Comment by nonethewiser
3 years ago
Exactly. There is a clear majority in the answers. Sure, there are edge cases, but they are edge cases.
But I also want to say this is a really cool website. I love how he used this experience to set the table for what is otherwise essentially a blog post. Very cool.
But to hone in a bit more:
> It was about content moderation. Specifically, some people think that there could be simple rules for Internet content that are easy to apply.
His experiment not only doesn't prove this because of the observation you made (there is a clear majority opinion), but also because the "simple rules" people want ARE simple in contrast to the current standard of assuming you need to be a moral authority. The supposed simple rules aren't simple because they avoid controversy. They are simple because they don't avoid controversy. They are minimal. Basically just take the stuff virtually everyone agrees on, or is illegal/possibly illegal. Yes, there are gray areas there. There are always gray areas. But the gray areas surrounding "we need to shape productive discourse" is a lot more controversial than the gray areas surrounding "is this legal?" Once you stop using moderation to implicitly endorse speech you aren't as responsible for anything that is said. This is the entire point of section 230.
And before someone says "well if you have offensive content then advertisers will leave," I want to point out that is not a content moderation problem. That is an advertiser attraction problem. If the goal is advertiser attraction then we are playing a completely different game and you should remove everything that is remotely controversial. Or consider that your business model is inherently bad for speech.
> Once you stop using moderation to implicitly endorse speech you aren't as responsible for anything that is said. This is the entire point of section 230.
Are you suggesting that section 230 is meant to discourage Internet intermediaries from moderation?
The original intent of this law was to stop requiring intermediaries to choose between adopting a passive conduit role and having legal responsibility for content. The legislators hoped that providing a general protection from liability for user-generated content would encourage more moderation by intermediaries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230#Background_and_pas...
That might not have been the most pro-speech policy option overall but it was notionally very pluralist (with different platforms potentially having very different standards, purposes, goals, rules, communities, etc.) and it did manage to temper the previous somewhat paradoxical incentives, as well as providing a lot of legal certainty to facilitate the creation of new platforms of various sizes and models.
Pretty much everyone on the Internet is frustrated by moderation and sees pathologies and biases of moderation, intermediaries putting their thumb on scales, and so on. On the other hand, what we haven't seen is the enormous volume of litigation against intermediaries that would occur without §230. I expect people would literally be suing Y Combinator over HN moderation decisions. I can think of HN moderation decisions that I really disagree with, but it's impossible for me to imagine that having had those turn into lawsuits would somehow have been better for anyone.
If you take moderation far enough you become a publisher
That's not true. As far as the law is concerned, users/providers are shielded so long as they don't take part in authorship. You be as despotic or biased as you want, and you're still not considered the publisher of content provided by another user/provider.
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Given that this is about moderation, I've ran a short experiment asking the first 7 questions to GPT 4 to test a theory: https://chat.openai.com/share/87c7df76-c693-4446-b8ce-817ac5...
It fully agrees with the majority interpretation in all cases despite the rule being minimal and requires taking the inferred intent into account. LLMs for machine moderation are probably rolling out very soon, I doubt Reddit and the like will even allow for human moderation in a few years (if prompt injection can be solved robustly enough).
The problem with having humans as rule breaking judges is that we all have our ever changing biases and motives. Most everyone has an experience with a power tripping mod deleting their post or comment because they had a bad day and needed to take out their anger on something. An LLM can parse these variable situations with ease and can also be tested for those biases. Since it'll never deviate from its training data it always acts as impartial as possible within the rules' limits.
Yes, let's have chatgpt-5 decide what I can or cannot write, what a capital idea.
I mean why not? Automoderator bots are already a thing on reddit and work reasonably well with just simple fuzzy string matching. If one can appeal to a human as a last resort when edge cases occur I don't really see a problem. If anything it'll have a few orders of magnitude less false positives.
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