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Comment by lgleason | Hacker News Reader

Google, Facebook, Twitter, Patreon and others were able to grow to the size they did based on Safe Harbor provisions that exempted them from libel laws under the premise that they were neutral platforms that allowed anybody to post content etc.. Newspapers and television stations are held liable for their content. Once they started to editorialize by banning things under subjective pretexts such as "hate speech" they started to violate that. It is also well known that there is political bias among these companies. This is one of many strategies that can be used. But, more importantly, there is concern from the left as well about these platforms and have been calls from that side as well to regulate them. They would have been much better served to have stayed neutral, but they've made their beds....

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This is a weird argument to have. It raises many questions. Like, it's one thing to suggest maybe libel laws should apply to big tech companies. But do we really want to force them to be "politically neutral?" Such a thing literally does not exist, for one thing; but who gets to define it? For example, can the president order that a given news source appear higher in the rankings? Who decides what deserves to be ranked higher?

Further, what happens if Google were to prove that it's search algorithm were completely politically neutral (which is obviously non-sense because that statement doesn't mean anything.) What do we do then?

Should we also look at New York Times? What if they are posting too many liberal viewpoints?

Why would we look at the NY Times? They don't have a monopoly on national news. They have a small minority position overall and always have.

Google effectively has three monopolies (or near monopolies): search, YouTube, Android.

I include YouTube because in their user-video / amateur-video space they have an overwhelming position, there's nothing even remotely close (Facebook is still a poor competitor, and will probably never capture the higher quality amateur content).

Now we're talking about an entirely different problem altogether. If you want that problem fixed, we need better legislation for tech companies, not worse. Adding more regulatory hurdles and legal obligations will just get you even stronger incumbents.

> But do we really want to force them to be "politically neutral?" Such a thing literally does not exist, for one thing; but who gets to define it?

Just a naive idea but personally, I'd say a platform is politically neutral if it takes no action to prioritise or remove content unless required by law. This puts what should and shouldn't be on the platform in the hands of lawmakers, who, theoretically at least, represent the will of the people.

However that's bad for business so I'm under no illusions it'll ever become reality.

It's worse than that.

Let's say a far right conspiracy blog is posting a conspiracy about a school shooting before any information is really available. Suddenly, it's on top of Google and being surfaced prominently on Facebook.

People don't like this because these neutral companies are now promoting fake, definitely potentially harmful stories.

But if you penalize them for this, from one viewpoint, you are suppressing political opinion.

That's with a conspiracy; but if you drag the slider backwards, you find that there's no actual tipping point where it's clear action should be taken. Further, what if the far right has more conspiracy theorist than the far left? It would be partisan to not run fake news!

Going more subtle, bias in algorithms is a thing. Like PageRank is based on the number of high quality links to your page, right? What happens when rightwing views are underrepresented because their network of links is naturally considered less high quality due to being less linked around the web?

And if you think people would never make arguments like this, try to remember how often people fight over the correlation of politics and population density. It's why the United States has a Senate and a House.

Ideally in this case, legislators would introduce a change encouraging deprioritization of information that is provably not factual.

Google doesn't produce news, though. It aggregates it based on user preferences and history. Complaining that the aggregate of news doesn't cast you in a good light is more of a reflection of who you are than what the aggregator is, as a public figure.

It also filters some sources and promotes other sources based on opaque criteria that many suspect to have political bias.

Do you really want a unsorted list of all web pages that contain your search keywords?

No, but I definitely don't want the results influenced by partisan politics.

So what? If you don't like how the algorithm sorts search results then use one of the many competitors. If you think the competition is inferior then you're by definition saying that the google algorithm is preferable to the competition despite whatever political bias you see in the results.

It's good to call for transparency. Google has an effective monopoly on search so it's not just about me as an individual switching to ddg or something. Google can make and break media properties based on what are currently hidden and seemingly editorialized levers.

I'm not a fan of regulation but as a consumer I'm absolutely within my rights to ask Google tough questions.

Google does not have an effective monopoly on search, and they've been very transparent about how you receive news on news.google.com.

> Google does not have an effective monopoly on search

That is clearly false.

What does it mean to have a monopoly on a product that costs nothing? Saying google has a monopoly on search is akin to saying that Tolkien has a monopoly on high fantasy novels; just because it's the most popular on the market doesn't mean its your only option, and the same is true of search engines.

https://quarterlyvalue.com/is-google-a-monopoly-79627b04941d

> Google, Facebook, Twitter, Patreon and others were able to grow to the size they did based on Safe Harbor provisions that exempted them from libel laws under the premise that they were neutral platforms that allowed anybody to post content etc

Google, in particular, did not, because web crawler results are not user-submitted content and thus are not within the scope of the CDA safe harbor.

They are, instead protected from libel a way that is open to, and frequently used by, newspapers: they mostly (i.e., in the form of search results) report what amounts to “X person said Y”, which is (to the extent it is true, whether or not Y is true) absolutely protected from libel in the US. And that would be true even if they preferentially promoted (or even exclusively carried) content favorable to (or, alternatively, disfavorable to) one viewpoint.

It's also possible that they consciously decided to stop being neutral (e.g. Zuckerberg's statement in Congress about being like a publisher) which would ultimately lead to regulation and thus reduce competition against them and "outsource" all the drama against them over to Congress.

> which would ultimately lead to regulation

Why would acting as a publisher lead to government content regulations? Do we not have freedom of the press guaranteed by the Constitution?

I don't remember the details but I remember some people were surprised by some of Zuckerberg's comments and thought it could open them up to regulation. Maybe it wasn't the comment about publishing.

No platform should be liable for content users post. Only if it is employees of the company doing the posting on company time should the company be held liable.

That is only true if you stay completely neutral according to those provisions. But when you curate/moderate content you are editorializing things and it becomes murky. Overall I agree with the original spirit of Safe Harbor. IE: the platforms should not be liable, but they also need to stay neutral, which means that they do not ban, demonetize, down rank anybody based on subjective moral grounds, but instead only do so if federal laws etc. have been broken that force them to.

I wasn't making a statement on current law. I said "should". As in, I don't think there should be any law pushing liability onto the service providers, regardless of neutrality.

I might agree with you if news outlets and others were held to the same standard. That said it would be be interesting to know how that changed the landscape. Right now you have the powerful choosing the narrative and the little guy being crushed with the current system. All of that being said, libel and slander offer protections against unfounded smear campaigns against individuals and adds accountability which should be there for everyone. There is not one size fits all to fix things, but the current system is majorly broken and the "don't be evil" company has become the monster they claimed to not be.

>Right now you have the powerful choosing the narrative and the little guy being crushed

So, Trump, a billionaire and POTUS, with Republican majorities in both houses is a victim/ little guy? As a conservative this makes no sense.

Google in particular is vulnerable because of their monopoly-level status on search traffic and search revenue.

Facebook less so, and Twitter even less so. Access to information is vital, access to your cousin's birthday photos and the blatherings of idiots who like to shout out into the ether probably less vital.

Are Google results actually worse for "conservatism"? Like if you go on Bing, Baidu, or DuckDuckGo, you're going to get better results? I'm really dubious about that.

Not only that, but the tech companies are starting to take an active role in politics [1]. The amount of power these companies wield should make everyone nervous - there is a comment on this article that "without checks and balances and the protection of the Constitution [the US] would be living under authoritarian dictatorship right now". On reflection, nobody should believe that the US is subject to sudden change but tech companies are somehow immune.

Imagine if the Google shareholders decided that someone like Trump would make a good Google CEO; paralleling the US move from Obama to Trump in one election cycle. It would be very worrying.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/17/google-was-against-trump-now...

As soon as they implemented algorithmic feeds they forfeited their neutrality as a service.

Removing Section 230 immunity should be one of the country's legislative priorities. It's incredible that we've literally given a whole industry a blank check to do what they want and be completely exempt from responsibility for the damage they cause. Without Section 230, companies would be subject to the standard definitions of intent in the law, as to whether their actions were purposely, knowingly, recklessly, etc. harmful. Tech companies have opted not to handle their platforms responsibly because it's more profitable not to.

Section 230 is how a company can make billions selling ads for malicious sites, and not be held liable for it because they didn't technically write the malicious ads themselves. Not only would moderating the content of the ads these companies sell cost them money, but refusing to sell malicious ads would cut off profit options for them.

If Section 230 was removed, they'd have to actually take care of the business they engaged in, as they'd be responsible for promoting and participating in illegal activity.

Wow that's incredible short-sided. Section 230 enabled the internet to grow and flourish with moderate freedom (the DMCA etc still exist). Removing it would heavily benefit large companies who can afford expensive monitoring and filtering software, while hurting small companies without enormous legal departments.

On the contrary, Section 230 was a short-sighted action to allow unchecked behavior in an attempt to get that rapid growth, without solid, reliable protections behind that growth. And while rapid growth can be good, we have to come back and put proper regulations in place to keep things from crashing to a screeching halt. The stock market's a great example: You can strip out protections, and yeah, growth will skyrocket, but when you realize what that house of cards is built on, it crashes down and makes everyone bankrupt.

And the suggestion that regulation hurts small companies and helps big ones is a myth generally perpetrated by those large companies. "Don't regulate us, it'll hurt the little guys" is an amazingly frequent scream of big monopolies trying to protect their business models.

Content moderation actually doesn't scale well at all, because nobody's really gotten automated content moderation right. Small companies have little to no problem moderating their comments sections or business relationships, but large tech companies actually can't do this without cutting deeply into their profit margins.

Yes, they'll use "expensive monitoring and filtering software", but those systems tend to suck, which is why so much malware and bad content comes through Google Ads and the Play Store and why Facebook's platform has been gamed in countless ways by bad actors. Automated systems present massively additional liability compared to human employees, and removing that immunity would ensure large companies couldn't just hand off moderation to an algorithm.

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