Judge demands social media sites prove they didn't help radicalize mass shooter

Won’t somebody think of the children. All communication must be filtered through benevolent feed algorithms! Oh no the benevolent feed algorithms are creating pedophiles and terrorists! I yearn for the days of unfiltered chronological communications. Won’t someone think of the children! All communication must be curated by machine learning algorithm. Oh no the machine has created monsters! Wasn’t the web better without the algorithms? Think of the children! We must censor the web! Oh no the web sucks and we still have pedophiles and terrorists. Wouldn’t it be better to go back to 1999? But think of the children.

Maximum stack size exceeded exception.

There has always been a large spectrum from overly censorious forums to 4chan. There’s a lot of room in between those. I don’t want nor do I visit 4chan but I do want something less censored than Reddit.

So there definitely IS algorimithic removers and such.

The difference is that posts don't even make it past the gate if they get blocked.

And certain content is also ban-worthy.

Again, they very much do censor stuff. You just don't see the censoring.

Threatening to "go kill ni**ers for a high score" is likely illegal.

That shits on /pol/ right now, and is the root of supporting extremism to the point of violence and murder. And last I checked, making death threats is explicitly not protected speech.

Calling something a website isn't descriptive enough, plenty of websites get shutdown so being a website alone isn't enough to qualify as protected speech.

4chan and Facebook both are already filtering out Child Porn, they may need to add other categories... or not it's an ongoing question.

More abstractly I think we can agree a phone network or ISP is a less active participant in what specifically gets said than a recommendation engine. So an websites internal recommendation engine will ultimately get its own kinds of regulations eventually just like search engines etc.

Would that not depend upon how the website works?

I'm fairly certain that any two people going to the same page at the same time on HN will see the same thing. What they see will mostly be determined by the age of a post/article along with up/down votes by end users. It would be difficult to argue that much is going on here beyond speech.

Yet a site like YouTube is different. It will display different content to different people based upon their history (and, likely, other factors). You don't even have to be logged into YouTube for this to happen. It is a lot more difficult to argue that this is a form of speech since the recommendations are most likely the product of some optimization algorithm. It certainly isn't the product of the direct input of other people.

Note that the judge did not find that any of the websites are products or subject to product liability, only that there is a justiciable dispute of fact on that point. Your argument hinges on facts that are on dispute and on which evidence will be presented later by the parties, at this stage the standard is does the complaint state a cause of action when viewing every disputed fact in the light most favorable to the plaintiffs. This is not a ruling on the facts, it is a ruling on whether the filing raises issues for which it is necessary to examine the facts to reach a resolution.

That's what the court is going to determine.

Sorry, I should have said this is my opinion. As my sibling mentioned, courts haven't tested it yet.

The interesting question is likely (IMO) to be that it can create liability.

Selectively picking & ordering the content of others can trivially create new meaning, for example the classic trope of a ransom note formed by clipping words & phrases out of a newspaper & gluing them onto a page. Whether a particular site's editorial actions on user content create liability is likely to be determined on a case-by-case basis. Real site's algorithmic recommendation systems aren't nearly as transformative as newspaper clipping ransom notes, but the sequence and organization of recommended content may well count as a new composite work (much like a music album is a work composed of a sequence of individual tracks) and create liability. I wonder if it would also qualify for individual copyright.

Eh, it confuses what's actually stated in the ruling with the direct results of the ruling, which would be a trial on the merits of this, in which they'll have to establish by the preponderance of the evidence that they're not a link in the chain of whatever radicalized this guy.

So I can see that it's misleading about what the ruling says, but not about the net effect of the ruling. But it actually links to the actual ruling here, so it still comes out as a C+ article over all, merely because of the terrible state of legal reporting.

I wasn't claiming that SLAPP applied, I was claiming that it's used to avoid even getting to discovery when it does apply, because even letting cases get that far is expensive.

Turn off your watch history, and only turn it on when you specifically want to.