Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

FCC to move ahead with 'rulemaking' on Section 230

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 261 posts

Re: FCC to move ahead with 'rulemaking' on Section 230

#91

Post by the8472 »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #67
the8472 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The platform operator can't. That's how common carriers work (telephone, your ISP etc.). But things running on that platform could. Basically look at reddit and perhaps take it up a notch. If the platform operator does not want to be associated with some of the stuff happening on their site then perhaps they should deemphasize their branding. It wouldn't be "reddit/watchpeopledie" just "watchpeopledie". I not sure ho…

> An alternative approach would be exemptions for non-profit sites. Another alternative would be "leave this problem alone, it's working just fine". Site operators can and should have the ability to ban anyone or remove any content, for any reason or no reason, and doing so does not mean they should be liable for everything they might have missed. (In practice, "liable for everything they might have missed" is equiva…

> Site operators can and should have the ability to ban anyone or remove any content, for any reason or no reason.

If a major fraction of human communication, especially during lockdowns, is facilitated by social networks then they are fulfilling a utility role. So being in the position of dictating what millions of people will talk about is at least questionable.

> for anything but the most massive sites that could theoretically afford an army of moderators

Ok, I have not considered this angle and it is indeed concerning.

> Destroying the concept of moderation does not make the world better.

That may be the goal of the FCC, but I for one did not say that I am in support of destroying moderation. Quite the opposite, I was thinking how it could be made to work while providing more open communication platforms and putting more control in the hands of the users rather than the companies.

Re: FCC to move ahead with 'rulemaking' on Section 230

#92

Post by tzs »

notankies wrote: post #42
tzs wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only partially correct. Some laws that require executive action to interpret and enforce leave it up to executive agencies to fill in the details. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 is one such law, which is why the FCC plays such a big role in net neutrality. Section 230 is not such a law. It creates a civil liability shield for interactive computer services and states who that applies to and how it is to be…

> it creates a civil liability shield for interactive computer services and states who that applies to and how it is to be used. Right, and the limits of that liability shield are not well enough defined in the law so the policy must define the limits until Congress acts to clarify the law. Hence the rulemaking. Facebook and Twitter's actions yesterday and the controversy over the role of 230 make the lack of clarity…

The administration only has authority to make and enforce rules about a law to the extent that Congress delegated that authority to them. Sometimes Congress does so. E.g., the FCC was created by Congress in the Telecommunications Act of 1934, with the authority to make rules regarding various things specified in that law.

If Congress does not so delegate such authority, interpreting the law is solely the job of the courts. They did not delegate such authority for section 230.

Agencies do not get to just look at any random law that is outside the are they were given power over, decide it is not clear, and make an enforceable rule clarifying it.

Re: FCC to move ahead with 'rulemaking' on Section 230

#93

Post by eli »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #21

I think that every company should decide if they're a "publisher" or a "platform". If you're a platform, you're not responsible for what your users say (except directly illegal stuff, eg. child porn), and have no say in what stays on, or gets removed/hidden (except, again, illegal stuff). If you're a publisher, you have a say what is posted on your site, and you carry full responsibility for all the onsite content. W…

I’m surprised to see this point take on HN. Most people who suggest this don’t realize that it would eliminate public participation from most of the internet. There can be no comment sections or Reddit or HN or StackOverflow or Wikipedia in this model. It would be very difficult to have any discussion forum at all. It would lead to an internet where powerful voices are even more powerful (because they have big publishers that will stand behind their words) and where the average user has a much much harder time being heard.

Re: FCC to move ahead with 'rulemaking' on Section 230

#94

Post by AnHonestComment »

akersten wrote: post #32
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #21

I think that every company should decide if they're a "publisher" or a "platform". If you're a platform, you're not responsible for what your users say (except directly illegal stuff, eg. child porn), and have no say in what stays on, or gets removed/hidden (except, again, illegal stuff). If you're a publisher, you have a say what is posted on your site, and you carry full responsibility for all the onsite content. W…

HackerNews could not exist in your proposed world. I doubt YC would hire a full-time staff of moderators to vet every single post. Since we remove things for being off-topic or overly mean, the only possible conclusion is that HN would shut down because they do not want to bear liability for the posts they leave up. The Internet as we know it would not exist without S230. Please read this[0] for a primer. [0]: https:…

HN also wouldn’t be able to benefit from immunity when infringing my content while simultaneously shadowbanning me for “wrongthink”.

HN would have to give users tools to moderate content themselves, instead of HN using moderation as a tool of political control.

Good.

Re: FCC to move ahead with 'rulemaking' on Section 230

#95

Post by eli »

hyper0perator wrote: post #64
mrtksn wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the Turkish model. A pioneer in censorship and totalitarian media control, it evolved in licensing and controlling everything. It started with simply getting your platform/publisher license(so they can make you take down illegal content, save the kids), now Turkey dictates your content depending on your internet business. Just few days ago Spotify was forced to get a license and establish a contact(probably be…

Disagree. Newspapers and ISP follow under this regulation. Social media networks have been able to skirt the issue. If newspapers can get sued for their content and the phone company can't, it only makes sense that this applies to social media companies are held to the same liabilities or protections.

I don’t understand what outcome you are seeking here. Clearly social media companies can’t prescreen every piece of content so either you want them to all go out of business or you want to forbid them from moderating even to delete spam. There are already forums with “zero” moderation and there’s a reason all discussion hasn’t migrated there.

Re: FCC to move ahead with 'rulemaking' on Section 230

#96

Post by AnHonestComment »

the_pwner224 wrote: post #33
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #21

I think that every company should decide if they're a "publisher" or a "platform". If you're a platform, you're not responsible for what your users say (except directly illegal stuff, eg. child porn), and have no say in what stays on, or gets removed/hidden (except, again, illegal stuff). If you're a publisher, you have a say what is posted on your site, and you carry full responsibility for all the onsite content. W…

This does not work. Example: I want to set up a forum where people can discuss a specific topic. Such as the Arch Linux forum, or ones for vehicles ( https://www.ninja400riders.com/ , https://www.civicx.com/forum/ ). I am clearly not a publisher; I do produce content and do not want to produce content. So I am a platform. Am I no longer allowed to decide what is acceptable on my platform? Even if I am running a forum…

It sounds like what you want is to publish an anthology of submitted content, all about Ninja 400s. The behavior you describe is simply automating an existing business practice: acting as an editor when deciding what’s included in an anthology.

That’s fine — but it makes you a publisher, not a platform.

Re: FCC to move ahead with 'rulemaking' on Section 230

#97

Post by stale2002 »

eli wrote: post #95
hyper0perator wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. Newspapers and ISP follow under this regulation. Social media networks have been able to skirt the issue. If newspapers can get sued for their content and the phone company can't, it only makes sense that this applies to social media companies are held to the same liabilities or protections.

I don’t understand what outcome you are seeking here. Clearly social media companies can’t prescreen every piece of content so either you want them to all go out of business or you want to forbid them from moderating even to delete spam. There are already forums with “zero” moderation and there’s a reason all discussion hasn’t migrated there.

> or you want to forbid them from moderating

The goal would be to put significant, very large restictions on their ability to moderate.

> There are already forums with “zero” moderation

How about we look at other examples of communication platforms, that are working perfectly fine.

Just take a look at the phone network, or ISPs.

ISPs and phone networks, have very little "moderation" from the parent company, and yet seem to work pretty well, IMO.

Why can't we treat other communication platforms, the same way that we are treating the large and successful communication platform, which is the phone network?

Re: FCC to move ahead with 'rulemaking' on Section 230

#98

Post by JoshTriplett »

the8472 wrote: post #91
JoshTriplett wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An alternative approach would be exemptions for non-profit sites. Another alternative would be "leave this problem alone, it's working just fine". Site operators can and should have the ability to ban anyone or remove any content, for any reason or no reason, and doing so does not mean they should be liable for everything they might have missed. (In practice, "liable for everything they might have missed" is equiva…

> Site operators can and should have the ability to ban anyone or remove any content, for any reason or no reason. If a major fraction of human communication, especially during lockdowns, is facilitated by social networks then they are fulfilling a utility role. So being in the position of dictating what millions of people will talk about is at least questionable. > for anything but the most massive sites that could…

> If a major fraction of human communication, especially during lockdowns, is facilitated by social networks then they are fulfilling a utility role.

Removing the ability of those sites to moderate will not make them better. (Even if it did by some metric, that still wouldn't be acceptable; what constitutes "better" is entirely up to the site owner to determine. But it's even less reasonable given that it wouldn't have the intended effect, unless the intended effect is to cause harm.) Having many users should not suddenly mean you don't own the site, nor should it mean that you cannot moderate the site as you see fit. "We came up with a new algorithm to automatically detect spam" should not need to come with "and several years later we managed to get the government to say we're allowed to use it without incurring liability".

>> for anything but the most massive sites that could theoretically afford an army of moderators

> Ok, I have not considered this angle and it is indeed concerning.

That angle is why Section 230 was created in the first place, and why it should remain intact.

> That may be the goal of the FCC, but I for one did not say that I am in support of destroying moderation.

Removing the liability shield for sites that moderate will destroy either the site or the moderation, and either way the usefulness of the site comes to an end.

> Quite the opposite, I was thinking how it could be made to work while providing more open communication platforms and putting more control in the hands of the users rather than the companies.

Make a new network that puts control in the hands of the users in the way you envision, and test it to see how well it works. Or join one of the existing efforts already working on that. This isn't a legislative problem; it certainly shouldn't have a legislative non-solution masquerading as a solution.

I think most people's experience with moderation puts more weight on any encounters they've had with being moderated, and little to no weight (except perhaps in the abstract) on the volume of what they don't see. Moderation, when done well, is close to invisible; I think as a side effect of that, people underestimate its value in contributing to their good experiences.

Re: FCC to move ahead with 'rulemaking' on Section 230

#99

Post by stale2002 »

eropple wrote: post #84
dexen wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And be ruined by shitty actors destroying the signal-to-noise ratio Moderation on the client side is a thing. It already is practiced on networks like Twitter and Mastodon. It was the historical model on Usenet too. At this point you're just posting excuses for prolonging the monopoly of centralized moderation. The bogeyman of "the right wing of American culture" doesn't help, given how international the discourse o…

Moderation on the client side doesn't work and never has. The Usenet killfile model was awful and was a big part of why huge swaths of it were an unnavigable mess for most users--because unless you wanted to expend the effort to build one you didn't have one and got the whole sewer pipe spraying straight into your face. And, oh boy, client-side moderation happens on Twitter, it works so well? Then why do female frien…

> Moderation on the client side doesn't work and never has.

Are you claiming that the phone system does not work? Or that ISPs do not work?

I think that they work pretty well, even though there really is not much top down moderation.

> If they want "unmoderated"

Why can't we consider the phone network, or ISPs, which are successful examples of the kind of unmoderated approach, that people are asking for?

Re: FCC to move ahead with 'rulemaking' on Section 230

#100

Post by eternalban »

eropple wrote: post #84
dexen wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And be ruined by shitty actors destroying the signal-to-noise ratio Moderation on the client side is a thing. It already is practiced on networks like Twitter and Mastodon. It was the historical model on Usenet too. At this point you're just posting excuses for prolonging the monopoly of centralized moderation. The bogeyman of "the right wing of American culture" doesn't help, given how international the discourse o…

Moderation on the client side doesn't work and never has. The Usenet killfile model was awful and was a big part of why huge swaths of it were an unnavigable mess for most users--because unless you wanted to expend the effort to build one you didn't have one and got the whole sewer pipe spraying straight into your face. And, oh boy, client-side moderation happens on Twitter, it works so well? Then why do female frien…

"Moderation on the client side doesn't work and never has. The Usenet killfile model was awful and was a big part of why huge swaths of it were an unnavigable mess for most users--because unless you wanted to expend the effort to build one you didn't have one and got the whole sewer pipe spraying straight into your face. And, oh boy, client-side moderation happens on Twitter, it works so well? Then why do female friends whose posts get some attention have a bunch of dudes in their mentions saying how they want to have sex with (consensually or not) and/or kill them no matter how many they block? Could it be because it's an abject failure of a model due to the low stakes of spinning up a new account--so low that Twitter stopped using egg avatars because they destroyed interaction rates with new users because most of them were troglodytes?"

Re client side moderation, it's possible that users can be educated about effective approaches. Just like they started warming the non-geeks about email with hollywood films (You've Got Mail, 1998), and I'm sure there must have been similar sort of concerted media efforts for older technology. Automobiles, for example. I -bet- we can dig up content (old films) that basically were teaching the American public how to use cars using movies.

Given the inherently democratic aspect of client-side filterings, and serious inherent political concerns with centralized moderation, it seems wrong to give up on the idea simply because the avant garde generation on internet (using mostly antique kludgy UI/UX, btw) had problems with it.

We can fix client side moderation with education. It is a transitory issue, only.

Centralized moderation is inherently problematic for public platforms. (I have no issues with private, members only, platforms opting for centralized moderation.)

Post reply on HN