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Comment by DarkWiiPlayer | Hacker News Reader

> The order asks the FCC to examine whether actions related to the editing of content by social media companies should potentially lead to the platform forfeiting its protections under section 230.

Honestly, that part seems very reasonable. If a platform curates or modifies content or promotes it beyond what some system thinks the specific user might like, then yes, the platform should be responsible for that content.

The real question would be, should the platform become responsible for all ontent, or just the content it curates / modifies / promotes?

My opinion is that this should work on a per-content basis, where the platform only becomes legally responsible for a unit of content once it associates itself with it by promoting, modifying, etc. this content. Whether it is realistic to enforce it this way is, of course, another question.

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> My opinion is that this should work on a per-content basis, where the platform only becomes legally responsible for a unit of content once it associates itself with it by promoting, modifying, etc. this content.

Such ideas are certainly worth discussing, but I don't see how it would work. If the platform is suppressing some items then it is in effect promoting all the items it doesn't suppress, so would be responsible for them. The only way to avoid responsibility would be to present everything to the user, including the most blatant spam, in no particular order. Or you could allow certain kinds of "curation", perhaps, but if the curation is anything other than filtering by application of a published algorithm, then probably the platform would have to take responsibility for anything that doesn't get filtered out. But filtering with a published algorithm wouldn't stop professional spammers.

Here's a random idea: delegate the filtering to lots of separate smaller companies which would be a less juicy target for lawyers and it wouldn't matter if they went bankrupt every now and then.

This is actually much more far reaching. Websites modify user content all the time. For example, if you post link on Twitter, you don't decide thumbnails. Another example, appending an ad or "fact check" link are modifications of user's original content. Technically, if you change your website's theme or design in future, you modified all of user content as well.

I think you do choose to use the thumbnails and metadata of the site you are linking to and allowing the site to change it.

> Websites modify user content all the time.

Not manually though. If you post a link to Twitter, a bot will do its thing and fetch a thumbnail. They will not do that only for some tweets but not others.

> if you change your website's theme or design in future, you modified all of user content as well

Hardly, but more importantly: you don't modify user content based on the user content in question. If you add a new script that will uppercase the first letter of all Tweets, you're altering user content, but I doubt there will be an argument about editorializing since you're applying it to all content.

So under this kind of system would sites like HN/reddit be responsible for comments on posts if they edited/removed them?

If an HN admin removes a comment on a post, they've curated that discussion, effectively.

> If an HN admin removes a comment on a post, they've curated that discussion, effectively.

Then they'd be responsible for the comment that got removed; what's the problem with that? It's not like they'd be modifying one word in a sentence and not want to be responsible for the next one.

This kind of thing should obviously work on small data units, like tweets, posts, etc.

If they curate the content, they're responsible for it. If they are then accused of political bias or censorship (as with the case that triggered all this), can they be sued by the commentor whose comment they removed?

Once they've curated a conversation (removing comments) are they responsible for the ones they didn't remove in that conversation as it's implicit approval?

Just as an addendum to this, HN provided a great example. This whole post just dropped off the front page and isn't showing in the top 3 pages of results.

It could very much be argued that they curated the post, and if they're responsible for removing it from the front page , is that a form of censorship...

Social media platforms came from private forums, not publishing and newspapers. Moderation has always been a form of accepted censorship on private forums, and indeed, they cannot exist in every legal form without being able to curate own design and content.

I agree with you, that's why I don't think it's plausible to apply legal rules to them in the way that's proposed for twitter.

The point I was making is that things that could apply to twitter also apply everywhere there is user generated content.

Maybe the question is, how much content can you remove for what reasons until it becomes an endorsement of the remaining content. Removing a specific post for reasons like violating site rules is different than removing hundreds of posts that express some common political opinion. How should that line be drawn? That's complicated, but that doesn't mean there's no good answer.

Maybe the line should be form vs. content; removing a post because of strong language (if the site specifically does not allow it) is different from removing a post because of an expressed idea. There's also a clear difference between presenting something demonstrably false as fact and and questioning the reasoning by which such falsehoods are identified. Both might be expressions of conspiracy theory, but should be protected by a persons freedom to express their opinion, the other is a lie.

Under current rules, on most social media sites, things can be cause for removal without being demonstrably false. What you appear to be suggesting is that only demonstrably false or things like strong language apply.

If you suggest that platforms cannot remove other content, a lot of actions from people like reddit to remove objectionable content are banned, similarly here. Content has been removed from HN for example for "not contributing to the discussion", that's a subjective opinion, but one I'd suggest that site owners are entitled to.

Also when you start getting into very fine grained distinctions (for example have some of the things president trump has said been "demonstrably false" or not?) the chances of a law accurately capturing that requirement in such a way that a massive number of lawsuits are not started are (in my opinion) low.

Opening the door to that kind of lawsuit would seem likely to destroy smaller, less well funded sites, whilst larger players could likely weather the storm.

Most of the big ad companies/social media platforms see their curation of the content flow as a strategic asset because the curation is what lets them drive eyeballs to whatever pays.

So curation independent of the wishes of the user is a central feature, making this sound like platforms would become really responsible for moderating what they publish. Historically this has been seen as completely cray-cray by the platform owners and they've fought it off successfully so far.

So what's wrong with twitter being responsible for the tweets that it drives eyeballs to? If you pay twitter to promote your content, then yes, twitter should be responsible for the legality of this content. This doesn't mean twitter should be responsible for every dumb thing some edgy teenager thinks is socially acceptable to shout out into the world (So long as it doesn't get promoted or endorsed by the platform).

> If you pay twitter to promote your content, then yes, twitter should be responsible for the legality of this content.

Imho that's exactly what Twitter does want to avoid under all circumstances because it would basically make ad-automation more risky.

Google dealing with regulation around advertising for medical products chose a blanket ban for any and all ads on a large range of keywords for some areas, and will only manually allow e.g. the manufacturer of some medication to buy ads. Automatically judging the legality of ads / tweets is too risky, and doing it manually is too costly (and still somewhat risky).

That's a really interesting suggestion I haven't seen before. It makes sense from a completely non legal perspective. If you're halfway between a platform and a publisher, as I believe all these platforms are, then a could compromise on how to solve this massive issue could be that modified, curated, fact checked content (by CNN not an independent fact checker) is what they are responsible for in terms of being a publisher.

With power comes responsibility. If you have the ability to censor/moderate/otherwise modify content, but choose not to do so, then you are tacitly responsible for that content.

You can see the problem if Twitter allows politician A to accuse politician B of eating babies, but getting all high and mighty about politician B doing the same to A.

That's not how the law works. If you don't touch it, even if you have the ability to do it, you remain a PLATFORM not a PUBLISHER.

Any platform has the ability to modify anything on it. Does that make them tacitly responsible for all the content on it? No, that is just silly, and that's the way the law looks at it too.

I think what they meant was not the theoretical ability to modify, but to actually have the systems in place to actually do so, as twitter clearly does.

It would be great if the occasion were used to consider this and other points dispassionately.

However, too many are invested in maximally extreme, literal parsings of every syllable uttered by Donald John.

You sound like you're talking about literary interpretations of ancient aphorisms.

The amusement this last decade has been how the two sides of the partisan divide switched.

The Left understood BHO figuratively, the Right, literally.

The Left understands DJT literally, the Right, figuratively.

We might all benefit from a deep breath.

there's no guarantee a government regulating body wouldn't be politically biased (in this case the FCC) when examining a case. it looks to me that Trump made the DoJ its leash dog, what would be so hard to make the FCC the same (if it's not already)

And Twitter is not politically biased? At least we vote for government officials. None of us vote for the Twitter mods who censor mainstream political discourse.

It all depends on your personal overton window

There are many people that believe Twitter is biased in favor of conservatives simply because it allows some conservatives to speak at all...

It tends to shut down plenty of left-wing folks too, you know. "I got banned from Twitter today" is practically a meme.

It does, largely classical liberal, moderate liberal, other "left-wing" people that to not endorse the extreme Authoritarian Socialist left.

I'm an anarchist and most other anarchist-leaning folks I know with Twitter accounts have been banned at one time or another. Turns out intentionally violating platform rules does that. :)

Tankies, though, I don't know whether they tend to get banned.

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