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U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

reuters.com

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Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

#761

Post by hedora »

tolmasky wrote: post #688
chaps wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing you can do, though it would take a lot of energy, is to add a "submit" button to your bot that you would have to click in order to tweet each tweet. That way it would be you who tweets it, though a bot did the hard work.

Then, as an optimization, you change the text to “submit 100 times”, and now it’s you that posted 100 of those tweets. Also, a little timer field where you tell it how long to wait until it tweets it. Perfect.

Or, buy a video game controller / mouse with a turbo button.

Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

#762

Post by blisterpeanuts »

ZoomerCretin wrote: post #720
xani_ wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that you can go to other restaurant, but social medias are so big that if you're not on twitter/facebook you might as well not exist in public view. Of course that does not apply to smaller forums and I think that if we had laws that force social companies to not censor people they don't like (let's face it, that's exactly what they want to do), it should be limited to anything that's actually big,…

"Social media companies are censoring people they don't like" This is ridiculous. No one is banned for their opinions on tax policy. No one is banned for their opinions on abortion. People (including the former POTUS) were removed for inciting violence, for fomenting harassment campaigns, and for racism/transphobia/other forms of bigotry.

People have been suspended or banned for "misinformation" ranging from Covid treatments to perceived irregularities in the 2020 elections. The New York Post was censored by Twitter for its initial report on the Hunter Biden laptop, which was subsequently verified as factual. There are countless other such examples. Heck, a friend was suspended from Facebook for a political posting months ago, and he still hasn't been able to find out why.

Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

#763

Post by hedora »

hailwren wrote: post #219
Buttons840 wrote: post #163

Will this apply to bots? What if I have a big list of a complaints about a certain politician (use your imagination, there's more than one politician to complain about), but the "other party" doesn't follow me, in fact, I have very few followers overall. So I create a bot that spreads my opinions by replying to millions of other Tweets. Anyone who mentions the politician of interest will receive a reply from "me" (my…

In Reamde, Neal Stephenson posits a future where we pay individuals/services to filter and prioritize the unordered deluge of data from the web. It seems like this ruling pushes us along that path.

I don't see any other possible solution, thanks to what GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion will turn into next year.

Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

#764

Post by quantumwannabe »

MandieD wrote: post #610
concinds wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A better comparison would be if Gmail placed emails you really want to receive in the spam for you. Actually, they wouldn't even put it in the spam folder; they'd just delete it permanently before you can read it, "for your safety". With email, if you don't want to receive someone's emails anymore, you unsubscribe. Or put it in spam (equivalent to social media block) and you won't see those emails anymore. "Platforms…

GMail does this with my absentee ballots if I don't get lucky and see them go to Spam instead, because the State of Texas gives counties that really don't care about citizens who live overseas a system for generating ballots that is so slapdash that emails are from a domain that doesn't have DKIM or SPF, and the link to click is HTTP and not even an FQDN, but an IP address.

Why should you have the right to vote in a place where you don't live?

Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

#765

Post by inhumantsar »

hailwren wrote: post #219
Buttons840 wrote: post #163

Will this apply to bots? What if I have a big list of a complaints about a certain politician (use your imagination, there's more than one politician to complain about), but the "other party" doesn't follow me, in fact, I have very few followers overall. So I create a bot that spreads my opinions by replying to millions of other Tweets. Anyone who mentions the politician of interest will receive a reply from "me" (my…

In Reamde, Neal Stephenson posits a future where we pay individuals/services to filter and prioritize the unordered deluge of data from the web. It seems like this ruling pushes us along that path.

That's actually in Fall, the sequel to Reamde but yeah

Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

#766

Post by esperent »

tolmasky wrote: post #688
chaps wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing you can do, though it would take a lot of energy, is to add a "submit" button to your bot that you would have to click in order to tweet each tweet. That way it would be you who tweets it, though a bot did the hard work.

Then, as an optimization, you change the text to “submit 100 times”, and now it’s you that posted 100 of those tweets. Also, a little timer field where you tell it how long to wait until it tweets it. Perfect.

I've heard of a good idea to prevent this (besides captchas), which is that if a user/bot needs to be rate limited, the service starts to require a small proof of work task to be done, something that would take a typical device a few seconds.

If you have a genuine need to post something, waiting 5 seconds is not a big problem. But if your goal is to spam 1000 of something, now you need to wait 5 seconds between each post, and the task can be made progressively harder so that by item 1000 it's a 5 hour calculation rather than 5 seconds.

Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

#767

Post by hedora »

imgabe wrote: post #642
Buttons840 wrote: post #163

Will this apply to bots? What if I have a big list of a complaints about a certain politician (use your imagination, there's more than one politician to complain about), but the "other party" doesn't follow me, in fact, I have very few followers overall. So I create a bot that spreads my opinions by replying to millions of other Tweets. Anyone who mentions the politician of interest will receive a reply from "me" (my…

To use a bot you need to register an API key for it. Twitter or such could simply revoke the API access. The user is still free to post manually and their free speech is not impinged.

You could just screen scrape and submit that way.

Twitter noticing and blocking your user account doesn't get them off the hook, according to the definition of user in the law.

Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

#768

Post by MichaelCollins »

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #68
guipsp wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every decision is inherently "political"

Exactly, grey zones can happen really quickly. For example if someone says "I think Candidate X from Party Y is a total a-hole." Is that a political statement or a cesspool comment? I see legitimate arguments for either.

> For example if someone says "I think Candidate X from Party Y is a total a-hole." Is that a political statement or a cesspool comment?

That's not even remotely gray, it's both a political statement and a "cesspool comment"; you're suggesting a false dichotomy.

Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

#769

Post by hedora »

hsn915 wrote: post #606
Buttons840 wrote: post #163

Will this apply to bots? What if I have a big list of a complaints about a certain politician (use your imagination, there's more than one politician to complain about), but the "other party" doesn't follow me, in fact, I have very few followers overall. So I create a bot that spreads my opinions by replying to millions of other Tweets. Anyone who mentions the politician of interest will receive a reply from "me" (my…

You are conflating two things: 1) The right to publish content that is not in line with mainstream politics 2) The right to spam replies against tweets of people you don't follow (directly or indirectly) for the purpsoe of marketing These two things are largely orthogonal.

Great. Point to the line of the law that makes this distinction.

Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

#770

Post by mustache_kimono »

eduction wrote: post #359
mustache_kimono wrote: post #5

Important to note that this 5th Circuit ruling conflicts with the 11th Circuit's ruling. And SCOTUS had previously reinstated an injunction against this very same law. And this 5th Circuit opinion has very idiosyncratic reasoning [0, just the first few pages will blow your hair back]. A sample: "In urging such sweeping relief, the platforms offer a rather odd inversion of the First Amendment. That Amendment, of cours…

> How the 1st Amendment might protect a corporation's religious POV but not its exercise of editorial control is a very good question I don’t think this court buys the idea that the platforms exercise editorial control. For example: “But the more fundamental problem with the Platforms’ reliance on Herbert is that they do not have an “editorial process” that looks anything like a traditional publisher’s. See supra Par…

> They don’t seem to have any particular editorial mission.

I don't think you have to have an editorial mission, as you say. But one could easily say our editorial mission is outlined in our terms of use.

> They seem to mainly want to grow and profit.

CBS News wants to grow and profit too? I don't know if there is anything wrong with the social media "editorial process" being different from the newspaper editorial process, because they are different things. For example, someone in a comment above said something like -- "Social media is obviously like the telephone system." Which just ignores the multitude of ways it's just extremely different, and perhaps even less like social media than a newspaper.

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