Lolllllll burn it down
This is 100% their most consistent position. McDonnell v US from 2016 was also a 9-0 overturned conviction and it was laughably blatant bribery in that case too. Pretty much if thereâs not a notary public present for a meeting between the official and the briber where the briber says the magic words âI am giving you this money to do X, this is a bribeâ and hands over a sack of cash with a literal $ on it and the official says âI accept this bribe and I am going to do X only because youâre giving me this sack of cashâ itâs fair game.
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I think Ted Stevens conviction also got overturned LOL
LAW
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a rare good decision.
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Reagan appointee!
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Interesting article: the law that courts frequently argue allows qualified immunity was actually passed in Congress with stronger wording than what got written down in federal law books. Pending âlol fuck youâ SCOTUSaments, this could change qualified immunity jurisprudence substantially.
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Could this be the first lol fuck you in American history? As in, âLol fuck you, Iâm not writing this part down.â
3/5s says âhiâ.
3/5âs was an enormous fuck you, but was it like an âLOL fuck you this law is not gonna work?â I would argue no, it was more of just some straight up empowering racists.
The Section 230 cases against Google & Twitter basically got punted, leaving the status quo in place:
I canât believe they even heard it. 230 goes poof, SPY goes down 10%+ that day imo. Entire business models disappear.
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Yea that would undermine the fabric of the internet lol
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Iâm coming around to changing my mind on section 230. The internet, and social media in particular, are not a town square, and they arenât a phone company. They use algorithms designed by people (aka, editorial decisions), to not just host speech but firehose you with whatever content they think youâll find most engaging.
A telephone call reaches one person, and you have to know their number. A town square can reach dozens or hundreds, but you donât get a customized town square of people who agree with you (or who otherwise promote your engagement to stay in the town square for hours every day). A town square canât amplify the loon in one square to meet up with the isolated loons from other squares into their own little fiefdom that reinforces their beliefs.
The downside, of course, is the censorship of the voices of the powerless and those who would speak against the company or its overseers in the government, but man, I am not sure we made a good trade.
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this is it
something like craigslist, which just has a bunch of posts in chronological order, would seem to be covered by 230. Even a twitter timeline that is just people you have explicitly opted into could still be 230-friendly assuming thereâs no algorithmic bubbling up of particularly âchosenâ content.
I appreciate this take, but I donât know that the analogies are particularly relevant or foundational. Like, the justification for section 230 isnât necessarily âwebsites should be treated like the phone companyâ, because like you said they are obviously different. Rather, it was passed in the 90s specifically to support the growth of the internet, recognizing the ways in which it is different:
Section 230 was developed in response to a pair of lawsuits against online discussion platforms in the early 1990s that resulted in different interpretations of whether the service providers should be treated as publishers or, alternatively, as distributors of content created by their users. Its authors, Representatives Christopher Cox and Ron Wyden, believed interactive computer services should be treated as distributors, not liable for the content they distributed, as a means to protect the growing Internet at the time.
You can imagine reforms or tweaks, but I donât know about looking at this and thinking we just straight-up got it wrong:
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, at its core, what makes the internet work; itâs why this site can exist, or why YouTube can exist.
The question of editorial decisions is interesting. These are the first two videos YouTube shows me:
These are videos Iâm interested in; if I had to broadly classify the content I watch on YT, itâs a.) cat videos (sometimes dogs too if theyâre very good dogs) b.) basketball content (biasing Warriors) c.) history videos mostly from this channel. Has this homepage above already broken Section 230 for trying to show me content it thinks is relevant? I feel like this is very harmless and what weâre really worried about here is if a Ben Shapiro video shows up.
Iâm of the opinion that Humanity isnât ready for the internet, we donât have the bullshit filters needed to not be sucked in by good stories. Shut it all down.
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The law doesnât do a good job with scale. Every content provider is targeting its content at the intended audience, however, prior to the algorithms this was a very general level of targeting. Today, itâs possible to individually target content to users, with is entirely different from someone putting Cat pictures into a Cat Fancier magazine.
I came to the conclusion a few days ago it just canât really âwork.â
take online news. itâs all click driven, so sensationalist content or misinformation to drive clicks is the capitalist incentive. how does one fix that? well, you could require funding them with tax money, but then that puts politicians in control of media. you could try regulating, but same problem.
the entire system just needs to burn
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YouTube isnât just hosting information generated by other people, though. They are making conscious decisions about what information to highlight and amplify. Book publishers are absolutely liable for the amplification of something someone else wrote. So is the NYT if they publish an e.g. libelous letter to the editor.
Sure, youtube curates what they think you want to see, or more precisely, what will keep you watching more YouTube videos. They donât feed you Shapiro because Shapiro wonât keep you engaged. Other people, theyâre deciding to amplify anti-vaxx, 9/11 truther, ISIS, etc. videos because it keeps those people engaged.
The argument not to hold a carrier liable for publishing content made by 3rd parties is if they are just passive hosts that arenât making decisions about what gets posted and what gets amplified, in contrast to a book publisher or the NYT which is absolutely making decisions about what they publish and what they amplify. E.g., telephone companies arenât making decisions about whoâs saying what on their phone networks. Theyâre just passive carriers. But do you think people would treat them differently if they had algorithms that fed you calls from ISIS a few times per day? Sure, a lot of people would just hang up, but theyâd also be able to reach a few more nut cases than they otherwise would have without that specific power to amplify ISIS to other people who otherwise would have gone unreached but for the amplification decision.
The notion that all these websites would cease to exist but for section 230 is corporate propaganda. The solution is obvious: if they are going to amplify certain messages due to them generating increased engagement, then they cannot do so in an amoral fashion that amplifies any message that generates increased engagement, but instead they must moderate the messages being amplified. This website is moderated, and it could exist in a world where websites were held liable for hosting or amplifying illegal content. There is potentially an issue of malicious nuisance lawsuits filed against small time websites to make the cost of defense against the lawsuits greater than the value the website provides, but thatâs potentially fixable issue with things like loser has to pay legal bills. Thatâs not an issue to multibillion dollar corporations who are whining about this because they want to save a few milly a year in content moderation salaries, not because theyâd forgo billions in revenue because they have to moderate content.
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I donât think itâs possible to reform or tweak this stuff in any meaningful way. You could require high level publishing of the suggestion algorithm but whatâs the point, we already know how it works.
The problem at its core of course is that content that invokes fear and hatred gets the most engagement. The end. How do you regulate that?