301–310 of 392 posts
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> You want to pay a cop to write the law? Put it under their seal, the one they use to exercise police powers? > Sure, other people vote on it. But it stinks. Wait, do you think that police departments and police unions don't participate in drafting laws?
Participating and writing are a bit different things.
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With such proposed laws on the books, I don't see how anyone would start a new company that does anything at all with user generated content, as the risk for significant criminal liability is just too high. Only billion dollar companies would be able to afford to curate and make sure not a single law was broken ever, at any time, by one of their users. Imagine having your home raided in the middle of the night becaus…
Maybe that means only peer to peer systems without central servers are safe. There is no "server" and the data is everywhere but nowhere.
I joke, of course what would actually happen is your ISP would turn off your connection.
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Conversely, this is the one section that I don’t want added. The “Bad Samaritan carve-out” seems to cover cases where the platform is aware of the content pretty well, and I’d support adding that. This is about making them liable even when they aren’t aware of it, which is problematic for any site that handles anything user-generated, especially if you don’t have an army of moderators like Facebook does.
Maybe needing an army of moderators is just the cost of doing business when it comes to hosting user content. I'm weary of that change being made, but really, I don't see a viable alternative, or a good argument against it. If you can't moderate content at some scale, then maybe you just shouldn't host content at that scale. I think there may be a light, or a deeper darkness, that comes out of this though. We may see…
It's not all chatrooms and social media. Restricting the internet to be run by people able to manage their own websites would hurt. Ebay would have to manually review every account and listing. Good luck finding a user review website like Rotten Tomatoes. No more Straw Polls. No more GitHub.
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What's the legitimate government interest in disallowing shadowbanning?
"To promote free and open discourse online and encourage greater transparency between platforms and users." That seems legitimate to me; the mechanisms of democratic government rely on free speech and the marketplace of ideas existing in practice as well as in theory. If undesirables were not only kept out of the town square, but kept out by a secret system that not even they were told about, that would be obviously…
I get to take down any flyers on my fence, even if I leave up the ones I like. Or I can vandalize the ones I dislike, maybe entirely changing their message. My fence.
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> Such designs and operation put our society at risk by: (1) severely eroding a company’s ability to detect and respond to illegal content and activity; (2) preventing or seriously inhibiting the timely identification of offenders, as well as the identification and rescue of victims; To me, that says if a company writes something that prevents or blocks illegal content from being accessed by law enforcement, any immu…
That’s a very narrow theory of it. I read it as saying “if the system is designed to keep out external viewers of the content, then it is illegal”. That is, E2E encryption, because it is impossible for someone to eavesdrop usefully by design, is intended to be made illegal.
"...if a company writes something that blocks... content from being accessed by law enforcement [like e2e encryption], protection is removed."
That's exactly how I read this. This is a head-on attack on all types of encrypted applications that would block government from (legally) accessing the user's data whenever they want.
This would effectively remove protections from Signal, iOS, WhatsApp, Keybase, or any other platform offering e2e encryption. It doesn't rule encryption illegal per se, but now the platforms may be held liable for the crimes that happened through their services, which would force them to either take their chances, or shut down, or implement some sort of backdoor.
(disclaimed: IANAL).
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"To promote free and open discourse online and encourage greater transparency between platforms and users." That seems legitimate to me; the mechanisms of democratic government rely on free speech and the marketplace of ideas existing in practice as well as in theory. If undesirables were not only kept out of the town square, but kept out by a secret system that not even they were told about, that would be obviously…
The "undesirables" can make their own websites, which are totally protected from the government by the First Amendment. The owners of the shadow-banning websites should also have the right to decide what thoughts are exposed on their website. I get to take down any flyers on my fence, even if I leave up the ones I like. Or I can vandalize the ones I dislike, maybe entirely changing their message. My fence.
No they're not; the government has already shown itself able and willing to do an end-run around the First Amendment by e.g. pressurising payment processors to refuse to do business with such websites.
> The owners of the shadow-banning websites should also have the right to decide what thoughts are exposed on their website.
> I get to take down any flyers on my fence, even if I leave up the ones I like. Or I can vandalize the ones I dislike, maybe entirely changing their message. My fence.
If you're hosting a private website you can privately decide what goes on it. If you're holding yourself out as a public communications provider and want the benefits of section 230, you're being granted special privileges by society and you need to hold up your end of the bargain by hosting the kind of uncomfortable discussion that society needs.
here is the DoJ's breakdown and red-line changes: 1. Incentivizing Online Platforms to Address Illicit Content The first category of potential reforms is aimed at incentivizing platforms to address the growing amount of illicit content online, while preserving the core of Section 230’s immunity for defamation. a. Bad Samaritan Carve-Out. First, the Department proposes denying Section 230 immunity to truly bad actors.…
Oof. That's a good source. Section 5c is particularly problematic. It disallows shadow-bans if I'm reading correctly. Section f9 is...suspicious. Section d4 seems painful for small providers. You lose good samaritan status if there isn't a good way to contact you. Section c2A is the important one. It basically means that a site cannot remove content unless it is objectively obscene or extreme. Section g5A suggests th…
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I think conjuring that book is hyperbole. I don't think making people responsible for the legality of content they host is some crazy oppressive overreach of government power. The laws about what content is legal or illegal are pre-existing, these rules just shift the burden of enforcement in recognition that the government being the sole source of rule on massive distributed platforms isn't feasible. We tried, we fa…
The laws about what actions are legal or illegal are pre-existing, the telescreens and mandatory neighbor reporting just shift the burden of enforcement in recognition that the government can't effectively police the distributed masses. Fixed that for you.
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Moderation is the secret sauce of user-generated content. You shouldn't allow for user generated content if you aren't prepared to moderate it. It seems many people still don't understand that this is the biggest problem facing social media. Not scaling, not engagement, but moderation.
If we started with this approach from the beginning, we wouldn't even have social media or sites like Wikipedia. Enshrining it in law just means only the existing players can play the game.
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The law provides them immunity from civil suits. Apple as a provider can say they comply with section 230 and avoid any legal liability from people that may be harmed by their actions. In other words, you can't sue Apple because someone used iCloud to distribute child porn of you. The essential bargain struck for 230 was that providers get immunity in exchange for policing their system and helping law enforcement. Ap…
Ok, so I was under the impression that if you are say, a telephone network, that people can't sue you for stuff people do during phone calls, under the premise that the phone company doesn't moderate phone calls; and my understanding of the "bargain struck" is then that online web forums felt that centralized moderation was absolutely critical to spam prevention and search/discovery services (I disagree on the practi…
Not really. Sure the telcos can't sensor individual phone calls, but if they don't like what you are doing they will disconnect you. For example my telco explicitly prohibits me from sending spam over SMS. If I break that, they disconnect me. It costs me money to reconnect which is a huge disincentive to spammers, but more than that, they insist on knowing who I am, that have a "true name" in other words. So not only can they disconnect me, they can ensure I never reconnect.
Two differences with an internet bulletin board is the users are anonymous and posting is free. Thus the owners can never effectively ban people that deliberately set out to harm their business, they can only deal with the posts as they occur. Or to put in another way: until you read his post, you can never know if a new user is a spammer and it cost him nothing to post his spam.
The difference between a telco and an internet web site is really competition, and it's curcial. It costs billions (trillions?) to set up a telco. Worse, there is typically no local competition for land line (and really just a hand full of mobile providers too). So your local land like provider bans you, it's as if you've lost your town water supply, or electricity connection. In that environment a telco shutting you down is indeed total censorship.
That's not true for the internet. There are literally thousands if not millions of outlets. If one does not like your post, another one surely will. Since there is no monopoly you are always able to publish somewhere so no one one person or company can shut you up. In fact, it's not difficult to build your own publishing forum and it costs peanuts, so in fact _no one_ except the government can prevent you from having your say.
230 struck a new bargain for this new environment. What arose under its protection was curated forums targeting particular consumers. Stuff the consumers didn't like (such as SPAM, or bullshit, or leftist, or abusive) it is removed. Because the cost of creating the forum is so cheap the competition for eyeballs is fierce, and what ends up dictating the success of these forums is not whether they agree with posts or their political views, it is how well their curation matches their target market. This equation has been spelt out here on HN time and time again, with comments like "Twitter must have judged the cost of letting Trump post bullshit higher than the readership it gained".
So, 230 solved the "free speech" problem using capitalist competition in its purest form. Where "pure" near zero friction, and a market with near perfect information flow between participants. It seems to work pretty well to me.
It's pretty clear these amendments, g.5(c) in particular, will destroy that balance.