Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

The entirety of Section 230 defense is "blanket immunity is fundamental to us, because it would cost us money if we had to go to court when someone thought we did something wrong", like every other type of business industry in existence.

Yes, Internet companies will have to go to court more. That's a good thing. It means there will be more actual legal precedent around how content should be handled, and it will mean companies will be more careful about doing things that are legally defensible, rather than solely focusing on what's profitable.

Donald Trump was elected President because sensationalism and radicalization drives engagement, and hence, ad impressions. The waves of mass shootings from incels and other radical right weirdos is on Section 230s head. And every single tech industry funded outfit defending it has blood on their hands because of it.

All of these amicus brief defenses come down to "we're afraid we might get sued", and if that's the case, maybe companies should rethink how they operate. Contrary to the positions of Mike Masnick and his ilk, US law isn't arbitrarily and capriciously going to attack anyone who's comment box gets spammed one day. Intent is a core part of law, and you need it to find someone responsible for most wrongdoing.

Tech companies have ill intent. They've chosen profit over responsibility, because the immunity granted by Section 230 makes that decision too easy. The current Supreme Court is awful and will do a lot of awful things, but stomping down Section 230 with absolute indiscretion will not be one of those awful things.

Kinda a sidebar, but I always love to see who actually is behind these sorts of things: The law firm behind this brief, Cooley LLP, appears to be a business entirely focused around things awful for consumers: Mergers and acquisitions, private equity firms, defense against shareholder litigation, protecting healthcare companies from regulatory investigations, and filing patent infringement lawsuits. They are quite proud of all of this on their home page. Wikimedia picked great friends here.

> Yes, Internet companies will have to go to court more. That's a good thing.

Isn’t this textbook regulatory capture? Only companies that can afford to go to court will continue to exist. Or move to IPFS, I guess.

We should do a better job as a society in using the Web as a tool rather than letting the Web use us as attention engines. We used to tell people “don’t believe everything you read on the Internet,” “don’t message strangers,” and “Mom hang up the phone I’m trying to play Quake!” Maybe we should bring that mindset back rather than trying to make hosting user content financially infeasible.

So, there's a thing that once you look for you see everywhere in these arguments: The giant corporations' first claim is that regulating them will hurt small companies. They say this all the time, about every regulation. Of course, since companies act with self-interest, if it really helped them and hurt smaller competitors, they would be for the law. Claims regulating big businesses hurt small businesses are without merit and should be discarded.

The law has, and can continue to develop, reasonable laws that protect people from frivolous lawsuits. Anti-SLAPP laws are key, and we should continue to raise penalties on larger players using them to bully smaller companies. And bear in mind, the cost of lawyers is... pretty relative to the business in question. If Microsoft and Joe's Blog go to court, Microsoft's spending 300x the cost on their lawyers, and if the case is completely bull----, Joe is still going to win on merits of the case.

Blanket immunity isn't really a solution here, and thousands of people have died over the past few decades of experimenting with allowing it. But I guess those deaths were worth it if it saved someone some legal fees.

How long do you think sites like Hacker News or non-profit Mastodon instances, would exist, in your vision of the economy?

Quite a bit longer than Facebook would. Because those are examples of communities where content is not moderated based on profitability, and best efforts are made to protect the community and deal with bad actors. (There's claims, of course, that HN moderates in manners to protect YC's business, but I don't feel that's significant, if it happens at all. YC definitely doesn't benefit financially from increased engagement on HN, so they have no reason to deliberately promote harm.)

"Best efforts" are not going enough for a community of this size to withstand a targeted attack (basically, spamming illegal content) - which is going to happen if such an attack could lead to actual legal trouble rather than inconvenience of the spam itself.

The only realistic thing they can do in that case is to lock down or at least throttle new user registration.

I mean, that's what they should do in that case. That would be a best effort mitigation to abusive spam. ...It's also probably what they would do even if they didn't face legal liability for it, because being on a community with a barrage of spam isn't fun.

You think without Section 230 more people would’ve voted for Hillary Clinton? Come on. We have 2020 as a counterfactual.

Also, Cooley’s more a general tech law firm.

I'm just going off the stats they're proud of on their about page: https://www.cooley.com/about

It looks like they pride themselves in helping corporations get away with bad behavior.

I'm not a fan of Hillary Clinton by any means, but she fits in the run of the mill space of career politicians that more or less are trying to keep the ship running. It's a stark difference from massive amounts of racist and sexist hatred, and I don't think Donald Trump could've won the election without the massive boost the social engagement of controversies around him drove.

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