Justice Dept. Urges Rolling Back Legal Shield for Tech Companies (nytimes.com) 247
The Justice Department released recommendations on Wednesday to pare back the legal shield for online platforms that has been crucial to their growth since the earliest days of the internet, taking a direct shot at companies like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube that have come into the cross hairs of the Trump administration. From a report: In a 25-page recommendation, the agency called on lawmakers to repeal parts of a law that has given sites broad immunity from lawsuits for words, images and videos people have posted on their services. The changes to the law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, would put the onus on social media and other online platforms to more strongly police harmful content and conduct while also being consistent about their moderation. The Justice Department proposal is a legislative plan that would have to be adopted by Congress. It adds to growing calls in Washington, from elected officials of both parties, to change Section 230. Last month, President Trump signed an executive order to limit protections for online platforms. Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, has criticized the law before, too. On Capitol Hill, Republicans have become increasingly critical of Facebook, Google and Twitter for abusing the safe harbor to take down content that employees disagree with, including conservative views.
Ok fine (Score:3, Interesting)
Just as soon as we get rid of qualified immunity for the cops
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Just as soon as we get rid of qualified immunity for the cops
And rule against absolute immunity [go.com] for the/this President.
Attorneys for President Donald Trump this week will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to grant him sweeping immunity from investigation by Congress and local prosecutors into his conduct as a private citizen, as long as he's still in office.
During oral arguments in three cases Tuesday, the justices will explore Trump's claim that he cannot be subjected to subpoenas or any criminal investigative process, by virtue of the demands of the presidency.
The assertion of expansive presidential power comes as Trump faces an array of mounting requests for his personal and business financial records. His efforts to challenge the subpoenas in federal courts have, so far, been unsuccessful at every level.
I'll note that "the demands of the presidency" for Trump mainly consist of: golfing, rage tweeting and attending campaign rallies -- he's super busy. /sarcasm
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many of us seem to be on this same wavelength.
to tech companies: lets remove their 'shield'
to cops: NO! don't touch OUR shield! we demand to keep QI
to heir twitler: NO! I want to be able to break any law and be untouchable (while he tweets 'LAW AND ORDER')
you guys are not even TRYING to hide your bullshit, anymore. damn.
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Just as soon as we get rid of Qualified Immunity for the judges, prosecutors, legislatures, and bureaucrats.
Would Trump be hit first? (Score:3, Interesting)
Given some of the stuff said on Twitter by the current US president, would that not mean he would actually find his own tweets being removed?
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I agree. I think that all of the hateful rhetoric currently associated with conservatism will be the stuff that will come down first. I don't think they understand what they are asking for...
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No because unlike you Trump is smart enough to understand this will effectively kill Twitter. They would only hurt traffic to their site more by shutting him out, making their situation even worse.
He is the POTUS! He has people who can stand up some LAMP servers with Wordpress installed if that comes to pass, and because he is POTUS at least the press and friendly conservative media will monitor what gets posted their and give him all the exposure he wants; on the flip side the uncoordinated response to his
Translation (Score:2)
Uncle Sam's pockets are getting a little light lately and need to be filled. Such nice big tech companies you guys have there. It would be a shame if business suddenly became a lot more difficult.
Section 230 was a trap all along (Score:5, Insightful)
Section 230 has always been a trap. Here's why:
3M is not responsible for what people write on post-it notes. Epson is not responsible for what people print on their printers. BIC is not responsible for what people write with their pens. Governments are not responsible for what people do on their roads. Ford is not responsible for what people do in their cars. Glock is not responsible for what people do with their guns. Newspapers have never been liable for opinions written in letters to the editor, or classified advertisements. Common carriers like telephone companies and package delivery companies were not responsible for what people put in their packages. -- And all of these things were true before section 230 existed.
I was around when the CDA was passed, and at the time I argued against it because it legislates what is already necessary and true. It is dangerous to allow congress to pass laws like that because it is just a setup to repeal them later and undo a legal principle that already existed. For example: never allow congress to pass a law explicitly allowing flag burning, because flag burning is already legal. Don't let congress pass a law allowing people to use curse words or kiss in public or wear the color red. All it means is that they will repeal the law later and claim it is now illegal. It's a trap.
I soooo want to go back and find my old posts on this topic from the wee era when Slashdot was formed.
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I was around then too. I had black pages with blue ribbons, the whole lot.
I don't think it was a trap. But then, my focus at the time was on the other parts of the CDA.
You won't have much luck looking though, as the CDA was enacted and largely found unconstitutional all before Slashdot started up. Maybe Chips and Dips had something; that predates me.
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Newspapers have never been liable for opinions written in letters to the editor, or classified advertisements.
Where did you get that idea? If they knowingly publish a statement that is false, even if they attribute that statement to a specific author letter writer etc, they absolutely could face libel damages if sued.
Now it does not come up often for 2 reasons. First most print media is responsible enough to not run unfact checked content that would be defamatory (which has its own specific legal meaning) regardless of source, editorial section or not. Second, print media rarely runs controversial content about pe
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The law in question actually simply defines these services in such a way that the cond
The Perspective You will not hear... (Score:5, Interesting)
"When NBC published their background conversation with Google yesterday the media outlet made a big legal mistake. NBC not only outlined the mechanics of a racketeering and antitrust violation, via Google’s power to control on-line ad revenue as a weapon to target NBC’s competition, but NBC outlined the actual collaborative communication.
NBC did the worst thing possible, they published the quotes from Google’s response to them where Google willingly accepted the request from NBC without pause. The collusion was not only clear, it was self admitted. What made the issue more explosive was the NBC article explained the motives of both organizations; the targeting was intentional and specific. The goal was to take-down The Federalist news outlet by removing their revenue. There was no ambiguity of purpose, and Google knowingly agreed with the intent.
Within hours of realizing the consequences of the publication, the legal offices of NBC and Google both activated and attempted damage control. The NBC article was completely rewritten and the communication between them and Google –as quoted– was removed. For its part Google published a statement saying no action had been taken, and later they professed no action would be taken. However, the damage was already done.
NBC’s hubris put both Google and NBC in the sunlight of their own admissions.
Google’s monopoly control of internet ad revenue made their agreement with NBC to target a competitor a transparent, and admitted, antitrust violation. Without question, that stark admission is what triggered the timing of the DOJ public statement today.
The DOJ needs congress to take action, modify the law, and update the outdated immunity for online platforms under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996."
-- From Sundance @ the CTH
Pyhrric victories (Score:2)
I mean obviously there's not a person in the administration who has ever read the classics, but I'd have thought at least one of them would be vaguely aware of the concept... when the tech companies are no longer shielded from the consequences of hosting harmful content, what exactly do the muppets pushing for this roll-back think is going to happen next? Has it really not occurred to them that the tech companies will pre-emptively take down content that could be labelled harmful -- including all the bilge
Re:This makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense. Traditional publishers can feasibly read and otherwise vet all content they publish. It would be quite impossible for someone to personally monitor public forum websites in the same way a publisher edits a book.
That's the whole idea behind the law. If you don't like internet censorship now, you are really going to hate what would happen if websites got sued right and left for things users decided to post.
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But the moment they decide to filter the content, now things change in my mind. You either publish everything with coverage or you filter and accept the consequences of you political correctness filter.
Re:This makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
But the moment they decide to filter the content, now things change in my mind. You either publish everything with coverage or you filter and accept the consequences of you political correctness filter.
So what if they filter for spam? For malware? (astonishingly, even now computers can be crashed with the right text strings or pictures; clever sorts can probably cause worse things to happen) For off-topic posts? For trolling and shitposting?
The decision as to what's appropriate is up to the people who own or run a given site, and it's entirely up to them. If you don't like it, go elsewhere; no one is stopping you. But attacking section 230 either results in everyplace turning into shitholes like 8chan or vapidity like cable tv. And that's the point -- the people supporting this hate the Internet and want to destroy it. I say, fuck them,.
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But attacking section 230 either results in everyplace turning into shitholes like 8chan or vapidity like cable tv.
Exactly correct. That said, I don't think America alone can destroy the internet at this point. It would be unfortunate if they were to try, but there are many other free countries that can still pick up the slack if that is what it comes down to. The inventors probably never thought that when it was designed to route around problems that their country could be one of those.
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Then don't fucking allow it.
The problem is that teapots are the most popular topic of discussion worldwide, and there are hundreds of millions of people discussing it at any time. There are not enough people to monitor all of the discussions in real time, and even if there were, it wouldn't be very consistent. While I might do everything I can to keep the discussion on topic and up to the standards the board maintains, checking every post for anything that might be tortious is not possible or practicable.
Your "solution" is to not di
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But attacking section 230 either results in everyplace turning into shitholes like 8chan or vapidity like cable tv.
Yep. If this goes through you can expect all of the major platforms to err on the side of safety, teaching their AI filters to remove anything even remotely offensive to anyone. Because the filters will never be perfect and because it's risky if they miss something, the result will be aggressive filtering. In addition, expect most online news sources, private blogs, etc., to disable commenting entirely. They won't have the resources to filter it themselves, so they'll just avoid the risk.
Re: This makes sense (Score:2)
No, they'll just stop allowing user posts. Otherwise anything that sneaks in -- and AI filters are not too hard to get around -- exposes them to liability.
Re: This makes sense (Score:3)
Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube without user-generated content will die rapidly.
Re: This makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
No, they'll just stop allowing user posts. Otherwise anything that sneaks in -- and AI filters are not too hard to get around -- exposes them to liability.
The big social media sites won't. They can't and still exist and make money, and they have the technical resources to apply AI to filter automatically (they already do; they'll just make it far, far more ban-happy).
Come to think of it, this would be a major coup for those sites, because it would pretty much permanently guarantee that they never have to worry about competition from nimble startups. Only the big boys with deep pockets and thousands of top caliber engineers will be able to play.
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That's Zuckerberg's plan, but it won't work, and it's just another reason to despise him.
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You have to admit there is plenty of shit on the internet that needs to be destroyed.
Maybe a compromise would be rules that mandate clear and concise TOS that apply to the Providers as well as the Users.
If you have a video, post, or other content taken down, they would need to provide notice, a reason, and cite a specific reason rather than some bullshit "TOS violation". They should be able to tell you the post, paragraph and word, or, the video, and precise second, that results in the take down.
The TOS
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Inflexible rules invite abuse. This is supposed to be a board for technology-savvy people, isn't it? Can anyone here think that they couldn't easy skirt by such a thing?
Since this isn't the government at work, I'm happy with the rule being 'I know it when I see it' because if you don't like it, you can go elsewhere or even create your own site that operates under your own rules.
Further, that other content is left up which arguable also violates the nebulous TOS, but isn't taken down.
So you also expect moderators to be perfect? To be aware of every post and to thoroughly review each one, lest there be some sort
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It's not a matter of moderators to be perfect. It's a matter of moderators not letting their own bias color their decisions when comparing content to the TOS.
As another poster mentioned, Anti-Police content from one group being taken down while outright calls for violence against the police from another group remains.
And you have to be careful about, "you can go elsewhere" when governments are openly using sites on which to transact business, even unofficially.
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It's a matter of moderators not letting their own bias color their decisions when comparing content to the TOS.
Well, let me know 1) what, precisely, is wrong with bias, so long as it's intended; 2) where you intend to obtain ISO-standard moderators who all act exactly the same given the same inputs.
As another poster mentioned, Anti-Police content from one group being taken down while outright calls for violence against the police from another group remains.
How do you know that that's not because it was missed? (Either not noticed, or incorrectly ruled as ok) Are you privy to everyone's moderation decisions?
And you have to be careful about, "you can go elsewhere" when governments are openly using sites on which to transact business, even unofficially.
Well, if the government wants to pass a law that says that the government and government officials and employees in an official capacity are prohibited from using social
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I think it's very obvious to a reasonable observer when a company, like reddit, or twitter, et al. filters content that's harmful to the site's operations or the safety of a user's computer, such as malware or phishing attempts, etc., and also plainly illegal content, versus when they filter out content for ideological or political reasons.
The courts have been pretty clear over the decades what kinds of speech they consider harmful or libelous, such as making violent threats, or calling for the assassinatio
Re:This makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)
The courts have been pretty clear over the decades what kinds of speech they consider harmful or libelous, such as making violent threats, or calling for the assassination of an individual, or saying outright lies about them. That kind of speech is not usually protected in the law, and most companies would not be required to host it or face punishment for policing that kind of content.
What the courts did was, they said that if you moderate for anything -- such as strong language, because you want the board to be family-friendly -- then you are obligated to moderate for everything, and you had better do it perfectly, because anything the site allows to be posted, it will be liable for, including defamation.
But what the social media companies have done is moderate with a very heavy hand what kind of speech they usually police on their sites. Just to use one example, reddit has a team it calls "Trust and Safety" whose putative task is enforce their content rules, but in reality exists to censor users and content that don't conform to a certain ideological position.
And since Reddit (1) is not prohibited from doing so by free speech laws, and (2) can exercise its own rights of free speech and free association to control what is on its own site, that's 100% fine. Users who dislike it can leave, and maybe start up a different site. It's up to the marketplace to decide whether Reddit is doing a good job or not.
So it's that kind of capricious applications of their own rules in the service of an ideological political position that put them in danger of getting the government involved.
For the government to be for or against speech on a privately owned board based on the viewpoints involved is prohibited under the First Amendment. The government has to be viewpoint neutral. Reddit is not the government and therefore can say 'to Hell with those filthy neutrals!'
They can't call themselves merely a platform when users post content they agree with, but then decide they're a publisher when users post (legal) content they disagree with.
Ah! So you're ignorant of the law. Good to know. The current law in the US (47 USC 230(c) -- you may want to read it) is that sites are never to be treated as publishers of third party content (with the liability that they would have if they were), no matter what. And that sites can remove content they subjectively consider "objectionable," without having to be consistent or perfect at it, and that they're not liable as a result of that either.
Basically, anyone who talks about a platform/publisher dichotomy is full of shit. You should generally ignore them. The rule, essentially, is that they're "platforms," to use your word, pretty much regardless of how they actually act.
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Thank You! All of these 230 discussion always fall into this platform/publisher whole. You are correct the current law is they are immune no matter what they do.
I for one think that is bad law and want to see 230 go; but I get tired of these counter factual discussion where 90% (maybe more of the participants) think the current law has some obligation of neutrality, when it has no such thing. The facts are twitter/facebook/etc can censor conservatives (if that is what they are doing, I tend to think they
Re:This makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
You are correct the current law is they are immune no matter what they do.
In truth there are a few limits, but nothing particularly meaningful. The safe harbor is extremely broad.
I for one think that is bad law and want to see 230 go
Why? Did the Internet kill your parents or something, and you swore revenge and now dress up as a bat? What outcome do you want out of repeal, and how, precisely do you think you'll get it? You may want to consider how the various site operators will react, and what motivates them.
I'd like to ignore the platform/publisher folks (Score:2)
I don't think it's safe to ignore them. They need to be addressed head on and made to understand the consequences of losing Section 230.
Re:This makes sense (Score:4, Informative)
That's not what Trump wants though, is it?
He tries to ban media outlets be accuses of lying from press conferences. Declared Antifa a terrorist organisation. Meets your "plainly illegal" standard because Trump says so.
He's transparent, he wants tech companies to be loyal to him and publish what he thinks is the right stuff.
It's an attack on democracy and on the 1st Amendment.
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If you don't like it, go elsewhere; no one is stopping you.
The thing is, a lot of these companies have become an oligopoly controlling the primary means of communication between people.
You can only communicate with users and people who actually use a platform, so it's not like the suggestion to just do something like start your own Jabber server is useful - nobody else is on there. Plain telephones and even email addresses are quickly being replaced as the communication method of choice by things like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
If those companies start to p
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The thing is, a lot of these companies have become an oligopoly controlling the primary means of communication between people.
Yeah, all the people you could ever want to talk to are on Usenet, I mean ICQ, I mean AIM, I mean Yahoo / MSN Messenger, I mean Myspace, I mean Orkut, I mean Facebook.
If the cool kids move someplace else, Facebook is as toast as all those other places. (Full disclosure: I have never been one of the cool kids, and as proof, please note that I've been on Slashdot since 1997-1998.)
If they want to enjoy common carrier protections
They don't! And they never did! It's virtually impossible for a website to be a common carrier-- that's a specific legal term that
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The thing is, a lot of these companies have become an oligopoly controlling the primary means of communication between people.
You can only communicate with users and people who actually use a platform, so it's not like the suggestion to just do something like start your own Jabber server is useful - nobody else is on there.
I'm not on Twitter or Facebook and I don't have any problems communicating with users and people that use those platforms. I just don't communicate with them on those platforms (obviously). Just because people choose to use social media platforms instead of other forms of communication doesn't mean that they are locked into using only social media platforms to communicate
Phone companies have a lot more protections and restrictions than just section 230 and they do have terms of service that will see you get
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everyplace turning into shitholes like 8chan or vapidity like cable tv
If that is true, how did they avoid being like that prior to 230?
Re:This makes sense (Score:5, Informative)
Well, my sweet summer child, long ago there were very few people -- all super nerds -- who were online. The Internet was very exclusive, and only for educational institutions and military contractors, and even then everyone dreaded September because then new freshmen would come online and need to be taught how to be polite human beings and not just shit everywhere like animals.
The commercial services were not quite so bad since they cost an arm an a leg and this kept people out mostly. And local dial up BBSes just didn't have many users, or money, so they flew under the radar if something bad happened.
If there were a million or more distinct users of online services of any stripe worldwide in 1990, I'd be surprised.
Even so, two lawsuits that are the basis for all of this came along on dialup BBSes in the 90s. On Compuserve, there was a claim of defamation, but Compuserve had a hands-off policy and this protected them. On Prodigy, which tried to be family friendly, and moderated for cursing and to stay on topic and such, the court said that this condemned them; they should have caught things that were bad that they were not looking for and could not have known about. So the lesson was: if you allow users to post, don't moderate. Otherwise it's in for a penny, in for a pound.
This pissed off Congress which just at that time had learned there was porn online that children could get at! They wanted to encourage moderation, were told that the courts were effectively discouraging it, so they passed this law -- 47 USC 230 -- which says that you can and should moderate, but it's okay if you don't moderate everything, like the Prodigy court said you had to. Also at around that time, the Internet opened to the general public, and we've been living in an eternal September.
And that's how it's been ever since. Also there are more users now... billions more users.
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No problem!
Without getting into exhaustive detail, I'd first ask whether the cake shop or lunch counter is engaged in interstate commerce -- probably, almost every business in the US is -- and whether it's making decisions about who it will serve based on some protected criteria (typically immutable criteria like race, national origin, or gender, or treated-like-immutable criteria, like religion).
For example, most businesses that have a "no shirt, no shoes, no service" policy are free to do so, despite such
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Cake shops and lunch counters already do it. Every cake shop or lunch counter has sold only what they want to sell. It is very seldom that you can go into either and get whatever you want (e.g. I haven't yet found a cake shop where you can get a new set of tires).
Your analogy fails hard since cake shops and lunch counters don't allow anyone and everyone to come in and make whatever they want to. I assume you are upset that they can't discriminate as to who enters/buys from the shop though.
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Why is the standard all or nothing? If they filter spam, should they become liable? What if they filter child pornography? What if they just filter things to be on topic? Should a car forum be forbidden from deleting political threads?
I get you may be upset that they are filtering content that you think has value, and there's a valid debate to had about what should be acceptable in that regard. But I don't see how the answer is to make them liable for everything any nutjob decides to post.
That's because Twitter isn't a publisher (Score:2)
Technology changed, and the law changed with it. This is a good thing, because it means we get all the good stuff on the Internet. If we try to apply 300+ year old laws to modern tech 1 to 1 then we get trapped in the past and nothing every improves.
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But the moment they decide to filter the content, now things change in my mind.
Would you be equally OK if you were charged with public indecency simply because you removed some indecent graffiti that another person spray painted on your property?
Just keep in mind the only difference between that and Section 230 is due to 230 being an "___ on the Internet" style law.
No individual should ever be held responsible for the actions of a completely different individual.
Facebook shouldn't be responsible for what a user does, the user should be.
You shouldn't be responsible for what a graffiti
Re:This makes sense (Score:4, Informative)
I am neither American nor do I live there, but I do know that in this case, the law is on the side of Facebook, Twitter, et al.
That is because Section 230 [cornell.edu] says the following:
"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account ofâ"
(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
(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1)."
The EFF agrees. Read the article: No! Section 230 does not require platforms to be neutral [eff.org].
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Wrong it will end 'social media' and probably message boards like this. It will raise the bar for putting stuff on the internet back to being able to rent a VPS, EC2, or lambda instance and register a domain.
Technical stuff will be fine, a small number of higher quality posts will be approved by site owners / operators.
We will all be better off for it. The signal to noise ration on the internet will go way down! 99.9% percent of content is garbage (including this post and yours and barely worth reading) no
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Nonsense. Traditional publishers can feasibly read and otherwise vet all content they publish. It would be quite impossible for someone to personally monitor public forum websites in the same way a publisher edits a book.
So what? Do we change the law everytime someone has a business plan that doesn't work?
Fuck 'em.
Re: They are already vetting content (Score:4, Informative)
They don't. Some things are caught by human moderators, some things are brought to their attention by users (by flagging posts), some things are caught by keyword searches and such, but most shit gets through.
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But they aren't. A traditional publisher has a human being read every single word being published, and will often dialogue with the author (especially if there's something particularly controversial or libelous). That's VERY different from running content moderation algorithms.
Some of the things that social media sites might be sued for would require complex legal analysis or investigation to assess the risk. For example, if I post that my next door neighbor is a child molester, the site I posted it on coul
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There's no reason they need added protections not granted to other industries like traditional publishers.
Apparently the purpose of this law escapes you. How do you expect public forums to review the billions of comments placed every day?
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There's no reason they need added protections not granted to other industries like traditional publishers.
Apparently the purpose of this law escapes you. How do you expect public forums to review the billions of comments placed every day?
It's worse than that. The purpose of the law was to make it possible for new companies to come into existence. Big companies can afford to build up piles of machine learning to make bulk moderation more feasible. Small startups can't realistically do that. So what this proposal effectively does is cement market control by companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google, and eliminate any real chance of new competitors entering the field.
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There's no reason they need added protections not granted to other industries like traditional publishers.
Apparently the purpose of this law escapes you. How do you expect public forums to review the billions of comments placed every day?
It's worse than that. The purpose of the law was to make it possible for new companies to come into existence. Big companies can afford to build up piles of machine learning to make bulk moderation more feasible. Small startups can't realistically do that. So what this proposal effectively does is cement market control by companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google, and eliminate any real chance of new competitors entering the field.
Not necessarily. They could easily limit new regulations to apply to companies having more than say 20 million users. This regulatory advantage could make it easier for new competitors to enter the field.
They could also force companies to divest divisions that inhibit competition.
Re: This makes sense (Score:2)
They don't. Some things are caught by human moderators, some things are brought to their attention by users (by flagging posts), some things are caught by keyword searches and such, but most shit skates by.
Re: This makes sense (Score:3)
I guarantee Siri Jackson at this point has been reported thousands, if not tens of thousands of times as she doxxes underage children, 12 year olds among others, because of singular examples of stupid shit they said on the internet. Yet Twitter has done nothing about her account. Spare me the lies. It is not the content algorithm that initiates shadow bans at Reddit. It is not the content algorithm that demonetized Zerohedge and The Federalist. They abused the system, and now enough people are getting angry
Re: This makes sense (Score:2)
Skai Jackson. Fucking autocorrect.
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Bullshit.
See Daily KOS. They fucking nuke comments that go against their radical agenda in a matter of minutes.
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I agree with the other posts about how it is possible for traditional publishers to moderate _everything_ where it is impossible for social media companies to do so _as they are now_.
What I mean by that is this: right now, when you post, it get posted immediately. Then, later on, if there is something wrong with it, it is taken down.
With these new rules the social media companies would be held liable for every single thing on their site (if you think they can just "not moderate" then you are delusional - t
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I agree with the other posts about how it is possible for traditional publishers to moderate _everything_ where it is impossible for social media companies to do so _as they are now_.
What I mean by that is this: right now, when you post, it get posted immediately. Then, later on, if there is something wrong with it, it is taken down.
With these new rules the social media companies would be held liable for every single thing on their site (if you think they can just "not moderate" then you are delusional - the internet would just devolve into something no one would want to interact with). The only way to do that is that EVERY post would need to get looked at before posting.
Imagine a world where your Facebook post has to get reviewed by an employee at Facebook before it is posted. If you hate internet censorship now - then you are REALLY going to hate what comes from a move like this.
Or - they could stop trying to be the thought police
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Many of them are monopolies. They have abused their monopoly position to crush competition. The government gets to regulate monopolies, that's not the least bit controversial.
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So you're in favor of granting traditional publishers the same sort of protection that websites etc now enjoy? Good to know.
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Good luck building a viable service using bulletrpoof hosting and taking only bitcoin payments.
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There used to be Gab. It got smeared with enabling terrorism and cut from being able to process payments and demonetized from showing any ads. SV tech is not actually going to allow competition and they control hosting, payment processing and all digital advertising.
Good luck building a viable service using bulletrpoof hosting and taking only bitcoin payments.
I agree, they should modify the banking regulations to prevent this. If payment processors are offering such services they should be enjoined from discriminating by type of client. Of course, they could report illegal activity to the government as necessary.
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Well, I see what's going on.
YouTube 0.5 let you post anything. That's not very legal, all sorts of copyright abuse showed up there.
YouTube 0.9 let large providers reject videos they claimed to own (whether they do or don't) leaving small producers held helpless.
YouTube 1.0 launched with a automatic system that lets anybody complain... good for those who own copyrights, but free speech can be censored by any one objector.
Now we've got the problem. The liability protection is that sites can censor or not sens
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Sort of like letting men and women use the same locker rooms. That's freedom!
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Ya know, I have tried to give Trump the benefit of the doubt.
Why?
Re:Ya know.... (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone who did the same (and now feels the same) I can answer:
I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt because I'm a moderate. As background, I have voted only Republican for president up until Trump. I did not vote for Trump - but I also didn't mind that he won. I thought it would be "fine"... that his rhetoric may have just been a "show" to get elected... and that he would be more "presidential" once he finally won. I also thought that the damage he could do would be minimized by our system of government.
I was wrong on all counts.
He displays absolutely zero presidential behavior... and he has been incredibly damaging to our democracy. I sincerely hope he is voted out this fall.
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Ya know, I have tried to give Trump the benefit of the doubt.
Why?
Because I thought after he was elected he would step up and be Presidential instead of this Reality TV personality that he is.
I have this stupid FAITH in people and I thought Trump would be a President. So, fuck me! I did not vote for him, but I was hoping....
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Because you must entertain the thought that you could be wrong.
I ALWAYS do. And it causes me much anxiety. I just wish I could halve the the ignorant delusional moral certitude of the the right. But as a thinking person, I always question my beliefs. That is what make me Liberal according to American values. Questioning.
I always question. I am under extreme self check. Because our media will not do it for us. They are no longer reliable.
But under my own fact check, Trump is a liar fraud criminal and maybe a child molester. Yes, I HAVE proof,. But the goddamn corrupt
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They never claim to be (Score:2)
There is such a thing as being wrong about something.
Re:This is an attempt to take over the Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
ACLU - Now there is a bastion of impartiality!
I seem to recall the ACLU suing [baltimoresun.com] on behalf [scotusblog.com] of many [archive.org] differing [aclunv.org] viewpoints [nytimes.com] in an effort to protect civil liberties regardless of where they land on the political spectrum.
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ACLU - Now there is a bastion of impartiality!
I seem to recall the ACLU suing [baltimoresun.com] on behalf [scotusblog.com] of many [archive.org] differing [aclunv.org] viewpoints [nytimes.com] in an effort to protect civil liberties regardless of where they land on the political spectrum.
That seems to be the ACLU of old. I think they have lost their way.
Re:This is an attempt to take over the Internet (Score:4, Funny)
Re: This is an attempt to take over the Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
They're winning because big tech continues to be as odious as possible about their bias. Google just decided that they would engage in a conspiracy of restraint of trade with NBC because of another news site's mostly unmoderated comment section bothered NBC and several 'activist websites'. When the people abusing the system get obvious about it, people get angry.
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No that's been Google's policy for years. It's why the Gab app got banned long ago.
No conspiracy, just consistent enforcement of the ToS. The app is still up by the way, Google helped them fix the issue.
Re: This is an attempt to take over the Internet (Score:2)
The Gab app got banned because it was competition. Payment processors and banks didnt give two shits till Google et al started whispering in their ear, exactly as the government did with Operation Chokehold.
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Competition with what? Google doesn't have a micro blogging service or a fast right hell hole. Twitter's app is still there too.
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Let me pose a question: If the company that had bought ad-delivery through Google discovered that their ads ran side by side to a comment on a forum that was obviously racist, what do you think would have happened?
If you need some type of hint - what precipitated the adpocalypse of 2017?
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The sane response for this is for tech to back off policing conservatives
They're not. Much as I wish they would, they're basically just trying to keep things civil. But conservatives since the mid-60s -- and particularly since the early 90s -- have been getting crazier and crazier. Thus they run into rules that are basically politically neutral and quite milquetoast.
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It cuts both ways. A Democrat that time traveled from the early 1990's would probably be labelled an ultra right-wing neo-Nazi by today's standards.
The reality is that in the last few decades the right has gone a lot further right, and the left has gone a lot further left. Whereas it used to be about 80% moderates in the country all of which had a slight lean in one direction or another, now it's nearly 50/50 all the way to one extreme or the other.
Society can't function this way much longer - and the rio
Re:This is an attempt to take over the Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
A Democrat that time traveled from the early 1990's would probably be labelled an ultra right-wing neo-Nazi by today's standards.
As someone who was around and politically active in the early 1990s and who knew many Democrats at the time, I can assure you that that's not true. Probably no more than embarrassing and thoughtlessly rude.
Try Democrats from before the New Deal era, maybe.
The reality is that in the last few decades the right has gone a lot further right, and the left has gone a lot further left.
Now I know you're ignorant. The Democrats reacted too much to Republican red-baiting as the Cold War started, and began to shift to the right. LBJ was probably the last really good Democratic President from the perspective of the glory days of the New Deal, except he totally fucked up with regard to Vietnam and he lost support from southern bigots by finally pursuing civil rights for blacks (even if he had to be pushed). This all resulted in the Democrats moving even further to the right. At this point they are now generally about the same as the mild Rockefeller Republicans that lost control in the 70s. There is no left wing party of note in the US, but there are leftists who are trying to wrest control of the Democratic Party from the older generation of conservatives.
The Republicans OTOH kept going right into full-on Bircher territory and are totally nuts now.
The best sort of realignment would probably be for the Democrats to split into a left wing and right wing party, and for the Republican Party to die off and for people who currently identify as 'conservatives' or 'Republicans' or points right of that to be excluded from politics and polite society and hopefully to just die in a ditch somewhere.
Society can't function this way much longer - and the riots and such of late are signs that honestly, things are starting to crumble.
Wimp. We've had much worse than this before and done fine, and other countries do too. The French strike at the slightest provocation, fistfights seem to break out in the South Korean National Assembly routinely ... this stuff is nothing.
Given how geographically centralized a lot of the zones tend to be
BZZT, wrong. This isn't the north vs. the south. (North rocks!) This is more the cities vs. the country with the suburbs in the middle. There is no clear geographic split. Don't look at red states vs. blue states -- that's not fine-grained enough.
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Quite the opposite. If Eisenhower was transported to the 21st century he would be mistaken for a modern moderate Democrat in many ways. Both parties over all have shifted to the right. Can you imagine Trump or Bush Jr warning us about the military-industrial complex?
There are a few Democrats leaning further left, but they are not mainstream. They get a bit more popular notice simply because they're the only ones saying anything other than more of the same but they are not mainstream.
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Police conservatives, lol.
I thought conservatives supported private property rights and the free market. Well why not use those rights to set up your own websites with blackjack and hookers. Oh you did, it was called can and rapidly became a cesspool. And now you're whining because you got exactly what you wanted and it was terrible.
Jesus you not are such delicate snowflakes.
Re: This is an attempt to take over the Internet (Score:2)
They tried, and then the advertisers suddenly wouldn't deal with them, and then suddenly payment processors wouldn't deal with them, and then the banks wouldn't deal with them. Amusingly the same sort of tactics the government used with Operation Chokehold. Yes, big tech is attempting to act like a government and enforce its policies on the rest of the internet. And you wonder why people are getting angry.
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Then their ideas are terrible and counter-productive, and they should probably change them.
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So one day, there was a flood. And while most of the people in the flood zone evacuated, one man said that God would save him, and refused to leave on his own. Neighbors offered to help him escape to high ground and he refused. After the water rose, a boat came and the people aboard offered to save him, and he refused. The water rose some more and as he took shelter on the roof of his house -- the only part above water -- a helicopter came by, and lowered a rope ladder to rescue him, but he refused. The
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Dude that's not big tech, that's *everyone*.
Why do you think advertisers don't want to place ads side by side with the kind of cess pool stuff you get on gab?
Help help we're being repressed!
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ah, the marketplace of ideas. As conceived by Trump, it's a marketplace that's constrained by hush payments, non disclosure agreements, baseless libel threats, and blackmail threats. If DJT Trump truly believed in free speech, John Bolton and and Mary Trump would be free to publish and be damned.
One of you is probably going to slam this post as a ORANGE MAN BAD post.That's fine. I'm not sure why some people believe that restating the obvious in the bluntest possible terms is an effective rhetorical tool.
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Will this mean the death of some companies that rely entirely on user-generated content? Possibly.
It will mean the death of sites where users can directly converse with one another; the death of sites like this one.
Instead, you will have to have your own site -- hosted on your own hardware, because this will affect sites like WordPress and Geocities (I'm dating myself, but I don't know what the kids use nowadays for that sort of purpose. You get my meaning though). This will not only make conversations difficult, but it will also vastly reduce the number of people who can converse online because most
Re: About time! (Score:2)
Guess you never read the law, because it is intended to encourage sites to moderate, and protects them as they do so. It's easy to google for at 47 USC 230(c) and you might want to give it a shot before you make yourself sound dumber.
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Guess you never read the law, because it is intended to encourage sites to moderate, and protects them as they do so. It's easy to google for at 47 USC 230(c) and you might want to give it a shot before you make yourself sound dumber.
That's fine. Time for an update to the law to be more specific about what they can and can't moderate.
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But won't they have even more incentive now to remove hateful content? This seems to be the exact opposite of what conservatives would want. This is actually going to make the social media companies do MORE moderation/policing - which, as far as I understand it, the right feels like those companies already do too much of.
Or, do you just mean that these companies should stop taking down conservative propanganda "or else!"... so threatening them with stuff like this is just a tool to get them to leave up ha
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But won't they have even more incentive now to remove hateful content?
Yes, if they choose to do moderation. Or they could do no censorship and still enjoy all the existing protections.
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If this happens — so be it. At least, the decisions on what's defamatory will be with the judges, rather than political activists.
Telephone company would disconnect you neither for saying "nigge'r" (which is legal, except on Slashdot, where it, literally, triggers the "lameness" filter), nor for conspiring to commit a crime (which is not) — they ought to remain immune from prosecutions for whatever is transmitted over their systems.
Twitter et al decided to make it political, and censor — i
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You are right - telephone companies don't drop you for saying offensive words. BUT - when you are saying offensive words you are doing it to exactly one person at a time - and those people are willingly talking to you.
Shitposting on the internet would be like calling thousands of people a day and yelling offensive shit at them. If you don't think a phone company would disconnect you for doing such a thing you are delusional. Why don't we have that happening already? Well, because there are laws against
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Wait - you're saying that if this is put in place then all of the assholes of the internet will leave Facebook/Twitter/etc?
This sounds amazing - maybe I should actually be for it.