Gonzalez vs. Google Live Analysis – Institute for Rebooting Social Media

rebootingsocialmedia.org

4 points·heliostatic··3 comments

Great metaphor I heard yesterday about 230 - think of three things: paper, the newspaper stand, and the newspaper publisher.

Obviously the company that makes blank paper newspaper publisher's buy is never liable for what's printed on it. They sell it blank!

The newspaper publisher is of course liable if they decide to make a new paper called "How to build Bombs Weekly".

And even the newspaper stand is liable if they decide to carry this new paper. (They are not liable for something bad printed in a mainstream paper since they had no way to know a normally good publication would suddenly include something terrible.)

Now what is youtube? Do they make paper, or are they the newspaper stand?

I don’t know the legal issues as play but morally speaking it seems to me that Google and Facebook are at fault. They deliberately control which material to feed to people in order to keep them hooked on their platforms. A person susceptible to radicalization for a given ideology will be fed the appropriate material to keep them hooked.

Google and Facebook pretend to be a public billboard where anyone can read/write what they want. That is not what they are though.

Live blog of the oral arguments in Gonzalez (the section 230 case) today with an exceptional panel:

Mary Anne Franks

Mike Godwin

James Grimmelmann

Gus Hurwitz

Jeff Kosseff

Emma Llanso

Alan Rozenshtein

Eugene Volokh

Benjamin Wittes

Jonathan Zittrain

Moderated by Kate Klonick

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