I fear a ruling where the interpretation of Section 230 puts dang at risk of liability for all of his necessary and appropriate historic moderation.
HN has algorithmic ranking, it has invisible moderation, it has shadowbanning (sort of), and it has YC sponsored ads injected into the “feed” that get special treatment relative to user submissions.
Many regulation proposals seem to have carve outs for sites and networks below a certain size, but if one past without such exceptions then a lot of the community sites we know and love would have no choice but to shut down.
I suspect a lot of the proponents of these regulations aren’t really interested in seeing the sites they like subjected to these regulations. It has almost become a talking point about punishing social media companies people don’t like others using.
In what sense does HN have shadow banning (sort of)?
Must've been a traumatic experience realizing that is even possible!
Imagine that you join a small subreddit focused on a hobby for which there's a lot of corporate-induced bullshit and not a whole lot of real information unless you've talked to actual experts in an informal setting (as in, company owners and manufacturers). It has maybe 400 members at the time, and most of those users come from other forums you recognize. Most of the users in that forum are past the novice phase for the most part, so their interest is a focus on deeper discussions that can further their own knowledge and expertise within that hobby.
As time goes on, more and more new people start posting, including many who are neophytes and can't tell their heads from their asses. They start to flood the forum with images of whatever it is they've just purchased and make the content that experienced members like to exchange harder and harder to find.
Meanwhile, the head mod is absent, he basically squatted on the subreddit, but reddit rules don't actually require one to maintain much activity in the sub. So the moderation team that actually has guidance and leadership are also a bunch of neophytes who begged for moderator status. They don't see anything wrong with the sheer lack of content in the subreddit because the sub is growing by thousands a month, but in the process all of the people who have actual knowledge of the topic are being driven off.
So now there's a crisis on multiple fronts: (1) the people who actually know what they're talking about are being driven off and not being replaced and so the sub is literally getting dumber on a daily basis, (2) you've got a core group of folks who actually used to be central to discussions who are now so incensed by moderator indifference that they're acting like idiots on the subreddit, and (3) the mods are paralyzed because they don't want to piss ANYBODY off.
That shit is dysfunctional. I agreed with the group of jerks that the subreddit needed to have a shift in what's allowable because it was nigh-impossible to find comment threads worth reading, but I also told them earlier that their best bet would be to create their own subreddit with their own rules (which is exactly what I did when they wanted to forbid talk about a specific topic... that sub has 30K or so readers now), and they wanted none of that. Since the mods were committed to growing the sub and not making the recommended changes, I told the mods after a while of watching these people behave like idiots that the best thing to do was to ban them. Didn't matter that I agreed with them in principle, the way they were going about trying to get the changes they wanted was belligerent.
230 is there to enable the existence of online platforms. It's not there to let Google wring every dollar out of YouTube they can, damn the societal consequences.
Much like Dobbs or a number of other recent cases.
If you held YC liable for its user content, HN would (and quickly) no longer allow user comments.
Why? Because YC doesn't want the liability. Doing so would likely kill off most sites that allow user-generated content or, at the very least, cause them to stop accepting such content.
Ironically, the folks who would have the best ability to fight the dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of lawsuits filed every week would be the ones that have the deepest pockets (Alphabet, Meta).
Everyone else would likely just fold unless they had a few million in cash they can use for frivolous lawsuits.
And that's the point. Section 230 forces plaintiffs to sue the authors of such content, not those who host that content.
There's a lot of nuance with that, as the algorithmic feeds and showing content (allegedly) based on previous user interactions could be argued to be "authorship" of a sort.
The arguments on both sides are nuanced and complex -- based on ideas about freedom of expression and private property rights.
Personally, I think that, on the whole, Section 230 does more good than harm. But I also believe there is room for disagreement among rational, good faith interlocutors.
Next, YC would be the relevant entity, not dang personally. (But that's a minor point because dang is part of YC. )
The difference between you and YC is that YC actually collects posts and re- publishes them.
Users simply tell YC if they like a post or not. They don't transmit the post content to anyone.
YC decides whether to grey a post or remove it, or keep it. Showing a post higher or lower on a page doesn't mean anything related to whether the post violates some law and someone needs to be held responsible.
Reddit mods are closer, since they have specific power to ban a post or poster.
> “Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act famously protects Internet platforms from liability, yet what’s missing from the discussion is that it crucially protects Internet users—everyday people—when they participate in moderation like removing unwanted content from their communities, or users upvoting and downvoting posts,” a Reddit spokesperson told Ars.
No, its not. Law predating section 230 is based on the principal that lots of people can be responsible for published content.
Section 230 is based on the conclusion that certain of those rules making people liable are inappropriate in the online context; particularly those that would give any active moderators of content liability as publishers, which does not depend on actual knowledge of the illegality of any content. These rules were being applied to both sites and users other than the creator when section 230 was adopted, which is why it explicilty protects both operators and users.
Section 230 doesn't he impact the liability of creators at all
An issue is you have anons causing harm to users who cannot be sued and the platform also cannot be sued. No good.
The creator is liable even if they are anonymous.
There is a difference between someone being liable and it being easy to identify who they are. (And, even if the site owner isn’t liable, a John Doe suit against the anonymous user can be a framework within which to subpoena the site owner for records which help to identify the liable user.)
I agree with you that it has gaps and ugly side effects, but it also has the effect that a lot of things are working because you're not by default responsible for them because they've been commented on your server.
The question is whether an automated algorithm is protected by 230 in the same sense that manual moderation is. To the extent this might impact HN, it'd be more along the lines of "HN weights stories too heavily by (upvotes, time of post, some other metric) and as a result harm has occurred."
Which is bizarre, given the legislative history of Section 230, whose entire point was to protect and encourage private censorship by sites and users.
> A key protection shielding social media companies from liability for hosting third-party content—Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—is set to face its first US Supreme Court challenge.
User content and the promotion of user content are different things. If Facebook picks a specific message out of the billions posted they can find basically any message ever said. The choice of a handful of messages to post on a TV commercial moves the message from user content to Facebook’s message.
Legally 230 could be limited to direct content and it’s moderation (removal) but not cover manual curation. Similarly purely algorithmic feeds may be yet another meaningful distinction.
It’s a surprisingly complicated topic and I doubt the Supreme Court will make a broad ruling covering every case.
I kind of disagree with this. It would make both safe harbors kind of nonsensical, because we're incentivizing platforms to keep their systems broken. We understand that free speech on the Internet requires a minimal amount of censorship: i.e. we have to delete spam in order for anyone else to have a say. But one of the ways you can deal with spam is to create a curated feed of known-good content and users.
Keep in mind too that "purely algorithmic feeds" is not a useful legal standard. Every algorithm has a bias. Even chronological timelines: they boost new posts and punish old news. And social media companies change the algorithm to get the result they want. YouTube went from watch time to engagement metrics and now uses neural networks that literally nobody understands beyond "it gives better numbers". And how exactly do you deal with an "algorithmic" feed with easter eggs like "boost any post liked by this group of people"?
The alternative would be to do what the Copyright Office wants, and take recommendation systems out of the defamation and copyright safe harbors entirely. However, if we did this, these laws would only protect bare web hosts. If you had a bad experience with a company and you made a blog post that trended on Facebook or Twitter, then the company could sue Facebook or Twitter for defamation. And they would absolutely fold and ban your post. Even Google Search would be legally risky to operate fairly. Under current law, the bad-faith actor in question at least have to make a plausible through-line between copyright law and your post to get a DMCA 512 notice to stick.
A curated feed being something like the current HN front page where websites from specific manually chosen domains are penalized.
I am not saying there is anything inherently wrong with curation, it may simply to reflect what users want. However, as soon as you start making editorial decisions it’s no longer purely user generated content. Which was the distinction I was going for, it’s still an algorithm just not a blind one.
> Every algorithm has a bias.
Using upvotes, deduplicating, or penalizing websites based on the number of times they have been on the front page in the last week definitely has bias, but it isn’t a post specific bias targeted by the website owner. I agree the lines aren’t completely clear, when you start talking AI the story specific bias can easily be in how the AI was trained, but I suspect something that flags child porn would be viewed differently than something that promotes discrimination against a specific ethnic group.