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

The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 185 posts

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

#141

Post by prepend »

eli wrote: post #57
hrunt wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL, but I would start developing my argument with the idea that emails Google placed in my Priority Inbox were sent to me specifically, and the intention of the sender is that I specifically would see it. Google is still not putting anything in front of my eyes that was not intended to be there anyway. When YouTube recommends content to me, the original author did not target that content specifically to me, and Yo…

When you post a story on HN you aren't specifically choosing to send it to a person. Is HN responsible if a harmful story reaches the front page?

HN is not recommending stories. Community members are endorsing or flagging stories and HN displays them ranked on that process.

There is moderation as well with the removal of stories but I’m not sure the responsibility is for removing harmful content. If someone posted a slanderous story or other illegal content and it was allowed to stay for some length of time then I think HN would be responsible. The most egregious would be if a child porn story was on the front page for days because HN staff chose to leave it there.

For YouTube, they are suggesting beheading videos to my child and I think bear some responsibility for doing that, and hopefully to stop doing that. They are making editorial decisions to promote content and so, I think, shouldn’t be protected by 230.

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

#142

Post by ericmay »

eli wrote: post #85
ericmay wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Why is it different if a "newspaper" does it if HN is curating the content algorithmically? I'm honestly not sure what the difference is.

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

#143

Post by ericmay »

warkdarrior wrote: post #120
ericmay wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If all that's allowed is "latest" or "most views", I will keep uploading my content to your platform and bot-voting/-viewing it to keep it at the top of everyone's feed.

These are solvable problems - for example requiring registration before posting. But I'm not moved at all by the technical problem because the technical problem isn't what is in question, it's the promotion and curation of content algorithmically.

Either way I think we're going to see a big swing back to authoritative sources because the very technical problems you mention will be taken advantage of by new tools and so the already meaningless content will not even be generated by humans. The Internet in the sense of "publishing content" will be meaningless and unprofitable [1].

[1] Obviously there will exist use cases where this is not the case

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

#144

Post by corbulo »

rayiner wrote: post #45

The Wired article’s title is frustrating. I’m pretty sure the Supreme Court does “understand the internet.” The judge I clerked for wrote the original decision that struck down most of the CDA except Section 230, which the Supreme Court later affirmed. If you go read that decision, it’s got a pretty accurate description of the internet: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/we... (see Findings of…

Wired is owned by the same people who own Reddit. They're providing narrative in case 230 gets shit on.

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

#145

Post by corbulo »

wil421 wrote: post #116
glitchc wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hear hear! Sounds like Wired is a mouthpiece for Big Tech.

Wired has been in the same camp as the Verge, IGN, Mac Rumors, and so on for a while now. They are closer to a tabloid than what Wired Magazine once was. Not sure who they are a mouthpiece for but they certainly don’t mind being one.

They're owned by Conde Nast, who also owns Reddit.

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

#146

Post by corbulo »

shadowgovt wrote: post #27

FWIW, the Supreme Court doesn't need to understand the Internet to do its job. A judge's job is to understand the law. It is the job of the lawyers to bring facts and argumentation before the judges to pursuade them that the law should be interpreted one way or the other. The expertise is expected to live with the lawyers, not the judges (and the ability to find expert witnesses and spin up on the details of what the…

It's really grounded in an anti-adversarial process ideology. Pre-empting it and demanding there should only be one side dictating what is and isn't true.

Thats probably overanalyzing a narrative piece for their owners but its what this accumulates to at scale.

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

#147

Post by notahacker »

owisd wrote: post #92
eli wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you post a story on HN you aren't specifically choosing to send it to a person. Is HN responsible if a harmful story reaches the front page?

They could rule against personalised recommendations (YouTube) vs while protecting recommendations where everyone sees the same thing (HN). In HN’s case I’m not sure it would matter much either way. HN is pretty heavily moderated already. If stories went into a moderation queue before hitting the main page rather than being retroactively moderated I’m not sure many of us would notice a difference.

They could rule against personalised recommendations whilst protecting recommendations where everyone sees the same thing, but logically it seems more likely they'd do the opposite (more reasonable to consider a single centralised top stories system consistently highlighting content to all its users a reflection of a "publisher" preference than an algorithm which highlights content based on each individual user's activity and filters the individual user may have set, moderators tend to manually intervene to influence the former more, and of course it's less reasonable to demand that all potentially libellous content is screened from procedurally generated individual user links than from a "top stories" list or home page.)

I think most of us would notice the difference if HN was allowed only to rank comments only in chronological order, never mind if for liability reasons the stories permitted to appear in order of upvotes on HN were restricted to the ones Dang was satisfied weren't libellous, or possibly none at all if YC decided it wasn't worth the risk

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

#148

Post by freejazz »

bikezen wrote: post #139
freejazz wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do you not recognize how lousy of a video sharing website this would be? Spammers are going to be constantly uploading marketing and other low-quality content with irrelevant keywords, while users that actually put work into making good quality videos will see their results pushed to the bottom quickly. How will you deal with that without implementing a system that can identify and recommend non-spam videos? Even th…

And what do you do when there's 10,000 exact keyword matches, how do you sort them? If it's newest the entire thing is just going to be spam accounts reposing the same video(s) on any major keyword. "top", or anything notable is also likely to be gamed and abused too, especially if you fuzz "top" sorting because then its not really neutral, you're deciding the order and therefore making a recommendation.

Then there might be a circumstance where it is promoting something. Your point? The law shouldn't make this illegal because then YouTube would have to have greater regard for what it surfaces? I'm not sure that's a bad thing, that's the entire point of the thread.

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

#149

Post by spaced-out »

freejazz wrote: post #131
spaced-out wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The most recent, the oldest Do you not recognize how lousy of a video sharing website this would be? Spammers are going to be constantly uploading marketing and other low-quality content with irrelevant keywords, while users that actually put work into making good quality videos will see their results pushed to the bottom quickly. How will you deal with that without implementing a system that can identify and recomm…

>Do you not recognize how lousy of a video sharing website this would be? Spammers are going to be constantly uploading marketing and other low-quality content with irrelevant keywords, while users that actually put work into making good quality videos will see their results pushed to the bottom quickly. How will you deal with that without implementing a system that can identify and recommend non-spam videos? Even th…

>Not sure why that's my problem, I'm not the one making money by promoting reactionary videos to reactionaries.

The reason I think we should see it as our problem is because I think the solution companies arrive at is just to turn the internet into cable TV, where only approved media organizations are able to share content because of liability concerns.

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

#150

Post by freejazz »

spaced-out wrote: post #149
freejazz wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do you not recognize how lousy of a video sharing website this would be? Spammers are going to be constantly uploading marketing and other low-quality content with irrelevant keywords, while users that actually put work into making good quality videos will see their results pushed to the bottom quickly. How will you deal with that without implementing a system that can identify and recommend non-spam videos? Even th…

>Not sure why that's my problem, I'm not the one making money by promoting reactionary videos to reactionaries. The reason I think we should see it as our problem is because I think the solution companies arrive at is just to turn the internet into cable TV, where only approved media organizations are able to share content because of liability concerns.

I'm not sure why YouTube should be able to operate the service it does with the little content filtering it does. In what other industry would you be allowed to post child pornography because it's too difficult to make sure it doesn't get posted? No newspaper could take that excuse. Toys R Us couldn't say "oh jeez, we didn't realize that a corner of our store was being used by child pornographers to spread child pornography and also recruit children" and not be liable. I'm not sure why we think it's good to give an excuse to YouTube and Facebook for this and anything else anyone else would normally be liable for.
Post reply on HN