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Comment by ptudan | Hacker News Reader

I can understand companies not being protected from profiting off of ads that come before viral lies (facebook, youtube), especially when the companies have a hand in spreading them with algorithms promoting addiction.

But if they're not promoting the content, and aren't profiting from it in a different way than other content, we can't hold them responsible. These providers create platforms. Would you hold CVS responsible for selling me the tape/sharpie/poster board to make a racist sign?

If I create a twitter clone, post it online, and it somehow blows up overnight with child porn and terrorism, why do I deserve to be punished?

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"Would you hold CVS responsible for selling me the tape/sharpie/poster board to make a racist sign?"

No, but I'd hold CVS responsible for displaying the sign in their stores.

"But if they're not promoting the content, and aren't profiting from it in a different way than other content, we can't hold them responsible."

That's the biggest issue Section 230 fails to account for: These companies are profiting off it. When Google or Facebook take down content, they still keep the profits they got from advertising it. Some of the most long-running ads on high traffic search terms on Google distribute malware, and they refuse to delist them due to the amount of money they make. Facebook refuses to restrict blatant lies on political ads because those political ads make it a huge amount of money.

Section 230 is a failure because Section 230 removes any financial incentive for platforms to moderate responsibility. If we were to replace Section 230, rather than removing it entirely, we would need a solution that makes it inherently expensive to host bad content, such that platforms are strongly incentivized to hire qualified staff to moderate and manage content.

If I report harmful content on Twitter or Facebook or Google, we need a system that ensures I receive a non-automated, competent response, and that the company is legally responsible for the decision they just made, such that they can't pawn it off on an algorithm or someone making 5 cents an hour.

> If I report harmful content on Twitter or Facebook or Google, we need a system that ensures I receive a non-automated, competent response

That seems extremely prone to being DOS-ed by bots or a brigade of complaint-heavy users.

If a platform can't scale to handle content moderation requests, it shouldn't exist at scale. Presumably a company shouldn't be responsible to respond to bot submissions, and could potentially ban complainants who abuse the system. (Although doing so would potentially open them to legal recourse if they were banning someone for filing legitimate reports they just didn't want to deal with, for example.)

There are reasonable controls that can be put in place, but ultimately, Big Tech companies' responsibility needs to be seated in the legal system, and there needs to be a way to escalate to the legal system when these companies operate in a societally harmful fashion.

"We're just a platform, it's not our fault" should never be a conclusive answer to conversations about these companies' operations.

No human review system can scale to automated reporting; the number of attackers you have is not bounded by your legitimate user base.

The system you describe would basically mean every online service that allows human interaction would always run under risk of any trolls being able to permanently take them down by abusing content moderation requests.

> If a platform can't scale to handle content moderation requests, it shouldn't exist at scale.

Agreed. This whole "we got so big chasing crazy growth that making us responsible for cleaning up our own mess would make us lose money" argument is very tiresome and one that I can't see holding any water outside of tech.

Exactly. There's an exclusive mindset in tech that it's okay to automate human problems and then just say there's nothing they can do when automation isn't adequate. Other businesses have huge percentages of their workforce tackling problems that tech companies just say they're not responsible for, like content moderation, customer service, etc.

> Section 230 is a failure because Section 230 removes any financial incentive for platforms to moderate responsibility.

What in the world does "moderate responsibility" mean? It's their site, they get to decide what goes on it as long as it's legal. If it's not legal, it has to be removed anyway!

> If I report harmful content on Twitter or Facebook or Google, we need a system that ensures I receive a non-automated, competent response, and that the company is legally responsible for the decision they just made, such that they can't pawn it off on an algorithm or someone making 5 cents an hour.

Yeah okay, fight for that then. This legislation isn't that.

>If it's not legal, it has to be removed anyway!

Isn't that the original intent of section 230? Because these websites couldn't possibly moderate all possible user submissions for illegal content, that when illegal content is discovered that liability is held with the user and not the website hosting it?

Yes, that's the point of 230. It doesn't make anything legal that wasn't before, or illegal that was legal before. It simply assigns the responsibility of illegal content to the party that created it. Which is just a reasonable application of common sense.

I simply do not understand the motives behind people who want to abolish 230 - they would turn the internet into a stark split between heavily moderated websites, looking out only for their own liability because should they lay a finger on anything, they are culpable for everything - and unmoderated hellholes. Maybe they enjoy the hellholes and want more sites like that? Misery loves company.

I suspect most of the posters arguing against 230 are:

* Uninformed about what the law actually does

* Purposefully antagonistic and contrarian, or part of a coordinated troll campaign to sow discord

* Folks who have a bone to pick with big tech and will support any law, no matter how ridiculous, thinking it would cause big companies grief

* Spiteful that their post got moderated off a popular platform, and want websites to be forced to broadcast their content (despite this being a clear 1A violation of the company's rights)

* Really, truly, think that sites on the Internet should be either a wasteland or approval-only-posting, and you have to pick one

In any case, this kind of discussion around 230 is kind of burying the lede of the EARN IT act, which is a desperate attempt at not only further eroding 230 protections after the monstrosities of FOSTA/SESTA, but to allow the government to take away these common sense protections from a site unless they capitulate to government spying.

Which really should be the focus here, but somehow we're all distracted in the comments dismantling the faulty "platform or publisher, pick one!" argument again.

Begs the question: who defines "bad content"?

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