Judges rule Big Tech's free ride on Section 230 is over
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I think the ultimate problem is that social media is not unbiased — it curates what people are shown. In that role they are no longer an impartial party merely hosting content. It seems this ruling is saying that the curation being algorithmic does not absolve the companies from liability.
In a very general sense, this ruling could be seen as a form of net neutrality. Currently social media platforms favor certain content, while down weighting others. Sure, it might be at a different level than peer agreements between ISPs and websites, but it amounts to a similar phenomenon when most people interact on social media through the feed.
Honestly, I think I'd love to see what changes this ruling brings about. HN is quite literally the only social media site (loosely interpreted) I even have an account on anymore, mainly because of how truly awful all the sites have become. Maybe this will make social media more palatable again? Maybe not, but I'm inclined to see what shakes out.
Yes, it would be great if parents would, universally, parent better, but getting all of them (or a large enough portion of them for it to make a difference) to do so is essentially impossible.
I remember my mom being so mad about the curriculum in general that she ran for the school board and won. (I believe it was more of a math and science type thing. She was upset with how many coloring assignments I had. Frankly, I completely agreed with her then and I do now.)
I think we've reached the point now that there is more speech than any person can consume by a factor of a million. It now comes to down to picking what speech you want to hear. This is exactly what content algorithms are doing -> out of the millions of hours of speech produced in a day, it's giving you your 24 hours of it.
Saying "teach your kids critical thinking" is a solution but it's not the solution. At some point, you have to discover content out of those millions or hours a day. It's impossible to do yourself -- it's always going to be curated.
EDIT: To whomever downvoted this comment, you made my point. You should have replied instead.
"The speech is either wholly your speech or wholly someone else's. You can't have it both ways."
Either they get to act as a common carrier (telephone companies are not liable for what you say on a phone call because it is wholly your own speech and they are merely carrying it) or they act as a publisher (liable for everything said on their platforms because they are exercising editorial control via algorithm). If this ruling is upheld by the Supreme Court, then they will have to choose:
* Either claim the safe harbour protections afforded to common carriers and lose the ability to curate algorithmically
or
* Claim the free speech protections of the First Amendment but be liable for all content as it is their own speech.
If this goes through I don’t think it will be such a big boost for Google search as you suggest. For one thing, it has no effect on OpenAI and other LLM providers. That’s a real problem for Google, as I see a long term trend away from traditional search and towards LLMs for getting questions answered, especially among young people. Also note that YouTube is social media and features a curation algorithm to deliver personalized content feeds.
As for social media, I think we’re better off without it! There’s countless stories in the news about all the damage it’s causing to society. I don’t think we’ll be able to roll all that back but I hope we’ll be able to make things better.
This ruling is not a ban on algorithms, it's a ban on the vertical integration between search or recommendation and hosting that today makes it possible for search engines other than Google to see traffic.
If Google wants to preserve their safe harbour protections they'll need to roll back to a neutral algorithm that delivers the same results to everyone given an identical query. This won't be the end of the world for Google but it will produce lower quality results (at least in the eyes of normal users who aren't annoyed by the personalization). Lower quality results will further open the doors to LLMs as a competitor to search.
This whole case comes down to having your cake and eating it too. Newspapers don’t have that. They have free speech protections but they aren’t absolved of liability for what they publish. They aren’t protected under section 230.
If the ruling is upheld by SCOTUS, Google will have to choose: section 230 (and no editorial control) or first amendment plus liability for everything they publish on SERPs.
Automatic libel generators, on the other hand, are mych closer at hand. :p
Sorry. That's simply disingenuous.
Yes, children and especially teenagers do lots of things even though their parents try to prevent them from doing so. Even if children and teenagers still get them, we don't throw up our hands and sell them tobacco and alcohol anyway.
It is pretty clear that china already forces a very different tiktok ranking algo for kids within the country vs outside the country. Forcing a single algo is pretty unamerican though and can easily be abused, let's instead open it up.
Even if they may have different skews on some issues, under a system where all such entities are operated entirely for-profit, they will tend to converge on other issues, largely related to maintaining the rights of capital over labor and over government.
What are the legal ramifications for the many thousands of similar operators which are much closer in feel to a message board than to Facebook or Twitter? Does a server run by Republicans have to accept Communist Party USA members and their posts? Does a vegan instance have to allow beef farmers? A PlayStation fan server host pro-PC content?
> There is no way to run a targeted ad social media company with 40% margins if you have to make sure children aren’t harmed by your product.
Wouldn't that put the responsibility back on the parents?
The state told you XYZ was bad for your kids and it's illegal for them to use, but then you bypassed that restriction and put the sugar back into their hands with an access-blocker-blocker..
Random wondering
What you should ask yourself is this: irrespective of whether compliance is voluntary or not, is political censorship on social media OK? And what kind of a logical knot one must contort one’s mind into to suggest that this is the second coming of net neutrality? Personally I think the mere fact that the government is able to lean on a private company like that is damning AF.
All large sites have terms of service. If you violate them, you might be removed, even if you're "the dominant electoral candidate". Remember, no one is above the law, or in this case, the rules that a site wishes to enforce.
I'm not a fan of political censorship (unless that means enforcing the same ToS that everyone else is held to, in which case, go for it). Neither am I for the radical notion of legislation telling a private organization that they must host content that they don't wish to.
This has zero to do with net neutrality. Nothing. Nada.
Is there evidence that the government leaned on a private company instead of meeting with them and asking them to do a thing? Did Facebook feel coerced into taking actions they wouldn't have willingly done otherwise?
By asking.
The government asking you to do something is like a dangerous schoolyard bully asking for your lunch money. Except the gov has the ability to kill, imprison, and destroy. Doesn’t matter if you’re an average Joe or a Zuckerberg.
I don't think that's settled law.
For example, suppose the US Postal Service opens a new location, and Google Maps has the pushpin on the wrong place or the hours are incorrect. A USPS employee submits a report/correction through normal channels. How is that trampling on Google's first-amendment rights?
Everybody who paid protection to the mafia did so "voluntarily", too.
With this ruling, HN is suddenly responsibly for all posts here specifically because of the moderation. So they have 2 options.
(1) Stop the moderation so they can be safe under 230. Result, HN turns to 4chan.
(2) enforce the moderation to a much higher degree by say, requiring non-anon accounts and TOS that make each poster responsible for their own content and/or manually approve every comment.
I'm not even sure how you'd run a website with user content if you wanted to moderate that content and still avoid being liable for illegal content.
They may lose 230 protection, sure, but probably not really a problem here. For Facebook et al, it's going to be an issue, no doubt. I suppose they could drop their algos and bring back the chronological feeds, but, my guess is that wouldn't be profitable given that ad-tech and content feeds are one in the same at this point.
I'd also assume that "curation" is the sticking point here, if a platform can claim that they do not curate content, they probably keep 230 protection.
Specifically, every political or science thread that makes it, is raided by 4chan. 4chan also regularly pushes anti/science and anti-education agenda threads to the top here, along with posts from various alt-right figures on occasion.
Seems pretty sparse to me, and from a casual perusal, I haven't seen any actual calls to raiding anything here, it's more of a reference where articles/posts have happened, and people talking about them.
Remember, not everyone who you disagree with comes from 4chan, some of them probably work with you, you might even be friends with them, and they're perfectly serviceable people with lives, hopes, dreams, same as yours, they simply think differently than you.
4chan is very well known for brigading. It is also well known that using 4chan as well as a number of other locations, such as discord, to post links for brigades are an extremely common thing that the alt-right does to try to raise the “validity” of their statements.
I also did not claim that only these opinions come from 4chan. Nice strawman bro.
Also, my friends do not believe these things. I do not make a habit of being friends with people that believe in genociding others purely because of sexual orientation or identity.
Also the alt-right is a giant threat, if you categorize everyone right of you as alt-right, which seems to be the standard definition.
That's not how I've chosen to live, and I find that it's peaceful to choose something more reasonable. The body politic is cancer on the individual, and on the list of things that are important in life, it's not truly important. With enough introspection you'll find that the tendency to latch onto politics, or anything politics-adjacent, comes from an overall lack of agency over the other aspects of life you truly care about. It's a vicious cycle. You have a finite amount of mental energy, and the more you spend on worthless things, the less you have to spend on things that matter, which leads to you latching further on to the worthless things, and having even less to spend on things that matter.
It's a race to the bottom that has only losers. If you're looking for genocide, that's the genocide of the modern mind, and you're one foot in the grave already. You can choose to step out now and probably be ok, but it's going to be uncomfortable to do so.
That's all not to say there aren't horrid, problem-causing individuals out in the world, there certainly are, it's just that the less you fixate on them, the more you realize that they're such an extreme minority that you feel silly fixating on them in the first place. That goes for anyone that anyone deems 'horrid and problem-causing' mind you, not just whatever idea you have of that class of person.
What are you expecting it to show? That site removes all content after a matter of days.
For the record, ensuring that those who wish to genocide LGBT+ people are not the majority voice on the internet is absolutely not “a worthless matter”, not by any stretch. I would definitely rather not have to do this, but then, the people who dedicate their lives to trolling and hate are extremely active.
I don't frequent 4cuck, I use soyjak.party which I guess from your perspective is even worse, but there are of plenty of smart people on the 'cuck thoughbeit, like the gemmy /lit/ schizo. I think you would feel right at home in /sci/.
HN is also heavily moderated with moderators actively trying to promote thoughtful comments over other, less thoughtful or incendiary contributions by downranking them (which is entirely separate from flagging or voting; and unlike what people like to believe, this place relies more on moderator actions as opposed to voting patterns to maintain its vibe.) I couldn't possibly see this working with the removal of Section 230.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubby,_Inc._v._CompuServe_Inc.
Along those lines then then an upvote i.e. endorsement would be protected, up to any point where it violated one of the free speech exceptions, e.g. incitement.
I think this is a mistaken understanding of the ruling. In this case, TikTok decided, with no other context, to make a personalized recommendation to a user who visited their recommendation page. On HN, your front page is not different from my front page. (Indeed, there is no personalized recommendation page on HN, as far as I'm aware.)
I don't see how this is about personalization. HN has an algorithm that shows what it wants in the way it wants.
> TikTok, Inc., via its algorithm, recommended and promoted videos posted by third parties to ten-year-old Nylah Anderson on her uniquely curated “For You Page.”
Winding up in the same place as the defendant would require making a unique, dynamic, individualized BB for each user tailored to them based on pervasive online surveillance and the platform's own editorial "secret sauce."
Although HN's algorithm depends (mostly) on user input for how it presents the posts, it still favours some over others and still runs afoul here. You would need a literal 'most recent' chronological view and HN doesn't have that for comments. It probably should anyway!
@dang We need the option to view comments chronologically, please
That said, the feature you requested is already implemented but you have to know it is there. Dang mentioned it in a recent comment that I bookmarked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41230703
To see comments on this story sorted newest-first, change the link to
https://news.ycombinator.com/latest?id=41391868
instead of
I don't think the feature was that unknown. Per Wikipedia, the CDA passed in 1996 and Slashdot was created in 1997, and I doubt the latter's moderation/voting system was that unique.
You might like this then: https://hckrnews.com/
Where is the algorithmic recommandation that differs per user on HN?
In other words, the Supreme Court decision mentions editorial decisions but no court case has yet backed up if that means editorial decisions in the HN front page sense (as in mods make some choices but it’s not personalized.) Common sense may say mods making decisions is editorial decisions but it’s a gray area until a court case makes it clear. Precedence is the most important thing when interpreting law, and the only precedence we have is that it pertains to personalized feeds.
If you child porn that gets shared via direct links then that is bad even if nobody can see it, but it is much much worse if you start recommending that to people as well.
It's rarely if ever going to be the case that there is some distinct unit of code called "the algorithm" that can be separated and considered legally distinct from the rest of the codebase.
I don't think timestamps are, in any way, construed editorial judgement. They are a content agnostic related attribute.
The FYP algorithm that's contested in the case surfaced the video to the minor without her searching for that topic, following any specific content creator, or positively interacting (liking/favoriting/upvoting) with previous instances of said content. It was fed to her based on a combination of what TikTok knew about her demographic information, what was trending on the platform, and TikTok's editorial secret sauce. TikTok's algorithm made an active decision to surface this content to her, despite knowing that other children had died from similar challenge videos, they promoted it and should be liable for that promotion.
"(2)Civil liability No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of— (A)any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or"
Algorithmic ranking, curation, and promotion are not.
And they probably didn't think through how this particular argument could affect other areas of their business.
Importantly, this does not mean that before the Third Circuit decision platforms could just curate any which way they want and government couldn't regulate at all -- the mandatory removal regime around CSAM content is a great example of government regulating speech and forcing platforms to comply.
The Third Circuit decision, in a nutshell, is telling the platforms that they can't have their cake and eat it too. If they want to claim that their algorithmic feeds are speech that is protected from most government regulation, they can't simultaneously claim that these same algorithmic feeds are mere passive vessels for the speech of third parties. If that were the case, then their algorithms would enjoy no 1A protection from government regulation. (The content itself would still have 1A protection based on the rights of the creators, but the curation/ranking/privileging aspect would not).
This ruling is a natural consequence of the NetChoice ruling. Social media companies can't have it both ways.
> If that were the case, then their algorithms would enjoy no 1A protection from government regulation.
Well, the companies can still probably claim some 1st Amendment protections for their recommendation algorithms (for example, a law banning algorithmic political bias would be unconstitutional). All this ruling does is strip away the safe harbour protections, which weren't derived from the 1A in the first place.
Would it? The TV channels of old were heavily regulated well past 1st amendment limits.
Cable was never regulated like that. The medium actually mattered in this case
But the basis of this ruling is basically "well the Moody case says that curation/moderation/suggestion/whatever is First Amendment protected speech, therefore that's your speech and not somebody else's and so 230 doesn't apply and you can be liable for it." That rationale extends to basically any form of moderation or selection, personalized or not, and would blow a big hole in 230's protections.
Given generalized anti-Big-Tech sentiment on both ends of the political spectrum, I could see something that claimed to carve out just algorithmic personalization/suggestion from protection meeting with success, either out of the courts or Congress, but it really doesn't match the current law.
I see a lot of people saying this is a bad decision because it will have consequences they don't like, but the logic of the decision seems pretty damn airtight as you describe it. If the recommendation systems and moderation policies are the company's speech, then the company can be liable when the company "says", by way of their algorithmic "speech", to children that they should engage in some reckless activity likely to cause their death.
I even think it would count if the only moderation you did on your Lionel model train site was to make sure that most of the conversation was about Lionel model trains, and that they be treated in a positive (or at least neutral) manner. That degree of moderation, for that purpose, would make you liable if you left illegal or tortious content up i.e. if you moderate, you're a moderator, and your first duty is legal.
If you're just a dumb pipe, however, you're a dumb pipe and get section 230.
I wonder how this works with recommendation algorithms, though, seeing as they're also trade secrets. Even when they're not dark and predatory (advertising related.) If one has a recommendation algo that makes better e.g. song recommendations, you don't want to have to share it. Would it be something you'd have to privately reveal to a government agency (like having to reveal the composition of your fracking fluid to the EPA, as an example), and they would judge whether or not it was "editorial" or not?
[edit: that being said, it would probably be very hard to break the law with a song recommendation algorithm. But I'm sure you could run afoul of some financial law still on the books about payola, etc.]
I'm not sure that's quite it. As I read the article and think about its application to Tiktok, the problem was more that "the algorithm" was engaged in active and allegedly expressive promotion of the unsafe material. If a site like HN just doesn't remove bad content, then the residual promotion is not exactly Hacker News's expression, but rather its users'.
The situation might change if a liability-causing article were itself given 'second chance' promotion or another editorial thumb on the scale, but I certainly hope that such editorial management is done with enough care to practically avoid that case.
Personalisation simply matches users with the content the algorithm thinks they want to see. Moderation (which is typically also an algorithm) tries to remove harmful content from the platform altogether.
The ruling isn't saying that Section 230 doesn't apply because TikTok moderated. It's saying Section 230 doesn't apply because TikTok personalised, allegedly knew about the harmful content and allegedly didn't take enough action to moderate this harmful content.
These algorithms aren't matching you with what you want to see, they're trying to maximize your engagement- or, its what the operator wants you to see, so you'll use the site more and generate more data or revenue. Its a fine, but extremely important distinction.
> "What does all this mean for Anderson’s claims? Well, § 230(c)(1)’s preemption of traditional publisher liability precludes Anderson from holding TikTok liable for the Blackout Challenge videos’ mere presence on TikTok’s platform. A conclusion Anderson’s counsel all but concedes. But § 230(c)(1) does not preempt distributor liability, so Anderson’s claims seeking to hold TikTok liable for continuing to host the Blackout Challenge videos knowing they were causing the death of children can proceed."
As-in, Dang would be liable if say somebody started a blackout challenge post on HN and he didn't start censoring all of them once news reports of programmers dieing broke out.
https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/mopaqabzypa/...
In general, judges will be ultimately responsible for evaluating whether "any", "sufficient", "appropriate", etc. actions were taken in each future case judgement they make. As with all things legalese, it's impossible to define with certainty a specific degree of action that is the uniform boundary of acceptable; but, as evident here, "none" is no longer permissible in that set.
(I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice.)
This has interesting higher-order effects on free speech. Let's apply the same ruling to vaccine misinformation, or the ability to organize protests on social media (which opponents will probably call riots if there are any injuries)
But I mean what do you expect from a group of judges that themselves have written they're moving away from precedent?
Does TikTok have preempt this category of videos in the future or simply respond promptly when notified such a video is posted to their system?
Do you think its reasonable for social media to send videos to people without considering how harmful they are?
Do you even think its reasonable for search engine to respond to a specific request for this information?
If it does any customization based on what it knows about you, or what it tries to sell you because you are you, then it would be liable.
Yep., recommendation engines would have to be very carefully tuned, or you risk becoming liable. Recommending only curated content would be a way to protect yourself, but that costs money that companies don't have to pay today. It would be doable.
An account otherwise identical made two days later is going to interact with a different stream. Technically deterministic but in practice no two end up ever being exactly alike, (despite similar people having similar channels.)
The "answer" will turn back into tv channels. Have communities curate playlists of videos, and then anyone can go watch the playlist at any time. Reinvent broadcast tv / the subreddit.
This could very well be true for TikTok. Of course "selection" would include liked videos, how long you spend watching each video, and how many videos you have posted
And on the flip side a button that brings you to a random video would supply different content to users regardless of "selections".
You can't be licensing user content to AI as it's not yours. You also can't be undeleting posts people make (otherwise it's really reddit's posts and not theirs).
When you start treating user data as your own; it should become your own and that erodes 230.
undeleting is bad enough, but they've edited the content of user's comments too.
It is theirs. Users agreed to grant Reddit a license to use the content when they accepted the terms of service.
That kind of sounds... great? The only instance where I genuinely like to have a recommendation engine around is music steaming. Like yeah sometimes it does recommend great stuff. But anywhere else? No thank you
Ranking: A group of people share a ouija board, and together make selections.
Suggestion: A singular entity clips together media to create a new narrative, akin to a ransom note.
If the sum of the collection of content more than its parts, if is different in strength not kind, or self reenforcing, it's really hard to distinguish where the algorithm ends and the voters begin.
I think that is quite generous. I think it is a deliberate reinterpretation of what the order says. The order states that 230(c)(1) provides immunity for removing harmful content after being made aware of it, i.e., moderation.
It’s still curated, and not entirely automatically. Does it make a difference whether it’s curated individually or not?
I enjoyed the communities around farming, homesteading, homeschooling of kids, classic litterature etc... but oh no, someone said some naughty words? lets shut it down.
... being manipulated by the algorithm (per this judges decision).
It would be perfectly legal for a platform to choose to allow a user to decide on their own to filter out spam.
Maybe a user could sign up for such an algorithm, but if they choose to whitelist certain accounts, that would also be allowed.
Problem solved.
TikTok. Facebook. Twitter. YouTube.
All of these have their algorithms specifically curated to try to keep you angry. YouTube outright ignores your blocks every couple months, and no matter how many people dropping n-bombs you report and block, it never endingly pushes more and more.
These company know that their algorithms are harmful and they push them anyway. They absolutely should have liability for what their algorithm pushes.
HN engages in the former but not the latter. The big three engage in the latter.
Or.. are you suggesting there's more to how this works? Is dang watching votes and then making decisions based on those votes?
"Editorial control" is more of a term of art and has a narrower definition then you're allowing for.
The same applies to comments on HN. Comments are not moderated based purely on legal or certain general "good manners" grounds, they are moderated to keep a certain kind of discourse level. For example, shallow jokes or meme comments are not generally allowed on HN. Comments that start discussing controversial topics, even if civil, are also discouraged when they are not on-topic.
Overall, HN is very much curated in the direction of a newspaper "letter to the editor" section, then more algorithmic and hands-off like the Facebook wall or TikTok feed. So there is no doubt whatsoever, I believe, that HN would be considered responsible for user content (and is, in fact, already pretty good at policing that in my experience, at least on the front page).
This is meaningfully different in kind from only excluding posts that reflect certain perspectives on such a conflict. Maintaining topicality is not imposing a bias.
Maintaining topicality is literally a bias. Excluding posts that reflect certain perspectives is censorship.
Even mentioning certain topics, such as Israel's invasion of Palestine, even when the mention is on-topic and not disruptive, as in this comment you are reading, is practically a death sentence for a comment. Not because of votes, but because of the moderators. Downvotes may prioritize which comments go in front of moderators (we don't know) but moderators make the final decision; comments that are downvoted but not removed merely stick around in a light grey colour.
By enabling showdead in your user preferences and using the site for a while, especially reading controversial threads, you can get a feel for what kinds of comments are deleted by moderators exercising. It is clear that most moderation is about editorial control and not simply the removal of disruption.
This comment may be dead by the time you read it, due to the previous mention of Palestine - hi to users with showdead enabled. Its parent will probably merely be down voted because it's wrong but doesn't contain anything that would irk the mods.
Comments are marked [flagged] [dead] when ordinary users have clicked on the timestamp and selected "flag." So user downvotes cannot kill a comment, but flagging by ordinary non-moderator users can kill it.
The pro-science crowd (which includes me fwiw) seems incapable of providing a proof any given scientist is that important. Same old social politics norms inflate some deflate others and we confirm our survival means we special. Ones education is vacuous prestige given physics applies equally; oh you did the math! Yeah I just tell the computer to do it. Oh you memorized the circumlocutions and dialectic of some long dead physicist. Outstanding.
There’s a lot of ego driven banal classist nonsense in tech and science. At the end of the day just meat suits with the same general human condition.
As if it was something bad. 4chan has /g and it's absolutely awesome.
For HN, Dang's efforts at keeping civility don't interfere with Section 230. The part relevant to this ruling is whatever system takes recency and upvotes, and ranks the front page posts and comments within each post.
For example the qanon conspiracy nuts got moderated out of /pol/ for arguing in bad faith/just being too crazy to actually have any kind of conversation with and they fled to another board (8chan and later 8kun) that has even less moderation.
Yep, 4chan isn't bad because "people I disagree with can talk there", it's bad because the interface is awful and they can't attract enough advertisers to meet their hosting demands.
In the newspaper case, you write your post, send it to the newspaper, and some editor at the newspaper decides whether or not to publish it.
In Social Media, the same thing happens, but it's just super fast and algorithmic: You write your post, send it to the Social Media site (or forum), an algorithm (or moderator) at the Social Media site decides whether or not to publish it.
I feel like it's reasonable to interpret this kind of editorial selection as "promotion" and "recommendation" of that comment, particularly if the social media company's algorithm deliberately places that content into someone's feed.
I think if social media companies relayed communication between it's users with no moderation at all, then they should be entitled to carrier protections.
As soon as they start making any moderation decisions, they are implicitly endorsing all other content, and should therefore be held responsible for it.
There are two things social media can do. Firstly, they should accurately identify its users before allowing them to post, so they can counter sue that person if post harms them, and secondly, they can moderate every post.
Everybody says this will kill social media as we know it, but I say the world will be a better place as a result.
This is literally the purpose of Section 230. It's Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The purpose was to change the law so platforms could moderate content without incurring liability, because the law was previously that doing any moderation made you liable for whatever users posted, and you don't want a world where removing/downranking spam or pornography or trolling causes you to get sued for unrelated things you didn't remove.
This would be the worst outcome of a rollback of 230.
What part of deliberately showing political content to people algorithmically expected to agree with it, constitutes "moderation"?
What part of deliberately showing political content to people algorithmically expected to disagree with it, constitutes "moderation"?
What part of deliberately suppressing or promoting political content based on the opinions of those in charge of the platform, constitutes "moderation"?
What part of suppressing "misinformation" on the basis of what's said in "reliable sources" (rather than any independent investigation - but really the point would still stand), constitutes "moderation"?
What part of favouring content from already popular content creators because it brings in more ad revenue, constitutes "moderation"?
What part of algorithmically associating content with ads for specific products or services, constitutes "moderation"?
Well, maybe it's just me, but only showing political content that doesn't include "kill all the (insert minority here)", and expecting users to not object to that standard, is a pretty typical aspect of moderation for discussion sites.
> What part of deliberately suppressing or promoting political content based on the opinions of those in charge of the platform, constitutes "moderation"?
Again, deliberately suppressing support for literal and obvious facism, based on the opinions of those in charge of the platform, is a kind of moderation so typical that it's noteworthy when it doesn't happen (e.g. Stormfront).
> What part of suppressing "misinformation" on the basis of what's said in "reliable sources" (rather than any independent investigation - but really the point would still stand), constitutes "moderation"?
Literally all of Wikipedia, where the whole point of the reliable sources policy is that the people running it don't have to be experts to have a decently objective standard for what can be published.
That part of the law was unconstitutional and pretty quickly got struck down, but it still goes to the same point that the intent of Congress was for sites to remove stuff and not be "common carriers" that leave everything up.
> Section 230 was intended to clarify the common carrier role of ISPs and similar providers of third party content. It does have a subsection to clarify that attempting to remove objectionable content doesn't remove your common carrier protections, but I don't believe that was a response to pre-CDA status quo.
If you can forgive Masnick's chronic irateness he does a decent job of explaining the situation:
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/08/29/third-circuits-section-2...
Basically true.
> Section 230 was intended to clarify the common carrier role of ISPs and similar providers of third party content.
No, it wasn't, and you can tell that because there is literally not a single word to that effect in Section 230. It was to enable information service providers to exercise editorial control over user-submitted content without acquiring publisher-style liability, because the alternative, giving liability decisions occurring at the time and the way providers were reacting to them, was that any site using user-sourced content at scale would, to mitigate legal risk, be completely unmoderated, which was the opposite of the vision the authors of Section 230 and the broader CDA had for the internet. There are no "common carrier" obligations or protections in Section 230. The terms of the protection are the opposite of common carrier, and while there are limitations on the protections, there are no common carrier like obligations attached to them.
>
It is not only biased but also biased for maximum engagement.
People come to these services for various reasons but then have this specifically biased stuff jammed down their throats in a way to induce specific behavior.
I personally don't understand why we don't hammer these social media sites for conducting psychological experiments without consent.
I'll have to read the third circuit's ruling in detail to figure out whether they are trying to draw a line in the Sand on whether an algorithm satisfies the requirements for section 230 protection or falls outside of it. If that's what they're doing, I wouldn't assume a priori that a site like Hacker News won't also fall afoul of the law.
I think of this more along the lines of preventing a factoring from polluting a water supply or requiring a bank to have minimum reserves.
The idea that curation is a problem with social media is always a head scratcher for me. The option to just directly publish to the world wide web without social media is always available, but time and again, that option is largely not chosen... this ruling could well narrow it down that being the only option.
Now, in practice, I don't think that will happen. This will raise the costs of operating social media, and those costs will be reflected in prices advertisers pay to advertise on social media. That may shrink the social media ecosystem, but what it will definitely do is raise the draw bridge over the moat around the major social media players. You're going to see less competition.
Not exactly. You still have to procure web hosting somewhere, and that hosting provider might choose to refuse your money and kick you off.
You might also have to procure the services of Cloudflare if you face significant traffic, and Cloudflare might choose to refuse your money and kick you off.
>that option is largely not chosen...
That's because most people do not have neither the time nor the will to learn and speak computer.
Social media and immediate predecessors like Wordpress were and are successful because they brought down the lowest common denominator to "Smack keys and tap Submit". HTML? CSS? Nobody has time for our pig latin.
Who says you need to procure a web hosting provider?
But yes, if you connect your computer up to other computers, the other computers may decide they don't want any part of what you have to offer.
Without that, I wouldn't want to be in the Internet. I don't want to be forced to ingest bytes from anyone who would send them my way. That's just not a good value proposition for me.
> That's because most people do not have neither the time nor the will to learn and speak computer.
I'm sorry, but no. You can literally type in to a word processor or any number of other tools and select "save as web content", and then use any number of products to take a web page and serve it up to the world wide web. It's been that way for the better part of 25 years. No HTML or CSS knowledge needed. If you can't handle that you can just record a video, save it to a file, and serve it up over a web server. Yes, you need to be able to use a computer to participate on the world wide web, but no more than you do to use social media.
Now, what you won't get is a distribution platform that gets your content up in front of people who never asked for it. That is what social media provides. It lowers the effort for the people receiving the content, as in exactly the curation process that the judge was ruling about.
Most people these days don't have a word processor or, indeed, "any number of other tools". It's all "in the cloud", usually Google Docs or Office 365 Browser Edition(tm).
>select "save as web content"
Most people these days don't (arguably never) understand files and folders.
>and then use any number of products to take a web page and serve it up to the world wide web.
Most people these days cannot be bothered. Especially when the counter proposal is "Make an X account, smash some keys, and press Submit to get internet points".
>If you can't handle that you can just record a video, save it to a file, and serve it up over a web server.
I'm going to stop you right here: You are vastly overestimating both the will and the computer-aptitude of most people. There is a reason Youtube and Twitch have killed off literally every other video sharing service; there is a reason smartphones killed off personal computers (desktops and to a lesser degree laptops).
Social media became the juggernaut it is today because businesses figured out how to capitalize on the latent demand for easy sharing of information: Literal One Click Solutions(tm) that anyone can understand.
>what you won't get is a distribution platform that gets your content up in front of people who never asked for it.
The internet and more specifically search engines in general have always been that distribution platform. The only thing that changed in the last 30 years is how easy it is to get your stuff on that platform.
Read that again. ;-)
> Most people these days don't (arguably never) understand files and folders.
We can debate on the skills of "most people" back and forth, but I think it's fair to say that "save as web content" is easier to figure out than figuring out how to navigate a social media site (and that doesn't necessarily require files or folders). If that really is too hard for someone, there are products out there designed to make it even easier. Way back before social media took over, everyone and their dog managed to figure out how to put stuff on the web. People who couldn't make it through high school were successfully producing web pages, blogs, podcasts, video content, you name it.
> I'm going to stop you right here: You are vastly overestimating both the will and the computer-aptitude of most people.
I disagree. I think they don't have the will to do it, because they'd rather use social media. I do believe if they had the will to do it, they would. I agree there are some people who lack the computer-aptitude to get content on the web. Where I struggle is believing those same people manage to put content on social media... which I'll point out is on the web.
> There is a reason Youtube and Twitch have killed off literally every other video sharing service
Yes, because video sharing at scale is fairly difficult and requires real skill. If you don't have that skill, you're going to have to pay someone to do it, or find someone who has their own agenda that makes them want to do it without charging you... like Youtube or Twitch.
On the other hand, putting a video up on the web that no one knows about, no one looks for, and no one consumes unless you personally convince them to do so is comparatively simple.
> there is a reason smartphones killed off personal computers (desktops and to a lesser degree laptops)
Yes, that reason is that smartphones were subsidies by carriers. ;-)
But it's good that you mentioned smartphones, because smart phones will let you send content to anyone in your contacts without you having anything that most would describe as "computer-aptitude". No social media needed... and yet the prevailing preference is for people to go through a process of logging in, shaping content to suit the demands of social media services, attempting to tune the content to get "the algorithm" to show it to as many people as possible, and put their content there. That takes more will/aptitude/whatever, but they do it for the distribution/audience.
> Social media became the juggernaut it is today because businesses figured out how to capitalize on the latent demand for easy sharing of information: Literal One Click Solutions(tm) that anyone can understand.
I'd agree with you if you said "distribute" instead of "sharing". It's really hard to get millions of people to consume your content. That is, until social media came along and basically eliminated the cost of distribution. So any idiot can push their content out to millions and fill the world with whatever they want.... and now there's a sense of entitlement about it, where if a platform doesn't push that content on other people, at no cost to them, that they're being censored.
Yup, that does really require social media.
> The internet and more specifically search engines in general have always been that distribution platform. The only thing that changed in the last 30 years is how easy it is to get your stuff on that platform.
No, the Internet & the web required you to go looking for the content you wanted. Search engines (at least at one time) were designed to accelerate that proces of find exactly the content you were looking for faster, and get you off their platform ASAP. Social media is kind of the opposite of search engines. They want you to stay on their platform; they want you to keep scrolling at whatever "engaging" content they can find, regardless of what you're looking for; if you forget about whatever you were originally looking for, that's a bonus. It's that ability to have your content show up when no one is looking for it where social media provides an advantage over the web for content makers.
Then give the choice to the user.
If a user wants to opt in, or change their moderation preferences then they should be allowed.
By all means offer a choice of moderation decisions. And let the user change them, opt out conditionally and ignore them if they so choose.
You said this: "People, and particularly advertisers, wanted a curated environment."
If moderation choices are put in the hands of the user, then what you are describing is not a problem, as the user can have that.
Therefore, you saying that this choice exists, means that there isn't a problem for anyone who chooses to not have the spam, and your original complaint is refuted.
I'm saying the choice exists. The choices we make are the problem.
Well then feel free to choose differently for yourself.
Your original statement was this: "People, and particularly advertisers, wanted a curated environment."
You referencing what people "want" is directly refuted by the idea that they should be able to choose whatever their preferences are.
And your opinion on other people's choices doesn't really matter here.
I think maybe we're talking past each other. What I'm saying what people "want" is a reflection of the overwhelming choices they make. They're choosing the curated environments.
The "problem" that is being referenced is the curation. The claim is that the curation is a problem; my observation is that it is the solution all the parties involved seem to want, because they could, at any time, choose otherwise.
Ok, and if more power is given to the user and the user is additionally able to control their current curation, then that's fine and you can continue to have your own curated environment, and other people will also have more or less control over their own curation.
Problem solved! You get to keep your curation, and other people can also change the curation on existing platforms for their own feeds.
> The claim is that the curation is a problem
Nope. Few people have a problem with other people having s choice of curation.
Instead the solution that people are advocating for is for more curating powers to be giving to individual users so that they can choose, on current platforms, how much is curated for themselves.
Easy solution.
When you say "on current platforms", I presume you mean on existing social media.
No, that isn't a solution. There's a reason advertising dollars eschew platforms without curation, and they're the one paying for it. Similarly, the people choosing the platform are choosing it because of the curation.
If you don't like it, you're going to have to pay for your own platform and convince other people to participate in it. Good luck.
Yes it is a solution to a user who want to control their own moderation and curated environment.
You get your environment, and other people get theirs. The problem for the user who wants their own curated environment is solved.
> the people choosing the platform are choosing it because of the curation.
They would be free to have that curation for themselves in this circumstance where the curation choice is given to the user.
> If you don't like it
You are literally commenting on a thread where the judge ruled in a way that forces liability onto social media companies for not doing this.
So, the choice that social media companies now have is to either 1: give the moderation choice to the user. or 2: suffer very serious and significant liability.
I am fine with either of those situations, and instead it is you and those social media companies who will have to deal with the "If you don't like it" questions, because thats what the judge said.
> you're going to have to pay for your own platform
No, we can instead laugh when social media companies have to pay a bunch of money due to their liability, as this judge just ruled.
Actually it seems like with these recent rulings, we will be free to use major social media platforms where the choice of moderation is given to the user, lest those social media platforms are otherwise held liable for their "speech".
I am fully fine with accepting the idea that if a social media platform doesn't act as a dumb pipe, then their choice of moderation is their "speech" as long as they can be held fully legally liable for every single moderation/algorithm choice that they make.
Fortunately for me, we are commenting on a post where a legal ruling was made to this effect, and the judge agrees with me that this is how things aught be.
I think we'd all agree that most websites are better off with curation and moderation of some kind. If you don't like it, you are free to leave the forum, website, etc. The problem is that Big Tech fails to work in the same way, because those properties are becoming effectively the "public highways" where everyone must pass by.
This is not dissimilar from say, public utilities.
So, why not define how a tech company becomes a Big Tech "utility", and therefore, cannot hide behind 230 exception for things that it willingly does, like censorship ?
There’s an enormous difference in the debate between what should be prohibited and what should be prohibited for children.
Media, generally, social or otherwise, is not unbiased. All media has bias. The human act of editing, selecting stories, framing those stories, authoring or retelling them... it's all biased.
I wish we would stop seeking unbiased media as some sort of ideal, and instead seek open biases -- tell me enough about yourself and where your biases lie, so I can make informed decisions.
This reasoning is not far off from the court's thinking: editing is speech. A for you page is edited, and is TikTok's own speech.
That said, I do agree with your meta point. Social media (hn not excluded) is a generally unpleasant place to be.
No more moderation? This seems bad.
No more recommendation/personalization? This could go either way, I'm also willing to see where this one goes.
No more public comment sections? Arstechnica claimed back in the day when section 230 was under fire last time that this would be the result if it was ever taken away. This seems bad.
I'm not sure what will happen, I see 2 possible outcomes that are bad and one that is maybe good. At first glance this seems like bad odds.
Actually there's a fourth possibility, and that's holding Google responsible for whatever links they find for you. This is the nuclear option. If this happens, the internet will have to shut all of its American offices to get around this law.
The underlying hosted service is nearly completely unmoderated and unpersonalised. It's just streams of bits and data routing. You can scan for/limit the propagation of CSAM or DMCA content to some degree as an infrastructure provider but that's really about it and even then you can only really do so to fairly limited degrees and that doesn't stop other providers (or self hosted participants) from propagating that anyways.
Then you provide custom feed algorithms, labelling services, moderation services, etc on top of that but none of them change or control the underlying data streams. They just annotate on top or provide options to the client.
Then the user's client is the one that directly consumes all these different services on top of the base service to produce the end result.
It's a true, unbiased section 230 compatible protocol (under even the strictest interpretation) that the user then can optionally combine with any number of secondary services and addons that they use to craft their personalised social media experience.
But I doubt this gets held on appeal. Given how fickle this Supreme Court is they’ll probably overrule themselves to fit their agenda since they don’t seem to think precedent is worth a damn.
In reality this will not be the case and instead it will introduce the bias of regulators to replace the bias companies want there to be. And even with their motivation to sell users attention, I cannot see this as an improvement. No, the result will probably be worse.
That's how I read it, too. Section 230 doesn't say you can't get in trouble for failure to moderate, it says that you can't get in trouble for moderating one thing but not something else (in other words, the government can't say, "if you moderated this, you could have moderated that"). They seem to be going back on that now.
Real freedom from censorship - you cannot be held liable for content you hosted - has never been tried. The US government got away with a lot of COVID-era soft censorship by just strong-arming social media sites into suppressing content because there were no first-amendment style protections against that sort of soft censorship. I'd love to see that, but there's no reason to think that our government is going in that direction.
"But by the time Nylah viewed these videos, TikTok knew that: 1) “the deadly Blackout Challenge was spreading through its app,” 2) “its algorithm was specifically feeding the Blackout Challenge to children,” and 3) several children had died while attempting the Blackout Challenge after viewing videos of the Challenge on their For You Pages. App. 31–32. Yet TikTok “took no and/or completely inadequate action to extinguish and prevent the spread of the Blackout Challenge and specifically to prevent the Blackout Challenge from being shown to children on their [For You Pages].” App. 32–33. Instead, TikTok continued to recommend these videos to children like Nylah."
We need to see another document, "App 31-32", to see what TikTok "knew". Could someone find that, please? A Pacer account may be required. Did they ignore an abuse report?
See also Gonzales vs. Google (2023), where a similar issue reached the U.S. Supreme Court.[1] That was about whether recommending videos which encouraged the viewer to support the Islamic State's jihad led someone to go fight in it, where they were killed. The Court rejected the terrorism claim and declined to address the Section 230 claim.
Their review process was developed to hit the much more stringent speech standards of the Chinese market, but it opens them up to even more liability here.
I unfortunately can't find the source articles for this any more, they're buried under "how to make your video go viral" flowcharts that elide the "when things get banned" decisions.
TikTok isn't available in China. They have a separate app called Douyin.
"The TikTok Defendants Knew the Deadly Blackout Challenge Had Killed Multiple Children"
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca3.118...
Rest of the filings here:
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67500541/tawainna-ander...
TikTok, Inc., via its algorithm, recommended and promoted videos posted by third parties to ten-year-old Nylah Anderson on her uniquely curated “For You Page.” One video depicted the “Blackout Challenge,” which encourages viewers to record themselves engaging in acts of self-asphyxiation. After watching the video, Nylah attempted the conduct depicted in the challenge and unintentionally hanged herself. -- https://cases.justia.com/federal/appellate-courts/ca3/22-3061/22-3061-2024-08-27.pdf?ts=1724792413
The dangers of social media are unknown to most still.
Then when you accidentally hit your hand with the hammer, you actually stabbed yourself. And that's when you realized your hammer is now a screwdriver.
It’s like trying to draw tiger but you’ve never seen an animal. We only have the faintest clue what social media is right now. It will change in the next 25+ years as well.
Sure we know some dangers but… I think we need more time to know them all.
And social media (with editorialized or even curated-for-specific-user feeds) have been around for more than a decade now (Facebook's big Timeline update for instance dates to 2011).
Except right now youtube have a self advertisement in the middle of the page warning people not to trust the content on youtube. A company warning people not to trust the product they built and the videos they choose to show you... we need to rethink 230. We've gone seriously awry.
I know youtube is different in important ways than the post, but it's also different in important ways from e.g. somebody who builds a building that falls down.
YouTube, TikTok, etc. differ by applying an algorithm to "decide" what to show you. Those algorithms have all sorts of weights and measures, but they're ultimately personalized to you. And if they're making personalized recommendations that include "how to kill yourself"... I think we have a problem?
It's simply not just a FIFO of content in content out, and in many cases (Facebook & Instagram especially) the user barely gets to a choice in what is shown in the feed...
Contrast with e.g. Mastodon where there is no algorithm and it only shows you what you explicitly followed, and in the exact linear order it was posted.
(Which is actually how Facebook used to be)
There is now too many posts on Facebook to do that.
Or you do things that gives you rewards - and do not care what it will result otherwise - but you want to be saved from any responsibility (automatically!) for what it causes just because it is an algorithm?
The enjoying the benefits but running away from responsibility is a cowardly and childish act. Childish acts need supervision from adults.
Someone else's response was that a 10 year old should not be on ticktoc. Well then how did they get past the age restrictions?(I'm guessing its a check box at best). So its inadequately gated. But really, I don't think its the sort of thing that needs an age gate.
They are responsible for a product that is actively targeting harmful behavior at children and adults. It's not ok in either situation. You cannot allow your platform to be hijacked for content like this. Full stop.
These 'services' need better ways to moderate content. If that is more controls that allow them to delete certain posts and videos or some other method to contain videos like this. You cannot just allow users to upload and share whatever they want. And further, have your own systems promote these videos.
Everyone who makes a product(especially for mass consumption), has a responsibility to make sure their product is safe. If your product is so complicated that you can't control it, then you need to step back and re-evaluate how it's functioning. Not just plow ahead, making money, letting it harm people.
Since consumable alcohol has other legitimate uses besides getting a buzz on, I don't think this point stands. For example, it's used quite often in cooking and (most of the time?) no intoxicating effects remain in the final product.
Impossible goals are an asinine standard and "responsibility" and "accountability" are the favorite weasel words of those who want absolute discretion to abuse power.
Would Mercedes be liable if the car (i.e. the algorithm) decided to run over someone?
If a child searches Google for "boobs", it's not fair to accuse Google of showing naked women to children, and definitely not fair to even say Google was targeting children.
«Had Nylah viewed a Blackout Challenge video through TikTok’s search function, rather than through her FYP, then TikTok may be viewed more like a repository of third-party content than an affirmative promoter of such content.»
Like if I'm a cement company, and I build a sidewalk that's really good and stable, stable enough for a person to plant a milk crate on it, and stand on that milk crate, and hold up a big sign that gives clear instructions on self-asphyxiation, and a child reads that sign, tries it out and dies, am I going to get sued? All I did was build the foundation for a platform.
If you were indeed monitoring the footpath for milk crate signs and moving them, yes you may be liable for showing or not removing one to someone it wouldn't be appropriate for.
In my analogy the stable sidewalk that can hold the milk crate is both the platform and the optimization algorithm. But to your point there's actually a lot more going on with the optimization than just building a place where any rando can market self-asphyxiation. It's about how they willfully targeted people with that content.
If your algorithm decides that things in the 90th percentile of shock value will boost engagement to a user profile that can also include users who are ten years old then you maybe have built a negligent algorithm. Maybe that’s not the case in this particular instance but it could be possible.
Then again, I guess your platform is about article recommendation and not about recording yourself doing popular trends. And perhaps children are not your target audience, or an audience at all. In many ways the situation was different for TikTok.
> But by the time Nylah viewed these videos, TikTok knew that: 1) "the deadly Blackout Challenge was spreading through its app," 2) "its algorithm was specifically feeding the Blackout Challenge to children," and 3) several children had died while attempting the Blackout Challenge after viewing videos of the Challenge on their For You Pages. App. 31-32. Yet TikTok "took no and/or completely inadequate action to extinguish and prevent the spread of the Blackout Challenge and specifically to prevent the Blackout Challenge from being shown to children on their [For You Pages]." App. 32-33. Instead, TikTok continued to recommend these videos to children like Nylah.
Do you think this should be legal? Would you do nothing if you knew children were dying directly because of the content you were feeding them?
Given the Supreme Court's observations that platforms engage in protected first-party speech under the First Amendment when they curate compilations of others' content via their expressive algorithms, it follows that doing so amounts to first-party speech under Section 230, too."""
I've agreed for years. It's a choice in selection rather than a 'natural consequence' such as a chronological, threaded, or even '__end user__ upvoted /moderated' (outside the site's control) weighted sort.
If my forum has a narrow scope (say, 4×4 offroading), and I delete a post that’s obviously by a human but is seriously off‐topic (say, U.S. politics), does that make me legally liable for every single post I don’t delete?
What are the limits here, for those of us who unlike silicon valley corporations, don’t have massive legal teams?
According to the article, probably not:
> A platform is not liable for “any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.”
"Otherwise objectionable" looks like a catch-all phrase to allow content moderation generally, but I could be misreading it here.
I imagine that getting rid of spam wouldn't meet the bar, and neither would enforcing that conversations are on-topic. But if you're removing and demoting posts because they express views you disagree with, you're implicitly endorsing the opinions expressed in the posts you allow to stay up, and therefore are exercising editorial control.
I think the lesson here is: either keep your communities small so that you can comfortably reason about the content that's up there, or don't play the thought police. The only weird aspect of this is that you have courts saying one thing, but then the government breathing down your neck and demanding that you go after misinformation.
> any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected
I think that allows your use case without liability.
That doesn't mean anyone is free to promote content without liability, just that moderating by deleting content doesn't make it an "expressive product."
The "my moderation makes me liable for everything I don't moderate" problem, that's what's addressed by the preceding section, the core of the law and the part that's most often at issue, which says that you can't be treated as publisher/speaker of anyone else's content.
No.
From the court of appeals [1], "We reach this conclusion specifically because TikTok’s promotion of a Blackout Challenge video on Nylah’s FYP was not contingent upon any specific user input. Had Nylah viewed a Blackout Challenge video through TikTok’s search function, rather than through her FYP, then TikTok may be viewed more like a repository of third-party content than an affirmative promoter of such content."
So, given (an assumption) that users on your forum choose some kind of "4x4 Topic" they're intending to navigate a repository of third-party content. If you curate that repository it's still a collection of third-party content and not your own speech.
Now, if you were to have a landing page that showed "featured content" then that seems like you could get into trouble. Although one wonders what the difference is between navigating to a "4x4 Topic" or "Featured Content" since it's both a user-action.
[1]: https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/mopaqabzypa/...
Consider HackerNews's functionality of flamewar suppression. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231821
And this is the difference between https://news.ycombinator.com/news and https://news.ycombinator.com/newest (with showdead enabled).
"may"
Basically until the next court case when someone learns that search is an algorithm too, and asks why the first result wasn't a warning.
The real truth is, if this is allowed to stand, it will be selectively enforced at best. If it's low enough volume it'll just become a price of doing business, sometimes a judge has it out for you and you have to pay a fine, you just have to work it into the budget. Fine for big companies, game ender for small ones.
As an example, suppose on a HN thread about the Coq theorem prover, someone starts a discussion about the name, and it's highly upvoted but the moderators downrank that post manually to stimulate more productive discussions. Is this considered curation, and can this be no longer done given this ruling?
It seems to me that this is indeed the case, but in case I'm mistaken I'd love to know.
If you discovered a thread on the forum where a bunch of users were excitedly talking about doing something incredibly dangerous in their 4x4s, like getting high and trying some dangerous maneuver, would you let sit on your forum?
How would you feel if somebody read about it on your forum and died trying to do it?
Update: The point I'm trying to make is that _I_ wouldn't let this sit on my forum, so I don't think its unethical to ask others to remove it from their forums as well.
However, if my hypothetical forum received a persistent flood of posts designed to soften people up to dangerous behaviors, I'd be pretty liberal removing posts that smelled funny until the responsible clique moved elsewhere.
> “Section 230 protects targeted recommendations to the same extent that it protects other forms of content presentation,” the members wrote. “That interpretation enables Section 230 to fulfill Congress’s purpose of encouraging innovation in content presentation and moderation. The real-time transmission of user-generated content that Section 230 fosters has become a backbone of online activity, relied upon by innumerable Internet users and platforms alike. Section 230’s protection remains as essential today as it was when the provision was enacted.”
[1][PDF] https://www.wyden.senate.gov/download/wyden-cox-amicus-brief...
[2] https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/sen-wyden-a...
It is now firmly established in the case law that Section 230 cannot act as a shield whenever a website is in any way complicit in the creation or development of illegal content.
...
In FTC v. Accusearch,[69] the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals held that a website’s mere posting of content that it had no role whatsoever in creating — telephone records of private individuals — constituted “development” of that information, and so deprived it of Section 230 immunity. Even though the content was wholly created by others, the website knowingly transformed what had previously been private information into a publicly available commodity. Such complicity in illegality is what defines “development” of content, as distinguished from its creation.
In writing Section 230, Rep. Wyden and I, and ultimately the entire Congress, decided that these legal rules should continue to apply on the internet just as in the offline world. Every business, whether operating through its online facility or through a brick-and-mortar facility, would continue to be responsible for all of its own legal obligations.
EDIT: Added quote about additional legal obligations.
[1]: https://jolt.richmond.edu/2020/08/27/the-origins-and-origina...
Whether an intermediary has knowledge of specific content that is illegal to redistribute is very different from whether the intermediary has "knowledge" that the algorithm it designed to rank legally distributable content can "sometimes" produce a high ranking to "some" content that's illegal to distribute. The latter case can be split further into specific illegal content that the intermediary has knowledge of and illegal content that the intermediary lacks knowledge of. Unless a law such as KOSA passes (which it shouldn't [1]), the intermediary has no legal obligation to search for the illegal content that it isn't yet aware of. The intermediary need only respond to reports, and depending on the volume of reports the intermediary isn't obligated to respond within a "short" time period (except in "intellectual property cases", which are explicitly exempt from Section 230). "TikTok knows that TikTok has blackout challenge posts" is not knowledge of post PQR. "TikTok knows that post PQR on TikTok is a blackout challenge post" is knowledge of post PQR.
Was TikTok aware that specific users were being recommended specific "blackout challenge" posts? If so, then TikTok should've deleted those posts. Afterward, TikTok employees should've known that its algorithm was recommending some blackout challenge posts to some users. Suppose that TikTok employees are already aware of post PQR. Then TikTok has an obligation to delete PQR. If in a week blackout challenge post HIJ shows up in the recommendations for user @abc and @xyz, then TikTok shouldn't be liable for recommendations of HIJ until TikTok employees read a report about it and then confirm that HIJ is a blackout challenge post. Outwardly, @abc and @xyz will think that TikTok has done nothing or "not enough" even though TikTok removed PQR and isn't yet aware of HIJ until a second week passes. The algorithm doesn't create knowledge of HIJ no matter how high the algorithm ranks HIJ for user @abc. The algorithm may be TikTok's first-party speech, but the content that is being recommended is still third-party speech. Suppose that @abc sues TikTok for failing to prevent HIJ from being recommended to @abc during the first elapsed week. The First Amendment would prevent TikTok from being held liable for HIJ (third party speech that TikTok lacked knowledge of during the first week). As a statute that provides an immunity (as opposed to a defense) in situations involving redistribution of third-party speech, Section 230 would allow TikTok to dismiss the case early; early dismissals save time and court fees. Does the featured ruling by the Third Circuit mean that Section 230 wouldn't apply to TikTok's recommendation of HIJ to @abc in the first elapsed week? Because if so, then I really don't think that the Third Circuit is reading Section 230 correctly. At the very least, the Third Circuit's ruling will create a chilling effect on complex algorithms in violation of social media websites' First Amendment freedom of expression. And I don't believe that Ron Wyden and Chris Cox intended for websites to only sort user posts by chronological order (like multiple commenters on this post are hoping will happen as a result of the ruling) when they wrote Section 230.
[1] https://reason.com/2024/08/20/censoring-the-internet-wont-pr...
However, if Section 230 is on its way out, won't this just benefit the largest tech companies that already have massive legal resources and the ability to afford ML-based or manual content moderation? The barriers to entry into the market for startups will become insurmountable. Perhaps I'm missing something here, but it sounds like the existing companies essentially got a free pass with regard to liability of user-provided content and had plenty of time to grow, and now the government is pulling the ladder up after them.
are able to profit to the tune of a 40% margin on advertising revenue
With that, they're saying that they're only going to be able to profit this much in this current regulatory environment. If that goes away, so too does much of their margin, potentially all of it. That's a big blow no matter the size, though Facebook may weather it better than smaller competitors.
I'd wager the bigger you are the harder it gets. How would they fend off tens of thousands of simultaneous lawsuits?
This is a pretty good take, and it relies on pre-Internet legal concepts like distributor and producer. There's this idea that our legal / governmental structures are not designed to handle the Internet age and therefore need to be revamped, but this is a counterexample that is both relevant and significant.
> So what happens going forward? Well we’re going to have to start thinking about what a world without this expansive reading of Section 230 looks like.
There was an internet before the CDA. From what I remember, it was actually pretty rad. There can be an internet after, too. Who knows what it would look like. Maybe it will be a lot less crowded, less toxic, less triggering, and less addictive without these gigantic megacorps spending buku dollars to light up our amygdalas with nonsense all day.
Judge Matey's basic point of contention is that Section 230 does not provide immunity for any of TikTok's actions except "hosting" the blackout challenge video on its server.
Defining it in this way may lead to a tricky technical problem for the courts to solve... While working in web, I understand "hosting" to mean the act of storing files on a computer somewhere. That's it. Is that how the courts will understand it? Or does their definition of hosting include acts that I would call serving, caching, indexing, linking, formatting, and rendering? If publishers are liable for even some of those acts, then this takes us to a very different place from where we were in 1995. Interesting times ahead for the industry.
>(2) Interactive computer service The term “interactive computer service” means any information service, system, or access software provider that provides or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server, including specifically a service or system that provides access to the Internet and such systems operated or services offered by libraries or educational institutions.
That's crazy, I feel like being a lawless no-man's land is the best part of the internet.
It would be nice to see those 'For you' and youtube's recomendations gone. Chronological timelines are the best , and will bring back some sanity. Don't like it? don't follow it
> Accordingly, TikTok’s algorithm, which recommended the Blackout Challenge to Nylah on her FYP, was TikTok’s own “expressive activity,” id., and thus its first-party speech.
>
> Section 230 immunizes only information “provided by another[,]” 47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1), and here, because the information that forms the basis of Anderson’s lawsuit—i.e., TikTok’s recommendations via its FYP algorithm—is TikTok’s own expressive activity, § 230 does not bar Anderson’s claims.
How did you find it in the first place? A search? Without any kind of filtering (that's an algorithm that could be used to manipulate people), all you'll see is pages and pages of SEO.
Opening up liability like this is a quagmire that's not going to do good things for the internet.
Not sure if you've noticed, but the internet seemingly ran out of good things quite some time back.
For example, just today there was a highly entertaining and interesting article about how to replace a tablet-based thermostat. And it was posted on the internet, and surfaced via an algorithm on Hacker News.
Also, lists of content (or blind links to random pages - web rings) have been a thing since well before Twitter or Dig.
Do you genuinely believe a judge is going to rule that a Boyer-Moore implementation is fundamentally biased? It seems likely that sticking with standard string matching will remain safe.
«Had Nylah viewed a Blackout Challenge video through TikTok’s search function, rather than through her FYP, then TikTok may be viewed more like a repository of third-party content than an affirmative promoter of such content.»
You realize that there is immense arrogance in this statement where you have decided that something is good for me ? I am totally fine with youtube's recommendations or even Tiktok's algorithms that according to you "manipulate" me.
Not to mention CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, NPR, etc.
They don't literally, as can be seen by that guy who got roughed up by the Pinkertons for the horror of accidentally being sent a Magic card he shouldn't have been.
Nobody went to jail for that. So corporations have at least as much power over your life as the government, and you don't get to vote out corporations.
Tell me, how do I "choose a different company" with, for example, Experian, who keeps losing my private info, refuses to assign me a valid credit score despite having a robust financial history, and can legally ruin my life?
Source for that?
I found [1] which sounds like intimidation; maybe a case for assault depending on how they "frightened his wife" but nothing about potentiall battery, which "roughed up" would seem to imply. The Pinkertons do enough shady stuff that there's not a need to exaggerate what they do.
1: https://www.polygon.com/23695923/mtg-aftermath-pinkerton-rai...
To be a bit cliched, there's a rather a lot of inattention and time that lets a child kill themselves after watching a video.
Did you know that there's has been a homeowner jailed for breaking his HOA's rules about lawn maintenance?
The chances are good that someone will go to jail.
Citation needed.
One such example happened in 2008. The man's name is "Joseph Prudente", and he was jailed because he could not pay the HOA fine for a brown lawn. Yes, there was a judge hitting Joseph Prudente with a "contempt of court" to land him in jail (with an end date of "the lawn is fixed or the fine is paid"), but his only "crime" was ever being too poor to maintain his lawn to the HOA's standards.
> “It’s a sad situation,” says [HOA] board president Bob Ryan. “But in the end, I have to say he brought it upon himself.”
As I expected, Mr. Prudente wasn't jailed for violating a HOA rule but rather for refusing to comply with a regular court order. It's a tragic situation and I sympathize with the defendant but when someone buys property in an HOA they agree to comply with the CC&R. If they subsequently lack the financial means to comply then they have the option of selling the property, or of filing bankruptcy which would at least delay most collections activities. HOAs are not charities, and poverty is not a legally valid reason for failing to meet contractual obligations.
> It's not my job to do your legal research for you and you're misrepresenting the facts of the case.
So, since it's not your job, you're happy to be ignorant of what can be found with a simple Google search? It's not looking up legal precedent or finding a section in the reams of law - it's a well reported and repeated story.
And let's be honest with each other - while by the letter of the law he was put into jail for failing to fulfill a court order, in practice he was put into jail for having a bad lawn. I'll go so far to assert that the bits in between don't really matter, since the failure to maintain the lawn lead directly to being in jail until the lawn was fixed.
So no, we don't have a de jure debtor's prison. But we do have a de facto debtor's prison.
The reality is that this case is going to spend years working through the normal appeals process. Before anyone panics or celebrates let's be patient and wait for that to run its course. Until that happens it's all speculation. Calm down.
The US legal system gives authority to judges to use contempt orders to jail people when necessary as a last resort. This is essential to make the system work because otherwise some people would just ignore orders with no consequence. Whether the underlying case is about a debt owed to an HOA or any other issue is irrelevant. And the party subject to a contempt order can always take that up with a higher court.
Elected governments also aren't as free as you'd think. Two parties control 99% of US politics. Suppose I'm not a fan of trade wars; both parties are in favor of them right now.
Ah, the libertarian way.
I, earning $40,000 a year will take on the corporate giant that has a multimillion dollar legal budget and 30 full time lawyers and win... I know, I saw it in a movie once.
The law books are filled with story after story of corporations doing fully illegal shit, then using money to delay it in court for decades... then laughably getting a tiny fine that represents less than 1% of the profits.
TANSTAFL.
Yeah good luck with that buddy. I’m sorry, but you can’t do a thing to these behemoths. At least when a government bends you over it loses your vote, which sorta kinda matters to them. A corporation is incentivized to disregard your interests unless you are profitable to them, in which case they treat you like glorified livestock.
A corporation might have "power" in an economic sense. It might have market significant presence in the marketplace. That presence might pressure or influence you in certain ways that you would prefer it not, such as the fact that all of your friends and family are customers/users of that faceless corporation.
But what the corporation cannot do is put you in jail, seize your assets, prevent you from starting a business, dictate what you can or can't do with your home etc.
Government is a necessary good. I'm no anarchist. But government is far more of a potential threat to liberty than the most "powerful" corporation could ever be.
a corporation can "put me in jail" for copyright violations, accuse me of criminal conduct (happened in the UK, took them years to fix), seize my money (paypal, etc), destroy my business (amazon, google)...
But government is far more of a potential threat to liberty than the most "powerful" corporation could ever be.
you (in the US) should vote for a better government. i'll trust my government to protect my liberty over most corporations any day.
But you still think parliament actually controls the government as opposed to Whitehall, so I understand why this may be a little intellectually challenging for you.
the end result is the same.
Whitehall
1: i was talking about the US government and my own.
2: i am not from the UK
therefore your comment is entirely inappropriate.
By that same logic, you can 'trivially' influence a democratic government, you have no such control over a corporation.
That is a misrepresentation of the message you are replying too:
>>You can trivially choose not to associate with a corporation. You can't really do so with your government.
You won't get into legal trouble if you don't have a Facebook account, or a Twitter account, or use a search engine than Google, etc. Try to ignore the rules setup by your government and you will very quickly learn what having a monopoly of physical force within a given territory means. This is a huge difference between the two.
As far as influencing a government or a corporation, I suspect (for example) that a letter to the CEO of even a large corporation will generally have more impact than a letter to the POTUS. (For example, customer emails forwarded from Bezos: https://www.quora.com/Whats-it-like-to-receive-a-question-ma...). This obviously will vary from company to company and maybe the President does something similar but my guess is maybe not.
As opposed to when they didn’t?
Yes, if you as a person start making death threats or direct calls to violence, then you could be held liable for that.
Were you not aware of that?
An algorithm isn't any different from any other sort of speech.
It's one thing to say, "Some idiot posted this on our platform." It's another thing altogether to promote and endorse the post and send it out to everybody.
Businesses should be held responsible for their actions.
The alleged activity in this lawsuit was TikTok either knew or should have known that it was targeting content to minors that contained challenges that was likely to result in harm if repeated. That goes well beyond simple moderation, and is even something that various social media companies have argued in court is speech made by the companies.
Section 230 is not canceled. This is a significant but fairly narrow refinement of what constitutes original content and Stoller’s take (“The business model of big tech is over”) is vastly overstating it.
Some kinds of recommendation algorithms produce original content (speech) by selecting and arranging feeds of other user generated content and the creators of the algorithms can be sued for harms caused by those recommendations. This correctly attaches liability to risky business.
The businesses using this model need to exercise a duty of care toward the public. It’s about time they start.
More specific than being harmed by your product, Section 230 cares about content you publish and whether you are acting as a publisher (liable for content) or a platform (not liable for content). This quote is supposing what would happen if Section 230 were overturned. But in fact, there is a way that companies would protect themselves: simply don't moderate content at all. Then you act purely as a platform, and don't have to ever worry about being treated as a publisher. Of course, this would turn the whole internet into 4chan, which nobody wants. IMO, this is one of the main reasons Section 230 continues to be used in this way.
Would love to have a timeline only, non reinforcing content feed.
Wouldn't this be the perfect precedence case on why minors should not be allowed on social media?
Also, I’m not sure how TikTok would know that the videos are viral among the protected demographic if the protected demographic cannot even put in the information to classify them as such?
I don’t think requiring moderation is the answer in all cases. As an adult, I should be allowed to consume unmoderated content. Should people younger than 18 be allowed to? Maybe.
I agree that below age X, all content should be moderated. If you choose not to do this for your platform, then age-restrict the content. However, historically age-restriction on the internet is an unsolved problem. I think what would be useful is tighter legislation on how this is enforced etc.
This case is not a moderation question. It is a liability question, because a minor has been granted access to age-restricted content. I think the key question is whether TikTok should be liable for the child/their parents having bypassed the age restriction (too easily)? Maybe. I’m leaning towards the opinion that a large amount of this responsibility is on the parents. If this is onerous, then the law should legislate stricter guidelines on content targeting the protected demographic as well as the gates blocking them.
Facebook has a “marketplace” but no customer support line. Google is serving people scam ads for months, leading to millions in losses. (Imagine if a newspaper did that.) And feeds are allowed to recommend content that would be beyond the pale if a human were curating it. But because “it’s just an algorithm bro” we give them a pass because they can claim plausible deniability.
If fixing this means certain companies can’t scale to a trillion dollars with no customer support, too bad. Google can’t vet every ad? They could, but choose not to. Figure it out.
And content for children should have an even higher bar than that. Kids should not be dying from watching videos.
The key thing people are missing is that TikTok is not being held responsible for the video content itself, they are being held responsible for their own code's actions. The video creator didn't share (or even attempt to share) the video with the victim- TikTok did.
If adults want to subscribe themselves to that content, that is their choice. Hell, if kids actively seek out that content themselves, I don't think companies should be responsible if they find it.
But if the company itself is the one proactively choosing to show that content to kids, that is 100% on them.
This narrative of being blind to the vagaries of their own code is playing dumb at best: we all know what the code we write does, and so do they. They just don't want to admit that it's impossible to moderate that much content themselves with automatic recommendation algorithms.
They could avoid this particular issue entirely by just showing people content they choose to subscribe to, but that doesn't allow them to inject content-based ads to a much broader audience, by showing that content to people who have not expressed interest/ subscribed to that content. And that puts this on them as a business.
> Because TikTok’s “algorithm curates and recommends a tailored compilation of videos for a user’s FYP based on a variety of factors, including the user’s age and other demographics, online interactions, and other metadata,” it becomes TikTok’s own speech. And now TikTok has to answer for it in court. Basically, the court ruled that when a company is choosing what to show kids and elderly parents, and seeks to keep them addicted to sell more ads, they can’t pretend it’s everyone else’s fault when the inevitable horrible thing happens.
If that reading is correct, then Section 230 isn't nullified, but there's something that isn't shielded from liability any more, which IIUC is basically the "Recommended For You"-type content feed curation algorithms. But I haven't read the ruling itself, so it could potentially be more expansive than that.
But assuming Matt Stoller's analysis there is accurate: frankly, I avoid those recommendation systems like the plague anyway, so if the platforms have to roll them back or at least be a little more thoughtful about how they're implemented, it's not necessarily a bad thing. There's no new liability for what users post (which is good overall IMO), but there can be liability for the platform implementation itself in some cases. But I think we'll have to see how this plays out.
When you can be held liable for surfacing the wrong (for unclear definitions of wrong) content to the wrong person, even Google could be held liable. Imagine if this child found a blackout video on the fifth page of their search results on "blackout". After all, YouTube hosted such videos as well.
That's one hell of a specific accusation - that they looked at her age alone and determined solely based on that to show her that specific video?
First off, at 10, she should have had an age-gated account that shows curated content specifically for children. There's nothing to indicate that her parents set up such an account for her.
Also, it's well understood that Tiktok takes a user's previously watched videos into account when recommending videos. It can identify traits about the people based off that (and by personal experience, I can assert that it will lock down your account if it thinks you're a child), but they have no hard data on someone's age. Something about her video history triggered displaying this video (alongside thousands of other videos).
Finally, no, the girl did not do a search (that we're aware of). But would the judge's opinion have changed? I don't believe so, based off of their logic. TikTok used an algorithm to recommend a video. TikTok uses that same algorithm with a filter to show search results.
In any case, a tragedy happened. But putting the blame on TikTok seems more like an attack on TikTok and not an attempt to reign in the industry at large.
Plus, at some point, we have to ask the question: where were the parents in all of this?
Anyways.
I suppose I did not phrase that very carefully. What I meant is that they chose to surface the video because a specific young girl visited the site -- one who had a specific history of watched videos.
> In any case, a tragedy happened. But putting the blame on TikTok seems more like an attack on TikTok and not an attempt to reign in the industry at large.
It's always going to start with one case. This could be protectionism but it very well could instead be the start of reining in the industry.
You can of course choose not to believe the judges saying it matters for them, but it becomes a very different discussion...
Chronological order, location based, posts-by-followed-accounts, etc. "Most liked", etc.
Essentially by only using 'simple' algorithms.
(And as an addendum, even if you think the answer to that is no, do you trust a judge who can probably barely work an iphone to come to the same conclusion, with your company in the crosshairs?)
And for the addendum, that's why we have hearings and experts. No judge can be expected to be knowledgable about everything in life.
> presenting a curated and “edited compilation of [third party] speech” is itself protected speech.
This circuit court case mentions the personalization but doesn't limit its judgment based on its presence - almost any type of curation other than the kind of moderation explicitly exempted by the CDA could create liability, though in practice I don't think "sorting by upvotes with some decay" would end up qualifying.
Court: Social Media algos are protected speech
Social Media: Yes! Protect us
Court: Since you're speech you must be liable for harmful speech as anyone else would be
Social Media: No!!
You’re cheering on expansion of government power and the end of the free internet as we know it.
> You’re cheering on expansion of government power
More like a shrinking of megacorp tech giant power.
If they can customize the feed, does that make it their speech or my speech? Like if I give them a "subscribe to x communities" thing with "hide already visited". It'll be a different feed, and algorithmic (I suppose) but user controlled.
I imagine if you have explicitly ask the user "what topics" and then use a program to determine which topic then it's a problem.
I've got a WIP mastodon client that uses a llama3 to follow topics. I suppose that's not releasable.
The Ninth Circuit has a reputation as flamingly progressive (see "Grants Pass v. Johnson", where SCOTUS overruled the Ninth Circuit, which had ruled that cities couldn't prevent homeless people from sleeping outside in public parks and sidewalks). The Fifth Circuit has a reactionary reputation (see "Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine", which overruled a Fifth Circuit ruling that effectively revoked the FDA approval of the abortion drug mifepristone).
So- platforms aren’t publishers, they are distributors (like news stands or pharmacies).
So they are responsible for the goods they sell.
They aren’t responsible for user content - but they are responsible for what they choose to show.
This is going to be dramatic.
The distinction between "conduit" and "publisher" seems compelling to me. Once a company has pierced the veil and looked at the content of the messages they transmit to me it doesn't really matter how they are modifying the stream they still should be liable for what they transmit.
E.g. if someone uses Twitter to send 12-year actress Jenna Ortega a photograph of a penis then Twitter should be liable for aiding and abetting child abuse. (In my opinion.)
I am not happy with how governments think they can dictate what internet users can and cannot see.
With respect to TikTok, parents need have some discipline and not give smart phones to their ten-year-olds. You might as well give them a crack pipe.
I guess that's one way to say that you never experienced the early internet. In three words: rotten dot com. Makes all the N-chans look like teenagers smoking on the corner, and Facebook et.al. look like toddlers in paddded cribs.
This will frankly hurt any and all attempts to host any content online, and if anyone can survive it, it will be the biggest corporations alone. Section 230 also protected ISPs and hosting companies (linode, Hetzer, etc) after all.
Their targeting may not be intentional, but will that matter? Are they willing to be jailed in a foreign country because of their perceived inaction?
But more on point, we're discussing modification of how laws are interpreted. If someone can be held civilly liable, why can't they be held criminally liable if the "recommended" content breaks criminal laws (CSAM, for example)? There's nothing that prevents this interpretation from being considered in a criminal case.
The Judge made no ruling on Section 230 protection for anyone who truly just hosts the content so ISPs/Hosting Companies should be fine.
Parasites.
I think especially content for children should be much more severely restricted, as it is with other media.
It’s pretty well-known that age is easy to fake on the internet. I think that’s something that needs tightening as well. I’m not sure what the best way to approach it is though. There’s a parental education aspect, but I don’t see how general content on the internet can be restricted without putting everything behind an ID-verified login screen or mandating parental filters, which seems quite unrealistic.
Pretty much every option is full of pain, but I think the least-terrible approach would be for for sites to describe content with metadata (e.g. HTTP headers) and push all responsibility for blocking/filtering onto the client device.
This has several benefits:
1. Cost. The people paying the most expense for the development and maintenance of blocking infrastructure will be the same parents who want to actually use it, instead of creating an enormous implicit tax on the entire digital world.
2. Privacy. The websites of the world don't need to know anything at all about the user. No birthdays, no geographical information to figure out what legal jurisdiction they live in, and no giant national lookup database that can track every website any resident registers to. Just isolated local devices that could be as simple as a Boolean for whether the child lock is currently unabled. (In practice I'm sure there will be local user accounts.)
3. Leveraging physical security. Parents do not need to be programmers to understand and enforce "little Timmy shouldn't be using anything except the tablet we specially set up for him that's covered with stickers of his favorite cartoon." Sure, Timmy might gain access to an unlocked device, but that's a challenge parents and communities are equipped to understand and handle.
4. Rule complexity. The individual devices can be programmed with whatever the local legal rules are for ages of majority, or it can simply be parents' responsibility to change things on a notable birthday. Parents who think ankles on women should never be shown at any age would be responsible for putting on plugins that add extra restrictions, instead of forcing that logic on the rest of the world.
“Most users load n pages with ankles, the likelihood of a user only loading a single page with ankles is someone under the age of X from country Y with Z% likelihood”
Once they've weighed in, we'll know if the "free ride" really is over, and if so what ride replaces it.
Option 1: ByteDance appeals, loses, and the ruling stands
Option 2: ByteDance appeals, wins, and the ruling is overturned
Option 3: ByteDance doesn’t appeal, the ruling stands, and nobody has standing to appeal the ruling without bringing a new case.
This is fascinating and raises some interesting questions about where the liability starts and stops i.e. is "trending/top right now/posts from following" the same as a tailored algorithm per user? Does Amazon become culpable for products on their marketplace? etc.
For good or for bad, this century's Silicon Valley was built on Section 230 and I don't foresee it disappearing any time soon. If anything, I suspect it will be supported by future/refined by legislation instead of removed. No one wants to be the person who legisliate away all online services...
If you actually want to understand something about the decision, I highly recommend Eric Goldman's blog post:
https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2024/08/bonkers-opinio...
If you're going to throw up your hands and say, "Well, users posted this, not us!" then you'd better not promote or bury any content with any algorithm, period. These assholes (TikTok et al) are now getting what they asked for with their abusive behavior.
Deleting the useless garbage one has to develop an idea where the line is suppose to be. The bias there will eventually touch all angles of human discourse. As an audience matures it gets more obvious what they would consider interesting or annoying. More bias.
Then there are legal limits in each country, the "correct" religion and natuonalism.
Quite the shit storm.
Excellent news, frankly.
First, this seems like courts directly overruling the explicit wishes of Congress. As much as Congress critters complain about DCA Sec230, they can’t agree on any improvements. Judges throwing a wrench at it won’t improve it, they will only cause more uncertainty.
not liking what social media has done to people doesn’t seem like a good reason to potentially destroy the entire corpus of videos created on YouTube.
I’m arguing that judges shouldn’t be tearing down the existing legal regime without someone actively planning for a replacement that doesn’t have massive _unintended consequences_ (which all of the proposed Sec 230 reforms have)
And the fact that you only mentioned “modern social media companies” means that you are also underestimating which offerings qualify. Sec 230 protects all websites and apps that show _any_ user content to other users, not just the large social media companies. Think review sites, online classifieds, your group chat in a Messenger app, blog comments, social recipe sites, shared bookmarking sites, the “memo” field of transactions in every blockchain, etc.
And the obvious worry I have is that new jurisprudence starts pulling Jenga pieces away from AI chatbots before Congress even decides whether those qualify as a platform, a publisher, or something completely different.
Meta - Helped facilitate multiple ethnic cleansings.
Twitter - Now a site run by white supremacists for white supremacists.
Youtube - Provides platforms to Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro and a whole constellation of conspiracy theorist nonsense.
Reddit - Initially grew its userbase through hosting of softcore CP, one of the biggest pro-ana sites on the web and a myriad of smaller but no less vile subreddits. Even if they try to put on a respectable mask now its still a cesspit.
Linkedin - Somehow has the least well adjusted userbase of them all, its destruction would do its users a kindness.
My opinion of social media goes far and beyond what anyone could consider "not liking".
In any case, it would mean that those videos would have to be self hosted and published, we'd see an en masse return of websites like college humor and cracked and the like, albeit without the comments switched on.
You are arguing that mega social media companies should not be immune from liability. I could care less about those companies, but I do care about the unintended consequences of this ruling.
The mega social media companies weren’t immune from liability before the ruling. But they are mega corporations, with lots of attorneys on retainer who craft the ToS / EULA / other contracts to shed legal risk. Even this ruling isn’t likely to hurt them much in the long run.
The “baby” is every small blog that allows comments, every store / product review, every social bookmarking site, every game with multi-player chat, etc. These are examples of features available because of Sec230 protections. If some enterprising attorney can spin the _default sort order_ into a statistically significant harm to their plaintiff, every single website/app just became a far bigger target for litigation. And even if they can’t, now every mom and pop website will have to pay an attorney to find out if the plaintiff has a case according to this new vague standard.
And this happened because of a judge / jurisprudence, not because of a lawmaking body who solicited feedback from both companies and consumers. This ruling is likely to stand no matter the legal / / social economic fallout.
Craigslist already lost the Personals section to Sec230-modifying legislation. That was a drop in the bucket compared to what we could lose from this ruling.
You seem to be making many assumptions here.
(1) I don’t think this cripples the mega social media companies. They already have thousands of attorneys — they will be busy for a year shedding by liability risk by crafting more onerous ToS that we all end up agreeing to.
(2) Nobody “self hosts” from soup-to-nuts (except for the biggest companies in the world). Your ISP, your DNS provider, your cloud host, etc. all benefit from Sec 230 protections to some extent. We have to wait to see the fallout of those layers.
(3) Companies like College Humor and Cracked benefitted from viral marketing of social networks. If your implied expectation comes true and big social media companies are crippled by this ruling, there will be fewer upstart acts like College Humor and Cracked that grow to become something notable.
(4) Even small companies like College Humor and Cracked won’t be immune from this new redefinition of the line between platform/publisher and speech. My suspicion is this ruling pulled out a Jenga piece, but it will be a while before we see how the tower of internet economics falls.
Oh come off it, writers very explicitly blame Facebook lying about the viral impact of their social network on the collapse of CH and others.
The original video is still the original poster's comment, and thus still 230 protected. If the kid searched specifically for the video and found it, TikTok would have been safe.
However, TikTok's decision to show the video to the child is TikTok's speech, and TikTok is liable for that decision.
That's going to be hell for Google. Well, maybe not, they have many and decent lawyers.
How is my interpretation incorrect, please? TikTok (or any other website like Google) can show a video to a child in any number of ways - all of which could be considered to be their speech.
That said, this is a statement completely unsubstantiated in the original post or in the post that it links to, or the decision in TFA. It's the poster's opinion stated as if it were a fact or a part of the Judge's ruling.
"We reach this conclusion specifically because TikTok’s promotion of a Blackout Challenge video on Nylah’s FYP was not contingent upon any specific user input. Had Nylah viewed a Blackout Challenge video through TikTok’s search function, rather than through her FYP, then TikTok may be viewed more like a repository of third-party content than an affirmative promoter of such content."
This is a pedantic thing to point out, but I do it because the comment has been downvoted, and the top response to it seems to misunderstand it, so it's possible others did too.
I just didn’t choose to address only that comment in my reply — I spun my reply in the context of all of the previous discussions about Sec230 reform — because that’s the underlying worry that I have. I could care less if the biggest social media companies die off, but I _do_ worry about all of the other unintended consequences of this ruling (more accurately, changing the definition of “speech” to include something that is so far removed from direct and intentional).
I remember the internet pre social media but I don't exactly remember it being filled with the sparkling wit of genius.
The internet is supposed to belong to everyone, it wasn't meant to be a playground only for a few nerds. It's really sad that hacker culture has gotten this angry and elitist. It means no one will ever create anything with as much egalitarian potential as the internet again.
... because it's small tech that need Section 230. If anything, retraction of 230 will be the real free ride for big tech, because it will kill all chance of threatening competition at the next level down.
So, we actually have to watch out for kids, and maybe only have a 25% profit margin? Oh, so terrible! /s
I'm 100% against the political use of censorship, but 100% for the reasonable use of government to promote the general welfare, secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves, and our posterity.
Robert Heinlein in "Life-Line"
Whether it was Eugene Debs being thrown in the pokey, or every Japanese civilian on the west coast, or some harmless muslim suburbanite getting waterboarded, nothing ever changes. Wake me up when they actually do something to Facebook.
the chinese and iranians are taking advantage of this and thats not something i would want to entrust to them
Section 230 absolutely should come with an asterisk that if you train an algorithm to do your dirty work you don't get to claim it wasn't your fault.
An algorithm in this context is nothing more than a reflection of what all the humans who created it designed it to do. In this case, it's to deny Medicaid to make money. For RealPage, it's to drive up rents for profit. Health insurance companies are using "AI" to deny claims and prior authorizations, forcing claimants to go through more hoops to get their coverage. Why? Because the extra hoops will discourage a certain percentage.
All of these systems come down to a waterfall of steps you need to go through. Good design will remove steps to increase the pass rate. Intentional bad design will add steps and/or lower the pass rate.
Example: in the early days of e-commerce, you had to create an account before you could shop. Someone (probably Amazon) realized they lost customers this way. The result? You could create a shopping cart all you want and you didn't have to create an account unti lyou checked out. At this point you're already invested. The overall conversion rate is higher. Even later, registration itself became optional.
Additionally, these big consulting companies are nothing more than leeches designed to drain the public purse
TikTok's design presented harmful information to a minor resulting in her death.
TikTok's product presented harmful information to a minor resulting in her death.