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Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

If CNN or FoxNews says something blatantly slanderous / libelous, you can sue them and probably win.

If someone on Facebook says something blatantly slanderous / libelous, you can't sue anybody. Ditto with Youtube, etc. etc. So if you're going to say disinformation, its best to do it on Facebook.

EDIT: Downvotes? I'm sure everyone has heard the story of "Liars on Facebook / Amazon reviews / Yelp are killing my business". You literally can't win vs the liars on these platforms. FoxNews / CNN are legally not allowed to make libelous / slanderous claims. But go to Facebook / Amazon Reviews / Yelp (etc. etc.), and suddenly you see slander / libel / lies all over the place.

Because our laws are ineffective at policing that behavior on the internet.

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If someone on Facebook says something blatantly slanderous / libelous, you can't sue anybody. Ditto with Youtube, etc. etc. So if you're going to say disinformation, its best to do it on Facebook.

You can sue the person who made the defamatory statements...That's basic defamation law.

If you mean that you can't sue Facebook, that's due to section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

If you mean that it's difficult to sue people making slanderous statements on Facebook, that's true, but it's not impossible and plenty of people have succeeded in suing people who slandered them on Facebook.

> you can sue them and probably win

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-...

The news article you posted there isn't clearly libel or slander. Still, it shows that Fox News is defensively reacting and lawyering up.

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The fact of the matter is: Facebook trolls __don't even bother__ lawyering up. They don't even care. They know they're immune through a combination of technique + laws.

Facebook trolls are not immune under the law.

They might be immune due to the techniques they used, but if so that is an argument against allowing anonymity, which is what lets trolls say what they want with impunity.

> They might be immune due to the techniques they used, but if so that is an argument against allowing anonymity, which is what lets trolls say what they want with impunity.

Even if they weren't anonymous, they're physically outside of the USA and therefore outside the reach of the US Civil Court system.

I think I'd be in favor of a US PKI-based ID issued by the Post Office. Post Office easily verifies addresses of every US Citizen. Whether or not to make online ID's mandatory is... well... a different question.

But knowing if someone is a US citizen or not (with verification through simple PKI / certificates) would go a long way. Maybe reviews for US-based items / stores would require a US id for example, to be posted on Amazon. Or, maybe anonymity would be allowed by default, but with a civil court case Amazon would be obligated to disclose the ID of the individual who posted the review.

I mean I can't defend the general jist of what's said on CNN or Fox, but a lot of the time they say things or promote little things that don't matter but are most likely factually accurate enough to pass legal muster.

I don't watch 24/7 so I know someone's going to respond with a Tucker Carlson quote that's like: "The Vaccine is killing people" and unfortunately, even for that, there's technically accurate data to back it up. I'm not saying that's RIGHT but I'm saying why Fox news is still on the air.

People using lawyers to skirt the law will always happen.

But the idea is that we __want__ people to do that. No one likes it when lawyers tell them "you can't legally do that", even when the lawyer is on their side.

Fox News / CNN has a team of lawyers whose job is simply: making sure what they air is legal. All news teams have this, to varying effects. (Maybe not fact checking every article ever written, but at a minimum, lawyers provide advice and review every now and then).

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In any case, Fox News / CNN will not ever say anything blatantly slanderous / libelous. Its why they word things in certain ways. They could have footage of X literally shooting Y in the face, and they'll describe it as "Alleged suspect X allegedly shot Y in the face".

That's a result of this "lawyer training". They're wording their articles so that suspect X won't be able to sue them for libel / slander. You won't find any such weasel words in any social media post.

Absolutely. Every detail is thought out on these networks. They only get in hot water when someone goes off-script and even for that stuff there's typically some kind of correction issued later. It's all about covering their butts.

With enough weasel words, you can say almost anything. Those words degrade a potential statement of fact to that of a mere opinion, and you are free to share your opinions everywhere and with anyone. Legally speaking.

Yeah, but at least we get Tucker Carlson's lawyer telling us that Tucker Carlson's words are non-factual. We get to see who the real clowns are eventually.

You can also see how FoxNews (and other media) are reacting to the libel / slander claims of Dominion Voting (the makers of the vote machines that Fox News claims were insecure). That's a factual claim and directly damages Dominion Voting's business. Fox News overreached severely, and are now backpedaling and cooperating with Dominion Voting's lawyers (https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-donald-trump-media-laws...).

We've got concession articles and "takebacks" from Fox. Its not perfect, but the legal system does in fact have emergency stopgap measures to pull a media company back from the brink.

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You won't even get that far on social media. You can't even pass step 1 of the suing process: naming the person to sue.

You sue the person who made the post.

And if that person is a negative-review farm out in (insert 3rd world country here) who was paid $10 to write 100 fake negative reviews, how does that help?

What, are you gonna ask the authorities to extradite him into the US to show up in his appropriate court date?

Everyone knows that you pay offshore troll farms for your negative reviews / disinformation these days. EDIT: Heck, there's a huge market for fake offshore accounts. You can buy fake offshore accounts and do the negative trolling yourself these days. (3rd world citizen "farmed" thousands of accounts on Facebook, to bypass the moderators. 3rd world person sells those accounts to someone nasty, and then the nasty person uses the account to troll / harass / misinform)

Its a well known fact that moderators mostly look at new accounts. 3rd world citizen actively using an account and look vaguely "humanish" for 30 days is enough to bypass the bulk of Facebook moderation.

You ain't winning this battle. Not with the current set of laws, not with the current set of techniques being used. You have a better chance of suing Fox News / CNN. Seriously.

Well it's simpler than that. Even if it was a known and specific American that can be sued, there are literally 10000s of them. A Judge may look poorly on a lawsuit where 1 of them was chosen - he'll say, why are you not going after the other 9999? The legal case there is this person is obviously unfairly chosen, and is likely just rebroadcasting a popular sentiment. It would also go nowhere if it had to get to casting a jury.

Maybe we need a class-offensive suit?

Basically allow suing a class as a whole, where if the class loses each member (named in the suit up front) gets a lien?

Or perhaps if you can identify the tree of dissemination, you can roll up all the harm from each individual actor and apply it against a higher level instigator to get the entire pyramid (up to that instigator’s level) worth of damages out of one actor.

Moderators must take responsibility for some (but maybe not all) of the words that are said on their platforms.

Swatting and Doxing are two kinds of content that must be moderated, and I believe we can morally say that these two behaviors must be stopped. Revenge porn maybe as well, and some other rules of the internet.

I don't know where to go for "fake reviews" or how to police that behavior. I simply am not imaginative enough to come up with a law or rule that's useful. Its clearly damaging behavior. More of a thing on Amazon than Facebook really, but it still happens on social media (Facebook reviews, Yelp).

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