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DOJ unveils proposed Section 230 legislation

justice.gov

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Re: DOJ unveils proposed Section 230 legislation

#291

Post by ByteJockey »

leetcrew wrote: post #114
xpe wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Please note that ‘obligation’ is not the only standard at play. Companies exist in a social and economic context. (I have previous comments on this topic that can be easily found.) 2. The ‘if you want a company to be run differently, start your own’ argument is tiresome and weak. There are (and should be) many mechanisms to influence corporate behavior. 3. Even the pre-Trump Republican Party has long taken flack f…

> libertarians who essentially argue that one core principle should guide their political philosophy. this isn't really true of libertarianism even. the word "aggression" from the NAP does a lot of heavy lifting and is subject to a lot of different interpretations.

I've always heard aggression defined as roughly:

Initiating or threatening any forceful action against an individual or their property

Is your complaint that the boundaries of "threatening" are too squishy?

Re: DOJ unveils proposed Section 230 legislation

#292

Post by salawat »

zerocrates wrote: post #267
aspaceman wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You couldn't pack courts to change the meaning of a phrase like this. It's not like I can come in as a new judge, say that I interpret these words a certain way, and plow my way forward. The wording has to be accepted within the technical jargon of the field. You know how we have words like compile, build, "binary", or executable? It's the same thing. Expanding the interpretation of the law is expanding the interpret…

> The wording has to be accepted within the technical jargon of the field. Huh? If a majority Supreme Court decides a phrase "really" means X in a certain context, it means X for the rest of the courts. The "technical jargon of the field" notwithstanding. They're often the source of that jargon. The Slaughter-House Cases famously by a 5-4 vote reduced the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment to a dea…

The court that turned "Shall not be infringed" into "No really, it's okay to infringe on this particular combination of parts because it wasn't an arm at the time" should not in any way be underestimated for capacity to torture language.

Re: DOJ unveils proposed Section 230 legislation

#293

Post by BobbyJo »

stickfigure wrote: post #277
BobbyJo wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe needing an army of moderators is just the cost of doing business when it comes to hosting user content. I'm weary of that change being made, but really, I don't see a viable alternative, or a good argument against it. If you can't moderate content at some scale, then maybe you just shouldn't host content at that scale. I think there may be a light, or a deeper darkness, that comes out of this though. We may see…

I think maybe you got the wrong lesson out of reading 1984?

I think conjuring that book is hyperbole. I don't think making people responsible for the legality of content they host is some crazy oppressive overreach of government power. The laws about what content is legal or illegal are pre-existing, these rules just shift the burden of enforcement in recognition that the government being the sole source of rule on massive distributed platforms isn't feasible. We tried, we failed. The bad guys ruined a good thing like usual.

Re: DOJ unveils proposed Section 230 legislation

#294

Post by lmm »

djur wrote: post #166
tangjurine wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Section 5c is particularly problematic. It disallows shadow-bans if I'm reading correctly. Can you explain more, I'm not really seeing it... Also how is disallowing shadowbanning problematic? I always never liked it.

What's the legitimate government interest in disallowing shadowbanning?

"To promote free and open discourse online and encourage greater transparency between platforms and users." That seems legitimate to me; the mechanisms of democratic government rely on free speech and the marketplace of ideas existing in practice as well as in theory. If undesirables were not only kept out of the town square, but kept out by a secret system that not even they were told about, that would be obviously damaging to democracy; yet that's what's happening online.

Re: DOJ unveils proposed Section 230 legislation

#295

Post by geofft »

ROARosen wrote: post #77

I don't care for most of it except this: >> Carve-Out for Actors Who Purposefully Blind Themselves and Law Enforcement to Illicit Material >>...it makes little sense to apply “Good Samaritan” immunity to a provider that intentionally designs or operates its services in a way that impairs its ability to identify criminal activity occurring on (or through) its services, or to produce relevant information to government…

I'm not seeing that in the actual proposed legal text (https://www.justice.gov/file/1319331/download), and I'm wondering if I'm overlooking it or this is just posturing that they weren't able to write up in a reasonable way.

The closest thing I see is subsection (d)(2), which says that the platform can be prosecuted (A) for a "specific instance of material or activity" (B) if it had "actual notice of that material's or activity's presence on the service," unless (C) they remove/block "the specific instance of material," report it to law enforcement, and "preserve evidence related to the material or activity for at least 1 year."

I believe the major commercial E2E platforms generally have the ability to notice specific hashes of known-bad material (think, e.g., child sexual abuse material) and block it / alert the platform through a client-side filter, which I think would make it pretty easy to comply with these requirements.

Alternatively, it would be enough, I think, to remove and ban the accounts involved.

The only difficult part is that you need to "preserve evidence," but my understanding is that this phrasing doesn't generally compel you to create evidence where none existed. Privacy-focused platforms have for years avoided keeping logs that they do not want to get turned over for the government, and it's generally much more onerous for the government to ask you to start keeping logs than to get mad at you for deleting/purging logs you already collected.

So I don't think this actually imposes any requirements on design, or gets in the way of E2E or non-logging platforms. If you are informed of specific illegal content, you need to take action. But if you operate the service in a way that you don't have "actual notice" or "evidence" of anything people send with it, I think that's still fine.

The other carve-outs don't seem to be relevant. (d)(4) might be if you look funny enough: it says the platform has to make itself able to receive notification of illegal content, and that a platform doesn't get immunity "if it designs or operates its service to avoid receiving actual notice of Federal criminal material on its service or the ability to comply with the requirements under Subsection (d)(2)(C)." I suppose you could argue that not keeping logs means that you've designed your service in a way where you can't "preserve evidence," which would run afoul of this. But I don't think that's the right interpretation: if you're not creating unnecessary logs in the first place, if you keep the logs you do log for a year, you've preserved all the evidence that exists.

Am I being too optimistic here? (I do agree that the plaintext summary you quoted is very concerning.)

Re: DOJ unveils proposed Section 230 legislation

#296

Post by strbean »

jackcosgrove wrote: post #284
BobbyJo wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe needing an army of moderators is just the cost of doing business when it comes to hosting user content. I'm weary of that change being made, but really, I don't see a viable alternative, or a good argument against it. If you can't moderate content at some scale, then maybe you just shouldn't host content at that scale. I think there may be a light, or a deeper darkness, that comes out of this though. We may see…

Moderation is the secret sauce of user-generated content. You shouldn't allow for user generated content if you aren't prepared to moderate it. It seems many people still don't understand that this is the biggest problem facing social media. Not scaling, not engagement, but moderation.

If we started with this approach from the beginning, we wouldn't even have social media or sites like Wikipedia. Enshrining it in law just means only the existing players can play the game.

Re: DOJ unveils proposed Section 230 legislation

#297

Post by bilegeek »

shadowgovt wrote: post #173
majormajor wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd think people who operate in a realm where text becomes action executed by a machine designed wholly around faithful, reliable execution of text fed to it would come to learn the reality-defining power of rules. Ah, but don't forget how often the code that gets written doesn't do exactly what the writer expected! Or is exploited by another party...

Indeed. I wouldn't say the law is for show; I would say the written law isn't the whole story. Reality is a three-edged sword: the law, the intent, and the implementation. "For show," to me, implies you can ignore it and charge forward, bull-in-a-china-shop-style. That doesn't work in law or computers; naive invalid input gets rejected by the first-stage parser, and a court complaint completely ignorant of the law ca…

This is my first time seeing a Babylon 5 reference in the wild. Well said.

Re: DOJ unveils proposed Section 230 legislation

#298

Post by waheoo »

anonHacker2 wrote: post #230
InTheArena wrote: post #19

here is the DoJ's breakdown and red-line changes: 1. Incentivizing Online Platforms to Address Illicit Content The first category of potential reforms is aimed at incentivizing platforms to address the growing amount of illicit content online, while preserving the core of Section 230’s immunity for defamation. a. Bad Samaritan Carve-Out. First, the Department proposes denying Section 230 immunity to truly bad actors.…

> Replace Vague Terminology in (c)(2). First, the Department supports replacing the vague catch-all "otherwise objectionable" language... This disallows the common practice of open-ended moderation criteria such as "Be kind. Don't be snarky". Proposed section (c)(1)(b) removes the safe harbor except for moderation criteria on the list in proposed (c)(2)(a), which is: "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively vi…

Isn't this the point of the legislation?

If you want to be deemed a public square type of space that is fine but you don't then get to impose arbitrary rules about what is said, that would mean it is not a public place and is in fact a private space being editorialized by your private rulings on what speech should be allowed.

This is a very good move and clarifies everything for everyone.

Re: DOJ unveils proposed Section 230 legislation

#299

Post by takeda »

webmaven wrote: post #286
hawkice wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to pay a cop to write the law? Put it under their seal, the one they use to exercise police powers? Sure, other people vote on it. But it stinks.

> You want to pay a cop to write the law? Put it under their seal, the one they use to exercise police powers? > Sure, other people vote on it. But it stinks. Wait, do you think that police departments and police unions don't participate in drafting laws?

Participating and writing are a bit different things.

Re: DOJ unveils proposed Section 230 legislation

#300

Post by stickfigure »

BobbyJo wrote: post #293
stickfigure wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think maybe you got the wrong lesson out of reading 1984?

I think conjuring that book is hyperbole. I don't think making people responsible for the legality of content they host is some crazy oppressive overreach of government power. The laws about what content is legal or illegal are pre-existing, these rules just shift the burden of enforcement in recognition that the government being the sole source of rule on massive distributed platforms isn't feasible. We tried, we fa…

The laws about what actions are legal or illegal are pre-existing, the telescreens and mandatory neighbor reporting just shift the burden of enforcement in recognition that the government can't effectively police the distributed masses.

Fixed that for you.

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