There is no bottom when it comes to Section 230 reform proposals
blog.ericgoldman.org
blog.ericgoldman.org
"such recommendation materially contributed to a physical or severe emotional injury to any person."
What specifically is an 'emotional injury'? What's the legal bar for that? Does one merely need to say "I experienced trauma from reading that" and that flies? Or do I just need to go to a sympathetic doctor who can say I'm experiencing anxiety symptoms?
Any lawyers here have color on how such loose ambiguous language around subjective harms will (or currently) get handled by the courts?
Emotional injury isn't a new concept in law. Such injury has been around probably since the dawn of legal systems. For example, you (broadly) cannot harass or slander people, even if it doesn't cause physical or financial harm.
> Slander and harassment really have very specific definitions.
Yes, I know. I was in a hurry and didn't come up with something better. I'm just pointing out that emotional injuries are well-established. There are plenty more, such as emotional distress in damages.
> Social media mobs ... are rarely, if ever, held to full (or any) consequences.
I think that is, in part, because the legal system hasn't caught up with reality.
not a lawyer, but have taken a number of law courses focused on civil law and worked on legal platforms. I suppose it would be handled the same way such concepts have been handled in tort cases for a long time in common law systems.
I think it’s also important to think about what it’s not. It’s not something that can happen to a company, so no one with deep pockets will be able to go after big tech. It’ll open up the potential for people to sue, but that’s just a matter of throwing a tiny amount of money around around if anyone is dumb enough to think they can win a lawsuit against a big tech company.
Is there a potential risk there for companies with class action suits? Or will the arbitration clauses/class action waivers found in terms of services prevent that from happening?
I'm instantly reminded of an at least 3 year trauma time when my Ex cheated on me and added more insult to injury. Emotional injury is real. I felt a pain as if someone has beaten the crap out of me and it was present all day every day from a few seconds after waking up to falling asleep. I felt as if I was beaten up so bad that if it was physical damage I would've been put in hospital.
That is real emotional injury and should be punishable by law. And if I'd have an educated guess it's also why some men beat up their cheating ex-partners or the third party, commit murder, suicide etc.
And reading some text can make me infuriated but not injure. I can only be injured by text if I'm already in an emotionally vulnerable state, see the cheating ex example.
Being bullied or harrassed is a different topic.
While I'm sorry that you had a bad experience, it is a phenomenally bad idea to make failed personal relationships into criminal offenses. This is like some nightmare straight out of 1700s puritanism.
That would be wonderful. And while facebook could no longer aggregate and weaponize feeds from your friends against you, a browser or a downloadable RSS feed viewer could use any algorithm to fetch and sort the feeds of your friends, whether they are on facebook or on their blogs or anywhere. Which sounds to me the way the internet should have evolved, with personal computers instead of dumb terminals.
But lawsuits still cost defendants millions in expensive attorneys' fees to fight them in court. E.g. Oakmont's $200 million lawsuit against Prodigy. [1][2]
So it's missing the point if people only emphasize that 1995 Prodigy didn't remove an anonymous user's comment about Oakmont. In other words, leaving the dangerous comment up isn't really "winning". Instead, it's not having to deal with lawsuits at all from future "Oakmonts" that Section 230 clarified.
So would HN exist if Paul Graham had to deal with repeated $200 million lawsuits because anonymous posters kept writing "Facebook is a cancer on society..." ? It doesn't seem worth the liability risk without Section 230.
[1] https://itif.org/publications/2021/02/22/overview-section-23...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prod....
They 'd have to moderate somehow. In this new world, if it is OK to force porn sites to get the ID card of everyone who posts videos, then HN should also be able to moderate user submissions.
HN isn’t interfering with user generated rankings, right? That’s still a platform IMO.
I’m sure any regulation changes will benefit big tech. Facebook will have their politically connected staff writing half the bill so it’s burdensome for anyone small (aka competitors), but tolerable for themselves.
/u/dang will absolutely step in where necessary, to flag a post, split a thread off, or warn/ban people.
HN is a recommendations engine and the front page is similar to a feed. HN has user-generated content and comments. HN is definitely a social media platform and would be covered under any such laws.
HN has algorithms to determine which stories and comments are shown and in which order. The primary inputs are upvotes, downvotes, and flags, but it’s not a transparent or linear algorithm. Moderators (or single moderator, I’m not sure) have influence to override algorithm decisions like buried stories and force them to be shown again.
Which is not really that much different than what Facebook and other sites are doing with likes, follows, and views in their own algorithms. If HN exceeded the unique monthly visitor threshold of this bill, it would absolutely be impacted.
HN even has a feature that goes a step further than Facebook: The site allows privileged posters (YC companies) to insert special stories for hiring requests that don’t allow comments and, as far as I can tell, get some special priority in the front page rankings without necessarily requiring user upvotes. If someone decided to argue that such a job posting caused them “emotional harm” under this proposed law, they could have some standing.
NNTP clients generally worked by just downloading the whole group, so this could be done client side. With the scale of modern internet services, however, you're not going to be downloading the whole day's twitter content and doing client-side filtering, so you'd need to provide your filtering list to the provider. At that point, you have a friends list, and on a naive reading this might be a problem.
alt.something.twitter.text-only.emotional-support-animals.fluffy-bunnies
alt.something.twitter.text-only.checkmarked.public-figures
alt.something.twitter.bin.sfw.memes
The problem around sec. 230 is that large groups of people disagree. Trying to solve that with law is going to be ugly. The politicians aren't going to roll in and make a useful contribution to how algorithms work technically, or civility on the internet. That is hard enough to do with years of experience working with algorithms - without having to run the lobbyist & special interest gauntlet like legislation does.
Politicians no longer want any company to be able to mass manipulate their constituents. The fact that operating a platform at scale relying on user submitted content would be impossible with this bill is precisely the outcome being sought. This requires tech companies to either change their business model or take editorial responsibility for the content promoted on their platform.
I actually find this bill clever and elegant since it excludes search engines, discussion boards and more. Yes certain business models and startup dreams relying on making algorithmic recommendations without being accountable for the outcomes on individuals and society will die, but is this really a bad thing?
To me this is a total positive, there are still plenty of opportunities to build large scale platforms with the web. Simply moving forward, this will require bringing more value to the table rather than just putting people in a walled garden and making money by poisoning their mind and society at the same time.
If you give a specific exemption for narrow classes of existing things, you're crushing all of the un-thought-of things that innovation would create. There's no reasonable boundary that permits search engines and discussion boards but disallows "algorithmic recommendation systems", because they're the same thing.
When cars were getting faster in the 20th century, we made speed limits. This didn’t hinder building faster cars, just that you needed to start speeding on race tracks and rallies.
At some point we must define whats more harmful than beneficial. Ads driven models with algorithmic recommendation systems are not very beneficial, or so it seems.
So youre for the end of Youtube, et al.?
Ie., This opens every site up to massive amounts of litigation.
YouTube would still be able to sell ads, but it will be the dumb pipe it was always supposed to be under section 230. This will be a much healthier situation with many regards.
I think the key thing is to stop considering that the current status quo is the golden age: there is so much abuse everywhere from misinformation and manipulation to wall gardens and monopolies, but somehow we've rationalized it and accepted it as a fact of life. What this law will do, is introduce some much needed rule of law in the digital landscape, and I believe create a healthier and even more competitive landscape.
Presumably, then, the "recommendation company" does not need to take editorial responsibility because they aren't accepting the UGC.
Don't we end-up back at status-quo? Why don't your SaaS companies just become the places where these status-quo issues reoccur?
I think people would hate an internet without 230. Everyone is just acting like a kid tattling in kindergarten to get their way. The thing that gets lost is that Hatebook, etc. are mass manipulating because it is insanely profitable. Make it less profitable and the algorithm will change. This is why I feel the solution is a tax on digital advertising revenue. People will never choose paid over free w/ ads at scale and rules like this could offer users a more pragmatic choice.
I thought the author was being sarcastic with that. As it turns out? Nope. That's the title of the bill.
Can an algorithm be "well-meaning"? Is there such a thing as a "kind" algorithm? What kind of attitude does the Sieve of Eratosthenes have?
1) What are the rules for non-US sites that allow access to US based IP addresses? Does that count/is that enforceable?
2) I'd find it fairly amusing if sites with UGC would "shut off" access to US based IP addresses at 4.999m unique visitors (or whatever the limit ends up being) to stay in the "small service" exception window.
I also found the following article a good starting point for learning about what Section 230 is and is not: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
IMHO that’s purposely worded to limit the bypass to people, not companies. That’s why the SV rep supports it. It’ll allow people with no money or chance of winning to sue tech companies and that’s it.
Paraphrasing someone that commented on HN once and I totally agree, services providing reverse chronological feeds should be considered platforms while services providing algorithmic feeds should be considered publishers.
There should be no qualifier. Anything that’s a personalized feed should be considered publishing and companies should be liable for promoting that content.
A reverse chronological feed is no more or less algorithmic than any other - any sort requires an algorithm. You're just criminalizing algorithmic complexity, which is insane. There's no reason the same n items in a list should expose a site owner to different degrees of legal liability because they're sorted one way versus another.
What about cases when the user can choose a different sort? Is a company liable based on whether or not a user decided they wanted to see content in anything other than strict chronological order? Is Twitter publishing or promoting content as soon as users tag it? Does sorting by karma make Hacker News a "publisher" of content? Do downvotes and flags count as "promotion" of the downvoted content, or all non-downvoted content?
No. If I’m asking for it and they give me what I asked for, that’s not publishing. If they pick some content that would normally be buried and jam it in my face because some ML algorithm thinks it’ll cause engagement that’s publishing.
> You're just criminalizing algorithmic complexity, which is insane.
I don’t think it’s insane. I think letting black box ML algorithms moderate public discourse is insane. I have no problem with that being turned into a liability for big tech.
The abuse of 230 is in what separates a content source from that which conveys such content. It’s not that drawing an objective separation is challenging it’s that nobody wants objectivity. For example some people don’t care that Facebook will be harmed, and perhaps they hope it will be harmed, but cry a river if it prevents equivalent access to cat videos on YouTube.
That subjectivity is the only defense potential targets of reform, beneficiaries of online advertising, have and will exploit it to death irrespective of what any such specific reform contains or intends. As such any proposed reformed is going to make people angry no matter how toxic Facebook is. The quantity and directness of evidence towards vile, harmful, and catastrophic behavior doesn’t matter.
As I see it there are only two paths forward for successful regulation and they will both make people very upset.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/17/21070403/joe-biden-presid...
It blows my mind that after all this time that people still operate under the assumption that one political party’s representatives are somehow less stupid than the other party and are actually surprised at the realization that their preferred party representatives don’t meet their expectations. Or, which is also likely in this case, don’t actually read the bills that they vote on and support.
Especially beware of those that agree with your suspicions or biases - you are the prey.