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You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 of the CDA

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Re: You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 of the CDA

#271
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not true any more though. All of the media networks have shown examples of cutting away from the Presidents speeches when they detect he’s going to say something they don’t like. If you were Trump right now and want to directly address the nation, you know calling CNN and Fox and NBC are going to be a mixed bag at best. FAANG has given the indication right now that for two week no one should be giving the Pres…

>when they detect he’s going to say something they don’t like. Give me a break. You act like they have been cutting out on him for years. It's only been recently this year when he literally lying and calling covid a hoax, telling people to do dangerous things like gather for his rallies during a pandemic / actively saying not to wear masks, and finally this election bullshit. The networks have gone above and beyond h…

> Give me a break. You act like they have been cutting out on him for years.

You may want to check the date on the links I posted. This has been going on since 2017. The search term I used was “cut away from Trump”.

> The networks have gone above and beyond his bs for years- there is a time to take a stand

I promise you the pendulum will swing and so will your reaction.

Re: You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 of the CDA

#272
post #159
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The proposal still lets platforms moderate on certain grounds, a repeal would mean that a platform can't moderate for any reason other than "illegal content" if it wants to keep the protection. The law currently says that a platform can moderate material that is "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected."…

> I'm sure we'd see plenty of litigation on what constitutes harassment, terrorism, etc. Let me predict how terror will end up being defined: Promote storming the Capitol - No Promote a free Palestine - Yes Any fight against US oppression - No

This is getting downvoted, probably because it's pushing an unrelated agenda, but there's an important principle here that both Democrats and Republicans don't seem to understand: at some point, the other party just 100% is going to seize control of the government. It is going to happen.

Donald Trump's administration openly considered declaring BLM a terrorist group. I don't want someone like that deciding what does and doesn't count as neutral speech. That is a thousand times more dangerous to me than Facebook making the same decision.

It is startlingly naive for people not to understand that terrorism laws and 'neutral-speech' laws will be used against causes they agree with. Republicans in particular are kind of jumping the gun by encouraging the government to get involved with speech literally during a period where they no longer control the presidency, or the house, or the senate.

Re: You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 of the CDA

#273
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you're really just mad because the big companies don't moderate evenly enough for you. > replacing it with something that requires a reasonable level of moderation, or provides a little bit of protection for companies that have made a good attempt at moderation. That would be a much better incentive for companies than the incentive 230 currently provides. I'll bite. I think TW/FB have done a reasonable…

> It sounds like you're really just mad because the big companies don't moderate evenly enough for you. You're actually not too far off. I'm mad that companies are protected unevenly relative to normal people, which allows them to moderate unevenly and have no risk of downside resulting from their decisions. A law which protects a company when they do no moderation, but sets no restrictions on who they can moderate i…

> So where would I set the bar? I would set it at the level that a company isn't at fault if their platform has the right kind or amount of moderation that the bad event that happened was unusual or couldn't have been expected. If someone gets hurt because Facebook didn't police an openly Nazi group, they should be liable. If someone gets hurt because Facebook has decent moderation procedures in place but the Nazi group was sneaky and posed as a sports fan club and used coded messages, then I think Facebook would have a pretty easy defense even without Section 230.

I like this idea in theory. How does this work if the platform promises no moderation? Is that allowed? I'm thinking of a mastodon-type setup where a setup can choose not to do any type of filtering/moderation.

Re: You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 of the CDA

#274
post #220

I have one issue with this article. Section 230 certainly encouraged centralization of the internet. Without it, platforms would be liable for content they hosted, which would be financially unviable. Instead, people would have to self-host their own content on their own infrastructure. (230 provides no protection for people that do that.) In addition to preventing the big monopolies from arising, this would have mad…

>Without it, platforms would be liable for content they hosted, which would be financially unviable

I don't think that's true is it? YouTube could continue to operate exactly like today EXCEPT they couldn't moderate beyond the legal minimum (no CP etc). That would mean they were still shielded as your options WITHOUT s230 are Hard Moderate (and accept liability) or Not Moderate.

Re: You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 of the CDA

#275
post #87
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this mean if a sports fan comes into my forum about programming and starts making sports threads, I cannot moderate that away, or else face legal action? Does it also mean HN could face legal action according to its current rule set?

Yes, except for the fact that 1st amendment protections would still exist. How much protection that actually provides is unknown and it would need to be litigated to find out.

What does that mean? Off-topic discussion does not fall outside of the 1st Amendment, and a restriction of the 1st Amendment to try and classify that as somehow less deserving of protection -- that would be a much greater curtailment of 1st Amendment rights than anything Facebook has done.

Bluntly, "would need to be litigated to find out" isn't an acceptable answer given that the people giving this answer are the same people proposing the legislation.

Courts don't decide what the law is, they interpret it. You have to have an idea of what you want the law to be, you can't kick that off to the courts. They're trying to interpret your intention and the letter of the law you propose, not the other way around.

Re: You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 of the CDA

#276
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, repealing section 230 would result in more censorship, not less. But I think "repeal section 230" has been shorthand slogan for a more detailed set of proposals (much like "defund the police" doesn't mean $0 budgets for all law enforcement). For example, see the DoJ's proposal to amend and clarify section 230 [1] [2]. Among other changes, they suggest limiting the extent to which a platform can moderate…

Wait, so is the idea of those proposals that the federal government or the courts or the lawyers are going to be in charge of deciding what counts as aggressive moderation as opposed to regular moderation? Is that supposed to be better? Also, your comment is confusing because "limiting moderation to illegal content and viagra spam" was the legal limit before section 230, if I understood correctly, so it's not making…

It's pretty revealing that many of the replies to this (and the general response whenever anyone brings up content that we obviously want to be moderated but that doesn't fall outside the 1st Amendment) can be summed up as, "well, we'll make an exception for that." In practice, this constitutes the government deciding what communities themselves are able to moderate and filter. That should terrify 1st Amendment advocates, for multiple reasons:

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A) It's wildly abusable by corrupt governments, and both parties in the US believe that their opponents are corrupt. You don't even need to outright censor -- you can just classify one political group's speech as harassment and make your own speech un-moderatable.

And importantly, when you do that, it doesn't just apply to one platform like Facebook, it applies to everyone. It applies to independent forums that are owned by the other party. Do you really want to give either Republicans or Democrats the ability to basically at-will strip 230 protections from opposition-run forums whenever they control all three houses?

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B) It places a burden on the courts that courts are not designed for. Courts interpret laws, they don't create them. The implication behind that is that the people making the laws have a general understanding of their own intent, and the Courts try to figure out what that intent is and what the implication of the letter of the law is. It is unreasonable for people to propose legislation that they themselves don't understand, and then ask the courts to retroactively come up with an interpretation and a set of guidelines that make the laws work. It's backwards design that will lead to a lot of unintended consequences and dumb, harmful rulings.

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C) Many of these exceptions being proposed even in this comment section are themselves contentious. It is not clear to me, at all, why pornography should have fewer 1st Amendment protections than hate speech. Both are harmful to children, both can gross people out, both cause discussions to degrade, both are things that people don't want on their platforms. Yet, there is a general assumption that of course platforms will be able to filter lewd content, they just won't be able to filter low-key racists and nazis.

This is exactly the kind of content-favoritism that the 1st Amendment was designed to prevent. It is inherently problematic for the government to privilege certain categories of speech over others. The distinction between pornography and hate speech is one of the more blatant examples of hypocrisy, but the problem also comes up in more subtle ways when people talk about banning spam, as if comment spam, self-promotion, and off-topic discussion are some kind of clear categories that everyone agrees with -- they're not.

Reddit, Hackernews, and Facebook all have very different definitions of what self-promotion and spam are. Which definition is correct? Which one should be baked into law? And why? Why is it more reasonable for us to come up with an ad-hoc definition of spam than it is for us to come up with an ad-hoc definition of hate speech? Why should spam deserve less protection under the 1st Amendment?

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D) Finally, baking these exceptions and moderating decisions into law creates an environment where we're constantly chipping away at the 1st Amendment. The way that the US works right now is that we have extremely broad legal protections, but that the systems built on top of those laws provide additional subjective moderation controlled by the free market, by individual choices, and by communities themselves. This is a good system because universal moderation decisions are practically impossible. In short, it gives us breathing room and allows us to acknowledge that moderation is both important and subjective.

When people tear away independent, private moderation decisions, the only thing that's left to protect people from harassment online is now the law. You lose that subjectivity and that acknowledgement that different forums need to be moderated differently.

People who advocate that private platforms shouldn't be able to make their own moderation decisions should not be surprised to see increased calls for the government to get involved in making certain speech illegal. Even if you could force Twitter or HN to turn into 4Chan, people aren't going to tolerate that. They are going to go to the government and ask the government and the courts to make more speech illegal -- because that's the only avenue they'll have left to protect themselves.

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I have not seen any proposal, from anyone, not just in general in comments, but from political activists, from bloggers, from lawyers -- I have not seen one single proposal for Section 230 reform that addresses those problems. They all propose an incredibly ambiguous set of restrictions on moderation and then fall back on, "we'll work the details out later." But when you're talking about restricting someone's fundamental Right to Filter[0], the details really matter.

[0]: https://anewdigitalmanifesto.com/#right-to-filter

Re: You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 of the CDA

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Defund the police" is such a bad catchphrase, it does all sorts of disservices to the actual proposed measures. It sounds vengeful and petty, not thoughtful. It's also misleading - the purpose is not (or should not) be primarily to make sure police has less funds; it's to make sure social services and other programs have funds. Why not call it "fund social services" instead of "defund the police", instead? ("fund so…

Whether you agree with it or not, the purpose is to remove funds from police, which many believe is a positive outcome. Look at police budgets, how that money is spent, how it affects communities to have 60-80% of their tax money go to police. Again, you may disagree, but removing money from the police is the point of the slogan.

Here's a simple test: if half of the funds that go today to the police would simply be wasted (say, they go to a "Trump foundation" where Trump may use them as he pleases) - would you consider that a "win"? If not, your primary goal is not "defund the police", it is better allocation of funds

Re: You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 of the CDA

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It costs maybe $100/year and takes a couple of hours for an inexperienced user to set up a Wordpress blog with manually-moderated comments. It would also cost however much a lawyer charges for helping to moderate every submission. Because I doubt the average WordPress blogger is familiar with all possible laws the submissions could violate. Or can make correct judgements based on precedent for things like copyright…

Setting up your own Wordpress blog can be done with a domain name and server hosting outside the United States, and with some effort this can be done anonymously. In that case, you don't need to worry about Section 230, you only have to worry about the (possibly laxer, possibly stricter) local laws. The reason that big social media sites are vulnerable to this particular US law is because they are businesses that cho…

Should it bother us that the solution to a free speech problem in the US under your proposed legislative change can be rephrased as, "hide from the government and piggy-back on another country's better speech laws?"

This strikes me as a solution to the problem of censorship in the same way that "just buy your medical supplies from Mexico" is a solution to US healthcare costs.

Re: You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 of the CDA

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Section 230 were repealed the business model of selling ads around user generated content would still exist, but it would cost enough in lawyers to kill off the smaller forums that actually wanted to moderate properly, and you could be sued over the manually moderated comments in your WordPress blog.

I have a WordPress blog and a separate forum for comments. If I were responsible for comments, I would do either of two things: a) just shut down the forum, b] use a paid commenting service that would come with moderation. This means that people who would want to comment would probably pay some fee for that privilege. Accidentally, b) is unusual for us, but a quite sustainable model. Surely more sustainable than curr…

> use a paid commenting service that would come with moderation.

Note that a side effect of this is that you would no longer have moderation control yourself. And how many of those paid services would exist, given the legal costs of running them?

What makes you think there wouldn't in practice be the same centralization that we see today -- one or two paid services that handle moderation for the entire Internet because only they have the lawyers necessary to do so. The only difference would be that every independent forum that didn't use them would be opening themselves up to significant legal risk.

At least right now if I set up a forum with Open Source software on a Linode server, I don't need to worry that turning off Google Captcha or avoiding a 3rd-party centralized service for my comments will get me sued.

Re: You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 of the CDA

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s hard to claim your definition for”defund the police.” Perhaps some people view it as “reduce police funding” but many mean it to mean “$0 to police” and that’s the definition of defund. Words matter and language matters and trying to nuance a pretty simple statement like “defund” is hard for people to understand. Especially with people, friends of mine to be specific, literally mean to defund and remove…

Do you think you’ll ever move past the initial shock of disagreement with a movement’s slogan that may be an oversimplification or misleading, or will you always need someone to clarify the argument before you can take it seriously (and not take it seriously until then)?

I’ve “moved on” but I think my issue is with the people I’m trying to talk to who haven’t moved on.

I don’t think I need someone to clarify, but it does take me extra time to figure out if someone is taking about the literal or figurative “defund” idea.

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