Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember when DCMA passed, and everyone assumed that "safe harbor" meant that if a provider moderated or policed the content, then that service would be liable. If they just allowed things to pass through, not unlike the phone company, then the company could claim safe harbor. The law was designed to shield ISPs and online services from liability for what their users did with the service, not to enable content filt…
“Section 230 was intended to clarify that the government would not impose liability on internet companies even if they moderated their content.” -Jeff Kosseff How come you and Jeff Kosseff seem to think opposite ideas about whether 230 was intended to enable content providers to moderate content? I wonder who is right.
The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet
171–180 of 185 posts
Re: The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#173Re: The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Section 230 was intended to clarify that the government would not impose liability on internet companies even if they moderated their content.” -Jeff Kosseff How come you and Jeff Kosseff seem to think opposite ideas about whether 230 was intended to enable content providers to moderate content? I wonder who is right.
Safe harbor is 512 not 230. 230 was added to DMCA as part of the Communications Decency Act as I recall
Re: The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet
#175Re: The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 porn…
YouTube takes it down. Not as fast as it’s put up. But fast.
I found it irritating because I wanted to know what my daughter had been exposed to, but couldn’t. Her history linked to removed videos.
The titles were nonsensical - mostly Unicode homoglyphs.
It wasn’t child pornography, but was definitely grooming material.
Re: The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet
#177Earlier 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.
You could imagine the kind of elements that might matter for a fact pattern that would emerge from a deposition: revenue and size of website, proportion of website revenue directed towards moderation, percentage of requests that identify illegal material that are responded to, manner of response, tools provided to users, the types of content actually hosted on the site, nature of the algorithm itself, discussions that were had internally about access to harmful content. HN is a text-based website (which also mitigates the harm claim), it gets maybe in the orbit of a few hundred submissions a day, the vast majority of possible harm is when a submission is connected to a topic likely to cause legal issues, and in my experience such topics are typically flagged within a few minutes and removed quickly. There's no mechanism to directly communicate with users, there is no mechanism to follow users, there's no mechanism to change what you see on the front page based on what you clicked before. Everyone is exposed to the same content.
By contrast, thinking about the companies that are actually the target of these lawsuits I was at the TASM (Terrorism and Social Media) 2022 conference -- some of my research is adjacent to this but I've never done any work on terrorism and my social media work involves alt-tech stuff, not the big social media platforms -- where the keynotes were harm policy leads for Europe for Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, all of whom made it clear that their position was that it is incumbent on academics and government agencies to identify harmful content and work with social media, because every region has their own unique content challenges and it's not possible for Tech companies to handle those at a global scale. A question was asked of the panel that went something like "Meta was, as it admits, instrumental in spreading the violence-inciting messages that drove the anti-Rohingya pogroms in Myanmar. The defense is that Meta wasn't prepared for, or staffed for, detecting issues in a single small market, and things snowballed quickly. You could hire 100 full time content people in that country for the salary of a single person sitting on the panel or a single SWE, so how could resource constraints be the issue?" and the answer was "We're already devoting enough resources to this problem." I think that's an incredibly shitty answer to the question, and I think a deposition could surface exactly this kind of logic, and to me that would be a fact pattern that supports liability. I hope they get their pants sued off in every jurisdiction that allows it. It's clear an aversion to staffing is a huge part of the issue.
So from my perspective, I think the typical process for resolving civil liability + reasonable assumptions about how courts should interpret fact patterns is likely to get to outcomes I'm plenty happy with.
(In the two cases in front of SCOTUS right now it seems like the victims, who have basically no evidence connecting the perpetrators of the violence to the social media services used, would win: the argument seems to be of the form "some terrorist killed my family member, and some other terrorists got radicalized online, ipso facto social media is liable". I don't think that'd be a winning case with or without s.230)
Re: The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 n…
You can just register anonymously like you do on HN. Though for social media sites or similar having "verified human" seems like not just a good idea but ultimately the direction we'll go.
> Really everything that you're saying doesn't have shit to do with authoritative sources, but authoritarian sources.
You are really jumping the gun here so I'm not going to respond to your points here since I wasn't making those.
Re: The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It obviously is a circumstance that is occurring every second of the day. Not some hypothetical 'might be'. The parent has a point.
Re: The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet
#180The 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…
I encourage anyone who thinks the Supreme Court is composed of 9 wordcel idiots who can't possibly understand anything about computers to read their opinion in Google v. Oracle [1]. It's very readable and well-argued. It's like a reverse Gell-Mann amnesia—clearly the author of the draft understands the issues at play quite well. [1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf
The decision does show that the Supreme Court justices are savvy as to how the tech industry works, at least they know from a policy perspective they can't strike down the whole Android ecosystem without causing mayhem. And they know they can't affirm copyrights of APIs for similar reasons.
But from a legal perspective the way they outright dodged the legal question they were supposed to answer (i.e. are APIs copyrightable?) and the way they just asserted the conclusion about fair use without pretending to apply legal reasoning (together with a disclaimer that they haven't tried to change the existing law even if it looks like they have), I wouldn't say it's one of their better decisions.
As you say, in general people in tech have a tendency to assume judges are idiots. Most often they aren't, because judges sitting in the top courts are a handful of people at the pinnacle of their field, and they don't get there by being idiots. I agree with you that it's a good idea to sample some opinions from Supreme Courts or perhaps even others appeal courts to gain an appreciation of how judges tend to think. I just think Google v. Oracle is one of the worse ones to start with..