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U.S. Senators propose limiting liability shield for social media platforms

reuters.com

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Re: U.S. Senators propose limiting liability shield for social media platforms

#81

Post by novok »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #67
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably this would lead to this site shutting down. Do you think that's an acceptable trade-off?

First, your presumption is completely bull----. HN isn't ad supported. And every other class of business has normal liability, tech companies are the only business that claims to need magical immunity to lawsuits, and for some reason, people believe them. Second, if websites shutting down is the tradeoff for harmful websites being able to be sued, yes, absolutely that's acceptable. Websites that propagate mass harm a…

If section 230 disappears, it will likely mean HN will also disappear.

Also HN is high end marketing as an input for Y Combinator's founder program, if there was no business of Y Combinator funding it, it would not exist.

Re: U.S. Senators propose limiting liability shield for social media platforms

#82

Post by ocdtrekkie »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #64
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The failure though is the government isn't accounting for content next to ads. Ad companies are likely to keep user generated content that drives good ad revenue, even if it's also harmful. This is a start, but the solution is to revoke 230 entirely.

Are you familiar with the case that originally prompted Section 230? It would be a pretty serious problem if hedge funds could sue your ISP for letting you say bad things about them. (In fact, without Section 230, ad companies could sue YCombinator for letting you make this very comment.)

I am familiar, and Section 230 was not the answer. And yes, normally anyone can sue anyone, I'm not sure why tech companies deserve to be magically immune to this.

Re: U.S. Senators propose limiting liability shield for social media platforms

#83

Post by xpe »

prepend wrote: post #42
xpe wrote: post #20

Too many people do not understand the First Amendment (1A). In case you have not reviewed the 1A recently, please read this carefully: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/first_amendment > The First Amendment of the United States Constitution protects the right to freedom of religion and freedom of expression from government interference. It prohibits any laws that establish a national religion, impede the free exercise…

Who do you think doesn’t understand 1A? I’m not sure if you mean that the senators don’t understand. Or social media companies. Or us? Government (in the US) regulates commercial speech all the time. Try broadcasting without an FCC license. Government also regulated privately owned public places. Try banning people of a particular race from your shopping mall and see what happens. Shopping mall operators aren’t free…

> Government (in the US) regulates commercial speech all the time. Try broadcasting without an FCC license.

Yes, I understand this.

> Government also regulated privately owned public places. Try banning people of a particular race from your shopping mall and see what happens. ...

So far, this is not an issue of speech.

> ... Shopping mall operators aren’t free to absolutely limit speech however they like, even though private.

Ok, I see where you were going with it... I'm not a legal expert, much less in this area, but after skimming over [1] and [2] this appears to be a complex area.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...

[2]: https://www.ccim.com/cire-magazine/articles/states-speak-out...

Re: U.S. Senators propose limiting liability shield for social media platforms

#84

Post by IG_Semmelweiss »

NoodleIncident wrote: post #66
IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #41

Im worried this would codify fine power for whatever way the political wind blows, which seems to be incremented by increasing the size of payroll particularly at the FTC. Here is an idea for better oversight of big tech that does not involve more regulation: a deacentralized moderation system that replicates the us court system. If something is flagged, then a jury made up of randomly selected users decide if the co…

Aren't you describing Parler's failed attempt at pretending they moderate their content?

By definition, if they pretended, it means they were not serious about getting to a solution that the average person would find reasonable

Note that it doesnt mean aws or gcp or cnn had to agree, it just means that it really resembled the process that we have for the us court system

In fact something well implemented would potentially threaten (and by definition, by attacked by) the twitters fb, aws , etc, because it would become a more reliable predictor of content moderation than what currently exists via ToS. It would effectively obsolte catchall ToS, and decidely be a vote against centralized control

We can likely agree that the words "well implemented" and "parler" do not belong in the same sentence

Re: U.S. Senators propose limiting liability shield for social media platforms

#85

Post by ocdtrekkie »

novok wrote: post #81
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, your presumption is completely bull----. HN isn't ad supported. And every other class of business has normal liability, tech companies are the only business that claims to need magical immunity to lawsuits, and for some reason, people believe them. Second, if websites shutting down is the tradeoff for harmful websites being able to be sued, yes, absolutely that's acceptable. Websites that propagate mass harm a…

If section 230 disappears, it will likely mean HN will also disappear. Also HN is high end marketing as an input for Y Combinator's founder program, if there was no business of Y Combinator funding it, it would not exist.

On the contrary, I expect the death of harmful ad companies like Google and Facebook would cause an explosion of growth in the Internet startup space.

Re: U.S. Senators propose limiting liability shield for social media platforms

#86

Post by whack »

Ironically, this law would give tech companies vastly more power to censor and police online speech. As soon as tech companies are made legally liable for any speech that occurs on their platform, they would be both legally and morally justified in using draconian measures to preemptively block activities that could expose them to liability. For example, banning all controversial hashtags, automatically banning anyone who promotes controversial hashtags, or deleting tweets/individuals that their algorithms have flagged as being problematic.

In all of these cases, Twitter and Facebook would argue that they don't have the manpower to quickly and thoroughly review every single interaction that occurs on their platform. And they don't have the luxury of being permissive in allowing free speech. And they would be right.

If you're afraid of online free speech being aggressively policed by tech companies, their customer-service reps, and their automated algorithms, then such proposals should absolutely scare you. You could very well see a 21st century where Mark Zuck becomes the next Rupert Murdoch.

Re: U.S. Senators propose limiting liability shield for social media platforms

#88

Post by [deleted] »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #67
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably this would lead to this site shutting down. Do you think that's an acceptable trade-off?

First, your presumption is completely bull----. HN isn't ad supported. And every other class of business has normal liability, tech companies are the only business that claims to need magical immunity to lawsuits, and for some reason, people believe them. Second, if websites shutting down is the tradeoff for harmful websites being able to be sued, yes, absolutely that's acceptable. Websites that propagate mass harm a…

[deleted]

Re: U.S. Senators propose limiting liability shield for social media platforms

#89

Post by Jtsummers »

devonbleak wrote: post #72
cmdli wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "communicating through the barkeeper" makes the barkeeper's involvement sound much more intentional than it actually would be. It's more like if a group regularly gathered at the bar, using the barkeeper's space and supplies, and planned a murder. The barkeeper might have a responsibility to listen in to the conversation and report if they are planning a crime, and the group is using the barkeeper's space to…

But the platforms have perfect knowledge of the text content of these conversations. It's not unreasonable to say they have near-perfect knowledge of the graphic and A/V content also - that stuff is easily automatically parsed at this point and they're likely already doing that parsing. Hell it's part of their business model for increasing the value of their ads.

> But the platforms have perfect knowledge of the text content of these conversations.

"[P]erfect knowledge"? They have knowledge of the text. You can even say they have perfectly accurate knowledge of the text. Do they have perfect comprehension and understanding of the text?

They have some comprehension and understanding in order to direct ads. But it is not perfect comprehension and understanding. And unless you're content with your apparently violent talk that's actually about a guild raid in WoW getting blasted by an AI, they need humans to ultimately decide what to do about content.

Re: U.S. Senators propose limiting liability shield for social media platforms

#90

Post by pixxel »

Scoundreller wrote: post #71
everdrive wrote: post #14

When I was young, I realized that eventually the problems of the real world would catch up to the internet. It was in the mid-2000s that I realized a well-staffed company, with people working on problems for 8+ hours a day, for years, could always outpace individuals. Just as has been true with all human affairs: better-resourced groups can overpower lesser-resourced groups. It has been true for years now that the pr…

> In its infancy, the internet was an "island of sanity," a (socially and intellectually) secure enclave from the real world. Just find another place on the internet with a barrier to entry that hasn’t been eliminated yet. Back to Gopher and IRC I guess.

> Back to Gopher and IRC I guess

Yes, and happily so, for me at least. I use HN via RSS(except when making the odd comment), YouTube-DL via terminal, and the mainstream internet for ecommerce.

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