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The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet

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Re: The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet

#81

Post by pgodzin »

causi wrote: post #9

Whether Section 230(c)(1) of the Communications Decency Act immunizes interactive computer services when they make targeted recommendations of information provided by another information content provider Should it? This feels a lot like a "have your cake and eat it too" situation. Either you're a neutral party or you are not. Being a trillion-dollar company doesn't exempt you from that. Letting a computer make the de…

Choosing keyword matching as the algorithm is explicitly a way to target recommendations of information provided by another information content provider. As is sorting by most recently updated, as is using a machine learning model that optimizes for engagement.

All of those approaches can lead to illegal content, and the entire point of Section 230 is that regardless of which they choose, they are immune from any legal repercussions of surfacing that content.

Re: The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet

#82

Post by commandlinefan »

freejazz wrote: post #78
commandlinefan wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you guys are nothing if not predictable, I knew this would be the first response. But you're living in a fantasy world if you think that I, personally, could ever recover meaningful damages from somebody with enough reach to meaningfully defame me. Rather, defamation laws are being successfully (ab)used to silence politically inconvenient people like Alex Jones.

So you won't respond whether or not you'd care that you were defamed, and instead offered some ridiculous made up scenario where there is no way you'd recover from defamation? Do you do defamation litigation? Oh, you don't? >Rather, defamation laws are being successfully (ab)used to silence politically inconvenient people like Alex Jones. LOL. Strong disagree there. He's not being silenced by any means. He's free to…

> whether or not you'd care

I'd just defame him right back.

Re: The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet

#83

Post by pgodzin »

hrunt wrote: post #73
eli wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely do not understand your definition of "promote"? Is the difference that Youtube recommendations are personalized? Of course HN promotes content. There's much more content submitted than can fit on a screen. Automated filtering, human moderation, and signals from other users decide what to show you -- on both sites.

I think your comment shows the difficulty SCOTUS is having with this case. What's the difference between "promotion" (in my definition, that means putting an influence behind it to improve its standing with the viewer) and other actions commonly necessary to display information, and is that difference enough to eliminate the Section 230 protections for the defendants? In my language, I say HN does not "promote" conte…

So if YouTube used the same deep learning models to push people to more extremist content but without using any user signals so that everyone has the same recommendations that's no longer promotion?

Fundamentally any decisions a site makes to filter and sort content to show, including HN ordering by vote count and mixing in new content to allow it to make the top page, is an explicit choice they are making that cannot be differentiated from "promotion"

Re: The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet

#84

Post by freejazz »

commandlinefan wrote: post #82
freejazz wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you won't respond whether or not you'd care that you were defamed, and instead offered some ridiculous made up scenario where there is no way you'd recover from defamation? Do you do defamation litigation? Oh, you don't? >Rather, defamation laws are being successfully (ab)used to silence politically inconvenient people like Alex Jones. LOL. Strong disagree there. He's not being silenced by any means. He's free to…

> whether or not you'd care I'd just defame him right back.

So, you would care, and you would be petty. Got it.

Re: The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet

#85

Post by eli »

ericmay wrote: post #74
eli wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pick any definition you like. If recommendation systems come with existential legal risks for a small company, then only the biggest companies can afford to run them. Or think of it this way: How is Mastodon supposed to take on larger social networks without recommending people to follow? Should every Mastodon server operator be legally liable for recommending someone harmful?

My definition would be that they're all bad and there is no good use for them because the end results are harmful - more spend/engagements I view in the same way I would "more smoking". Any algorithm or curation excluding perhaps based on latest or "most views" or something similar would be a recommendation as far as I'm concerned. But I'm just not sure how or why online platforms get to have their cake and eat it to…

You don't use the algorithmically generated and ranked HN homepage? You scroll through pages and pages of every new submission?

If you said something libelous about me on HN, I can sue HN for publishing and promoting the comment?

A platform that "allows everything that isn't breaking the law" is a platform that is 99% spam.

Re: The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet

#86

Post by fzeroracer »

hrunt wrote: post #41
eli wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would want Hacker News or any other forum to be legally responsible for comments posted by users?

No, I would not want HN legally responsible for comments posted by users. Hacker News does not directly promote content (aside from prioritizing content based on non-content factors [age, voting, etc.]). It does moderate, but that is not the same as promotion. The crux of the argument in this case is that the plaintiffs want Google held liable for promoting content, not hosting it. The difficulty the Supreme Court se…

> Hacker News does not directly promote content (aside from prioritizing content based on non-content factors [age, voting, etc.])

This, by many of the same arguments people say about Youtube, would absolutely constitute a recommendation. Even if it's primarily user driven, HN is responsible for the synthesis of all these values which results in content appearing on the front page and tuning which content appears or is downweighted. You can try to play word games but the reality is that should Section 230 go, no one's going to risk the cost of lawsuits to discover what the limits of promoted content / algorithms is.

Re: The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet

#88

Post by kube-system »

migf wrote: post #87

I think the Supreme Court has a real out here to say, "Fuck, we dunno" and rule to change nothing and suggest that Congress remedy the situation through new laws. That's ideologically consistent and the right move. I would be astonished if they don't do that here.

A lot of news outlets are just posting the funny part of Kagan's quote and not the rest of the context... but it sounds like that's exactly what she was saying.

> "We're a court. We really don't know about these things. You know, these are not like the nine greatest experts on the internet," Kagan said of her colleagues, eliciting a laugh from the courtroom gallery. "There's a lot of uncertainty going the way you would have us go, in part, just because of the difficulty of drawing lines in this area and just because of the fact that, once we go with you, all of a sudden we're finding that Google isn't protected. And maybe Congress should want that system, but isn't that something for Congress to do, not the court?"

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/supreme-court-wrestles-immun...

Re: The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet

#89

Post by swatcoder »

To look for an upside to the worst case scenario, the biggest win from a deep challenge to Section 230 protections would be a return to a smaller and more mindfully curated web.

Many of the problems from social media are rooted in the idea of having such enormous hoards of content that the only way to trawl through it is with automated algorithms. This was great when it worked, but the content pool seems to grow faster than algorithm design can accomodate and will only get worse as AI content generators mature.

It suggests that there are possibly as few as two futures:

1. The internet is a wasteland of content pollution and the automated tools for sorting and sifting through it are overwhelmed with toxic waste.

2. The internet returns to a network of trust where people are individually, but only marginally, accountable for what they share with others and this accountability engenders thoughtful curation at a manageable scale.

It might be that modern equivalents of web rings, curated directories, group chats, and member forums supplant "Internet Scale" search engines and social media networks. It would be an adjustment, but it wouldn't be the end of the world.

Re: The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet

#90

Post by jabroni_salad »

coffeeblack wrote: post #15

230 would be okay if the user had the ability to choose the algorithm that determines what content that user sees. That was one of the early ideas for Twitter when Musk took over. Could even have external, independent “filter providers”. Then the user a chose what bubble they want to live in. Or none at all, if they are brave enough to see opposing opinions. But if the web site decides the algorithm for the user, wel…

given the rate at which youtube takes in new videos (millions per day), I think you would be supremely lucky to see anything even resembling "an opinion" in a truly unfiltered list.
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