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Comment by novagameco | Hacker News Reader

> the first place do they offer a service for communities, making it a social platform.

All social platforms are advertising publishers. Facebook is an advertising company (though they refuse to say so; calling themself a publisher is a legal liability for them), they make almost all of their revenue from selling ads. YouTube is an advertising company as well.

Working with technology (and even developing your own technology) doesn't make you a technology company. insurance companies employ software engineers, but they're still insurance companies.

Even if twitch fails to make any money at advertising, they're still an Advertising company.

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> All social platforms are advertising publishers.

Yes, because originally, they had no other way to monetize, unlike Twitch. But Twitch has subs and donations for a long time now, and ads are just another stream of income for them. And the other platforms are now trying to add subs and donations to their income too, while Twitch is coming from the other side, and tries to expand their income through ads.

> Even if twitch fails to make any money at advertising, they're still an Advertising company.

Going by that logic, are they also a Tech-Company.

Your definition of "tech company" is so restrictive that it's effectively meaningless.

Tech companies sell tech. Advertising companies sell attention. Most big tech companies are just high tech advertising companies. They don't like to say this because it doesn't carry nearly as much prestige to admit that the culmination of their life's work is to get people to buy more crap rather than making the world better in any measurable way. I say this as someone who works for an advertising company

I take issue with pretty much every single one of your statements here.

> culmination of their life's work is to get people to buy more crap rather than making the world better in any measurable way

Advertising makes the world better in a lot of ways. It allows companies to provide services without actively charging for them which is a much preferred way of monetization of the vast majority of users (just look at the popularity of Netflix's recent ad supported plan). It allows companies and users to connect on new products which often results in a purchase that both the consumer and company benefit from. The result are higher living standards.

Google Search is funded primarily through ads. If you truly believe that Google Search hasn't made the world better in any measurable way I truly don't know what to tell you.

Then you'll probably disagree with me when I say that I think the world wide web in general has had a net zero impact on the world. I believe it's had as many positives as negatives. Perhaps if we could've frozen it circa 2005 it would be an overall positive but I'm not convinced it's as good as we all believe it is

A company doesn't incur any legal liability by calling themselves a publisher.

They worry that if they consider themselves to be publishers of content, they will become liable for the substance of that content (e.g: calls to violence on their platforms). Thus, they go out of their way to specifically deny that they are a publisher.

> The oft-cited Section 230(c)(1) states, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”3 In practice, this means online services are not liable for defamatory or otherwise unlawful content their users post. Section 230(c)(2) elaborates, stating that online services are not liable for “any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of [objectionable content.]”4 This second provision protects online services from liability for engaging in content moderation and enforcing their community standards.

https://itif.org/publications/2021/02/22/overview-section-23...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/02/facebook-...

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