Washington's rush to smash tech's liability protection | Hacker News Reader

Washington's rush to smash tech's liability protection

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On the one hand it seems completely reasonable that websites like HN should be able to both display user generated content without liability, and also apply moderation at will. On the other hand that kind of negates the distinction between a neutral platform and publisher. Any platform could display user generated content, but curate it via moderation to only show the opinion of its owners, which makes it sort of equivalent to a publisher, but does an end run around the standard rules of liability for such an entity. I really don't know what the best way to handle this is.

Curated user generated content and a publisher are very different and this needs to be distinguished. This has been mixed quite a lot in the past few weeks of events.

While it is theoretically possible to moderate to th point they are close to each-other, this is not the reality of any of the cases being discussed. Such draconian levels of moderation will kill any community that was not already a full echo chamber without diversity, and not in the "oh Facebook is an echo chamber" way but in a true, cult-like following fashion.

Affiliation vs Promotion vs Allow - Publishers have directly affiliated authors. Algorithms and manually curated sets within UGC are promotion. Most all other social postings are simply "allowing". These distinctions are important, and arguably each have different legislative implications.

I don't think they are as different as you say. Take the example of the NY Times and Youtube. Both accept content from unaffiliated authors, monetize it, and pay the authors. They both apply censorship based on the ideas expressed by those creators (note the recent censorship of Tom Cotton by the NY Times). Why should the NY Times be liable for what it runs but at the same time Youtube avoids this liability?

I think my post laid out the response to this clearly: NYTimes has affiliated authors, thus enabling liability. Youtube has promotion at best, more like allowing. The sheer scale of Youtube and the vastness of what is allowed (their monetization system is fucked and needs reform/regulation but that's another matter than liability) makes it clear that youtube is applying policies with large swaths of opinion, not taking any editorial stances beyond what they deem is hate/abuse.

If youtube only allowed centrist opinion vlogs and no other content, you might have a point. They are not even close to comparable to that in a practical world.

Say YT censors after publication, NYT censors before. If you're liable either way, then the first model is just not possible.

Well that brings me back to my first point that on the face of it, the business model seems perfectly reasonable. I brought up Tom Cotton specifically because in that case the NYT moderated after publication like YT, but in any case I don't see why when the moderation is applied should determine liability or lack thereof.

In the real world, when something happens is very important.

Applying moderation before publication is active moderation, so everything that appears is approved by the "publisher." Applying moderation after publication is reactive moderation, so things the publisher disagrees with could get published.

It's like the difference between shooting someone to death and shooting a corpse.

> Curated user generated content and a publisher are very different

On the scale of facebook or twitter, not really. You have enough users that every conceivable opinion is going to show up on your platform, and by boosting or suppressing those opinions, you have basically exactly the same amount of power and influence as a traditional publisher.

> by boosting or suppressing those opinions, you have basically exactly the same amount of power and influence as a traditional publisher.

Strong disagree there. First, on either platform, you can go seek out every opinion under the sun, it's users that do their own content selection. Not to mention that there are top-level features that break any user-bubble like Twitter + Trending.

There's plenty of nuanced opinions on power/influence, but equal power/influence does not make them publishers, and I struggle to see how that relates to topics like moderation and liability. If these types of boosting/suppressing mechanisms are the policies actually in concern by people, this has nothing to do with all of the recent buzz/potential actions as any laws addressing that aren't going to get near that, only increase spam and abuse levels.

Are you going to make a law that me choosing the people I follow on Twitter is illegal?

There was a big thread about this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23550215.

I'm not seeing SNI (significant new information [1]) in this submission, so I think we need to downweight this thread as a follow-up [2].

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Rush? Are you kidding? If anything our policymakers have been delayed, led around with blinders on, unawares to the issues arising from tech's influence on society, for a decade.

If you don't think that these social media tech companies have done something fundamentally changing to our society and political process, then you've got a head in the sand. And at some point, like corporate finance in elections, the situation could grow to where they cannot even control it any more, and are just pawns in a social media game.

I'm not saying that Washington policymakers will handle it right, and should go headlong into poorly thought out action. But the idea that we have been in a rush to do something too soon, and should wait and see some more to figure out what's happening -- that is a joke.

I feel like attacks on 'the media' and so forth we'll see this just grow into a larger ball of cynicism about everything and everyone just clings to their given biases, ignorance, and ideology.

The silver lining here is that this could potentially push companies to shift user generated content to data models that protect privacy in order to absolve the platform provider from any responsibility. Signal for example has avoided information requests thanks to their architecture that respects privacy.

I find it remarkable that HN readers can be simultaneously in favor of Net Neutrality and in favor of censorship. How can these two opinions coexist? The flipside is also true: I find it remarkable that conservatives are _against_ Net Neutrality and censorship at the same time.

Whereas the right answer looks pretty obvious to me: I'm for Net Neutrality and against censorship.

It's possible to look at this in a less black-and-white way: when there are multiple parties involved in delivering content (the ISP, the website, and the author), who should decide what happens, and how responsible should they be for the content?

Net Neutrality says that the ISP shouldn't decide, but it doesn't cover other disputes.

Net neutrality is itself a (soft) form of censorship, in that you're taking away a private party's ability to make pricing decisions on information transfer. That said, I find it much less objectionable than what e.g. Facebook and Google are doing - mostly it just has negative economic consequences.

> taking away a private party's ability to make pricing decisions on information transfer

Seems like it's a soft form of anti-censorship then.

It’s very clear what is going on here, and it’s concerning that none of these articles actually point it out. None of this is meant to go through. It doesn’t matter if it will be struck down on First Amendment grounds, or if it will eventually lead to removal of more content. What does matter is how much money it will take to launch legal defenses, that the process will drag companies through the mud, and that it will not be over until after the election.

The timing of when this has started is not a coincidence. There are enough months left before the election to make a lot of noise and scare the companies, but not enough time for it to actually be resolved. During this time, they will be able to drum up a support on how bad “these liberals” are trying to censor conservative voices. All of it is a show to whip up The Base to come out to vote and “save our freedom”.

These moves are meant as a warning to companies that the government plans to tie them up in legal proceedings for years if they don’t fall in line.

Anyone making arguments about the logical end results (if these things go through) has missed the point.

Sort of a SLAPP suit?

Welp, looks like if you decide to edit what people post you become a publisher. Just like it says in Section 230.

Big tech gave up moral right for that protection as soon as they decided to interfere with what is posted. Its like claiming that you don't generate any of the content, because you "just" select what to ban from an endless stream of randomly generated content.

Moderation was explicitly considered as part of the reason for section 230. What are you basing your opinion on?

How many people on twitter were banned for "eat the rich"?

The parent's point is not that tech companies are unbiased or shouldn't be criticized for their bias, it's that §230 was originally adopted specifically to allow subjective moderation. It's a misconception that the law was predicated on a neutrality or objectivity obligation. Instead, it was meant to reverse court decisions that suggested that such an obligation might exist as a requirement for protection of intermediaries. §230 was meant to allow intermediaries to be protected while exercising editorial control.

That doesn't mean that platforms' actual editorial control is "fair"; it just means that the argument that platforms should obviously have to lose §230 protections over their editorial biases misrepresents the history of this legislation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...

Shuting out half of a political spectrum doesnt strike me as the original intention.

The idea was "to keep internet civil" which makes a lot of sense, but that's obviously not what is happening and not what provoked this reaction.

On the contrary, that is exactly why it was created. Dog lovers forums aren't supposed to be compelled to allow cat lovers a platform to voice their opinion on the dog lover's private server. Private servers are not public forums in the legal sense. We can have a conversation on whether or not that needs to change, but basic US law on private property is very clear about this.

Law follows morals, so first we need to determine what we actually want.

Dog lovers forum is not at issue here because it doesn't matter to how society functions, giant twitters and facebooks on the other hand very much matter and should be re-evaluated.

Large websites, large skyscrapers. Still private property.

How may were banned?

Does that matter?

The protection isn't moral, whatever that means to you, in nature in the first place its practical.

Even with expensive manual review of all user generated content our society is so litigious and litigation so expensive that nobody could afford long term to offer user generated content. Basically without forcing liability for content to be between the person wronged and the person responsible for the wrong doing the internet as we know it basically can't exist.

Moderating nothing instead means communities turn into cesspools of hate where an increasing number become afraid or disinterested in engaging. Meanwhile increasingly evil and radical ideas become normalized in the context of these echo chambers damaging our society.

Furthermore the idea that if they must choose between zero interference and full responsibility is a false dichotomy invented from whole cloth not in support of neutrality but as a last ditch defense against inevitable social change.

Becoming aware of a bad actor and then stopping them need not confer a responsibility to find and stop all bad actors known and unknown. The telephone company isn't, like, detecting prank calls and stopping them before they can happen. Make 10,000 irritating calls and maybe you'll show up on their radar screen, though.

Sure, but if your rule application has a significant bias then maybe you are not as impartial as you are trying to appear.

Why is impartiality a desired characteristic?

The first amendment protects that moral right. Free speech isn't free, if other people can compel you to amplify their speech, against your wishes.

>Big tech gave up moral right for that protection as soon as they decided to interfere with what is posted.

Do I do the same if I remove something from my own site that someone else posts?

Do you?

Depends on what was posted obviously.

If I'm just removing opinions I disagree with its obvious I'm exercising full control over the content and therefore assume full liability. Can't have one without the other.

By that argument, if you fail to remove a comment from your post because you were on vacation, that means you accept full liability for that comment...even if that comment was inciting murder and someone acted on it.

That sort of silly black and white logic doesn't work in the real world.

Wouldn't your premise mean that at some scale you can't actually operate? It's not really possible to operate and actually be liable all content on facebook, or youtube, or etc right?

Maybe you can't, maybe you should have thought of that before assuming this liability.

But for society at large good faith attempt at following your own rules would suffice probably.

I don't think communication should be restricted because of scale of moderation issues.

That seems artificial and strange.

We agree here, I also don't think that communication should restricted because twitter is based in california.

Do you mean if you do touch any of the content, you must touch it all? Or if at scale you have to shutdown or something?

This path seems unworkable.

If you become too touch-happy maybe you are editing more than you are moderating.

And if you edit more that you moderate maybe you don't deserve moderation protections.

How do you determine any of this?

Who gets to decide?

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