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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

#101

Post by bskap »

freejazz wrote: post #47
spaced-out wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Personally I'd find it delightful if the rage-engine got smashed with a legal hammer and my Youtube recommendations were as useful as they were fifteen years ago. Why would it be safe for them to use an older recommendation system? It doesn't solve the problem, if their older system recommends a terrorism video, even if it only did so because that video came up chronologically, they're still liable. I would think th…

>Why would it be safe for them to use an older recommendation system? It doesn't solve the problem, if their older system recommends a terrorism video, even if it only did so because that video came up chronologically, they're still liable. A system that keyword matches isn't making recommendations, it's just keyword matching based upon the user's request. The law actually cares about intent and how things function,…

If there are 150,000 results that match your keyword, which results show up first?

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

#102

Post by freejazz »

commandlinefan wrote: post #94
freejazz wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I definitely think that the negatives of establishing legal liability for written words outweigh the positives, by a lot.

Establishing? Defamation goes back to at least 130 AD.

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

#103

Post by freejazz »

bskap wrote: post #101
freejazz wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why would it be safe for them to use an older recommendation system? It doesn't solve the problem, if their older system recommends a terrorism video, even if it only did so because that video came up chronologically, they're still liable. A system that keyword matches isn't making recommendations, it's just keyword matching based upon the user's request. The law actually cares about intent and how things function,…

If there are 150,000 results that match your keyword, which results show up first?

The most recent, the oldest, the closest match? That doesn't make it a recommendation system. Maybe try and read my post and make an effort to understand it rather than just responding with the first thing that comes to mind, because it is as if you have not understood my post at all and you seem to have not made any effort thereto.

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

#104

Post by yamtaddle »

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…

Do you thing Cisco router configurations of BGP or whatever have anything to do with how this case is going to be decided?

I'm pretty sure that's not what was meant by "understand the Internet", in this context.

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

#105

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

ladyattis wrote: post #10
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…

The thing is that the law as written allows them to do just that. If they don't like your content on YouTube, they can punt it instantly. And it can be for ANY REASON. And that's not even including their first amendment right to refuse distributing or listing your content.

Perhaps it would be useful to separate these functionalities into two categories: User-initiated (searches) and passive (sidebar garbage, play next video trash, etc).

Giving the user the ability to search doesn't mean you're curating content with a recommendation engine.

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

#106

Post by freejazz »

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.

That wouldn't resolve the question as to whether or not the laws conflict and to what extent they do...

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

#107

Post by llbeansandrice »

pgodzin wrote: post #83
hrunt wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 canno…

It absolutely can be differentiated. One major one is that Youtube is optimizing for engagement and increased viewing time to keep people on the website longer to see more ads and increase their profits. That intent is entirely different from HN's "promotion algorithm".

The law can and does differentiate across lines like these even if they're both technically "promotion algorithms".

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

#108

Post by yamtaddle »

mrguyorama wrote: post #31
Retric wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn’t the definition it’s that companies want the common carrier status without actually acting like one. The phone company doesn’t editorialize and we would think it insane if they started doing so.

Except we are right now screaming that the phone companies should be responsible for eliminating spam from the phone system! That exact moderation should not cause them to lose their common carrier status, and that moderation should be expected, and that moderation should not cause them to be responsible if someone uses their phone network to call in a bomb threat. All section 230 does is make clear that if you don't…

Humans don't work like formal logic processors and are capable of navigating the ambiguity between "ban spammers" and "editorialize" without much difficulty.

> All section 230 does is make clear that if you don't have people signing off on each and every bit of content on your platform, but respond with a good effort to reports of illegal content, then you will not be held responsible for someone using your platform as a way to do illegal things.

Web hosts that just serve content when a client requests it should definitely have this protection. Great idea. YouTube promoting outrage bait because it makes them more money? God no, no protection beyond what any other business doing that would have, not on the Internet. The line's somewhere between those.

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

#109

Post by kube-system »

tristor wrote: post #65
billythemaniam wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it is necessary to understand how the internet works technically to "understand the internet". It's like saying a race car driver can't drive fast without understanding the physics of a piston.

I get what you're saying, but I think you might be missing the point that I'm making. DNS and BGP aren't JUST technical, they're also deeply geopolitical. The Internet isn't an accident, it's an intentionally and carefully formed set of peer autonomous networks, with a shared protocol and written (and unwritten) rules for how we name and resolve the path to get to those different networks from one another. These stan…

These things are not the court's job to figure out. It's the job of the parties arguing the cases to explain the technical details of the case and how the law applies. The court is not an expert on any topic other than the law.

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

#110

Post by tsimionescu »

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.

For-profit or non-profit seems to make 0 difference to any of the discussed arguments. Also, the first amendment doesn't protect you from accusations of libel or defamation etc. There are limits to it, and a company that is knowingly spreading either could be on the hook for huge lawsuits if not under section 230 protections.

For example, if a newspaper published a reader letter that accused some rich dude of having defrauded them, the newspaper itself would probably be liable just as much as the reader whose letter was sent. Apply this same logic to any HN comment and you'll get a huge issue - and being a non-profit is entirely irrelevant to this.

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