Comment by bigfishrunning

There is a decent legal argument to be made that §230 doesn't immunize platforms for the speech of their algorithm, to the extent that said speech is different from the speech of the underlying content. (A simple, if absurd, example of this would be if I ran a web forum and then created a highlight page of all of the defamatory comments people posted, then I'm probably liable for defamation.)

The problem of course is that it's difficult to disentangle the speech of algorithmic moderation from the speech of the content being moderated. And the minor issue that the vast majority of things people complain about is just plain First Amendment-protected speech, so it's not like the §230 protections actually matter as the content isn't illegal in the first place.

I don't think we even need to go that far. Just remove protection for paid advertisements. It's absurd that Meta cannot be held liable for the ads they promote when a newspaper can be held liable if they were to publish the same ad.

How would you square that with a site like Hacker News, which has algorithms for showing user-submitted links and user-generated comments?

Really nice to see someone else bringing this up. Algorithmic editorial decisions are still editorial decisions. I think ultimately search and other forms of selective content surfacing should not have ever been exempt. They were never carriers. I appreciate that this would make the web as we know it unusable. I think failing to tackle this problem has will also make the web unusable, and in a worse way.

This seems the same as news organisations choosing which news to report on, but driven by user behaviour rather than the org's employees themselves.

> oddly enough the TikTok referred to here was to be shut down in the US. But then the executive branch ignored the law while it could organize handing the company over to Larry Ellison instead

Which should make people think twice when they call for government regulation on speech as a solution to content they don't want other people to see.

The more you give the government power to control speech, the more they'll use those laws to further their own interests.

There are people in this thread directly calling for us to strip protections from search engines and force them to shut down.

I think a lot of this discussion has become detached from reality and we’re just entertaining some people’s impossible fantasies about shutting down the internet and returning to the past.

Like TikTok?

At least in the US the government can't regulate speech (for the most part). But what we could do is regulate recommendation algorithms or other aspects of the overall design in a way that's generalized enough to be neutral in regards to any particular speech. And such regulations don't need to apply to any entity below some MAU or other metric.

Even just mandating interoperability would likely do since that would open up the floor to competitors. Many users are well aware of the issues but don't feel they have a viable alternative that satisfies their goals.

> I get regulating CSAM, calls for violence or really obvious bullying (serious ones like "kill yourself" to a kid)

I’ve reported videos that look like sexual exploitation, videos that call for violence and videos that promote hate (xyz people are cockroaches) and all I’ve gotten is that “it does not go against community guidelines” with a link to block the person who created them. So any concerns of “where do we draw the line” are in my opinion pointless because the bare minimum isn’t even being done.

I'm sorry but are you saying it's hard to figure out what to do so let's do nothing? Banning racist and sexist content is not a slippery slope. It's just banning racist and sexist content, slope is only slippery because the salivating mouths of these social platforms grease them.

Also, I don't think people are advocating censorship, they are advocating not promoting assholes. You can have your little blog and be racist on it all you want, but let's not give these people equivalent of nukes for communication.

All the more reason for regulation. If people catch on to the fact that they are being manipulated and abused by the platforms to "drive engagement" they might abandon them or spend less time on them. If the government regulates these platforms so that they are safer or at least less harmful people will feel better about using them giving the government a larger platform to use to control the masses.

In my experience the 60+ demographic have had far more damage done.

Technology, culture, legalization of pot, adtech, covid, there are a metric ton of factors that all had significant impact on both decreasing socialization and reduction in drinking. And lowering the birth rates, and the number of healthy relationships, healthy friendships, etc.

I'm for legalizing all drugs, regulating the sale, ensuring quality and purity, and educating the public. Cognitive liberty is sacred - but the dip in drinking has a whole lot of causes.

A healthier society would be more social and get out and drink more, I think.

Millennials love their weed, party drugs too, it took over Gen X drinking in some way.

But I find Zoomers to be rather tame in terms of drinking, smoking, drugs, unsafe sex, etc... Few of the traditional vices, really.

I'd wager how expensive it has gotten plus a year or two of lockdowns which lead to a whole generation of people not going out to get wasted as soon as they're legally allowed to had way more effect.

Oh, and weed being increasingly legal to consume.

Real life experience with alcoholics would at-best be constant over time, or be diminishing (since gen Z drinks less).

Also seems like the science on whether science communication actual changes behavior doesn't point towards it being much of a cause here.

As one of said generation, I would chalk it up to instant communication creating innumerable shallow remote relationships that significantly replace time spent with others in person.

>Science is a lagging indicator of reality

Tell me what the leading indicator of reality is then

Social media addiction is much deeper than nicotine addiction. And people still smoke, see Phillip Morris stock and earnings :)

I recently provided guidance to state legislators, with that guidance making its way into law in regards of balcony solar. If you don’t think that making law works, I would encourage you to get involved somewhere that means something to you.

It turns out that if you present as an honest, non-interested party, people will call you and ask you for your advice. I do admit that the ease of this is going to be a function of the people you are up against and the subject being regulated. My point of this comment is: default to action. “You can just do things.”

> Laws appear to have fallen out of fashion.

Laws are very much fashionable, but only for us. “Rules for thee but not for me” is what's in season right now.

Consuming social media doesn't have an inescapable negative impact on other people, unlike burning leaded fuel. In the same way that eating junk food doesn't. Should we ban junk food? What else do you want to ban from others just because it has a risk profile you personally don't feel comfortable with?

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I wonder where folks like this came from, and at what point did people who associate themselves with hacker culture decide that censorship is great.

The OG hackers thought of censorship as network damage that needed to be routed around.

People who support censorship always think of themselves as smarter than the rest. Dunning-Krueger however would suggest something different.

okay. go ahead and make "conspiracy theories" illegal.