None that have been made with a straight face before a real court, that I'm aware of. That's the spin that the activists put on this, not something that anyone thinks SCOTUS is going to rule on.
You're absolutely right that 230 as written doesn't really speak well to the modern semi-automated echo chamber. But improperly written laws are congress's job to fix, not the courts. Courts step in when laws conflict, they aren't there to figure out how to solve problems with new laws.
The simplest way to look at the spirit of this law is: Congress said that internet companies shouldn't be punished just for hosting other people's opinions. And at the end of the day, TikTok and YouTube and Facebook are still just hosting this data. They didn't write it. They don't curate it. Anyone can post. Anyone can read.
Arguments about "recommendation algorithms" are legitimate, but not really in scope of the first amendment and liability issues envisioned by the original law. They're just not. It's not something congress thought about. And if congress didn't have a clue, why should the courts?
Section 230 does not speak about this because section 230 wasn't supposed to care about this. Section 230 was entirely about protecting large companies from legal harm when, say, the christchurch shooter posts their spree on your platform, or someone uploads literal child porn to your platform, as long as you attempt to remove such content when it appears. Section 230 is simply a legal admission that moderation is hard but necessary, and a single failure should not doom your platform.
If we think the way large platforms recommend content is harmful, we should write legislation for that, instead of yet again fucking with a working law to hammer it into something it wasn't meant to do. The USA loves to do that and all it does is give us really shitty legislation.
Okay - so in your universe, it's just as easy to punish them, not for the hosting, but the promotion of the content which is explicitly not covered in 230...
Hacker News does not directly promote content (aside from prioritizing content based on non-content factors [age, voting, etc.]). It does moderate, but that is not the same as promotion.
The crux of the argument in this case is that the plaintiffs want Google held liable for promoting content, not hosting it. The difficulty the Supreme Court seems to have is understanding what the boundaries are between promoting content and simply delivering a usable view of content choices to consumers, and whether Congress intended for that difference to matter with regards to Section 230.
Is Hacker News default feed that promotes highly-upvoted, newer stories to the front of the list and example of HN promoting those stories? If so, should HN be held liable if that algorithm pushes content that harms others?
Of course HN promotes content. There's much more content submitted than can fit on a screen. Automated filtering, human moderation, and signals from other users decide what to show you -- on both sites.
In my language, I say HN does not "promote" content because the view for me is substantially the same as the view for everyone else. Contrast that with YouTube, where Google's algorithms elevate content specific to individual users, thus leading me to conclude that Google thinks I "should" watch the content. I would argue that far more than automated filtering, signals from other users, and human moderation goes into YouTube's recommendations -- particularly a calculation of the revneue to Google of you watching the video.
But again, this concept that Google "promoted" the content that harmed the plaintiffs and should thus be liable for that action is the heart of the case, not that Google should be liable for the content itself.
Fundamentally any decisions a site makes to filter and sort content to show, including HN ordering by vote count and mixing in new content to allow it to make the top page, is an explicit choice they are making that cannot be differentiated from "promotion"
I don't want to respond to part of your comment and not the other, so I'll just say: I don't know, because exactly defining the specifics is not my goal.
> Fundamentally any decisions a site makes to filter and sort content to show, including HN ordering by vote count and mixing in new content to allow it to make the top page, is an explicit choice they are making that cannot be differentiated from "promotion"
This is the part of your comment that actually matters to me. This statement is so definitive, and yet there are people arguing just as definitively that some ways of prioritizing content for users create liability while others do not. I think there is a difference between "elevating when it otherwise wouldn't be elevated" and "providing a moderated list", but those two states are probably separated by a grey area, not a bright line. I think how YouTube identifies content for users is distinguishable from what HN does, but I also don't know if that difference matters with regard to liability, especially with regards to Section 230, which makes no attempt to legislate HOW content is made discoverable.
There's no natural state of how content would be displayed, any choice of how to do it would result in a moderated list that elevates something that wouldn't have otherwise been elevated with a different approach.
There is no distinction to me between what YouTube and HN do, and I certainly don't think the law should treat them any differently. Both should be legally protected regardless of which specific approach it takes.
Simple orderings like chronological are not considered moderated because the content doesn’t define the order.
Exactly defining specifics is kind of important in having workable laws.
The law can and does differentiate across lines like these even if they're both technically "promotion algorithms".
This, by many of the same arguments people say about Youtube, would absolutely constitute a recommendation. Even if it's primarily user driven, HN is responsible for the synthesis of all these values which results in content appearing on the front page and tuning which content appears or is downweighted. You can try to play word games but the reality is that should Section 230 go, no one's going to risk the cost of lawsuits to discover what the limits of promoted content / algorithms is.
But you're living in a fantasy world if you think that I, personally, could ever recover meaningful damages from somebody with enough reach to meaningfully defame me. Rather, defamation laws are being successfully (ab)used to silence politically inconvenient people like Alex Jones.
>Rather, defamation laws are being successfully (ab)used to silence politically inconvenient people like Alex Jones.
LOL. Strong disagree there. He's not being silenced by any means. He's free to engage in whatever speech he wants, be it defamatory. He only need pay for the damages he causes in doing so. I cannot imagine what's more libertarian than that.
I'd just defame him right back.
All section 230 does is make clear that if you don't have people signing off on each and every bit of content on your platform, but respond with a good effort to reports of illegal content, then you will not be held responsible for someone using your platform as a way to do illegal things.
If all these weird people that misunderstand this get what they want, it doesn't mean youtube recommends their conservative creators more, what it means is that youtube stops doing any personalized recommendations, and all you are going to see on youtube is Logan Paul, Mr Beast, and the other mega creators that little children love.
> All section 230 does is make clear that if you don't have people signing off on each and every bit of content on your platform, but respond with a good effort to reports of illegal content, then you will not be held responsible for someone using your platform as a way to do illegal things.
Web hosts that just serve content when a client requests it should definitely have this protection. Great idea. YouTube promoting outrage bait because it makes them more money? God no, no protection beyond what any other business doing that would have, not on the Internet. The line's somewhere between those.
Care to share any of that sense?
This mirrors pretty well how the rest of the world operates. If I walk into a Macy's and start screaming libel or inciting a riot, the Macy's Corporation is not liable for that speech. Why should a 'digital property' like a social media site work differently?
Of course, it doesn't totally erase the server owner's liability. If someone posts child pornography that my server displays, it is my responsibility to remove it as soon as I become aware of it, just as it is Macy's responsibility to escort the libel-screamer off the premises. Failure to do that can confer liability onto me.
To break this consensus is to break the ability to foster human interactions on the internet that mirror how humans interact in the real world.
Edited to add: It seems like this is what distinguishes a telephone company from a television broadcaster too.