s audience the whole time, but that ignores the content being generated by my friends which drove the whole thing.
Useful instructional videos and webpages I liked watching/reading and wanted to revisit had been deleted in the intervening time.
It’s destroying value, because these sites function as content-neutral hosting... until suddenly they don’t one day as the censorship hammer comes down. I have been telling people to start hosting on their own domains instead. This is the only way we can disintermediate our audience we work so hard to build.
The gun emoji one is more subtle. Emoji are, recall, plain text. Changing the rendering of plain text to alter its meaning is really, really bad. Here’s an example scenario as to why such ambiguity is harmful:
Imagine you’re a parent. It’s summer, and it’s hot. You have a squirt gun battle with your child. The next morning, you take them to school. (You’re a parent in the southern hemisphere, probably.)
An hour later you get a text from them: johnny brought a (gun emoji) to school
The rendering of this image is platform-specific. Their message is either harmless context-referencing fun, or cause for the most major of alarm. Which is it?
Depending on the sender’s device, they could be indicating a toy gun or a real one. Depending on the receiver’s device, it could render the same or differently.
Regardless of how you feel about weapons, surely you can recognize that introducing that communications ambiguity introduces a safety issue because it just impaired communications.
Now realize that they did so as a political statement.
That’s not okay, any more than changing the rendering of any other letter of plain text. I really, really do not want my text handling and rendering systems editorializing to me. Ever.
https://gizmodo.com/a-cellphones-missing-dot-kills-two-peopl...
It's fair to ask how big of a problem libel is. It's hardly enforced now, anyway. False accusations fly, with no consequences. Reporters at major outlets repeat accusations with no evidence ("sources say that ... did ...").
Therefore, if we tried to connect liability to the UGC business, the semi-democratized form it currently has would have to die. Instead, you'd have a situation much more like the broadcast model where producers and content would need to be vetted beforehand. Small-time producers without much economic value would not be permitted onto UGC sites because the risk of liability would outweigh the benefits of hosting.
(I don't see YouTube going in the direction of 8chan. It would be too damaging to the brand. So the idea that there should be no moderation is right out the window.)
That's the reason why these provisions exist: without them, the businesses cannot exist. Now if you think it's a problem that teens and mommy bloggers and small time streamers can upload home movies to YouTube, you might applaud this result. But personally I don't think there's a problem with that segment existing on UGC sites, so I think it's a terrible idea to connect liability to UGC sites.
It appears you are not from the US. Can you elaborate more on your perspective on why you think this to be the case? I am genuinely curious. (Just for full disclosure, the top 10 industries experiencing large growth at the moment are mostly related to construction or engineering in the traditional sense, not much hyper growth coming from web apps these days)
I think it is tradition in the US that whenever there is a new market or opportunity, to both celebrate the early entrants (in the case of tech, the persistent “two founders in a suburban garage” meme) and then also ignore the fact that it’s routine to make it as difficult as possible to replicate the conditions that lead to new companies or new people having wealth creation opportunities. I’ve heard it described as “pulling the ladder up behind you”.
A lot of people play the game as if it’s zero-sum.
It could also just be that I’m somewhat bitter because I have about five great ideas for companies that would make the world markedly better and more useful, and they have all recently been made either de facto or de jure illegal.
I hate that we’re almost always stuck with large incumbents who rent-seek based on their position, or seek for the government to make it harder/illegal for others to use the same general wealth-creation methods that they did.
Witnessing that level of selfishness hurts my soul, especially leveled against those who are most able and willing to build new businesses, cool products and services, and jobs.
It's correct to be thinking about this, notwithstanding the fact that I place little faith in the federal government to produce the correct outcome.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions
Unless they're equally blasé about "women are trash" posters, seems their enforcement against sexism is only one sided?
Note it’s not like there are humans evaluating each and every tweet so it’s going to be inconsistency applied.
I also find it interesting that since posting on HN someone is trying to reset my Facebook account. Talk about censorship...
Reddit has been censoring their less mainstream-friendly BDSM porn subreddits. To appear on most of the site your subreddit has to be whitelisted, now.
It’s not just politics. They are defining broad guidelines of what categories of (legal) things you are allowed to publish or not.
Everything is both!
Of course you'll have more and more proprietary-algos / blackbox-ML/AI-systems filtering content. And of course the content can't be manually reviewed (because SIZE) and you can't have the platform be responsible for it (what does it even mean to "be responsible for content"?!).
It's sad there's not much we can do to regulate away some of the toxic infos (like the "platform vs publisher" meme currently floating around...), but here it's actually a case where doing nothing and stomacking some of the bad consequences is 1000% better that doing something! Because that "something" whatever it may be will limit fundamental freedoms simply by having something exists in this space!
It's a red herring.
In practice, say I set up an anonymous social media account and publish false/defamatory statements about myself, then I sue the tech company and john doe (as the poster), what exactly can/could the tech company do to have prevented liability? Seemly they would have to somehow change their systems so posts are reviewed by editors prior to publication to minimize legal risk and potential liability.
The argument is that the services desire to keep the protections of 230 but act like publishers that are not afforded the same protections.
On the other hand, phone calls are not persistent and one to one, not one to anyone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_line_(telephony)
But, for example, if Dang selectively removed posts such that the remaining posts slandered someone in a way that none of the individual posters intended, I believe Dang would be the only one in the chain liable for the resulting slander, not the posters. But under current law, Dang has protection under 230, so no one could get charged for the resulting slander
That's an extreme hypothetical case of course.
Publishers can publish (or decline to publish) whatever they want, but they do have some responsibility for what they say. Libel, copyright infringement, and threats all carry consequences even if the publisher is not the author. Publishers can be as biased as they want.
Is FB a publisher or a common carrier? What about Google? Youtube? Instagram? Twitter?
(The answer is that they are kind of either depending on the exact part of the organization. And they are having it both ways: control without responsibility.)
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
It is abjectly insane to label a tweet as something Twitter, the company, is "saying". If we're retooling the law to orient it toward that definition, then the inevitable endgame, after the avalanche of litigation, will be that the concept of posting text on social media or blogging platforms is dead. It kills Web 2.0 in its entirety. It regresses the United States back to the dark ages of a completely one-directional media, where the best you can do as an outsider is to submit a letter to the editor.
I don't think anyone wants Twitter to be responsible for every tweet. What most people want them to do is be more like they used to claim to be "We are the free speech wing of the free speech party"
https://metro.co.uk/2018/09/06/twitter-admits-shadowbanning-...
If there were a company printing and distributing, to any passing person on the street, fliers with content provided by the company's clients, would they have any legal liability for what their clients put in the fliers? That seems very similar to what Twitter does. Certainly closer than their being treated like a phone company or mail carrier, which they don't much resemble (email provider? Yeah, sure, they do). Perhaps in that situation the printing & distribution company would also have no liability, I don't know.
However, you would probably say I start to become liable if I erect a giant wall on which all of these flyers are posted, and allow illegal content to remain hanging there even when I'm informed of it and aware it's illegal. This gray area is exactly what Section 230 is designed around.
It's totally unreasonable to expect a platform operator to act as the speaker of a post the moment it is posted. But after becoming aware of a post and the reasons it may be objectionable, they start to gain a sort of post-hoc liability.
If someone prints out child porn, glues it to a yard sign, and plants it on your front lawn, you should probably not be liable for arrest starting that instant. But if, after coming and going and seeing it over and over for a week, you make no efforts to remove it or report it, then you should probably be liable for arrest. This is exactly the logic behind Section 230.
I'm not following how having a machine do the work absolves the owner of responsibility. It seems like the same kind of "normal thing, but with a computer!" that folks in tech circles usually mock when it shows up on patent applications or when someone decides we need a new law to cover something that's already covered by existing laws, simply because now it's with a computer.
If you manage to replace all the components of an ordinary publisher with robots, seems to me the owner of those robots ought to be treated just like an ordinary publisher. Accepting, storing, reproducing, and distributing as broadly as possible (oh and don't forget slapping your own ads on) others' work sure seems like publishing to me.
The fact that it's happening on a computer isn't the important part, and indeed if that were the only difference it would be a ridiculous argument. The important part is that the operator of the machine has never seen the content.
It's unreasonable to be liable for content you aren't aware of, and thankfully the status quo is still that you are not (outside of a few unfortunate cases). Effectively most of the internet couldn't exist if this protection were eliminated. Hacker News might not be able to exist. If you were liable for everything any user might possibly say, regardless of whether or not you notice it, would you run a discussion forum like this? A web host? A messaging app?
Once you're aware of e.g. illegal content, of course you should be liable.
Twitter also acts as a publisher by exercising editorial control over if and where tweets actually appear to each user.
Twitter would have a stronger legal and moral argument against further regulation if they acted as a neutral intermediary. For example, they could establish a policy of only removing content if required to do so by law.
Only the ones that act like publishers, curating the content they allow and disallow. The ones that behave more like the telephone or postal system would not have the liability, right?
For example, Internet services which host user-generated content might be able to retain liability protection only if they also provide some reasonable degree of transparency and accountability. Clearly document their editorial policies and algorithms, and provide a formal appeals process for users who were censored.
I'm not sure if that is a great analogy for what Twitter et al. are doing in regards to content policing, but there is some kind of argument there.
Edit:
We try to make Facebook broadly available to everyone, but you cannot use Facebook if:
From Facebook's Terms of Service:https://www.facebook.com/terms.php
I don’t understand how people can post on a heavily moderated forum like HN while demanding that moderation be effectively made illegal. It’s like people hate Facebook and Google so much that they mindlessly get onboard with any form of retaliation against them regardless of the actual consequences.
As much as I find the idea of "illegal content" galling (I love freedom) I'm not so idealistic that I fail to recognize that freedom of speech cannot be an absolute. ("Fire" in theaters; revealing national security secrets; doxxing; there are limits. I'm glad I'm not on the hot seat when it comes to nailing them down: I don't run open internet forums, for example.)
If you don't have a way to pass that responsibility onto the actual speakers then you must shoulder it yourself, no?
Whether or not current systems can survive that is less important to me than the establishment of formal responsibility for one's speech.
1) ok, in the US anyone can get sued and there seem to be some specific things people can sue and win on, but that is outside the scope of 230.
It's almost like 230 has been a bait and switch ploy. With 230, mega social media corps developed, with nothing else to protect them against liability.
But instead, we could have had decentralized systems that made liability impossible. And if stuff like this goes forward, maybe we can. Someday, anyway.
Especially since allowing providers to increase (automated and best-effort, but not comprehensive human) moderation withour incurring general liability for content was the explicit and overt justification for Section 230, because the kind of complete human editorial control expected of publishers in traditional media was viewed as preventing scalable systems on the internet (where traditional media had other scaling limits that make content liability far from the limiting factor.)
> But instead, we could have had decentralized systems that made liability impossible.
Decentralized systems probably wouldn't have made liability impossible, just ineffective at it's objectives, because no matter how many operators were ruined by liability. the content would still thrive and you'd never hit enough operators.
> I don't tend to think tinkering with intermediaries' incentives about content is the thing that will get us there, because there are so many other practical advantages that people have perceived in the more centralized services.
Do you think otherwise about that?
Also, I'm not advocating any "tinkering". I'm just not optimistic about relying long term on legal protection. Even for the US, it's been fragile, and not anywhere near effective enough.
I was just being wistful, speculating that, without §230 protection, we'd have ended up with a system that didn't need such protections. With intermediaries that were totally isolated from content, with absolute anonymity for users. That is what I was imagining in the mid 90s.
I can imagine more or less centralized services that could handle content which was otherwise end-to-end encrypted and anonymized. And could make money doing it, as VPN providers get paid by Orchid users via an Etherium-based currency.
Users would have the tools to filter what they see. But nothing could be removed, and nobody could be prosecuted (or persecuted).
How we might get there from current social media, I have no clue.
They had something like $18 billion dollars in profit last year, you don't think they could afford to hire an army of moderators?
Meanwhile, what about mailing lists? "But those aren't (necessarily) public! What if we want to put our proceedings on a web site?" Well, luckily there's precedent for that, and the word you're looking for rather than "put" is "publish", and you can absolutely do that, but, naturally, it's publishing, just like if you were to publish a private physical mail mailing list.
Either physical publishing needs to get the same protections certain kinds of web publishing have now, or we need to rethink what we've done with web publishing. Unless there's reason to believe we don't need those laws around traditional publishing anymore, the latter seems like the better idea to me.
Employees produce content/products/sales/projects for the Company.
Social media users create the content that give value to social networks, thus social media users are, in a way, employees of the company. The Company has the requirements of limiting and being liable for the content that exists on their platform.
https://www.adl.org/news/article/sacha-baron-cohens-keynote-...
If you haven't seen it before, I would highly recommend it -- regardless of whether you agree with him or not.
its so bananas that statements like this are glossed over and unqualified. this is not a solved problem, and its not even being treated like its a problem at all.
this perception that there are a set of correct facts and incorrect facts is just so meaingless. what does it even mean to be true? $Person is on $Video saying $Statement. True or false? Well, it depends. It ALWAYS depends. are you asking if $Video.Words = $Statement.Words? almost never. You are not investigating $Video.Soundwaves and $Person.VocalCords, you are making a case for $Person.Beliefs. What if $Person.Beliefs @ $Video.TimeStamp != $Person.Beliefs @ $Today? Is it true but meaningless, or are you trying to imply conclusions contextually - but guess what, different people interpret the same context differently!
an example suitable for HN is talking about security. Is your company secure? You cant answer the question because _the question is bad_. the answer to security is ALWAYS it depends. Are you talking about physically secure against a wandering drunk trying to pee on your server, or physically secure against a disgruntled employee building a killdozer and driving through your building? Are you talking about secure from some kid who finds LOIC and tries to DoS you or from a long term campaign from a nation-state APT? The discussion _requires_ framing, and so does discussing "misinformation and extremist content"
It is disheartening to see it unquestioned and in mainstream.
> Kate Klonick, a law professor at St. John’s University in New York, urged caution.
> “This is a massive norm-setting period,” she said, with any alterations to one of the internet’s key legal frameworks likely to draw unexpected consequences. “It’s hard to know exactly what the ramifications might be.”
> his perception that there are a set of correct facts and incorrect facts is just so meaingless
Yes, there are facts. In your example, if I say "person X said Y" and have a video of them saying it, I am stating a fact. I am not dealing in beliefs and I don't give a fuck whether or not the person still supports the statements they made or not. I am saying that at some point in time T, person X said Y and this fact is on record.
And these are the problems with the simplest sort of fact, "A said B." That's not even the majority of misinformation out there. We usually have to contend with even worse ambiguities, like whether A "caused" B, or whether A "supported" B, or whether A "criticized" B.
In everyday life of course, these problems are solvable. We find ways to punish people for acting in bad faith, and the incentives mostly line up. But that is very much not how things work in politics or in law. People have large incentives to seek out ambiguous cases. These edge cases become the typical case.
Sure. And either you can prove it or not. But that is not what I am arguing against. The way things seem to be working today, is that you say "person X cures cancer" and I say "person X eats babies", neither one of us has any proof whatsoever, but that is OK because nobody ever asks for proof because "hey, there is no such thing as facts anymore"
There are clearly facts. But people don't spend a lot of time arguing over whether "person X said Y". Rather, we argue over the meaning of Y and the context in which it was said.
Political discourse has almost nothing to do with facts. That's just an observation, not necessarily a criticism.
In an extreme example, if someone says "There are extremists in the world, and I am not going to be one of them", I can quote that as "There are extremists in the world, and I am ... one of them", which is factually true, that is a portion of what was said. The interpretation is the polar opposite, but it is factually true.
Likewise, there are facts that are misleading, but true. "The Earth is at the center of our solar system". It's a perfectly valid statement; the rotation of planets can be modeled where the Earth is at a fixed point and the other planets moved around it. It's messy, and the movements look extremely erratic, but it's perfectly valid to be modeled that way.
There are also facts that are true, given a set of circumstances. "I weigh 7 pounds". It's not true on Earth, but in the correct gravitational field, I do weigh 7 pounds. Determining whether that statement is true depends on the implication; was I implying that it is true on Earth or not? That depends on the context of that statement, and on how you interpret the context.
Not so extreme considering this kind of editing is basically what led to Count Dankula's court case and conviction.
Doing explicitly offensive things as satire and being selectively quoted aren't similar.
Who gets to decide what is and isn't offensive and to what degree?
Because they are offensive
> and why should someone be legally punished for it
Because that is what legal systems are for. Punishing people who do things we, as a society, find objectionable
> Who gets to decide what is and isn't offensive and to what degree?
That is a rather general question, but generally speaking, the law makers and the legal system decide things like that.
Now, mind you, personally, I support a rather radical version of freedom of expression. I think almost every kind of censorship is ultimately detrimental to society, but I am not naive enough to ask "but who gets to decide" or "but why cannot I"
The original video started with him saying something like "my girlfriend thinks her pug is the cutest thing in the world, so I'm going to turn it into the worst thing I can think of".
To take a recent example:
"A renowned firefighter says that bushfires have mostly been caused by arsonists, exacerbated by conservationists protesting harm reduction burns, resulting in an exceptional fire season this year."
"A renowned firefighter says that climate change has reduced the safe period to perform harm reduction burns, and has contributed to drought conditions, resulting in an exceptional fire season this year."
These are both facts. But which one you report on will give your audience an entirely differently picture of the situation.
assuming you actually do this - which i dont believe you do but will accept for argument's sake - it is entirely meaningless. mouth-sounds are not important in and of themselves; you hear the mouth-sounds and interpret them to try and guess how that person will act in the future. you are building a predictive model of that person.
lets say there is a video of a politician (clumsily) saying "i am a rapist hater. i will increase the punishment to try and dissuade these awful crimes and make all our lives safer". You argue it is a true fact that politician is on video saying "i am a rapist". My point is that "true" in this sense is nonsense, and furthermore "true" in any absolute sense is always nonsense.
if your head is a list of quotes people have said that simply don't feed into your impression of them, then you are in a minority so small its effectively 0 on a global scale.
"Is your company secure?" has no factual answer, as you state.
"LIBRULZ KILL AND EAT BABIES ON COURTHOUSE STEPS WHILE THE JESUS CRIES" Well... that's pretty damn easy to fact check. Oh, wait, there was nobody on the courthouse steps eating babies? Well shit, I guess that's a LIE.
While there are large grey areas in the middle where subject opinion, context, and fuzzy word definitions make truth values complicated, there are also some very clear black and white areas for blatantly false concrete claims are being made and spread that have no basis in reality. I think there are ways to regulate and pushing blatant disinformation while leaving the greyer borders up to individual discretion and discernment.
While there are claims that are black and white, and claims that are grey, empowering someone to enforce that clearly-false claims cannot be published is going to bite you, because that person is going to have their own perspectives, biases, and (probably) agenda. It takes something close to a saint to not inflict their own agenda, and saints are in short supply.
Umm... we have an existing legal system already does this. It certainly isn't perfect, but your argument seems to boil down to: we don't have a perfect legal system, so we shouldn't have any laws.
I don't see any reason why we can't have laws that make it illegal to run around and hand out pamphlets that deliberately misinform people about if / when they can vote.
> Roundup/glyphosate might cause some harm to someone
You seem to be using an inherently grey claim to make your point. Of course glyphosate might cause harm to someone, there is almost literally nothing that has no possibility to cause harm to someone. This is exactly the sort of claim whose truth value depends on the context and meaning with which you interpret it.
This is different from a claim like "I have a bachelor's degree from UC Davis" or "You cannot vote without a drivers license"
The point about glyphosate et al is this: Sure, those are definitely grey. But the authority could claim that they are black and white at his own discretion. If he decides against you, you then have to go to court, with the default decision being against you, in order to be able to be heard.
Are you just saying that moderation should be illegal? In what way would going to court help you if you've been moderated off a platform?
Are you attacking some sort of straw man central censorship authority that would exist outside of the courts?
The framing is usually implied instead of spelled out precisely. At the same time, I don't see you arguing against this (probably shitty) implied framing and instead just pretending there is none. This makes it hard for me to take seriously, since it looks so similar to the "there is no perfect security so why even try" line of arguing.
And yes, my alarm bells also went off by AG Barr talking about "misinformation and extremist content", even though I actually do think we should carefully observe whether current online platforms / communication changes our societies and if in a favorable way.
What does "misinformation and extremist content" mean? Because that is the first point. Remember that the GOP called out large companies for "silencing the right" when they enacted policies that reduced misinformation and extremist content in the past. "Misinformation and extremist content" is thus itself an illdefined thing as different people consider different things to fall under it.
The framing usually used is that "if the big companies are liable the content won't be there" which history has shown is only true in so far as "if the big companies are liable user made content won't be there" effectively as huge restrictive filters need to be put in place to avoid the liability.
> even though I actually do think we should carefully observe whether current online platforms / communication changes our societies and if in a favorable way
Feel free to talk about it, you are not trying to enact policy. AG Barr is involved in creating policy and thus should be careful about exactly what he suggests rather than invoking the same liability boogieman that hasn't served us in the past.
The only reasons I've heard are related to how -current- internet content providers' business models work. Those companies' business models are heavily enabled by the CDA itself, so isn't it sort of begging the question?
Is Facebook responsible for every word of every Facebook post? Have they decided whether to publish it or not? No. (Yes, they do have certain filters that try to exclude certain things, but that's all. A newspaper would be different if it published every letter to the editor it received, so long as it didn't contain the words "child porn", for example.)
Facebook and Google occupy a legal grey area between publisher and common carrier that was literally created by the CDA. So your argument is like saying, "Vaping has to be legal because how else is Juul going to stay in business?", or "Loot boxes have to be legal because they're so important to EA's and Activision's business model." These companies only exist because of a certain legal environment, so how can their existence be used to justify that same environment? Are Google and Facebook now considered inalienable human rights used to derive laws?
Maybe Google and Facebook would be able to survive a change to the CDA, or maybe not. Who cares? The internet ran just fine before the CDA and the technology hasn't really changed much at all. Heck, the two of us are conversing right now without Google and Facebook involved.
Everyone gets so bent out of shape these days about Google and Facebook but no one is willing to even imagine an internet without them. Present company excluded, of course -- at this point I'm just ranting.
> A newspaper would be different if it published every letter to the editor it received, so long as it didn't contain the words "child porn", for example.
This is not true. It has nothing to do with the choices of the editor and everything to do with the medium used. The CDA carves out a specific immunity for internet companies that does not apply to print and broadcast media and that's what Barr is putting on the table here.
But they aren't the Internet. It was always intended as P2P.
Unfortunately I haven't made any progress in discovering a solution that would accurately determine if a company is secure or not.
Given that an org's security team, or even the world (in case of zero days), may not be aware of vulnerabilities that exist in a company's infrastructure, how do you solve this problem?
If anyone wants to chat about this, I'm at veeralpatel4@gmail.com
Historically cultures have modulated themselves in a variety of ways, including censorship of objectionable speech. Even the United States has maintained, in the past, sweeping norms which controlled what kind of rhetoric entered the public sphere. No one would suggest that these norms were always well applied, coherent, good. But its equally challenging to make the case that because of that ambiguity we should simply do nothing at all.
The ability of companies like Youtube or Facebook to shift culture is probably real and thus probably demands a response, imperfect as it may be.
But does that apply to web platforms that aren't content-neutral? I think probably not. There is such a huge volume of communication that they should have some protections built in, but not blanket protection.
What if they influenced the content that each side hears, e.g. add strategic gaps where they leave out key noises, to make the phone call go on for the maximum amount of time (because they charge by second)?
But that doesn't mean they should have no protections or that thry should be treated like a book publisher. There can be some reasonable processes amd limits of liability in place.
These kinds of generalities and hand waving doesn’t really get us very far.
If there's a blanket repeal of liability protection for UGC, it's going to have a much larger impact on smaller forums.
"No. Full stop." Is a stance that there is nothing to even argue.
It's interesting that you mention HN, because it's basically not a problem here.
I could easily post a libelous but interesting comment here that I'm sure that no moderator or no HN user would recognize as libelous, so it isn't going to get buried.
As soon as Google and Facebook moved to having an opinionated queue of content (Youtube's suggested videos and Facebooks timeline) based on things like engagement, I could see the argument made that they have both ceased being mere conduits of information and became publishers themselves.
The public and his own Justice Department cannot have a reasonable discussion with him, when his behavior and actions up to this point have almost all appeared to be for one purpose - to help the President and his supporters in criminal issues.
The question we all find ourselves asking is: "So how is this going to benefit the President at everyone else's expense?" and even if it doesn't benefit him, it colors the entire discussion in a bad light.
In the case of Barr or Trump, we are talking about effectively shuttering government progress/modernization. What does this serve? We don’t get these months/years back, the beat of progress marches on regardless. It’s unreasonable to think that we are just a few years away from a sweeping blue tide of progressives(or a red tide of conservatives under Obama) that are going to have the whole of congress on their side to make huge reforms, or whatever it is that would make the USG quickly modernize. Our system of governance stalls with sort of behavior, and it only really serves entrenched interests, if anyone.
In that light, it is impossible to think about the issue objectively, without legitimately worrying about what Barr in particular going to do with it. It's not hard to imagine how he can abuse new powers over Facebook and Google to benefit Trump in the 2020 election.
If he's already selectively applying criminal justice against opponents and not allies, do you think he'll apply fair and objective justice against Facebook and Google?
Considering the gravity of this issue, reasonable people can conclude that we'd be better off "wasting" these years and months and to return to the idea later when someone with more judicial independence is in the position.
Stop crying wolf. It only hurts your case when there are legitimate things to complain about. https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-w...
Until then, it is entirely possible they are shaping a narrative based on whatever model they want.
I don't buy the argument made by Barr that the scale of the platform reaches a point that it therefore requires regulation. This seems to be a simple money grab where large tech companies need to tithe to lawmakers.
They want to shape the content and do whatever curation or editorializing via human or algorithmic means, yet be seen an an open forum of user-generated content. Have it and eat it too scenario.
Not to mention adding paid content that blends in in a way that is indistinguishable from user submissions. This further complicates the intentions of the platform.
Should the US postal service be liable if they mail it to their friends?
The US postal service uses dogs to find drugs in the mail, and yet we don't charge the post master general with drug smuggling.
Any attempt to get rid of undesirable content should not then make you liable for the content you miss. The platform vs publisher debate is silly.
There is no universal objective truth. Specifically there are things that reasonable people can disagree about and the same set of facts can be used to argue different positions. This fact is abused by the mentally challenged to argue ridiculous positions (eg anti-vaxxers, the Moon landings are fake, that sort of thing).
Likewise, as seen here, one side will argue those who disagree are engaging is misinformation (and in the Trump administration's case, from the President down there are multiple claims per day that are demonstrably false such that no one can really keep up). The agenda is to silence the opposition and undermine confidence in any sort of news.
ISPs were given safe harbor from liability for traffic on their network, for good reason. They just need to comply with certain standards. Tech companies really are no different and to argue otherwise would set an incredibly dangerous precedent (IMHO).
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7p23mA2VV0A
Since there is no direct bridge to the digital money, power and influence, analog types will wreck the whole thing trying to implement legislation to give them any kind of foothold on all of that easy profit.
The lack of influence/sway will eventually drive the traditional powers to contrive the shortest-term solutions to destabilize the ecosystem. Its more than a "war of words" at play.
That law isn't about protecting Facebook or Google it's about ensuring that anyone can express themselves online without needing a highly paid lawyer and a protracted trial to do so.
It also isn't about publisher vs. platform, section 230 protects the Times from being sued for comments on their website same as for any bigger or smaller operation.
It's tragic how the powers that be in this country are trying to insert a lawyer into every transaction like it's a jobs program, and the infuriating part is that they are trying to convince people that it's for their own benefit.
If you post something defamatory on Facebook, you can be sued, but under Section 230 Facebook cannot. I happen to think that's a good arrangement, but it's definitely about "protecting Facebook or Google," and not about protecting the individuals "express[ing] themselves online."
Who in their right mind would host content created by individuals online? GeoCities, blogs and personal sites wouldn't exist as they did or do today.
1. Should Google, Facebook, etc. be responsible for user generated content hosted on their websites (i.e., should they not be treated as “public square”)?
2. Should the government have any hand in telling any company or any person what they can or cannot say, as long as they are not making threats or publishing illegal materials?
I am of the personal opinion that most (all?) of the major tech companies have engaged in censorship and even politically driven enforcement of their content policies, and therefore should have lost their “public square” status a long time ago, making them responsible for illegal content posted by their users.
Pertaining the second question, there simply is no question; the government does not and should never have any authority here, because the Constitution protects free speech, regardless of what kind of Ministry of Truth they would like to implement.
This is beyond idiotic.
The CDA was passed when people were scared of the internet and looked to government to protect them from its evils. Section 230 was added to save "the little guy" from becoming collateral damage of this legislation.
Fast forward 30 years and these "little guys" have grown into the scary forces that everyone wants the government to protect them from!
Imagine if ordinary people had been allowed to sue Google and Facebook over this time. There's good reason to think that no one would have been able to monetize the internet in such a way as Google, Facebook, etc. if not for Section 230.
I don't think anyone in Congress is interested in repealing Section 230 but I'm glad people in Washington are at least talking about it.
It seems like he's unhappy that facebook/google/et al. are shaping (or trying to shape) a narrative... I mean, he's not wrong. But everyone is: businesses, politicians, cia, hacker news.
Opening up people to easier liability for running a web forum, just means fewer will be able to provide this type of service; not to mention, this favors those with lots of money and time to spend on a lawsuit of such nature e.g. the gov't and large businesses... hmmm, maybe that's the point, only the gov't and monied interests should shape the narrative.
We could now discuss if democracy can work with so much centralized power. But the result we'll see is those powers fighting each others. It might be more obvious than before thanks to our current polarized times and such simple to identify targets.