8 ms·

It is my understanding that website owners (especially owners of small websites) rely on Section 230 in order to host user-submitted content (such as comments),

It is my understanding that website owners (especially owners of small websites) rely on Section 230 in order to host user-submitted content (such as comments), as they cannot feasibly moderate all the content and they don't want to be held liable for anything inappropriate or illegal. Am I mistaken?

fossuser 6y ago
The person you’re replying to is mistaken - 230 protects owners by allowing them to moderate, without it the existing legal precedent would force them to do nothing because any moderation would make them responsible for everything (as was the case before 230). This point is often confused and misunderstood. People think without 230 owners would be liable, but they’d only be liable if they moderated (so they wouldn’t). Without 230 owners would not moderate which would be worse for everyone. https://stratechery.com/2019/a-framework-for-moderation/ https://stratechery.com/2019/a-framework-for-moderation/ > “ In other words, the act of moderating any of the user-generated content on its forums made Prodigy liable for all of the user-generated content on its forums — in this case to the tune of $200 million. This left services that hosted user-generated content with only one option: zero moderation. That was the only way to be classified as a distributor with the associated shield from liability, and not as a publisher.” > “The point of Section 230, then, was to make moderation legally viable; this came via the “Good Samaritan” provision” > “In short, Section 230 doesn’t shield platforms from the responsibility to moderate; it in fact makes moderation possible in the first place. Nor does Section 230 require neutrality: the entire reason it exists was because true neutrality — that is, zero moderation beyond what is illegal — was undesirable to Congress.”
- saurik 6y ago
  I think the argument is that someone merely hosting something horrible on YouTube isn't really a problem if no one can find it? YouTube could still exist without Section 230, and it would work "great": it wouldn't have any "recommendation" or "discovery" algorithms--which we all know have been shown to actively drag people into extreme positions, and are of a class of systems that optimize for "engagement", which isn't even a healthy thing for a user to have--and would feel more like Instagram (without the discover page that doesn't work well anyway, and without the new recommended feed that maybe you like but a lot of us despise), where if you know about someone you follow them and you can see what the people you follow posted and you can get notifications when those person post new videos and if you dislike them you unfollow them... what sucks about all of these systems right now is someone posts something horrible and you then that content is actively pushed at people all while YouTube is making a profit, and then they can choose how quickly they want to respond to different kinds of moderation, and the whole thing is a bit evil :(.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    This is unrelated to 230. 230 is specifically about giving protection to sites so they can moderate their content without being legally responsible for every thing users post. It’s an update to older law that was written pre-internet for older style publishers (where they had more editorial control over what was published because the content wasn’t user generated). It doesn’t have to do with recommendation algorithms. Killing 230 would force YouTube to have zero content moderation beyond removing illegal content. It would be a bad outcome (which is why 230 was created).
    - alacombe 6y ago
      > Killing 230 would force YouTube to have zero content moderation beyond removing illegal content. It would be a bad outcome (which is why 230 was created). That actually sounds much better than arbitrary moderation.
      - azinman2 6y ago
        I think you’re underestimating how horrible the internet can be. Just go read some 4chan to see what no filter looks like.
        alacombe 6y ago
        I don't see blood running down the street because of a few teenagers comments. The pre-moderated internet has never been a blood bath.
        azinman2 6y ago
        I think you don't understand the role of 4chan and right-wing fringe: http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1422 http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/arti... The pre-moderated Internet was a small group of enthusiasts, and even then there was moderation (e.g. Prodigy). You cannot compare now versus 80s/early 90s to suggest in good faith that an Internet that's barely even 0.1% of what it is now would illuminate what it's like without 230.
- asveikau 6y ago
  It's interesting, because a lot of times when these matters are discussed people are talking about big music or movie distributors and copyright violations. Here it is a private individual saying some people on the platform are using his likeness to scam people out of money.
- austincheney 6y ago
  > No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. That is section 230 verbatim. It says a service provider should not be regarded as a publisher of user submitted content, wherein the user submitting said content thus accepts the role of publishers. I disagree and believe the service provider to be the publisher no differently than a magazine showing advertising the magazine did not themselves create. It’s time the laws reflect the reality of the content in question.
  - bargl 6y ago
    You were referring to (1) of the op was refering to (2). IANAL but I think that's what he was describing and makes his point true. Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material (1)Treatment of publisher or speaker No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. (2)Civil liabilityNo 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 (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).[1] This is section 230 verbatim. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
  - fossuser 6y ago
    If you remove that protection then the owners respond by doing zero moderation so they’ll be classified as distributors (since the alternative of moderating and being legally liable for all user content is not survivable). 230 was created to allow them to moderate their platforms. The context in my post (and the history described in that stratechery link) are critical to fully understand the issue. What you’re suggesting would lead to the opposite of what you want - it would force them to not moderate at all. Facebook being legally responsible for the random musings of two billion Facebook users and a magazine being responsible for the ads it runs are not equivalent.
- tmaly 6y ago
  >beyond what is illegal Is what is happening with YouTube allowing these videos to stay up illegal? I am not a lawyer, but I am curious to know.
  - prawn 6y ago
    Not a lawyer but I host user content. I've always assumed that if illegal content is brought to my attention and I have not made an attempt to deal with it in a reasonably timely matter, I could bear some legal responsibility for that content.
  - austincheney 6y ago
    Criminally illegal content is called obscene. This content does not fall into that category so and so it is not criminally illegal. It is clearly a form of libel, but there is no cure available because all parties are shielded by law from torts. Had this exact same violation occurred in any other medium of publication there would be no legal shield in place. For an even more heinous example see the Joe Scarborough murder conspiracy theory.
    - Nasrudith 6y ago
      That isn't true - the actual damn scammers are still legally liable. Even assuming they made it completely impossible to prove their linkage (unlikely) it would still be just as illegal. For a counterfactual if I somehow figured out something with chaos theory deep enough that doing something utterly innocous like knocking on a door would cause an accident that result in the ceiling of the Whitehouse collapsing and killing all inside I would still be responsible for murder among many other crimes even if nobody could discover it much less prove it. Premeditated planned actions to end many lives and carrying them out are still murder and I would still be responsible for them. It isn't a legal shield any more than you not being prosecutable for the death of Abraham Lincoln is - because it is the completely wrong person to try to prosecute!
      - austincheney 6y ago
        The scam is illegal, the advertising content is not unless there is a regulation expressly forbidding that messaging by regulation, which falls under the pervue of commercial law. The subject of this conversation is the advertising content and not Bitcoin scams. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscenity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscenity
austincheney 6y ago
The primary interest of section 230 is to allow user submitted content for public exposition without a barrier and typically for an advertising based revenue stream. In this context the profit margins are incredibly tiny and thus utterly reliant upon high transaction frequency. The larger the website the more reliant they are on this protect, because there is more revenue in jeopardy and the cost of moderation scales disproportionately to the profit margin. The immediate consequence of revoking 230 is hindering anonymous user contributions to websites for public exhibition. The liability associated with such can be substantially marginalized by any number of practices that cripple a public facing ad based revenue model.

fossuser 6y ago

The person you’re replying to is mistaken - 230 protects owners by allowing them to moderate, without it the existing legal precedent would force them to do nothing because any moderation would make them responsible for everything (as was the case before 230). This point is often confused and misunderstood. People think without 230 owners would be liable, but they’d only be liable if they moderated (so they wouldn’t). Without 230 owners would not moderate which would be worse for everyone. https://stratechery.com/2019/a-framework-for-moderation/ https://stratechery.com/2019/a-framework-for-moderation/ > “ In other words, the act of moderating any of the user-generated content on its forums made Prodigy liable for all of the user-generated content on its forums — in this case to the tune of $200 million. This left services that hosted user-generated content with only one option: zero moderation. That was the only way to be classified as a distributor with the associated shield from liability, and not as a publisher.” > “The point of Section 230, then, was to make moderation legally viable; this came via the “Good Samaritan” provision” > “In short, Section 230 doesn’t shield platforms from the responsibility to moderate; it in fact makes moderation possible in the first place. Nor does Section 230 require neutrality: the entire reason it exists was because true neutrality — that is, zero moderation beyond what is illegal — was undesirable to Congress.”

saurik 6y ago
I think the argument is that someone merely hosting something horrible on YouTube isn't really a problem if no one can find it? YouTube could still exist without Section 230, and it would work "great": it wouldn't have any "recommendation" or "discovery" algorithms--which we all know have been shown to actively drag people into extreme positions, and are of a class of systems that optimize for "engagement", which isn't even a healthy thing for a user to have--and would feel more like Instagram (without the discover page that doesn't work well anyway, and without the new recommended feed that maybe you like but a lot of us despise), where if you know about someone you follow them and you can see what the people you follow posted and you can get notifications when those person post new videos and if you dislike them you unfollow them... what sucks about all of these systems right now is someone posts something horrible and you then that content is actively pushed at people all while YouTube is making a profit, and then they can choose how quickly they want to respond to different kinds of moderation, and the whole thing is a bit evil :(.
- fossuser 6y ago
  This is unrelated to 230. 230 is specifically about giving protection to sites so they can moderate their content without being legally responsible for every thing users post. It’s an update to older law that was written pre-internet for older style publishers (where they had more editorial control over what was published because the content wasn’t user generated). It doesn’t have to do with recommendation algorithms. Killing 230 would force YouTube to have zero content moderation beyond removing illegal content. It would be a bad outcome (which is why 230 was created).
  - alacombe 6y ago
    > Killing 230 would force YouTube to have zero content moderation beyond removing illegal content. It would be a bad outcome (which is why 230 was created). That actually sounds much better than arbitrary moderation.
    - azinman2 6y ago
      I think you’re underestimating how horrible the internet can be. Just go read some 4chan to see what no filter looks like.
      - alacombe 6y ago
        I don't see blood running down the street because of a few teenagers comments. The pre-moderated internet has never been a blood bath.
        azinman2 6y ago
        I think you don't understand the role of 4chan and right-wing fringe: http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1422 http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/arti... The pre-moderated Internet was a small group of enthusiasts, and even then there was moderation (e.g. Prodigy). You cannot compare now versus 80s/early 90s to suggest in good faith that an Internet that's barely even 0.1% of what it is now would illuminate what it's like without 230.
asveikau 6y ago
It's interesting, because a lot of times when these matters are discussed people are talking about big music or movie distributors and copyright violations. Here it is a private individual saying some people on the platform are using his likeness to scam people out of money.
austincheney 6y ago
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. That is section 230 verbatim. It says a service provider should not be regarded as a publisher of user submitted content, wherein the user submitting said content thus accepts the role of publishers. I disagree and believe the service provider to be the publisher no differently than a magazine showing advertising the magazine did not themselves create. It’s time the laws reflect the reality of the content in question.
- bargl 6y ago
  You were referring to (1) of the op was refering to (2). IANAL but I think that's what he was describing and makes his point true. Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material (1)Treatment of publisher or speaker No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. (2)Civil liabilityNo 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 (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).[1] This is section 230 verbatim. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
- fossuser 6y ago
  If you remove that protection then the owners respond by doing zero moderation so they’ll be classified as distributors (since the alternative of moderating and being legally liable for all user content is not survivable). 230 was created to allow them to moderate their platforms. The context in my post (and the history described in that stratechery link) are critical to fully understand the issue. What you’re suggesting would lead to the opposite of what you want - it would force them to not moderate at all. Facebook being legally responsible for the random musings of two billion Facebook users and a magazine being responsible for the ads it runs are not equivalent.
tmaly 6y ago
>beyond what is illegal Is what is happening with YouTube allowing these videos to stay up illegal? I am not a lawyer, but I am curious to know.
- prawn 6y ago
  Not a lawyer but I host user content. I've always assumed that if illegal content is brought to my attention and I have not made an attempt to deal with it in a reasonably timely matter, I could bear some legal responsibility for that content.
- austincheney 6y ago
  Criminally illegal content is called obscene. This content does not fall into that category so and so it is not criminally illegal. It is clearly a form of libel, but there is no cure available because all parties are shielded by law from torts. Had this exact same violation occurred in any other medium of publication there would be no legal shield in place. For an even more heinous example see the Joe Scarborough murder conspiracy theory.
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    That isn't true - the actual damn scammers are still legally liable. Even assuming they made it completely impossible to prove their linkage (unlikely) it would still be just as illegal. For a counterfactual if I somehow figured out something with chaos theory deep enough that doing something utterly innocous like knocking on a door would cause an accident that result in the ceiling of the Whitehouse collapsing and killing all inside I would still be responsible for murder among many other crimes even if nobody could discover it much less prove it. Premeditated planned actions to end many lives and carrying them out are still murder and I would still be responsible for them. It isn't a legal shield any more than you not being prosecutable for the death of Abraham Lincoln is - because it is the completely wrong person to try to prosecute!
    - austincheney 6y ago
      The scam is illegal, the advertising content is not unless there is a regulation expressly forbidding that messaging by regulation, which falls under the pervue of commercial law. The subject of this conversation is the advertising content and not Bitcoin scams. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscenity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscenity

austincheney 6y ago

The primary interest of section 230 is to allow user submitted content for public exposition without a barrier and typically for an advertising based revenue stream. In this context the profit margins are incredibly tiny and thus utterly reliant upon high transaction frequency. The larger the website the more reliant they are on this protect, because there is more revenue in jeopardy and the cost of moderation scales disproportionately to the profit margin. The immediate consequence of revoking 230 is hindering anonymous user contributions to websites for public exhibition. The liability associated with such can be substantially marginalized by any number of practices that cripple a public facing ad based revenue model.