I am so ready for law suits to tear down Section 230 and similar legal shields. Web sites should not have unique legal protections just to show outrageous ad content only to plead ignorance when publishing content is the revenue stream. They should be held liable for all content expressed on their platforms like any other publisher.
It is my understanding that website owners (especially owners of small websites) rely on Section 230 in order to host user-submitted content (such as comments), as they cannot feasibly moderate all the content and they don't want to be held liable for anything inappropriate or illegal. Am I mistaken?
The person you’re replying to is mistaken - 230 protects owners by allowing them to moderate, without it the existing legal precedent would force them to do nothing because any moderation would make them responsible for everything (as was the case before 230).
This point is often confused and misunderstood. People think without 230 owners would be liable, but they’d only be liable if they moderated (so they wouldn’t). Without 230 owners would not moderate which would be worse for everyone.
> “ In other words, the act of moderating any of the user-generated content on its forums made Prodigy liable for all of the user-generated content on its forums — in this case to the tune of $200 million. This left services that hosted user-generated content with only one option: zero moderation. That was the only way to be classified as a distributor with the associated shield from liability, and not as a publisher.”
> “The point of Section 230, then, was to make moderation legally viable; this came via the “Good Samaritan” provision”
> “In short, Section 230 doesn’t shield platforms from the responsibility to moderate; it in fact makes moderation possible in the first place. Nor does Section 230 require neutrality: the entire reason it exists was because true neutrality — that is, zero moderation beyond what is illegal — was undesirable to Congress.”
I think the argument is that someone merely hosting something horrible on YouTube isn't really a problem if no one can find it? YouTube could still exist without Section 230, and it would work "great": it wouldn't have any "recommendation" or "discovery" algorithms--which we all know have been shown to actively drag people into extreme positions, and are of a class of systems that optimize for "engagement", which isn't even a healthy thing for a user to have--and would feel more like Instagram (without the discover page that doesn't work well anyway, and without the new recommended feed that maybe you like but a lot of us despise), where if you know about someone you follow them and you can see what the people you follow posted and you can get notifications when those person post new videos and if you dislike them you unfollow them... what sucks about all of these systems right now is someone posts something horrible and you then that content is actively pushed at people all while YouTube is making a profit, and then they can choose how quickly they want to respond to different kinds of moderation, and the whole thing is a bit evil :(.
230 is specifically about giving protection to sites so they can moderate their content without being legally responsible for every thing users post.
It’s an update to older law that was written pre-internet for older style publishers (where they had more editorial control over what was published because the content wasn’t user generated).
It doesn’t have to do with recommendation algorithms.
Killing 230 would force YouTube to have zero content moderation beyond removing illegal content. It would be a bad outcome (which is why 230 was created).
> Killing 230 would force YouTube to have zero content moderation beyond removing illegal content. It would be a bad outcome (which is why 230 was created).
That actually sounds much better than arbitrary moderation.
The pre-moderated Internet was a small group of enthusiasts, and even then there was moderation (e.g. Prodigy). You cannot compare now versus 80s/early 90s to suggest in good faith that an Internet that's barely even 0.1% of what it is now would illuminate what it's like without 230.
There has always been shady part of the Internet sub-culture. Nothing is new, as you so infer. People were just more open-minded. Nobody's forcing you to read 4chan.
If people hold a conspiracy theory gathering in a bar without causing disturbance, should the patron be judged for the behaviour of his guests ? If you do believe so, I really do not want to live in your world.
An argument could be made for allowing patron to deny service to the guests if he so desire, in which case, guests shall be discriminated for any particular reason, and the patron shall not have to justify himself for such or such decision. Unfortunately, the law says that "some class" of citizens are protected from discrimination (congratulations if they belong to multiple class!) while a lower classes of citizen have to be discriminated against (talk about equality !). I do not agree with this principle. Either any or no discrimination is acceptable, no in-between.
FWIW, I appreciate the problem of 4chan (and I have seen in person the pain of moot's face as he tries to grapple with what he accidentally managed to build)... but you can't exactly stop the existence of opt-in full-on 4chan: we don't have, and I will argue really wouldn't want, the technology required to do that, and it isn't like "with Section 230, 4chan became illegal". However, to the extent to which 4chan still works at all without Section 230, it doesn't pop up everywhere any more than it did before the Internet existed: the "dark corners" of the Internet are just as corner-y without Section 230 because most people avoid darkness when it is opt-in.
I frankly think the core problem in a lot of these discussions is "a lack of vision" with respect to what all the changes would be to get a website compatible with a complete lack of moderation. Like, look at comments on videos: I think in practice almost no videos would have comments (and I think this is great, as YouTube comments are well known to be extremely low quality, despite supposedly having moderation: we finally got to the point on the Internet where we realized that even comments on news sites are generally harmful, and have given people a weird expectation of a "right to be heard" as opposed to merely "a right to free speech").
The assumption--which makes no sense to me--is always "without moderation everything you see would be a cesspool", when I will argue that it should be obvious that that won't happen, because you will have to rethink how comments work entirely if they are unmoderated, and I think the result of this is that comments will just get turned off. When you follow some random channel, you will see videos from that channel and videos shared by that channel (the content of both of which the people who make that channel will be liable for, but not YouTube, as they exercised editorial control but YouTube did not) and that's it: you won't see videos from other channels (as YouTube won't take that liability unless they carefully hand-curate their selections, which maybe some website would but Google would never bother with ;P) and you won't see comments on any videos unless someone agreed to pre-moderate them (and accept liability for them).
Again: you won't see YouTube showing you random videos unmoderated, as that isn't a useful platform (ignore "horrible" for a moment: this would be 99% spam... even 4chan doesn't work once you truly reject Section 230; and again: maybe that isn't a bad thing ;P), and you won't see unmoderated horrible comments for the same reason: the feature set of the Internet changes once you change this law; and maybe you really really like those features and refuse to give them up... but trying to make arguments about what the content on the Internet would look like without first contemplating how the feature set changes is a nonsensical prediction and I think does a disservice to these discussions and forms a kind of strawman for the position against Section 230.
> It’s an update to older law that was written pre-internet for older style publishers
Specifically, common law defamation. The two cases that the authors of Section 230 principally had in mind were Cubby v. CompuServe[1] and Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy[2].
> It doesn’t have to do with recommendation algorithms.
It theoretically could. Section 230 basically immunizes websites from defamation suits. The question in the above two cases was the degree of editorial control that CompuServe and Prodigy exercised. If you exercise insufficient editorial control, then you're not liable for defamatory statements made by users of your platform; you're just a passive entity, no more liable for libel than the telephone company is for slander. If you exercise sufficient editorial control, then you're directly liable for any defamatory statements as if you made them yourself in the first instance, much like a newspaper is liable.
There's no hard-and-fast rule for what constitutes sufficient editorial control, especially as it regards online interactive services. Section 230 stopped the evolution of the caselaw in its tracks. If the bar is relatively low, then some automated recommendation systems conceivably could trigger liability, presumably based on how sophisticated they are. I mean, that is the impetus for removing Section 230 protections afterall--recommendation algorithms that seemingly popularize "fake news", some of which is defamatory in nature. The selection of which user posts to popularize, and the manner in which they're presented, could constitute editorial control the same way a newspaper selects and frames statements taken or revealed by journalists. In fact, it might be worse for some websites--journalists and editors can interject weasel wording[3] to avoid liability, but algorithmic systems aren't that smart. And because defamation is a common law claim, the rules are likely to vary state by state.
[3] Or another way to put it: reasonable qualifiers and narrative structure that make it clear the publisher isn't affirming the truth of the matter asserted.
I rely heavily on Youtube's recommendation engine and I think it's fantastic. Not sure what your feed looks like, but mine is full of trains and airplanes and machining videos and history pieces and technology breakdowns and... I wish I had a lot more time to watch.
If you're getting terrible content, I have to think you're the one to blame. You have the like and subscribe buttons, you can train the system. I did.
Poe's law seems to be in force here, I can't tell if you're serious.
Thumbs-up stuff you want to see more of, ignore or thumbs-down stuff you want to see less of. Subscribe to channels that seem to have a lot of stuff you like. It seems straightforward?
It’s been shown again and again [1] that YouTube endlessly promoted conspiracy videos, fringe thinking, UFO “truth”, and other such garbage for wide swaths of its audience. They are a parasite on the way the algorithm works, feed by clicks.
It’s a bit like blaming the heroin addict who is offered it everywhere they go. Don’t blame the user when this is wide spread.
They promote what they asked for. Assigning it agency from its content would be fundamentally ignorant and/or disingenuous. It is the exact same thing as the Google testimonies where congress members were upset that negative content came up when they were searched for.
I'm not sure thumbs up/down matter in the algorithm. But that's the problem: we don't know.
I understand you can watch only one type of video, but, from what I,'ve seen, as soon as you watch/click on 1 political video, you get bombarded by it. Also sharing ip with other people seem to affect what you're being shown. I'm surprised that hn seems to think it has that much control over the recommendation algorithm.
Unironically yes actually. The inputs are simplified and documentation wouldn't really help anyway given it is based on such a vast dataset it is less trying to drink from a firehose and more trying to drink the entire ocean at once.
It's interesting, because a lot of times when these matters are discussed people are talking about big music or movie distributors and copyright violations.
Here it is a private individual saying some people on the platform are using his likeness to scam people out of money.
Not a lawyer but I host user content. I've always assumed that if illegal content is brought to my attention and I have not made an attempt to deal with it in a reasonably timely matter, I could bear some legal responsibility for that content.
Criminally illegal content is called obscene. This content does not fall into that category so and so it is not criminally illegal. It is clearly a form of libel, but there is no cure available because all parties are shielded by law from torts. Had this exact same violation occurred in any other medium of publication there would be no legal shield in place.
For an even more heinous example see the Joe Scarborough murder conspiracy theory.
That isn't true - the actual damn scammers are still legally liable. Even assuming they made it completely impossible to prove their linkage (unlikely) it would still be just as illegal.
For a counterfactual if I somehow figured out something with chaos theory deep enough that doing something utterly innocous like knocking on a door would cause an accident that result in the ceiling of the Whitehouse collapsing and killing all inside I would still be responsible for murder among many other crimes even if nobody could discover it much less prove it. Premeditated planned actions to end many lives and carrying them out are still murder and I would still be responsible for them.
It isn't a legal shield any more than you not being prosecutable for the death of Abraham Lincoln is - because it is the completely wrong person to try to prosecute!
The scam is illegal, the advertising content is not unless there is a regulation expressly forbidding that messaging by regulation, which falls under the pervue of commercial law. The subject of this conversation is the advertising content and not Bitcoin scams.
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
That is section 230 verbatim.
It says a service provider should not be regarded as a publisher of user submitted content, wherein the user submitting said content thus accepts the role of publishers. I disagree and believe the service provider to be the publisher no differently than a magazine showing advertising the magazine did not themselves create. It’s time the laws reflect the reality of the content in question.
You were referring to (1) of the op was refering to (2). IANAL but I think that's what he was describing and makes his point true.
Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material
(1)Treatment of publisher or speaker
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
(2)Civil liabilityNo provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
(A)any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
(B)any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).[1]
If you remove that protection then the owners respond by doing zero moderation so they’ll be classified as distributors (since the alternative of moderating and being legally liable for all user content is not survivable).
230 was created to allow them to moderate their platforms. The context in my post (and the history described in that stratechery link) are critical to fully understand the issue.
What you’re suggesting would lead to the opposite of what you want - it would force them to not moderate at all.
Facebook being legally responsible for the random musings of two billion Facebook users and a magazine being responsible for the ads it runs are not equivalent.
That is an incorrect interpretation of the law. Regardless of whether you consider them distributors they still retain liability. The point of separating distribution from content creation, such as with the movie industry, is to shield the producer from liabilities associated with business relationships associated with distribution, such as movie theaters, and not end consumers. The end consumer can still sue the movie producer for content that is provably libel. In this regard of online content the distributors would retain liability as well as the creators of advertising content. The creators of advertising content are more challenging to identify though, since their intention is criminal.
I am completely fine with that since content moderation is virtually nonexistent online.
> being legally liable for all user content is not survivable
That is the same argument for opposing slavery. Its a meritless argument.
At any rate the section is most certainly a legal shield both in practice and intent contrary to your claim:
> this section also protects ISPs from liability for restricting access to certain material or giving others the technical means to restrict access to that material
As another example one of my coworkers claims residence in California where he owns an agricultural services business. He supplies labor to orchards to pick nuts and fruit. It costs more for the farms to hire him than for them to hire and manage the field labor directly. The only reason they use him is to shield themselves from liabilities associated with labor law. He is their legal shield in the capacity of a distributor and retains liabilities associated with such.
> “That is an incorrect interpretation of the law. Regardless of whether you consider them distributors they still retain liability.”
This seems to contradict everything I’ve read, including the case law history, do you have something you’re basing this on beyond personal opinion? Given that you left out the relevant Good Samaritan portion in your previous comment, it feels like you’re arguing from a position of motivated reasoning. I think you’re wrong on this issue, but I’m happy to be shown otherwise.
> “I am completely fine with that since content moderation is virtually nonexistent online.”
As far as meritless argument, sites that allow user content could not exist if they were responsible for all of it. This is no way comparable to the moral hazard of slavery (which should not exist) so there’s no conflict.
I’m confused by your last point, I’m arguing that it is a legal shield. It’s just that the shield enables them to moderate.
My last point is that the producer of physical goods does not need a legal shield, because they separate distribution from availability. A web server cannot separate distribution from availability and thus would retain liability for content regardless of its reclassification.
Yes, but HN already behaves and moderates as though they are not protected by 230. If they are not the publisher of my comment then who is? I have no relationship with this service: business, legal, or otherwise. I am a user.
The primary interest of section 230 is to allow user submitted content for public exposition without a barrier and typically for an advertising based revenue stream. In this context the profit margins are incredibly tiny and thus utterly reliant upon high transaction frequency. The larger the website the more reliant they are on this protect, because there is more revenue in jeopardy and the cost of moderation scales disproportionately to the profit margin.
The immediate consequence of revoking 230 is hindering anonymous user contributions to websites for public exhibition. The liability associated with such can be substantially marginalized by any number of practices that cripple a public facing ad based revenue model.
I'm kind of surprised by these scams. If you're savvy enough to know how to buy cryptocurrency in the first place, how can you get duped by these kinds of scams?
Do you really have to be savvy to buy cryptocurrency? A lot of people just sign up for an online wallet and buy cryptocurrencies as if they were trading shares online.
I think the days of cryptocurrency being for the "savvy" are long past.
It's been featured in everything from The Today Show to supermarket tabloids. There is no counting the number of crypto buying tutorials on the web. There are crypto ATMs. I've heard retires with no computer talking about it.
It's not mainstream the way a savings account is, but it's not the exclusive club the promoters want people to think it is.
There was another post on HN just 2-3 days ago, about how an HN-poster was taking a cab in Sydney and the cabbie was talking to him about BTC.
Cue the inevitable Joe Kennedy comparison: Kennedy Sr. supposedly got a shoe-shine one day, and had a conversation with the shoe-shine boy about said boy's hot stock tips. Kennedy realized everything was overheated and overhyped, and pulled his cash out of the market; the crash of '29 happened not long after.
If you can figure out how to buy stocks on Robinhood, you can figure out how to use the Gemini or Coinbase apps to buy and send Bitcoin. There is no barrier to entry. It's not 2013 anymore.
Bitcoin scams, never send Bitcoins unless you verified the source you are sending them to. Giveaways don't exist and even if they do you should not send Bitcoins in a contest but send a Bitcoin address to the person to send you Bitcoins.
With all their recent moderation changes over the years Youtube have stupidly opened themselves up to these kinds of lawsuits and it'll be what opens up oportunity for a competitor to take over.
The DMCA take down system was a legal requirement and one that was hands off, submission, manual verification and action. By moderating things like hacking or covid videos automatically they have opened a massive can of litigation smack down on themselves.
A competitor would have to do a lot, unfortunately, to compete with YouTube. YouTube is so much more than just video hosting, and enough time has passed without any serious competition that YouTube is nearly insurmountable. Sure, you can make a YouTube "clone" easily, but does it support live streaming at large scale? Does it allow for superchats? Can it serve 4k? What about buying and watching shows and movies? The only thing that comes close to competing is TikTok, which is a gimmick and not truly in the same space. There's BitChute, but because that becomes the refuge for all the people kicked off YouTube, it's easy for the media to paint them as "far right"; the same will likely be true for anyone who creates a real alternative to YouTube.
The technical implementation isn't the the fundamental moat.
The real moat is the advertising/monetization. The ad revenue drives content creators and now in 2020 likely the (presumably quite insane) operating costs. Sadly the harsh, Disney-esque moderation appears to have been necessary for this.
This is also why it seems unlikely why we'll see an alternative, more open Youtube: It won't be able to able to compete on ad revenue.
It has taken Google 14 years to get to this level. I wonder how many 10s of billions of dollars have been spent in the process.
These scams are so stupid I can't believe people actually fall for them in significant numbers, let alone after all this time they've been going on.
The scams must be part of some kind of bitcoin laundering scheme, I just can't figure out how, it seems more like a bitcoin tainting scheme rather than cleaning.
There is people with a high level of trust. They will believe almost anything. Sometimes they are in a vulnerable situation, sometimes it comes with age as cognitive function gets worse, other times maybe people with high stress situations looking for a way out of their problems, they exist.
In phishing, the scammer knows that most people will ignore their mails. But, they are trying to get to the vulnerable people, the ones that will bite the bait. "significant numbers" is difficult to evaluate. Maybe it is a very low percentage of the people that is targeted, but when the targeted are in the millions the victims are going to add up.
And, in my experience, this is a psychological trait. A kind of opposite to paranoia. A paranoid person will not believe anyone. A too-trusting person will believe everyone.
> In phishing, the scammer knows that most people will ignore their mails. But, they are trying to get to the vulnerable people
This is also the reason why they use grammatical errors. To further fish out the too wary. You are left with desperate (people in dire financial situation), or 'high level of trust' as you put it.
> In phishing, the scammer knows that most people will ignore their mails. But, they are trying to get to the vulnerable people, the ones that will bite the bait. "significant numbers" is difficult to evaluate. Maybe it is a very low percentage of the people that is targeted, but when the targeted are in the millions the victims are going to add up.
Probably a stupid question, but is there any first hand evidence (like a testimony from a scammer) that this is the case?
Feels like a completely unfalsifiable argument, since knowing whether the mistakes are deliberate because they make it easier to trick people, accidental but kept because of the same (the scammer doesn't know why it works) or actually accidental cause of the scammer doesn't know better seems like something that's almost impossible to prove.
> Phishing and other scams prey on the vulnerable.
And it would be wrong to assume that "the vulnerable" would be a disjunct group. People, i.e. everyone, will at one point or another find themselves in dire straits. When desperate, the threshold of what seems like a 'good idea', a way out of misery, will be lower. People tend to believe what they want or need to believe.
I set up a bitcoin (and other crypto) payment option for my client a while ago, and it's sad to see it's getting used by less and less customers every month (not even a single customer use it in the last two months).
Bitcoin is much more useful in the early days as a payment option. It let me receive money for my small gigs from overseas clients back then when I was a student without getting a major cut from transfer fee, and let me purchase stuff online via reloadable bitcoin virtual debit card or even direct bitcoin payment (back then banks in my country treat online purchase as high risk and disable support for online payment with visa/mc debit cards, and as a student I couldn't get a credit card yet). It did felt like a currency of the future back then. Now it's just another financial commodity used by day traders and get-rich-quick scammers :(
You said it yourself: sending money from overseas or making online purchases got much easier today, so crypto is being displaced into more shadier areas, where fiat electronic payments are less acceptable, like buying illegal goods or scamming people.
I really hope that it's not that percent of retarded (in medical sense) people is growing thru population, it's just that connecting to internet and buy bitcoins became extremely easy and seamless.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communica...
This point is often confused and misunderstood. People think without 230 owners would be liable, but they’d only be liable if they moderated (so they wouldn’t). Without 230 owners would not moderate which would be worse for everyone.
https://stratechery.com/2019/a-framework-for-moderation/
> “ In other words, the act of moderating any of the user-generated content on its forums made Prodigy liable for all of the user-generated content on its forums — in this case to the tune of $200 million. This left services that hosted user-generated content with only one option: zero moderation. That was the only way to be classified as a distributor with the associated shield from liability, and not as a publisher.”
> “The point of Section 230, then, was to make moderation legally viable; this came via the “Good Samaritan” provision”
> “In short, Section 230 doesn’t shield platforms from the responsibility to moderate; it in fact makes moderation possible in the first place. Nor does Section 230 require neutrality: the entire reason it exists was because true neutrality — that is, zero moderation beyond what is illegal — was undesirable to Congress.”
230 is specifically about giving protection to sites so they can moderate their content without being legally responsible for every thing users post.
It’s an update to older law that was written pre-internet for older style publishers (where they had more editorial control over what was published because the content wasn’t user generated).
It doesn’t have to do with recommendation algorithms.
Killing 230 would force YouTube to have zero content moderation beyond removing illegal content. It would be a bad outcome (which is why 230 was created).
That actually sounds much better than arbitrary moderation.
The pre-moderated Internet was a small group of enthusiasts, and even then there was moderation (e.g. Prodigy). You cannot compare now versus 80s/early 90s to suggest in good faith that an Internet that's barely even 0.1% of what it is now would illuminate what it's like without 230.
If people hold a conspiracy theory gathering in a bar without causing disturbance, should the patron be judged for the behaviour of his guests ? If you do believe so, I really do not want to live in your world.
An argument could be made for allowing patron to deny service to the guests if he so desire, in which case, guests shall be discriminated for any particular reason, and the patron shall not have to justify himself for such or such decision. Unfortunately, the law says that "some class" of citizens are protected from discrimination (congratulations if they belong to multiple class!) while a lower classes of citizen have to be discriminated against (talk about equality !). I do not agree with this principle. Either any or no discrimination is acceptable, no in-between.
I frankly think the core problem in a lot of these discussions is "a lack of vision" with respect to what all the changes would be to get a website compatible with a complete lack of moderation. Like, look at comments on videos: I think in practice almost no videos would have comments (and I think this is great, as YouTube comments are well known to be extremely low quality, despite supposedly having moderation: we finally got to the point on the Internet where we realized that even comments on news sites are generally harmful, and have given people a weird expectation of a "right to be heard" as opposed to merely "a right to free speech").
The assumption--which makes no sense to me--is always "without moderation everything you see would be a cesspool", when I will argue that it should be obvious that that won't happen, because you will have to rethink how comments work entirely if they are unmoderated, and I think the result of this is that comments will just get turned off. When you follow some random channel, you will see videos from that channel and videos shared by that channel (the content of both of which the people who make that channel will be liable for, but not YouTube, as they exercised editorial control but YouTube did not) and that's it: you won't see videos from other channels (as YouTube won't take that liability unless they carefully hand-curate their selections, which maybe some website would but Google would never bother with ;P) and you won't see comments on any videos unless someone agreed to pre-moderate them (and accept liability for them).
Again: you won't see YouTube showing you random videos unmoderated, as that isn't a useful platform (ignore "horrible" for a moment: this would be 99% spam... even 4chan doesn't work once you truly reject Section 230; and again: maybe that isn't a bad thing ;P), and you won't see unmoderated horrible comments for the same reason: the feature set of the Internet changes once you change this law; and maybe you really really like those features and refuse to give them up... but trying to make arguments about what the content on the Internet would look like without first contemplating how the feature set changes is a nonsensical prediction and I think does a disservice to these discussions and forms a kind of strawman for the position against Section 230.
1. No moderation and continuing to allow user created content.
2. Removal of all user created content (with some narrow exceptions like YouTube video channels).
I don’t think either of these is a better outcome.
Along the way we’d lose sites like HN and any others that do the best they can to moderate a varied user base.
Specifically, common law defamation. The two cases that the authors of Section 230 principally had in mind were Cubby v. CompuServe[1] and Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy[2].
> It doesn’t have to do with recommendation algorithms.
It theoretically could. Section 230 basically immunizes websites from defamation suits. The question in the above two cases was the degree of editorial control that CompuServe and Prodigy exercised. If you exercise insufficient editorial control, then you're not liable for defamatory statements made by users of your platform; you're just a passive entity, no more liable for libel than the telephone company is for slander. If you exercise sufficient editorial control, then you're directly liable for any defamatory statements as if you made them yourself in the first instance, much like a newspaper is liable.
There's no hard-and-fast rule for what constitutes sufficient editorial control, especially as it regards online interactive services. Section 230 stopped the evolution of the caselaw in its tracks. If the bar is relatively low, then some automated recommendation systems conceivably could trigger liability, presumably based on how sophisticated they are. I mean, that is the impetus for removing Section 230 protections afterall--recommendation algorithms that seemingly popularize "fake news", some of which is defamatory in nature. The selection of which user posts to popularize, and the manner in which they're presented, could constitute editorial control the same way a newspaper selects and frames statements taken or revealed by journalists. In fact, it might be worse for some websites--journalists and editors can interject weasel wording[3] to avoid liability, but algorithmic systems aren't that smart. And because defamation is a common law claim, the rules are likely to vary state by state.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubby,_Inc._v._CompuServe_Inc.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prod....
[3] Or another way to put it: reasonable qualifiers and narrative structure that make it clear the publisher isn't affirming the truth of the matter asserted.
If you're getting terrible content, I have to think you're the one to blame. You have the like and subscribe buttons, you can train the system. I did.
Thumbs-up stuff you want to see more of, ignore or thumbs-down stuff you want to see less of. Subscribe to channels that seem to have a lot of stuff you like. It seems straightforward?
It’s a bit like blaming the heroin addict who is offered it everywhere they go. Don’t blame the user when this is wide spread.
[1] https://mashable.com/article/youtube-conspiracy-theory-recom...
I understand you can watch only one type of video, but, from what I,'ve seen, as soon as you watch/click on 1 political video, you get bombarded by it. Also sharing ip with other people seem to affect what you're being shown. I'm surprised that hn seems to think it has that much control over the recommendation algorithm.
Here it is a private individual saying some people on the platform are using his likeness to scam people out of money.
Is what is happening with YouTube allowing these videos to stay up illegal? I am not a lawyer, but I am curious to know.
For an even more heinous example see the Joe Scarborough murder conspiracy theory.
It isn't a legal shield any more than you not being prosecutable for the death of Abraham Lincoln is - because it is the completely wrong person to try to prosecute!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscenity
That is section 230 verbatim.
It says a service provider should not be regarded as a publisher of user submitted content, wherein the user submitting said content thus accepts the role of publishers. I disagree and believe the service provider to be the publisher no differently than a magazine showing advertising the magazine did not themselves create. It’s time the laws reflect the reality of the content in question.
Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material
(1)Treatment of publisher or speaker No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
(2)Civil liabilityNo provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of— (A)any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or (B)any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).[1]
This is section 230 verbatim. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
230 was created to allow them to moderate their platforms. The context in my post (and the history described in that stratechery link) are critical to fully understand the issue.
What you’re suggesting would lead to the opposite of what you want - it would force them to not moderate at all.
Facebook being legally responsible for the random musings of two billion Facebook users and a magazine being responsible for the ads it runs are not equivalent.
I am completely fine with that since content moderation is virtually nonexistent online.
> being legally liable for all user content is not survivable
That is the same argument for opposing slavery. Its a meritless argument.
At any rate the section is most certainly a legal shield both in practice and intent contrary to your claim:
> this section also protects ISPs from liability for restricting access to certain material or giving others the technical means to restrict access to that material
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Decency_Act
As another example one of my coworkers claims residence in California where he owns an agricultural services business. He supplies labor to orchards to pick nuts and fruit. It costs more for the farms to hire him than for them to hire and manage the field labor directly. The only reason they use him is to shield themselves from liabilities associated with labor law. He is their legal shield in the capacity of a distributor and retains liabilities associated with such.
This seems to contradict everything I’ve read, including the case law history, do you have something you’re basing this on beyond personal opinion? Given that you left out the relevant Good Samaritan portion in your previous comment, it feels like you’re arguing from a position of motivated reasoning. I think you’re wrong on this issue, but I’m happy to be shown otherwise.
> “I am completely fine with that since content moderation is virtually nonexistent online.”
This just isn’t true: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/02/men-are-scum-inside-...
As far as meritless argument, sites that allow user content could not exist if they were responsible for all of it. This is no way comparable to the moral hazard of slavery (which should not exist) so there’s no conflict.
I’m confused by your last point, I’m arguing that it is a legal shield. It’s just that the shield enables them to moderate.
My last point is that the producer of physical goods does not need a legal shield, because they separate distribution from availability. A web server cannot separate distribution from availability and thus would retain liability for content regardless of its reclassification.
The immediate consequence of revoking 230 is hindering anonymous user contributions to websites for public exhibition. The liability associated with such can be substantially marginalized by any number of practices that cripple a public facing ad based revenue model.
Savvy enough to know how to buy cryptocurrency, but not savvy enough to not buy cryptocurrency.
It's been featured in everything from The Today Show to supermarket tabloids. There is no counting the number of crypto buying tutorials on the web. There are crypto ATMs. I've heard retires with no computer talking about it.
It's not mainstream the way a savings account is, but it's not the exclusive club the promoters want people to think it is.
Cue the inevitable Joe Kennedy comparison: Kennedy Sr. supposedly got a shoe-shine one day, and had a conversation with the shoe-shine boy about said boy's hot stock tips. Kennedy realized everything was overheated and overhyped, and pulled his cash out of the market; the crash of '29 happened not long after.
The DMCA take down system was a legal requirement and one that was hands off, submission, manual verification and action. By moderating things like hacking or covid videos automatically they have opened a massive can of litigation smack down on themselves.
The real moat is the advertising/monetization. The ad revenue drives content creators and now in 2020 likely the (presumably quite insane) operating costs. Sadly the harsh, Disney-esque moderation appears to have been necessary for this.
This is also why it seems unlikely why we'll see an alternative, more open Youtube: It won't be able to able to compete on ad revenue.
It has taken Google 14 years to get to this level. I wonder how many 10s of billions of dollars have been spent in the process.
The scams must be part of some kind of bitcoin laundering scheme, I just can't figure out how, it seems more like a bitcoin tainting scheme rather than cleaning.
There is people with a high level of trust. They will believe almost anything. Sometimes they are in a vulnerable situation, sometimes it comes with age as cognitive function gets worse, other times maybe people with high stress situations looking for a way out of their problems, they exist.
In phishing, the scammer knows that most people will ignore their mails. But, they are trying to get to the vulnerable people, the ones that will bite the bait. "significant numbers" is difficult to evaluate. Maybe it is a very low percentage of the people that is targeted, but when the targeted are in the millions the victims are going to add up.
And, in my experience, this is a psychological trait. A kind of opposite to paranoia. A paranoid person will not believe anyone. A too-trusting person will believe everyone.
Phishing and other scams prey on the vulnerable.
The internet must be a hell of a place for these.
You mean, pronoia?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pronoia#Etymology_2
Yes.
(psychology) A belief (sometimes regarded as irrational) that people conspire to do one good. [from 1981] Antonym: paranoia
It is interesting how prevalent is "paranoia" in books and movies and how little attention "pronoia" gets.
Thank you. I didn't knew that the word existed.
This is also the reason why they use grammatical errors. To further fish out the too wary. You are left with desperate (people in dire financial situation), or 'high level of trust' as you put it.
Probably a stupid question, but is there any first hand evidence (like a testimony from a scammer) that this is the case?
Feels like a completely unfalsifiable argument, since knowing whether the mistakes are deliberate because they make it easier to trick people, accidental but kept because of the same (the scammer doesn't know why it works) or actually accidental cause of the scammer doesn't know better seems like something that's almost impossible to prove.
That's an easily curable condition though and doesn't last long.
And it would be wrong to assume that "the vulnerable" would be a disjunct group. People, i.e. everyone, will at one point or another find themselves in dire straits. When desperate, the threshold of what seems like a 'good idea', a way out of misery, will be lower. People tend to believe what they want or need to believe.
Best regards,
QuantumSuperFast ACME Inc.
BTW:
This is what happens when you reply to spam email | James Veitch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QdPW8JrYzQ
Bitcoin is much more useful in the early days as a payment option. It let me receive money for my small gigs from overseas clients back then when I was a student without getting a major cut from transfer fee, and let me purchase stuff online via reloadable bitcoin virtual debit card or even direct bitcoin payment (back then banks in my country treat online purchase as high risk and disable support for online payment with visa/mc debit cards, and as a student I couldn't get a credit card yet). It did felt like a currency of the future back then. Now it's just another financial commodity used by day traders and get-rich-quick scammers :(