Justice Department to propose limiting internet firms’ Section 230 protections • Hacker News Board

Re: Justice Department to propose limiting internet firms’ Section 230 protections

#161

Post by g-b-r » Wed, Jun 17, 2020, 11:19 PM UTC

tathougies wrote: post #103

save_ferris wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why isn't the market holding Facebook accountable for the numerous transgressions we've seen coming out of that company over the last several years? Because people don't understand or care how the money is made, which fundamentally undermines the argument that the market is always right. From broad, repeated invasions of online privacy to numerous scandals involving state-sponsored disinformation campaigns, Facebook…

My friend... Tucker Carlson was the most watched news anchor in all of America last week. It is apparent that a good portion of the population doesn't find Facebook's decision to allow free speech at all objectionable. Have you considered that the reason why most people are okay with Facebook not punishing president Trump is because many people agree with him? Have you considered that -- facebook having more active u…

omg... right-wing developers are a thing =:o

Re: Justice Department to propose limiting internet firms’ Section 230 protections

#162

Post by g-b-r » Wed, Jun 17, 2020, 11:24 PM UTC

sdwedq wrote: post #64

I agree. I used to believe in absolute freedom of speech on the web. But then people start sending goatsx or whatever as joke in emails. I learned to avoid opening any links form certain friends. MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter was nice clean space to hangout for a while. Then horrible and traumatic pictures and videos start showing up in my feed. I know the world is horrible place but I don't need constant reminder a…

There are filters for kids and indeed it wouldn't be bad in any way if there were various filters on Youtube, Facebook etc., they just ought to be voluntary (or at most imposed by one's parents).

And... this isn't going to change "kids shows on Netflix"...

Re: Justice Department to propose limiting internet firms’ Section 230 protections

#163

Post by throwawaygh » Wed, Jun 17, 2020, 11:52 PM UTC

jasode wrote: post #124

throwawaygh wrote: post #28

I'm generally sympathetic to the idea that Section 230 protections should come with some sort of obligation to allow free speech. However, the actual policy proposals for replacing Section 230 are all outright dystopian. Josh Hawley, in particular, is NOT a free speech advocate. His problem with Facebook/Tiwtter is perceived liberal bias, and the alternatives to Section 230 that he suggests are 100% about wrestling e…

>Section 230 protections should come with some sort of obligation to allow free speech. [...] Does anyone have a good proposal [...] and values free speech? Nobody has a good proposal because every discussion about the idealism of "values free speech" is always hiding the true difficulty: nobody wants to be forced to pay for others' undesirable speech. E.g. Youtube can't be a "free speech" platform because advertiser…

Yeah, I used to think of it like this.

In particular, my view was basically: "don't like FB/YT/Twitter policies? Spin up a wordpress; it's as easy as posting to FB/YT and you can pay the monthly bill for a quite decent audience using loose change."

I've come around in the past couple of years. Social networks/content platforms are... well, networks and platforms. Like it or not, the policies of the largest networks/platforms will have a non-trivial impact on public opinion. They have become a (perhaps the) public square. And the government doesn't have to extend Section 230 protections to those networks/platforms.

I really like the idea that individual users should be able to create their own content filters and buy/sell content filters. At least in the abstract, this seems like it would address the need for content moderation without centralizing the censorship.

Re: Justice Department to propose limiting internet firms’ Section 230 protections

#164

Post by geofft » Wed, Jun 17, 2020, 11:55 PM UTC

christkv wrote: post #145

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that could easily be weaponized to remove minority opinions.

I would rather hope it kills the big platforms and forces a reverting to smaller platforms and message boards. Social media has become a scourge on humanity.

Should the government be in the business of regulating social media to death because it is a scourge on humanity?

I am generally in favor of big government, but this seems too big even for me. (And if I were to be in favor of it, I would rather the government straightforwardly legislate what we don't like about social media or even ban it instead of burying it under crushing legal liability - which runs the risk that some even-more-scourgey platform will avoid the liability. For instance, the most vapid parts of Instagram would survive because there are no opinions or ideas there, just photos.)

Re: Justice Department to propose limiting internet firms’ Section 230 protections

#165

Post by throwawaygh » Wed, Jun 17, 2020, 11:58 PM UTC

pwdisswordfish2 wrote: post #139

throwawaygh wrote: post #28

I'm generally sympathetic to the idea that Section 230 protections should come with some sort of obligation to allow free speech. However, the actual policy proposals for replacing Section 230 are all outright dystopian. Josh Hawley, in particular, is NOT a free speech advocate. His problem with Facebook/Tiwtter is perceived liberal bias, and the alternatives to Section 230 that he suggests are 100% about wrestling e…

To me, the question is whether the web is a something people use through a middleman, i.e., someone else's website like Mark Zuckerberg's, versus a thing that we use directly, i.e., having our own websites. If we follow the later thinking, then of course we are personally responsible for what content we place on the website. In either case, the web in its design is still a "public place" where "free speech" can occur…

> It is up to the website owner to remove offending content, not the ISP to block access to it. This makes practical sense. We wanted ISPs to stay in businesss.

Yeah, it's interesting. That's how everyone thought about it back in the day. Section 230 was about ISPs, not phpBBs.

I remember actually worrying about this when setting up my own forums. Even talked to a lawyer and included CYA language in the EULA. I would also use this as a justification for bans ("I'm possibly on the hook for his bullshit, which might be called harassment by some local pd, because the law is new and who the hell knows what will happen").

Thanks for the reminder. That's really interesting, and it's also really interesting that I didn't even remember this.

Re: Justice Department to propose limiting internet firms’ Section 230 protections

#166

Post by throwawaygh » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 12:04 AM UTC

danShumway wrote: post #125

throwawaygh wrote: post #28

I'm generally sympathetic to the idea that Section 230 protections should come with some sort of obligation to allow free speech. However, the actual policy proposals for replacing Section 230 are all outright dystopian. Josh Hawley, in particular, is NOT a free speech advocate. His problem with Facebook/Tiwtter is perceived liberal bias, and the alternatives to Section 230 that he suggests are 100% about wrestling e…

If you're looking for an alternative take, check out some of Cory Doctorow's writing on this. His position is that forcing platform neutrality is less important when platforms don't have a monopoly over communication. Different people have come up with different plans about how you could address tech monopolies, with varying degrees of extremity: - Splitting up companies that control entire vertical slices of a marke…

Thanks for curating all of these proposals!

- splitting up: seems like a temporary fix at best (see ma bell).

- data exports: exporting is nice, but... then what? the network is still a network.

- weakening CFAA/DMCA and allowing scraping/interop: It'd be a terrible hacky world, but I could imagine it working. Probably would end up looking like a weird inverted version of the Wuph! bit from The Office. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WUPHF.com So not a good solution but maybe actually a solution. Plus we should do this anyways.

- standardized API: I like this combined with the sibling proposal of allowing people to build their own filters. I think that's my new position unless someone can convince me otherwise :)

Re: Justice Department to propose limiting internet firms’ Section 230 protections

#167

Post by throwawaygh » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 12:11 AM UTC

geofft wrote: post #116

throwawaygh wrote: post #28

I'm generally sympathetic to the idea that Section 230 protections should come with some sort of obligation to allow free speech. However, the actual policy proposals for replacing Section 230 are all outright dystopian. Josh Hawley, in particular, is NOT a free speech advocate. His problem with Facebook/Tiwtter is perceived liberal bias, and the alternatives to Section 230 that he suggests are 100% about wrestling e…

I'm not sure I agree with that framing of the relationship between Section 230 and free speech. For reference, here's the law: > (1) No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. > (2) No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of— (A)any action volunta…

Yeah, I agree with a lot of that. Especially the point that creating an obligation to protect free speech is, even if a nice value, pragmatically totally impossible to implement. That's sort of what I was trying to say in my original post (poorly I guess): "sure, maybe free speech would be nice, but honestly how? all the medicine seems worse than the cure and this is a sort of fundamentally thorny problem"

What do you think of the proposal that, to keep section 230, websites with a large audience must implement a standardized api and then folks would be allowed to create their own content filters on top of that api?

Thanks for your post.

Re: Justice Department to propose limiting internet firms’ Section 230 protections

#168

Post by pnw_hazor » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 12:15 AM UTC

throwaway_USD wrote: post #128

pnw_hazor wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The liability springs from enabling a straw purchase the plaintiff alleges should have been obvious and therefore the sale should have been denied. I imagine there is evidence (video, witnesses, etc.) that tend to indicate that the dealer knew or should have known he was facilitating a straw purchase.

Yes, you need a underlying cause of action...that's how law works. The point is liability, gun manufactures and dealers can be liable for the products used in killings by third parties...even after lawful sales. Take the case of the Sandy Hook victims that sued Remington. Initially their case was dismissed, because the lower court rules the manufacture is shielded from any liability under Protection of Lawful Commerc…

I guess I was differentiating plain old negligence from the lawsuits that specifically go after immunity carve-outs in the PLCAA.

Interestingly, most of the reporting I was just reading suggests that the Sandy Hook case has been allowed to move forward because makers and sellers lose their immunity if they "knowingly violated a State or Federal statute applicable to the sale or marketing of the product." This sounded like an overly broad immunity carve-out to me, but if true it seems reasonable that the case is still alive.

But of course, the reporting is not complete, it leaves out the second prong of this carve-out "and the violation was a proximate cause of the harm for which relief is sought"

I can't imagine the Sandy Hook plaintiffs proving or even providing evidence that supports the second prong. It will be interesting to see how this case unfolds. Hopefully it will not settle until all the appeals have been exhausted.

For Section 230, the immunity carve-outs are much clearer and limited. The tech industry must have better lobbyists than the gun industry.

Though if Biden is elected they may have problems:

In January 2020, former Vice President Joe Biden proposed revoking Section 230 completely. “The idea that it’s a tech company is that Section 230 should be revoked, immediately should be revoked, number one. For Zuckerberg and other platforms,” Biden said. “It should be revoked because it is not merely an internet company. It is propagating falsehoods they know to be false.” Biden never responded to follow-up questions about this statement.

https://www.theverge.com/21273768/section-230-explained-inte...

Re: Justice Department to propose limiting internet firms’ Section 230 protections

#169

Post by olliej » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 12:35 AM UTC

throwawaygh wrote: post #28

I'm generally sympathetic to the idea that Section 230 protections should come with some sort of obligation to allow free speech. However, the actual policy proposals for replacing Section 230 are all outright dystopian. Josh Hawley, in particular, is NOT a free speech advocate. His problem with Facebook/Tiwtter is perceived liberal bias, and the alternatives to Section 230 that he suggests are 100% about wrestling e…

Define free speech in a way that allows a platform to ban offensive content, while requiring them to publish all content.

Also this is contextually a clear retaliation for speech that the government does not like, and their arguments are pretextual.

But also if a platform loses 230 protectIon if it restrict political opinions then sites would need to leave racist and homophobic comments up, personal attacks against the authors, etc. Because if they lose 230 protection they become directly liable for content on their site if the filter any of it.

That was the whole point of section 230 - sites have a legitimate reason to want to stop arbitrary content being hosted by them, but they only had the “i’m just a dumb pipe” defense as long as they left everything up. Preventing that is literally the reason section 230 exists.

But here we have a president who doesn’t like one platform’s content moderation policies, as has decided to rewrite the law in order to make that moderation illegal.

It is clearly retaliatory, and it is clearly with the intent of restricting the speech of those entities.

Re: Justice Department to propose limiting internet firms’ Section 230 protections

#170

Post by belorn » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 1:12 AM UTC

akersten wrote: post #24

Can someone who supports "let's hold internet platforms responsible for what their users do on their platform" explain how that's any different than "let's hold gun manufacturers responsible for what users do with their guns?" I fail to see a difference between the two, and think both are untenable fantasies.

Gun manufacturers regulations and internet platform regulations are quite two different subjects with very little overlapping.

If a platform controls and exercise editorial control when something is said, what is said, and who may speak and who may listen, then it may be useful to hold that platform liable. It is about intent, control and power.

Gun manufacturers regulations however is full of rules that is about protecting society and international agreements. Selling guns to countries currently at war is problematic, so we hold those manufacturers responsible if they try to profit from running guns.