Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

The distinction the court is drawing isn’t about corporations versus non-corporations, but speech versus moderation.

You say moderation is about “editorial control” but that’s exactly the debate. Is Facebook moderation equivalent to the NYT deciding what to publish and not publish?

When someone reads a Facebook post, does anyone think that Facebook is the speaker? That legal fiction is attractive for various reasons, but I don’t think it’s such a slam dunk. I think there is a fair argument that Facebook is a pipe for someone else’s speech.

View on HN

Even if you subscribe to the viewpoint that Facebook is a "pipe" rather than the speaker, it seems hard to avoid the idea that Facebook's choice of which speech it is a pipe for constitutes free speech by Facebook. Nobody should be confused as to whether a newspaper is the author of letters to the editor, but it has a 1st amendment right to choose which letters to publish.

If it is Facebook's speech, and this is equivalent to a newspaper, then why shouldn't we hold Facebook liable for the speech they do choose to publish — just like a newspaper?

Has the "1st amendment right to choose which letters to publish" in a newspaper ever been tested in a court? Or could it also be challenged by the same kind of legislation, if it didn't apply only to "social media companies with at least 50 million monthly active users"?

It doesn’t seem that hard to me to say that what Facebook does with millions of messages flowing through its pipes every day is “conduct” not “speech.”

A better foundation for this seems to be property rights—it’s facebook’s pipes, and their business what they do with it.

The water company owns their pipes, and they're not allowed to shut off my supply because of something offensive I said.

> When someone reads a Facebook post, does anyone think that Facebook is the speaker? That legal fiction is attractive for various reasons, but I don’t think it’s such a slam dunk. I think there is a fair argument that Facebook is a pipe for someone else’s speech.

I do, in a sense. By the nature of its design, Facebook has a feed of virtually every opinion in the world and can show any of them to any user. Facebook could express any opinion it wants by choosing what content gets shown.

As a sort of analogy, let's say I want to say "I like dogs." If I read from a random character generator until it says "I like dogs" and then I send that to the internet, have I published it or am I merely a pipe for the random number generator?

Technically the random character generator "created" the content, but it would be a totally different work without my involvement.

It's not really relevant, though, because Section 230 applies regardless of whether FB is a publisher or not.

How is Facebook different from a book store and posts different from books? Or a newspaper and the letters to the editor? When somebody buys a book, do they think the bookstore is the speaker? Now should that bookstore be compelled to sell every book just because someone puts it there?

The NYT doesn’t write content. They hire writers. Is that the difference? NYT publishes content for which they pay? What happens when writers start getting paid ad revenue through Facebook or Twitter, etc?

It’s not so much about getting paid by NYT, but rather about NYT going through every word they paid for, and deciding whether to publish it or not after all. Facebook and Twitter do not do that: while they do have some very basic automated filters, they are extremely hands off with the large majority of the content on their platform, only reviewing maybe a single digit percentage of published stuff, and only after a fact. Because of this, they claim that they shouldn’t be legally liable on content published on their platform, as they weren’t making any decisions whether to publish it or not. This is the major difference with NYT: NYT does not claim that it’s just random writers publishing in it, and they don’t pay much attention to what is inside.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com