Comment by microcolonel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by microcolonel | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> affirmed that private websites are not public spaces and social media companies don't have First Amendment obligations

FWIW this is only thematically related, the order concerns the distinction between immune or non-immune activities under Section 230.

If you publish something defamatory on your blog, and you operate it, you may be liable. Section 230 is there to say that if a website merely retransmits your publication, it is not liable for it, so if you publish that same defamatory statement on Facebook, Facebook is not then liable.

However, the argument with the executive order is that if you exercise a level of deliberate control over the content beyond some threshold, or you augment expression (like Twitter did the other day, adding links to contrary opinion pieces next to the President's opinion), you effectively become a publisher of that content.

It's not a completely ridiculous idea either. Consider how diverse the expressions published to Twitter are; at some point it's not that different to choose not to publish some expression, than to express the complement of that expression yourself.

It's kind of a ridiculous idea.

Before S230 that was the case: Executing any editorial control risked you being concluded to be the publisher.

Online providers said this is bullshit, we want be able to remove garbage -- lies, obscene material, defamation, etc. If moderating makes us publishers over everything on our site and legally liable, we can't do that. Make us immune so we can clean up the worst of things, and you can still always go after the actual sources.

So I think it only makes sense to the extent that the world before S230 also made sense. But that's a world where sites like twitter probably couldn't have come into being.

Without S230 the law is bizarre because it treated running a public venue as equivalently of being a publisher for everything that happened in it. It would be like if I ran a shopping mall and some member of the public came in and started calling you a paedophile that you could sue the mall simply because at other times I removed other people who were urinating on the walls.

On the other hand, there must be a limit on the amount of "moderation" you're allowed to perform before becoming a publisher. If you start labelling content as misleading (but don't remove it) or even if you privilege certain content instead of another (for example, you privilege social media posts advertising a product because it increases your revenue) then you could be considered a publisher.

Let's put in another way: publishers used to produce content (as in select, solicit, remunerate) to further their interests (financial, but sometimes also political, or cultural). Now the big social networks don't need to produce the content, but they can tap into such an enormous amount of it that they can limit themselves to shaping it. Promote certain posts, reduce the visibility of others. The overall effect is the same. You could probably make Facebook or Twitter in a great cultural publications just by tweaking the algorithm that determines the visibility of the posts.

> On the other hand, there must be a limit on the amount of "moderation" you're allowed to perform before becoming a publisher.

That isn't clear to me at all. The publisher is essentially the author from a liability perspective.

I do agree (see my other post in this thread) that there are serious concerns about the moderation power of the operators of these massive online public forums. But that doesn't make treating them as the author from a liability perspective the right tool for dealing with that.

Particularly because in most specific cases where their moderation power might be misused there is no question of liability. Imagine a site where everyone was always honest and nice, but the operator ruthlessly censored all posts by Georgists and S230 didn't exist. Okay, they'd be liable for their users posts-- but so what? There is nothing there for anyone to sue over. The Georgists would still be totally silenced.

> That isn't clear to me at all. The publisher is essentially the author from a liability perspective.

In a newspaper that selectively chooses to print some letters from readers, would the author be the publisher or the newspaper? That's an example of extreme moderation ("out of the 1000 letters we received this week, we will print this one") while Twitter is likely closer to the other extreme ("out of these 1000 Tweets, we'll hide/delete this one").

IMO it's when you start curating and suggesting in complex ways rather than simple "most popular having (user-provided) tag X" ways. Throw in other stuff like monetizability but denying that to some creators, and IMO Youtube is way over the line and the rest aren't far behind, because they can't resist using their position to manipulate what the user sees—there's too much money in it.

One potential outcome here -- social media platforms start _more actively_ banning users to prevent potential liability issues, thus fracturing the market. Highly doubt it will work out that way, but it would be nice (well, maybe...).

That would be a spectacular outcome, especially for anyone who likes ActivityPub and blogs, and wants to see them get a fresh shot of juice.

I'm just glad the prevailing call isn't to delete Section 230 altogether, which I think would cause a bit of pandemonium (though maybe that would be a social good as well, and maybe Section 230 was the mistake that made the social media monster).

That would be a spectacular outcome, especially for anyone who likes ActivityPub and blogs, and wants to see them get a fresh shot of juice.

Wouldn't this harm any of these activities, aside from situations where people are directly hosting their own content, because anyone hosting could be held liable for what gets posted?

That's the rub. The fantasy seems great initially for the prospect of breaking up the far too large (in my opinion) social media behemoths but maybe also ruins things for all the potential little guys as well.

Hopefully it will lead to what happened on reddit: the worst go off to a competitor which then fails to gain mainstream attention (e.g. Voat, Gab, etc). While they’ll be in an echo-chamber (which isn’t a good thing at all), at least they won’t ruin other communities.

> the worst go off to a competitor which then fails to gain mainstream attention (e.g. Voat, Gab, etc).

Or, HN :)

The problem there is that these sites have become echo-chambers, where they breed extremism. These kinds of ideologies (E.G. Nazism) need to be exposed to the light, like a bacteria, in order to be shamed and debunked.

This is a nice theory but are there any instances of Nazis being converted to normies because someone told them they were wrong on the internet?

Instead what seems to happen is that normies get pulled into Nazi content because the recommendation algorithms on these sites see heated discussions as engagement and try to feed it.

The only study I'm aware of on that is on Youtube's recommendation algorithm, which found the opposite is true - it tends to steer people away from radicalization.

How does that work out though in practice?

If I go to a bar and there's some guy screaming about his Nazi ideology and the owners don't kick him out, I'm going to just move on.

If some social media platform is full of trolls and hatred and such... people are just going to go away. It becomes a 'race to the bottom'.

Doesn’t that just lead to an echo chamber on the site they left also? When Trump supporters were banned from the political subreddits, they formed /r/The_Donald. And it’s an anti-Trump-criticism, anti-anything-left-leaning echo chamber. But that left /r/politics to become a left leaning echo chamber itself. Now, one can’t have a civil discussion about anything because /r/politics will ban anything saying Trump did anything remotely good, and /r/The_Donald will ban anything remotely critical of Trump.

This is a false equivalence - r/politics is not the left leaving equivalent of r/The_Donald. Trump supporters weren't broadly banned from political subreddits, just the ones that broke the rules did, like everyone else. r/politics is a left leaning echo chamber, yes, but you won't get banned for being pro Trump (just downvoted). On the other hand, you will get banned from r/The_Donald or r/conservative for being anti-Trump.

Don't all these social media sites augment content with targeted ads?

Is this similar to how the phone company operates? As long as they just transmit your voice to the other party they can't be prosecuted for anything you say. But, as soon as they start listening in and commenting on your words they have to listen to everyone's conversations and comment on all the words. Obviously phone companies don't want to be responsible for everyone's words so they don't comment on anyone's words.

The parallel would be Twitter commenting on a tweet. As long as they just pass the tweet on to other people, without commenting on it, then they aren't responsible for it's content. But as soon as they say "hey, this might be false information" about a specific tweet then they are responsible for the content of all tweets.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com