U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech • Hacker News Board

Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

#541

Post by concinds » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 9:55 PM UTC

CJefferson wrote: post #240

coffeeblack wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let each user block what they don’t want to see. With filters, ai, etc. Don’t have a centralized “overlord” decide what an individual is allowed to see. That should be obvious and not controversial.

Having run a mail server, I don't think it's reasonable to expect most people to contain the deluge of spam and phishing attacks they would get if just told them to "sort it out" themselves.

A better comparison would be if Gmail placed emails you really want to receive in the spam for you. Actually, they wouldn't even put it in the spam folder; they'd just delete it permanently before you can read it, "for your safety".

With email, if you don't want to receive someone's emails anymore, you unsubscribe. Or put it in spam (equivalent to social media block) and you won't see those emails anymore.

"Platforms" claim that because they're platforms, they have a duty to "remove toxic elements from the platform". That doesn't work when they're practically monopolies for online speech, i.e. when if you get banned by one and you're famous enough, you get banned by all of them.

Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

#542

Post by unity1001 » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 9:55 PM UTC

daemoens wrote: post #525

unity1001 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But there’s a reason this stuff was invented in the US and not elsewhere. And that reason is the immense amounts of liquidity that both the US Federal Reserve and the private banks who are allowed to do fractional reserve lending, pump into the US economy. Thanks to the US dollar not losing value when that happens because it is (or was) used as the exclusive reserve currency due to the Gulf countries exclusively se…

Reserve currency status isn't decided by what countries use to purchase oil.

The main drivers of the chosen reserve currency were the oil producing countries using it. Now that Yuan entered the scene, things changed.

Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

#543

Post by coredog64 » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 9:56 PM UTC

joshuamorton wrote: post #510

idle_zealot wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't run a spam filter on the Twitter app on my phone That's nothing fundamentally preventing this. It's Twitter themselves who've decided not to allow you to do this. Were their app more open to extension you would be able to download and configure a spam filter of your choosing.

Are they allowed to provide a default filter?

This is it exactly: Apply the same rules that they have today for content moderation, but allow users to opt in to that filtering. Even if they apply it by default, that’s probably enough of an fig lead to get by this ruling.

Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

#544

Post by PradeetPatel » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 9:58 PM UTC

patmcc wrote: post #297

Brybry wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a lawyer but I don't think this would apply to bots. The Texas law text[1] says it only protects 'users' which are defined as people. And even then the law only prohibits censorship for specific reasons. It doesn't say companies can't ban users for running bots. Even if the messages the bot is posting are protected the fact of running the bot itself should still be a bannable offense if it's not allowed in th…

So can I hire someone from a low cost-of-living jurisdiction and get them to behave like a bot for me?

It's already being done by reputation management firms. As someone who worked as a resource liaison manager at one, it is not uncommon to see the majority of our social media operators are from diverse cost-of-living locations such as Nepal, rural Pakistan, and parts of Africa.

Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

#545

Post by fells » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 9:58 PM UTC

kgwxd wrote: post #310

Will Truth Social be complying?

They'd have to hit 50 million users first, or whatever arbitrary bar Texas will make so they don't have to.

Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

#546

Post by catiopatio » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 10:02 PM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #467

matthewdgreen wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you say "we are going to restrict ourselves [at the Government's insistence] to only moderating non-political speech" then someone will insist that some part of your non-political speech is actually political. And from some perspective they will be right. Then you get to negotiate with the government and the courts about what they consider to be political speech or not. And suddenly you no longer live in a country…

> And suddenly you no longer live in a country that has a meaningful First Amendment. The overarching issue is that I don't see what the first amendment has to do with this at all. Corporations have zero obligations to anyone under the first amendment, which only applies to the government.

The intent of the first amendment was to preserve free speech in the public square; "what the first amendment has to do with this at all" is a desire to preserve that underlying societal principle.

Section 230 was a give-away to corporations that allowed them to privatize and co-opt the public square; they reap the economic benefit of being shielded from liability for what people post, but none of the responsibility to carry everyone's speech.

If we want to preserve free speech in the public square, some form of balance has to be restored, either by:

1. Eliminating the section 230 liability shield that allowed them to privatize public discourse in the first place.

2. Requiring privatized "public squares" to operate more like common carriers.

Solution (1) — eliminating section 230 — would likely make it infeasible to run a private website carrying public speech.

Texas seems to have attempted a nuanced version of solution (2): in exchange for being granted the privilege of being shielded from liability for the speech they carry, platforms of a size large enough to justify treating them as a "public square" must meet common-carrier-like requirements that prevent them from discriminating based on viewpoint.

Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

#547

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 10:05 PM UTC

coffeeblack wrote: post #218

Buttons840 wrote: post #163

Will this apply to bots? What if I have a big list of a complaints about a certain politician (use your imagination, there's more than one politician to complain about), but the "other party" doesn't follow me, in fact, I have very few followers overall. So I create a bot that spreads my opinions by replying to millions of other Tweets. Anyone who mentions the politician of interest will receive a reply from "me" (my…

Let each user block what they don’t want to see. With filters, ai, etc. Don’t have a centralized “overlord” decide what an individual is allowed to see. That should be obvious and not controversial.

[deleted]

Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

#548

Post by _hcuq » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 10:06 PM UTC

netheril96 wrote: post #70

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the only reason. Without any moderation, sites would degenerate into cesspools that only cesspool dwellers would want to visit. Few site owners want their properties to be cesspools.

Why not give users the power of moderation? Currently the website owner makes the decision for me about what content I should not be seeing. I want instead all or at least almost all content preserved and the ability to create and subscribe to blocklists. The website can have a default blocklist active to make it palatable for the majority.

How Twitter used to be I think? If I remember correctly, I only got tweets from people I followed, in chronological order. I could unfollow someone and never hear from them again. Now the algorithm decides what I see.

Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

#549

Post by Hallucinaut » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 10:08 PM UTC

wernercd wrote: post #527

galaxyLogic wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a corporation’s unenumerated right to muzzle speech .. That is clearly not based on facts. Corporations simply have a right to choose which speech they will AMPLIFY. That is not the same as muzzling anybody. They don't knock on your door and say you better stop expressing these views or we will harm you. They don't even harass people online. They just simply choose which speech they will pass on and which not. If y…

"that is not the same as muzzling" They are actively blocking stories about Biden. Actively filtering stories about negative aspects of COVID vaccines. They are actively filtering stories about inconsistencies in the 2020 election - "The most secure ever". They are amplifying stuff - absolutely... but they are also censoring free speech because "corporations are allowed too". "If you tell me something and I don't tel…

"They" also ban anyone not supporting Trump from posting to their site

...or from forever blocking nonsense unscientific articles from a newsfeed

...or from wearing a shirt that's pro-Democrat at a convention

...or from bringing scientific consensus into Fox talking heads shows

...or from posting on their subreddit unless certified by a peer as being sufficiently conservative

That your post focuses singularly on denial of Republican establishment talking points shows the real intent implied by those pushing such laws, without any consideration that the "cancel culture" has been a deep tradition pervasive in media and American life on both sides of the aisle.

Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

#550

Post by thrown_22 » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 10:09 PM UTC

a_shovel wrote: post #157

There's discussion over what exactly a "political view" is here. I find this quote from a previous article [1] enlightening: > "No one—not lawyers, not judges, not experts in the field, not even the law's own sponsors—knows what compliance with this law looks like." [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/05/texas-law-bannin...

No one knows what pornography is either. But for some reason we've managed to keep going as a society for 60 years after it was declared that "I'll know it when I see it."