Comment by fc417fc802
4 days ago
By that logic no product regulation could ever exist because it restricts in some way the free expression of any corporation subject to it.
Obviously that's nonsense. Government bodies in the US are permitted to regulate the products traded on the market, at least within reason.
> the only reason the algorithm promotes things is because that person signaled that they were interested in it.
What point do you believe yourself to be making here? The only reason anyone shoots up heroin is because they want to. Or alternatively, someone can want a particular product without appreciating the toxic chemicals it happens to expose him to.
> By that logic no product regulation could ever exist because it restricts in some way the free expression of any corporation subject to it.
Except that this is case law, not something I'm pulling out of my ass. See Moody v. NetChoice, LLC, 603 U.S. ___ (2024), in which the court ruled that compiling and curating user-generated content into "a distinctive expressive offering" is protected editorial discretion, and that "the First Amendment offers protection when an entity engaging in expressive activity, including compiling and curating others' speech, is directed to accommodate messages it would prefer to exclude." The court did not rule on whether the same First Amendment protection extends to personalized curation decisions made algorithmically solely based on user behavior online without any reference to a site's own standards or guidelines. However, we cannot definitively say that the algorithms Facebook and co. use are not making decisions based on standards or guidelines of some kind, whether those be the community guidelines FB publishes or something else, because we don't know how they work internally, and they very well could be AI-driven with community guidelines in the prompt or something. Or they could be generic off-the-shelf recommender algorithms. Or something totally different. This bit TikTok in Anderson v. TikTok, where the third circuit court ruled that TikTok's "for you" feed was first-party expression and therefore not shielded by section 230, which is itself a massively misunderstood law of it's own.
Literally the only thing I am trying to illustrate is that "ban all the algorithmic feeds" is not as easy as you suggest, and the definitive research proving that they are harmful has yet to actually be found when meta-analysis is conducted[0][1]. The (far more) harmful thing is these platforms extremely lax moderation. Granted, moderation is impossible to truly do competently at scale, but still.
[0]: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/18/yet-another-massive-stud... (this one links to 6 other studies)
[1]: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/01/21/two-major-studies-125000...
I don't think the case law you're citing says what you claim it does.
> is directed to accommodate messages it would prefer to exclude.
That says speech can't be compeled, which is consistent with lots of past case law. That doesn't mean various forms of expression can't be incidentally restricted by regulation that exists for some other legitimate purpose.
Of course the court could decide that algorithmic feeds are a protected form of expression that product regulations can't directly target. But in doing so they would (IIUC) be recognizing them as a form of intentional editorial expression and thus their output would no longer (again IIUC) receive section 230 protection. That would presumably constitute a de facto ban due to the imposed liability.
I mean, sure, but the only reason the court didn't answer the question of whether algorithmic feeds were forms of speech was because the justices decided to take the easy way out and reject it on procedural grounds.