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Comment by throwaway0asd | Hacker News Reader

If social media wishes to be immune from lawsuits regarding the content it publishes, section 203, then it should not have the ability to censor such content for an explicit commercial revenue model.

I understand why people hate that opinion, because they want civil discourse and nearly free access to media online. Uncensored content pushes normal people out.

Those things are great, but are ultimately out of alignment with a commercial revenue model. The result is social media imposing an algorithmic bias to increase engagement, the results of which are often toxic, and that toxicity ultimately pushes normal people out anyways. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

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> If social media wishes to be immune from lawsuits regarding the content it publishes, section 203, then it should not have the ability to censor such content for an explicit commercial revenue model.

Why? This is seems like a total non-sequitur. It's pretty obvious that the individual posting illegal content is the person responsible for it and not the platform it's posted to, unless the platform is soliciting or refusing to remove said content. The anti-230 reasoning seems purely motivated by punitive thinking rather than what actually makes sense in reality.

> Those things are great, but are ultimately out of alignment with a commercial revenue model.

I would say it's out of alignment with the ad model specifically. Currently, there exists a financial incentive to curate content in a manner that pleases advertisers and the internet mobs that patronize their businesses. However, if social media companies were somehow forced into a subscription model, they would have a financial incentive to avoid banning users because it would hurt the bottom line, it would also eliminate the incentive to curate content to the prerogative of advertisers, and it would make the user experience much better due to lack of ads and the need to create better user experiences to maintain retention.

230 is broad.

At the time, websites were mostly just hosts of content. The individual is posting on the website but otherwise the website is a tool.

This changes with recommendation algorithms. Nearly all social media is based on some kind of recommendation algorithm. Should that be covered by 230? It could be argued that it starts to get closer to an endorsement of certain content (and indeed, some of that recommended stuff is ads.)

Chronological is still fits the interface of a recommendation algorithm.

You can take HN as an example of a recommendation service - while they remove things that are off topic, you'd have to argue that YC endorses whatever is in the #1 spot on HN.

Who is "they", though? Aside from the spam filters, posts largely make it to the front page (or not) due to community moderation. YC isn't the one making those endorsements, the moderating population of HN users as a whole are doing so.

The HN mods routinely give posts they feel are interesting a second chance [0], and posts deemed "controversial" via a combination of human and automated factors are deranked.

HN has more active, hands on moderation than most social media sites, and there's a stronger argument that dang "endorses" the front page of HN than that Steve Huffman "endorses" the front page of reddit.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23239449

And at any rate, #1 on HN is not the product of any simple rule like "most upvotes per unit time with some decay function applied." There is significant judgment in expressed in the way that stories are ranked. The source code as of 2012 was enough to demonstrate this, but in my understanding yet more judgment has been applied since then.

https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc

> It could be argued that it starts to get closer to an endorsement of certain content

But we know that isn't actually the case. The algorithms are designed to drive engagement, what they show you is a function of your behavior on the site, it's not an "endorsement" by the site creators, they're finely tuned machine learning systems optimized for ad dollars - that's it.

Once again, this is just another example of how the ad model incentivizes pernicious behavior. If these sites were under a subscription model they'd be happy to offer you the option to sort your feed with a purely chronological algorithm because they'd still be getting paid regardless of your engagement behavior.

If people don’t explicitly look for recommendations and we shove it in their face anyways, is that not an endorsement? “We think you’ll like this.”

There are also active efforts to remove “bad” content from such recommendations, which is effectively un-endorsing it.

Fun fact: The US Copyright Office wants to junk DMCA 512 protection for social media using this same logic.

> Why?

It is a non-sequitur only from the perspective of a social media company protecting its media business, but not from any other perspective. If I, as not even a user of the given social media service, were to receive numerous death threats as a result of content published and republished on that social media service I should have the ability to sue them for libel. This, of course, also ignores the numerous criminal liabilities faced by that social media company had they not been shielded by something like section 203, such as depraved indifference harm. There are numerous examples of this scenario both large and small, for example pizza-gate conspiracy theory and various online conspiracy theories attributed to Alex Jones.

At the moment harmed individuals get neither the ability to sue to recoup their harms nor a vote to censor content that is clearly illegal and/or harmful in the immediate to their person. This immunity does not exist for any other communication venue in the US irrespective of first amendment concerns, for example if a radio show or newspaper allowed such conspiracy theories you could sue them into bankruptcy as did Hulk Hogan versus Gawker.

A fairly simple argument for this position is: This speech (the content posted to social media) is either speech by the poster or speech by the social media company; you can't have it both ways. If the social media company isn't responsible for illegal content, then ipso facto it must be the user's speech. But then the company doesn't have first amendment rights attached to that speech itself, such as the right against compelled speech that would be implicated by this law. (Note that this law doesn't by any plausible interpretation limit anyone's speech acts.)

I think everyone intuitively understands you can't assert 4A rights on contraband held by the police while also denying owning that contraband to dodge criminal responsibility. This thing with social media is the same thing but with 1A instead of 4A.

I would consider myself a first amendment absolutist; and yet I don't have a 1A problem with the concept of this law [0] insofar as social media companies choose the position that user speech isn't their speech. The problem is that they won't come out and state that position, they intentionally flipflop on whose speech their websites host exactly depending on what is most convenient. So of course it looks like this is a massively overreaching law when the position flops to "company speech". And if a company came out and said okay we accept responsibility for what's posted on our platform, then I'd be the first in line to say that the government can't force them to publish certain content.

Contrast traditional publishers who definitely have first amendment rights to publish or not to publish things. Well, yes, they do, but they also have legal responsibility for what they publish. The rights follow the responsibility.

[0] Saying nothing of the wording; because I'm sure it was drafted by censorious assholes, like every other law.

In a world where Facebook doesn't have a freedom of speech right to remove a post without also losing section 230 protection do you think freedom of association could cover removing specific posts or only banning users outright? Would Twitter's model of banning a user until they delete their own unwanted tweet(s) be okay?

That’s not freedom of speech. Freedom of speech only protects what you say only from government censorship.

That's not freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is a general principle that covers more than government censorship. What you're thinking of is the first amendment, which covers government censorship (including by its agents). 1A neither invented nor set the absolute boundary of the principle of freedom of speech.

In that case freedom of speech is generally defined according to Mills in On Liberty which still doesn’t acquiesce to the application suggested of social media. They as a large business of many users should not be provided a greater speech mandate than a dissenting individual should speech be actually free.

Freedom of association is rooted in freedom of speech. Otherwise all the Civil Rights Acts would be unconstitutional as they fundamentally impact association, but not in a way that dilutes speech which is what freedom of association covers, for better or for worse. So, social media corps lacking freedom of speech rights in their users content, they also lack freedom of association rights with regards to that content and those users. To push the metaphor too far, their users' speech and their own speech are like oil and water: they are too different to dilute each other.

Now, would an alternate universe in which freedom of association was actually a robust right on its own be a better one overall? Would I happily trade that for this social media thing? Quite possibly, quite possibly.

Alternatively, if you want a free speech platform as a public square, you should convince your government to build and operate it, rather than delegating to private entities who aren't bound by the constitution

What is a free speech algorithm? I just want online speech open to the same freedoms and limitations as all other speech.

Edit: Why is that objectionable?

Downvote trolls responding to a comment in less than a minute on a thread buried in other comments nearly 24 hours old. Feels like a bot.

> If social media wishes to be immune from lawsuits regarding the content it publishes, section 203, then it should not have the ability to censor such content for an explicit commercial revenue model.

It's a bit more insidious than that, as they can still go and say "we don't censor it, see, it is not removed", all while the content is blacklisted from recommendations.

Still works essentially as censorship as nobody can see it until they look at channel directly but it is not technically censoring.

> I understand why people hate that opinion, because they want civil discourse and nearly free access to media online. Uncensored content pushes normal people out.

Nope. It pushes ad revenue out. Youtube, aside from not allowing porn and other 18+ stuff was for long time basically uncensored, you could post anything and algorithms wouldn't punish you.

Got to be biggest video platform regardless of that.

They started with demonetizing or lowering monetization for "controversial" stuff because of ad money, and companies not wanting to see their ads on the more controversial stuff for fear of being associated with it. But it wasn't for people, it was to please other corporations that gave them money.

Recommendation system makes sure that generally if you don't search for something and don't watch it, you won't get it, so the fact some content that might offend them is on the platform is irrelevant.

And after Trump won, the companies just used same systems to push the topics they don't want on the margins of search results

> It pushes ad revenue out.

Same thing. Ad revenue is a result of eyeballs looking at it.

So walmart is responsible if a person in one of their stores walks around holding an image of child pornography?

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