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

161–170 of 185 posts

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

#161

Post by kmeisthax »

swatcoder wrote: post #89

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 fast…

In scenario #2 the toxic waste still exists. Unmoderated forums are protected against liability even if CDA 230 is repealed. So 4chan will still be around.

Furthermore, distributing liability among your users is not a great idea. What will happen is that extortion enterprises will be created to sue people on our hypothetical old-web-of-trust. We know this because BitTorrent allowed Prenda Law to make porn, share it themselves to dox users[0], and then sue the people who downloaded or watched it. This scheme worked because copyright lawsuits are expensive to defend against, and defamation is no different. So everyone just quickly settled, which is why it took years for judges to catch onto this particular fraudster.

The only thing that keeps you from being sued for watching an infringing YouTube video is DMCA 512, which works almost[1] identically to CDA 230. Because it's a large centralized service, it's a juicier target, and people with legitimate copyright grievances can get things taken down from them. So nobody bothers to try and sue individual viewers.

Your #2 scenario only works if the Supreme Court is merciful and only kills recommendation systems. If CDA 230 is struck down entirely, you won't get to run a network-of-trust version of the web, because just hosting a public web server will require signing an indemnification agreement and posting a very large bond. In this scenario the Internet becomes more like cable, or perhaps a games console.

[0] Normally an IP address is not dox; but a lawyer and an out-of-order DMCA subpoena can turn it into dox.

[1] 512 adds a notice-and-takedown regime because Hollywood wanted censorship powers over the Internet.

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

#162

Post by pixl97 »

ericmay wrote: post #143
warkdarrior wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

'registration', what does that mean exactly? Only people with government validated IDs are allowed to post in the internet in the US? This sounds strangely in conflict with the both the first amendment and the use of anonymous materials historically as is part of our national identity.

Really everything that you're saying doesn't have shit to do with authoritative sources, but authoritarian sources. If you're a big nice identified company, or you're a member of "the party" you get to post permitted information. If you're not, well, better learn how to post those pics of a your senator pulling some crap on the darknet.

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

#163

Post by kube-system »

wnoise wrote: post #155
kube-system wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think that any site which believes it is too burdensome to be legally responsible for their content should not be permitted to market their content as safe for children.

So, banning marketing lies, and fraud? No need to touch 230.

I might go one step further and say that platforms with children users should not get 230 protections. Or maybe not under some conditions.

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

#164

Post by pixl97 »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #51
shadowgovt wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a good breakdown of the situation and arguments here ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzNo5lZCq5M ). The tl;dr is that it may not be possible to split a hair as thin as the difference between an automated recommendation algorithm and automated (or manual) moderation (if the system chooses not to put your tweets in the Trending Topics, are we refraining from up-signalling you or down-signalling you? Is "signa…

I presume that non-profit forums would be judgement proof (literal first amendment grounds). Possibly even including non-profit forums attached to a for-profit entity. With regard to Hacker News in particular the only possibly problematic element would be the YC-linked advertisement posts. Of course I'm not a lawyer. But section 230 is not the only protection here.

You're thinking about this the wrong way.

You could potentially attack a forum by posting verboten content on it then turn around an petition the government/state to sue the forum out of existence. A new form of SLAPP.

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

#165

Post by pixl97 »

prepend wrote: post #141
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?

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 egregi…

What does 'choose to leave it there' mean in a legal sense?

For example if I the moderator check the site once a day, and someone posts 5 minutes after I leave, would the law say it's ok for the content to remain up another 23 hours because no moderative choice occurred? Is there now a legal requirement to ensure you moderate fast enough?

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

#166

Post by pixl97 »

swatcoder wrote: post #89

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 fast…

What about #3 that no one talks about?

3. Some other country tells the US to fuck off and foots a lot of the lost advertizing bill in order to collect a shit ton of user data like the big US sites do now?

It's a world wide web, if the US screws off too much there is no golden rule that says it has to be the monetary king of the internet.

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

#167

Post by shadowgovt »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #160
shadowgovt wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No; "Judgment-proof" means "too poor to be sued because there is no universe in which the costs will be repaid," not "Case too worthless to bring." Anything that is criminal liability is never judgment-proof (when jail is on the table, a defendant can always "pay" with their freedom); civil liability is judgment-proof if the defendant could never possibly scrape together the cash to make the plaintiff whole. Basicall…

> The only thing that keeps the forums themselves from catching a lawsuit when that happens is s230. Section 230 came about because of suits against for-profit entities. Has there ever been suit against the likes of IRC, USENET, or BBSes for libel from content of their participants?

It would have to be a suit against individual nodes, which would certainly increase the cost (particularly for something like USENET).

... But that's a little irrelevant because those services are ghost towns relative to the past now. The more pressing reason nobody would bother to sue those channels is because nobody cares what's said there. If the loss of s230 shuttered the web services, and there were a migration back to those channels instead of just a quieter internet... Eventually a threshold would be reached that would be worth it for somebody to fire off a salvo of lawsuits against those service providers. A lot of IRC and USENET nodes are tied to institutions with enough assets that they aren't judgment-proof.

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

#168

Post by pixl97 »

tristor wrote: post #33

The reality is that most people, EVEN technical people, don't actually understand the Internet. The only people I consistently have conversed with who understand the Internet are technology advocates that have a deep background in Internet networking. Even on HN, most people believe many things about how the Internet works, at the networking layer, at the application layer, and socioculturally, that are not true, and…

>EVEN technical people, don't actually understand the Internet

Didn't Isaac Asimov write a documentary on this call 'Foundation'?

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

#169

Post by krapp »

prepend wrote: post #141
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?

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 egregi…

HN does recommend stories. If the mods feel a story doesn't deserve its virality, they will manually weigh it down, if they feel a story isn't getting the visibility it does deserve, they will manually boost it. They will even sometimes replace the posted URL with one they feel is more relevant. This forum asbolutely does not place content based solely on user input.

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

#170

Post by Sai_ »

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…

I came the opposite conclusion as you.

Say your friend looks great in a piece of clothing. Based on just this, the next time they ask you what they should buy, you suggest the style and brand they looked good in before.

A day later, you discover that the brand in question clubs baby seals.

Does this suddenly make you liable for all the atrocities the brand commits?

Superficially, a YT recommendation is based on metadata - video length? Did the user watch the video beyond threshold values? Did they comment or react to a video? Where do this user’s metrics like in comparison to metrics of other users who watched the same video?

I concluded that since the algorithms aren’t moderating the content, just your access to it, they are not afoul of S230.

Maybe the answer is to require all social media to provide a strictly timeline based view. Even here, the submission time stamp is purely metadata about the content, as is the watch duration or “comment/react?” flags.

Post reply on HN