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Why do you say "clearly you can moderate based on your ToS"? I don't see anything here would permit the ToS to have moderation criteria such as "off-topic" while retaining the safe harbor. Section c1b is what leads to the conclusion that only the criteria in c2a are allowed, and section c1b doesn't mention "good faith" at all. Furthermore, for many sites such as Hacker News which define their topical focus broadly, "off-topic" could be judged to lack the "particularity" necessary to qualify as good-faith moderation criteria under section g5A.

You're right, I'm making the assumption that the law isn't completely nonsense and banning any form of moderation whatsoever.

I could be wrong.

"objectively obscene or extreme" - is there a clear definition for obscenity? I feel like there was a famous quote from a judge on the SCOTUS to effect of "I'll know it when I see it", but law is not an area that I have expertise in.

It’s evolved over time. The basis was content which was deemed to “deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences". The next step was to remove protection status only for speech which is “patently offensive" and "utterly without redeeming social value".

Maybe it’s time for another step.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roth_v._United_States

I agree, based on legal precedent ("know it when i see it") seems it would be very challenging to enforce an objective definition of obscenity.

It seems to be that under this reform to maintain Section 230 safe harbor either you would have clear and consistently enforced ToS or if not relying on a ToS you would be removing material that is objectively obscene or extreme.

This seems like a fantastic reform. It may lead to Twitter finally applying the same moderation standards to Trump, ie banning his account.

Slim chances. My source close to twitter feeding hose tells me Trump tweets and retweets are worth few million dollars in ad display daily. If they were to ban him, soon a stockholder lawsuit would follow that Twitter is willfully throwing revenue away.

Notably, there is no carve out for factually untrue information. So you can't remove posts claiming that silver solution will cure Covid...

But isn't that covered in the new last section 'good faith'?

where so long as it's clearly defined in TOS and moderation policy you can remove it. E.g. fb has a more clear policy that's public that says no false facts that can cause harm.

I'm a 100% skeptical of this administration and the (run on rant ahead) insanely religious zealot by the name of Barr who is terrifying in trying to force his crazy beliefs on all of us whilst creating a monolithic fascist-esque unitary executive who's whim (or that who has his ear last..) controls virtually all aspects of our lives...

but this seams reasonable and seems like it would answer a lot of the problems we see complained about on HN all the time?

right now one of the top posts is about YouTube take down with no info/recourse.

I don’t understand why Barr is hated by so many. I assume purely partisan reasons? He is very well spoken, principled, and in retrospect his summary of the Mueller Report was completely accurate (despite news articles I read at the time that had me convinced he was some kind of evil mastermind).

The only thing I don’t like about Barr is it’s hard to see him curtailing the surveillance state, but frankly that applies too almost everyone in politics since those who speak out against the cia/nsa tend to get into unfortunate high-speed car accidents.

Yeah, somehow I doubt you're actually asking in good faith.

Barr himself is horrifically partisan, which as the AG of your entire country is scary as all hell. Just read his speech in November 2019 to The Federalist Society (which itself is horrifying, the societies goals are simply at odds with what the USA has claimed to be).

It's as partisan as it gets.

Or is that okay, because its in-line with your own opinions?

Beyond partisan. He is truly devout Catholic and driven by religious doctrine. He argues that religion is necessary in American Democracy and the decline of religion has caused what he views as morally corrupt welfare state. His views are truly insane. far beyond republican politics.

he thinks that religion is needed side-by-side with our individual liberty style government.

read this whole speech it's truly insane i can't believe someone so intelligent (and effective), who was given so much power by Trump, has these views it's truly scary

"But today – in the face of all the increasing pathologies – instead of addressing the underlying cause, we have the State in the role of alleviator of bad consequences. We call on the State to mitigate the social costs of personal misconduct and irresponsibility.

So the reaction to growing illegitimacy is not sexual responsibility, but abortion.

The reaction to drug addiction is safe injection sites.

The solution to the breakdown of the family is for the State to set itself up as the ersatz husband for single mothers and the ersatz father to their children.

The call comes for more and more social programs to deal with the wreckage. While we think we are solving problems, we are underwriting them.

We start with an untrammeled freedom and we end up as dependents of a coercive state on which we depend."

https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-william-...

d4 could be accomplished by making an email to report complaints to. Doesn't seem especially onerous.

f9 is suspicious how? This document is not intended in anyway to prevent anti-trust actions, so why is a specific exclusion suspicious? There's a lot of public push right now to act on anti-trust issues for large tech companies, so there's no secret there.

5c... is more complex, and I'm not sure it means what you think it does.

c2A does seem particularly problematic to me in the context of trying to combat disinformation which is neither illegal nor obscene, nor violent.

>Section 5c is particularly problematic. It disallows shadow-bans if I'm reading correctly.

Can you explain more, I'm not really seeing it...

Also how is disallowing shadowbanning problematic? I always never liked it.

What's the legitimate government interest in disallowing shadowbanning?

Well "legitimate" is open for interpretation.

I'd say this administration has resonated with its base by treating bans as politically-motivated.

They are politically motivated. For example, I’ve been banned from Twitter for defending Kyle Rittenhouse, who engaged in lawful self defense against a number of violent assailants. Why? Because the left has decided it serves their interests to paint him as a mass murderer (indeed Facebook has an official policy that he is a mass murderer).

Facebook also regularly censors viral pro-trump content and project veritas has exposed this.

I wish it weren’t so, but it is. I’ve experienced it firsthand.

I'm guessing that's because "viral pro Trump content" is very frequently xenophobic& racist content, includes calls to violence and is full of conspiracy theories. If a site doesn't moderate that sort of stuff, it frequently goes to shit, I know inadequate moderation on that front had made reddit much much worse.

Also this sort of stuff can lead to real world violence like when Facebook let violent vigilantes organize on their site it led to Kyle Rittenhouse killing two people.

I've seen a lot of retellings of why someone was banned that end up being a bit generous, particularly if experienced first hand.

It's tough to take these at face value because we trust and believe in the things that define our ideology and take any challenge to our presentation of that as an attack on the underlying ideology.

Shadowbans make it harder for users who have been affected to report these outcomes.

"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 damaging to democracy; yet that's what's happening online.

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.

> The "undesirables" can make their own websites, which are totally protected from the government by the First Amendment.

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.

>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.

I cannot see how a change to a law that's proposed by the enforcement arm of government will actually protect people from abuses done by that same enforcement arm. If they act in bad faith now, why assume good faith will follow?

>you need to hold up your end of the bargain by hosting the kind of uncomfortable discussion that society needs.

I don't think Amazon's user reviews are where uncomfortable discussions need to happen. But I do think the government demanding what should be discussed on servers owned by private citizens is a clear violation of the First Amendment.

> I cannot see how a change to a law that's proposed by the enforcement arm of government will actually protect people from abuses done by that same enforcement arm. If they act in bad faith now, why assume good faith will follow?

This seems like an argument that no government will ever reduce its own power, and so constitutional protections, due process etc. are all pointless. Even a single arm of the government is far from a monolith, and the boundaries of what government should and shouldn't do are always evolving. I'm sure this proposal isn't coming purely from the good of this administration's heart; part of it is public pressure, and part of it is the consideration that they may no longer be in power come November. But realpolitik is always a factor; good laws are still good laws.

> I don't think Amazon's user reviews are where uncomfortable discussions need to happen.

I'm sure a lot of vital IRL political discussion happens in the checkout queue at the supermarket (I'm sure that sounds like a joke, but I'm completely serious). As life moves online, we need a corresponding public sphere.

> But I do think the government demanding what should be discussed on servers owned by private citizens is a clear violation of the First Amendment.

Private citizens acting in their capacity as private citizens are still free to discuss whatever they like, or ban whatever discussion they like. If you want to have a capaciously moderated website that's fine, but such a website will not and cannot be a Section 230 public communications provider.

As a user I don't like it but as an app/website provider, it significantly delays spammers, giving them the illusion that what they're doing is working so they should just maintain the status quo.

If instead you outright ban them, they adjust or learn about your anti-spam algorithms and just keep going.

Wonder if one answer would be to move potential spam, etc. to a separate-but-equal area. So if you're in /r/Politics and start advertising your get-rich-quick scheme your post is moved to /r/PoliticsSandbox.

That removes the "shadow," unless you present only to the submitter that the content is in the intended space.

You could break up moderation issues into 2 types:

Type 1: Errors, ignorance, human foibles. Primarily annoying/asshole behavior.

Type 2: Malice and malformed content. Spam, propaganda, trolling.

I can argue against shadow bans for the first type. For the second type, any evidence of your operational method is a data point to break the moderation barrier and infect/manipulate users.

If a spammer knows its been banned, it switches over to another account. If a troll knows where your ban lines are, they come back and stay exactly on the edge to trigger someone or make them fall over the line.