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Comment by traverseda | Hacker News Reader

You can be protected by safe harbour provisions, or you can editorialise your content. I don't think you should have both.

Free speech does not cover scams and fraud, something that happens on their platform. Society doesn't take any action against them for publishing illegal content, scams, libel, fraud, because they aren't a newspaper. They're more like a newspaper printing house.

In my opinion they should probably be losing those protections and should suffer legal consequences for the content their users post. The moderation has reached a point where they ate defacto editorialising content.

An alternative to that could be opting in to some kind of third party moderation arbitration process.

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> You can be protected by safe harbour provisions, or you can editorialise your content.

Aha, now this is an interesting distinction. I'm not an expert in this, as you might imagine, but what counts as editorialising?

To my naive eyes, having an algorithm that re-arranges posts, or injects new subjects seems like editorialising to me.

I'm also not a lawyer, I was making that as a more vague moral distinction on the topic of free speech and accountability.

For practical reasons I think those algorithms are absolutely necessary. We need spam filters. A good line to draw would be "bring your own algorithm". A technical challenge to be sure, bit breaking up social media backend providers and content filtering seems like one of the only safe ways to allow these massive platforms to exist.

The algorithm can be just "Dan filters out spam".

Even spam filters are problematic.

At first, its just unsolicited commercial crap.

Then its non-corporate allowed unsolicited commercial crap.

Then its 'hide commercial crap in posts to deceive'.

Then its 'fuck over screen readers by aligning everything weird like FB to prevent finding commercial crap'

Then its "hey we can add these other non-spam categories (like Palestine) to silence them".

> Aha, now this is an interesting distinction.

It's nothing new; the entire point of §230 is to provide protection to platforms that editorialize their content. Without editorializing, you have immunity anyway.

Most online platforms will become unusable if it becomes legally untenable for them to set their own rules about what is allowed and what is not.

Just take this website for example. If HN stops all forms of moderation, I bet you it will be flooded by wannabe startup entrepreneurs selling vibe coded SaaS overnight, right before every thread devolves into generic flame war about politics and whatnot.

And by the way, making platforms liable for scam and fraud that they do not intentionally allow turns every platform into the de facto arbitrator of what is scam and what is not, ironically giving them more power to control speech than they already do. Just look at how often DMCA takedowns are abused or how often the fraud detection on google etc misfires and censors legitimate websites to get a sneak peek of the future your good intentions pave the way to.

> You can be protected by safe harbour provisions, or you can editorialise your content. I don't think you should have both.

That's hilariously impractical. Just because you want to and can moderate some things doesn't mean you can guarantee rapid moderation of illegal stuff. When your platform is nominally open to everyone, and has millions of users, that just doesn't work out well.

Maybe platforms shouldn't be allowed to grow too large to manage themselves. Maybe, if strong self-regulation were a requirement, Meta and other companies wouldn't be market behemoths throwing their weight around in lobbying money to guarantee themselves monopolies while avoiding as much real scrutiny as possible.

Meta is enormous because it's useful. It's mostly useful now because of network effects. If it has no other use, Bluesky proves you can start a social media company in the time of Meta and have it be successful, given its slanty take on politics.

facebook of course, has the money to be responsible for its users comments and posts

I'm sorry but this is ridiculous. How on earth do you think Meta has money? Scale. If you descale it, it has no money to pay people to review everything.

And that's the less troubling issue. The more troubling one is you would be crazy enough to entrust Meta with the task of inspecting everyone's messages on the planet. That's some planet scale, ruinous communism.

“The business can’t survive if it has to play by the rules” is not a compelling reason to not make rules in my opinion.

What will happen in reality is the too big too fail platforms stay online by regulatory carve outs and smaller mom and pop forums shutdown, just like what is already happening now under other internet regulations.

>You can be protected by safe harbour provisions, or you can editorialise your content. I don't think you should have both.

Hi. You seem to be confused or uninformed. Check out this link[0]. IT should help.

[0] https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...

>You can be protected by safe harbour provisions, or you can editorialise your content. *I don't think* you should have both.

Personal opinion, not legal opinion.

>>You can be protected by safe harbour provisions, or you can editorialise your content. I don't think you should have both.

>Personal opinion, not legal opinion.

Fair enough. But not very charitable (or helpful/useful to freedom of speech) to anyone who doesn't have billions in cash on hand to fight the hundreds/thousands of lawsuits anyone who doesn't like what the thoughts of others that you (or I) choose to host on our platforms, whether they be web sites, mailing lists or video comment sections.

Section 230 protects the little guy much more than it does Meta, Alphabet, Musk, etc. As they have the deep pockets to fight those lawsuits. Do you? I don't.

i disagree, this just leaves the door open for whatever your preferred manipulation style is. Moderation was added with a purpose

just take away safe harbour as a whole. we dont need to subsidize the existence of Facebook and AWS and ISPs.

Without safe harbor, would Hacker News have to be shuttered?

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