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If you haven't read Section 230, go do so now. It's enabled the development of the modern internet as we know it, and the meat is only 3 sentences. The rest is

• wahern 6y ago
  I don't think it would be world ending to get rid of Section 230. I almost would like to see it happen, if only because it would have precisely the opposite effect expected by all the people whining about being censored. Though, I suppose you can't be censored if the channel itself is extinguished. More practically, the technically literate would go back to the world of Usenet, mailing-lists, and minimalistic forums like HN, hopefully inventing distributed reputation systems in the process. I have this vague idea for PGP web of trust-like signing of Usenet posts (published as hidden posts when readers +1/-1) which are then SPAM scored based on the depth of the attestation chain to the reader's own trusted posters, which may have been seeded from one or more centralized databases of group maintainers, similar to the current registration system for moderated Usenet groups except you could freely choose alternative registrars.
  • throwawaygh 6y ago
    The plan is not to repeal Section 230. The plan is to make protection contingent on appeasing political appointees at the FTC. Whoever controls the FTC will be able to (and will) pressure the major social media networks into acting as a propaganda arm for their political party. As dystopian as FB and Twitter are today, in this case, the medicine is poison. See https://www.hawley.senate.gov/senator-hawley-introduces-legislation-amend-section-230-immunity-big-tech-companies https://www.hawley.senate.gov/senator-hawley-introduces-legi...
    • adamiscool8 6y ago
      That's nonsense. Showing "their algorithms and content-removal practices are politically neutral" is not an insurmountable bar. It's just inconvenient for Big Tech's supporting interests.
      • throwawaygh 6y ago
        Really? You think we can here in this thread all agree to what it means for an algorithm or content-removal practice to be "politically neutral"? If so, please go ahead! But I seriously doubt it. This is a thing political philosophers argue about in journals to this day, that lawyers argue about in SCOTUS cases to this day, and that has been litigated to death in thousands of HN threads over the years. The question of what "politically neutral" means is perhaps the MOST political question there is. The delineation of political speech from non-political speech defines the playing field. And even setting aside genuine disagreement, politics does not operate on good faith. It operates on power. In practice, the bill does not outline specific criteria. So "politically neutral" will mean whatever the FTC wants it to mean. Which means it will mean whatever the appointees of the FTC chair want it to mean. Josh Hawley, of course, knows and understands how power works. He would not be proposing this bill if the big tech companies were right-biased. Democrats also understand how power works. So, in this counter-factual world of right-biased social media, it would be Democrats clamoring for federal intervention and Hawley decrying the "Democrat attack on the most successful American companies". Do you really believe otherwise?
        • 6y ago
  • NationalPark 6y ago
    Would forums like HN survive? I can think of a few incidents where malicious information about people made the front page then turned out to be false. Is HN prepared to defend against lawsuits about that? Is HN prepared to lose lawsuits about that? It sounds like you're basically suggesting that making the internet useless is a good thing, because maybe something something cool will come out of the ashes and there's a chance it could be even better after a bunch of extremely hard and broad problems are solved. I don't like those odds.
    • ColanR 6y ago
      I think the odds are pretty good. There's a lot of smart & motivated people who really like the internet, who would probably go a long way to replace it.
      • gowld 6y ago
        Why aren't those people interested in working on that today?
    • wahern 6y ago
      HN already has moderators who do a very good job of filtering posts in a timely manner. HN's exposure to liability for libel would be rather minimal. People and companies are exposed to legal risk all the time, everywhere they go, and somehow they don't curl up into a ball and die of starvation in their basements. Big, diverse sites like Facebook and Twitter need Section 230 because they can't effectively use human moderators to sift through the content. They have to rely on machine learning, which has false negative rates magnitudes higher than a human. Yet at the same time, they're constantly trying to shape and edit and, basically, narrate the user content, as part of their monetization strategy. That's their dilemma. Moreover, the distinction between publisher and distributor will still exist. The alternative to strong moderation is no moderation--you're just a distributor, like a Usenet node or the telephone company. But that's more difficult to monetize. (Of course, the legal landscape would be more nuanced than that--traditional libel law wouldn't demand a simple dichotomy between moderation and no moderation.) Without Section 230 companies would have a more difficult time trading profit potential for legal liability, but it would still be done. Newspapers, write-in columns, bulletin boards, and other forums were around for centuries, all the same exposed to libel law. Even the internet was around for decades prior to Section 230.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • rrobukef 6y ago
    Interesting. However, any manual action (choosing trusted posters, maintained database) is bad for adoption. Facebook and twitter take care of it, you should too. Perhaps you should use karma and comment interactions to automatically attest the people you interact with. Add a "report" button to disavow certain users. Now there is a positive and negative feedback loop to reduce the workload of attestation. Caveat: attestation must be stabilized. The existing hierarchies of admin/(super-)moderator work well as trusted posters. On the other hand, picking and choosing your moderator(s) is interesting and will birth new flame-wars and division. Caveat (2): Adding more crypto explodes the amount of data which must be handled. Especially when every comment and upvote is signed.
  • heavyset_go 6y ago
    > I don't think it would be world ending to get rid of Section 230 If you're running a start up, how would you feel knowing that if a user uploaded illegal content to your servers, you could be raided in the middle of the night and imprisoned for it? Only those with billions of dollars to throw at moderation would be able to comply with the law. Everyone else would need to block user content by necessity, or risk having their lives ruined by malicious users. The net result is that hosting free speech on the internet would be too risky for anyone other than giant corporations. The liability to host users' speech would be far too high for anyone else.
    • vharuck 6y ago
      Definitely. If 230 gets repealed, and somebody who had a forum wants to keep running it, they might consult a lawyer for advice. And that lawyer would say, "Don't allow user-created content. It's not worth the risk." It only makes sense if the user content is the profit-generator and the forum owner ran the numbers and expects to still be profitable even after lawsuits. So no more hobby forums, YouTube comments (some are good), or internet access in libraries: >Kathleen R. v. City of Livermore, 87 Cal. App. 4th 684, 692 (2001).[136] The California Court of Appeal upheld the immunity of a city from claims of waste of public funds, nuisance, premises liability, and denial of substantive due process. The plaintiff's child downloaded pornography from a public library's computers, which did not restrict access to minors. The court found the library was not responsible for the content of the internet and explicitly found that section 230(c)(1) immunity covers governmental entities and taxpayer causes of action. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230
• makomk 6y ago
  What makes Section 230 a complicated and contentious issue isn't the actual details of the law - as you say, that's quite simple - it's the consequences of such a broad, powerful, simple, thing as protecting "interactive computer services" from almost all kinds of legal action for content created by others that they keep up, regardless of what they remove, with few caveats, across a vast swathe of causes for action, business models, moderation policies, etc. For example, suppose you're an online service Twitbook used by a vast swathe of the world to communicate, and you decide that you want to allow calls to murder politicians you dislike but not (obviously) ones you like. Section 230 gives you pretty good protection from liability over your decisions as to which political figures get threatened with murder. Probably even if one of your users gets inspired and puts a bullet in the head of someone you'd like to see dead. Or suppose you've got a nice legalized extortion racket seeking out negative claims about people or businesses, getting them to rank highly in Google, not allowing the original posters to remove them, and demanding money from the targets to take them down. Section 230 offers pretty much ironclad protection for your business model by making it nearly impossible to get a court order forcing you to take the content down, meaning you can ensure the only way to make it go away is to pay up, and you can even literally call the fee a charge to remove libellous or defamatory content and there's not a damn thing the court system will do about it. There's a long-running website Ripoff Report that has this as their business model, and they've won every case trying to get them to remove defamatory content without paying them money for the privilege thanks to Section 230. There's also plenty of imitators going after individuals, seeking out (say) claims they've cheated on their partners and charging money to remove them - again, solidly protected by Section 230.
  • gowld 6y ago
    Why wasn't backpage.com projected by section 230?
    • curryst 6y ago
      e(5) of Section 230 is a specific carve out that the protections don't apply to sex trafficking content. I believe they used that to argue that Backpage wasn't protected by section 230.
• TimPC 6y ago
  There is good reason to reform section 230. Right now courts are applying the liability so broadly that companies aren’t liable even after they are notified about illegal behaviours on their site. In a court case involving Grindr refusing to take down a profile created by someone’s ex-bf that was being used to harass him, their refusing to so even after contact by lawyers was protected under section 230 and the case was thrown out. I’d be all for a modified version of section 230 that required sites to have a contact email and made them liable if they don’t address certain issues in an appropriate time period. It’s also worth mentioning that before section 230 if you didn’t moderate you weren’t liable so in certain senses it’s a censorship bill rather than a free speech one since it protects removing speech. That being said I do understand the need to moderate sites and remove some content, hence my proposal of the modified version rather than a call for its elimination entirely.
  • eli 6y ago
    > a modified version of section 230 that required sites to have a contact email and made them liable if they don’t address certain issues in an appropriate time period. So recreate the DMCA Takedown process but for speech? Do you think the DMCA is working well for copyright holders and users? The abuse of this would be massive. Let's say I don't like the comments you wrote so I email the host of the forum they're on and say they're defamatory. Now the host has to decide if they are defamatory (which is often a tough call even for lawyers) and also weigh the risk that I might file a costly lawsuit anyway. Or they just delete the comment.
    • hajile 6y ago
      They always have the option of allowing everything and ignoring emails -- something the dcma doesn't offer.
  • curryst 6y ago
    Grindr didn't refuse to take them down; the ex-bf kept creating new ones. That's a whole different problem. Grindr claims they were monitoring for new profiles, but that some slipped through their checks. In that scenario, I don't know what a reasonable level of effort for Grindr to exert is. It seems infinitely unreasonable to make them liable for any failure; there is a determined person on the other end that will probably eventually find some way of adding spaces or using symbols instead of letters, or using weird UTF-8 symbols or something. I don't see Grindr as failing there; while they probably could have done more, they seem to have made a best faith effort to stop it. The police should have intervened and filed charges against the boyfriend for stalking and harassment. Even failing that, I would have filed a civil case so I could subpoena the logs from Grindr and used them as evidence in a restraining order. Grindr is not the appropriate party to resolve this. I don't call Ford when people drive their trucks like assholes. I don't call Glock when somebody shoots someone. If you're going to call Grindr, you might as well call their ISP and Google too, see if you can get the ISP to block Grindr or get Google to route Grinder to localhost. They're complicit in enabling this too. > Right now courts are applying the liability so broadly that companies aren’t liable even after they are notified about illegal behaviours on their site This, to a degree, makes sense. They haven't been notified about illegal behavior on their site, they have been notified of allegedly illegal behavior on their site. Grindr is well within their rights to say that they don't believe that the profile violates any laws. For example, it says that he attempted to file for a restraining order and was denied. So that court either found that what the ex-bf was doing wasn't illegal, or that he failed to meet the requirement of a preponderance of evidence. So he failed to convince a judge that his ex was more likely than not stalking him. Should Grindr be required to take action on a claim that is more likely false than true? > I’d be all for a modified version of section 230 that required sites to have a contact email and made them liable if they don’t address certain issues in an appropriate time period. That's fraught with issues. What counts as addressing the issue? Is it banning the profiles as people identify them? Is it banning the personal info from appearing in profiles? Do they have to hire a group of people to memorize all the bits of bad data, and check new profiles and profile updates for those snippets, as well as any clever encodings that a computer wouldn't recognize? What is an appropriate time period? Is it some flat period, like a week, regardless of what changes are required? Does it vary, and if so, who decides what's a reasonable amount of time? This is not to mention that literally none of this goes through a court, which is terrifying and exceptionally prone to abuse. Of course, it could go through a court, but we already have laws and remedies for this situation in court. Cases like that make it seem really cut and dry, like there would never be a grey area. Even ignoring cases of outright fraud, what do you do in situations where one side feels victimized but it doesn't actually meet any legal standards? Like if person A always replies and argues with person Bs tweets. When person B blocks person A, they make a new account. Person B says they feel harassed and wants to force Twitter to do something about it. Person A says that Twitter is a public forum, and that if people don't want other people to disagree, they should use a more private forum. It never goes further than that. No threats, no doxxing, no real life interactions. Person A is probably an asshole, sure, but I don't think section 230 grants you immunity from assholes. I don't think it counts as stalking or harassment either (though I could certainly be wrong, not a lawyer). Should we really allow Person B to force Twitter to do something without having a judge involved? I would really rather not give the Twitter lynchmobs yet another way to dispense their own vigilante justice.
• gowld 6y ago
  Are anonymous trolls "information content providers"? An easy fix is to say that an "information content provider" must be a legal person who is liable for their content. Then it's easy to find where the buck stops for a Tweet or a Rip-off Report or a Revenge Porn.
  • incompatible 6y ago
    Every HN profile must include a real name, verified by legal documents? I think they do that already in China.