I really don’t like cases like this, nor do I like how much the legal system seems to be pushing “guilty by proxy” rulings for a lot of school shooting cases.
It just feels very very very dangerous and ’going to be bad’ to set this precedent where when someone commits an atrocity, essentially every person and thing they interacted with can be held accountable with nearly the same weight as if they had committed the crime themselves.
Obviously some basic civil responsibility is needed. If someone says “I am going to blow up XYZ school here is how”, and you hear that, yeah, that’s on you to report it. But it feels like we’re quickly slipping into a point where you have to start reporting a vast amount of people to the police en masse if they say anything even vaguely questionable simply to avoid potential fallout of being associated with someone committing a crime.
It makes me really worried. I really think the internet has made it easy to be able to ‘justifiably’ accuse almost anyone or any business of a crime if a person with enough power / the state needs them put away for a time.
I don’t think you understand the issue. I’m very disappointed to see that this is the top comment. This wasn’t an accident. These social media companies deliberately feed people the most upsetting and extreme material they can. They’re intentionally radicalizing people to make money from engagement.
They’re absolutely responsible for what they’ve done, and it isn’t “by proxy”, it’s extremely direct and deliberate. It’s long past time that courts held them liable. What they’re doing is criminal.
Proving this “intent to radicalize” in court is impossible. What evidence exists to back up your claim beyond a reasonable doubt?
The algorithms themselves. This decision opens the algorithms up to discovery and now we get to see exactly how various topics are weighted. These companies will sink or swim by their algorithms.
I do. I just very much understand the extent that the justice system will take decisions like this and utilize them to accuse any person or business (including you!) of a crime that they can then “prove” they were at fault for.
I dunno about social media companies but I quite agree that the party who got the gunman the gun should share the punishment for the crime.
Firearms should be titled and insured, and the owner should have an imposed duty to secure, and the owner ought to face criminal penalty if the firearm titled to them was used by someone else to commit a crime, either they handed a killer a loaded gun or they inadequately secured a firearm which was then stolen to be used in committing a crime, either way they failed their responsibility to society as a firearm owner and must face consequences for it.
If you lend your brother, who you know is on antidepressants, a long extension cord he tells you is for his back patio - and he hangs himself with it, are you ready to be accused of being culpable for your brothers death?
Did he also use it as improvised ammunition to shoot up the local elementary school with the chord to warrant it being considered a firearm?
I’m more confused where I got such a lengthy extension chord from! Am I an event manager? Do I have generators I’m running cable from? Do I get to meet famous people on the job? Do I specialize in fairground festivals?
Oh, it turns out an extension cord has a side use that isn’t related to its primary purpose. What’s the analogous innocuous use of a semiautomatic handgun?
Self defense? You don’t have to be a 2A diehard to understand that it’s still a legal object. What’s the “innocuous use” of a VPN? Or a torrenting client? Should we imprison everyone who ever sends a link about one of these to someone who seems interested in their use?
You’re deliberately ignoring the point that the primary use of a semiautomatic pistol is killing people, whether self-defense or mass murder.
Should you be culpable for giving your brother an extension cord if he lies that it is for the porch? Not really.
Should you be culpable for giving your brother a gun if he lies that he needs it for self defense? IDK the answer, but it’s absolutely not equivalent.
It is a higher level of responsibility, you know lives are in danger if you give them a tool for killing. I don’t think it’s unreasonable if there is a higher standard for loaning it out or leaving it unsecured.
“Sorry bro. I’d love to go target shooting with you, but you started taking Vynase 6 months ago and I’m worried if you blow your brains out the state will throw me in prison for 15 years”.
Besides, youre ignoring the point. This article isn’t about a gun, it’s about basically “this person saw content we didn’t make on our website”. You think that wont be extended to general content sent from a person to another? That if you send some pro-Palestine articles to your buddy and then a year or two later your buddy gets busted at an anti-Zionist rally and now you’re a felon because you enabled that? Boy, that would be an easy way for some hypothetical future administrations to control speech!!
You might live in a very nice bubble, but not everyone will.
So you need a strawman argument transitioning from loaning a weapon unsupervised to someone we know is depressed. Now it is just target shooting with them, so distancing the loan aspect and adding a presumption of using the item together.
This is a side discussion. You are the one who decided to write strawman arguments relating guns to extension cords, so I thought it was reasonable to respond to that. It seems like you’re upset that your argument doesn’t make sense under closer inspection and you want to pull the ejection lever to escape. Okay, it’s done.
The article is about a civil lawsuit, nobody is going to jail. Nobody is going to be able to take a precedent and sue me, an individual, over sharing articles to friends and family, because the algorithm is a key part of the argument.
Knowingly manipulating people into suicide is a crime and people have already been found guilty of doing it.
So the answer is obvious. If you knowingly encourage a vulnerable person to commit suicide, and your intent can be proved, you can and should be held accountable for manslaughter.
That’s what social media companies are doing. They aren’t loaning you extremist ideas to help you. That’s a terrible analogy. They’re intentionally serving extreme content to drive you into more and more upsetting spaces, while pretending that there aren’t any consequences for doing so.
This guy seems to have bought the gun legally at a gun store, after filling out the forms and passing the background check. You may be thinking of the guy in Maine whose parents bought him a gun when he was obviously dangerous. They were just convicted of involuntary manslaughter for that, iirc.
Yup, I was just addressing the point of tangential arrest, sometimes it is well justified.
Well you were talking about charging the gun owner if someone else commits a crime with the gun. That’s unrelated to this case where the shooter was the gun owner.
The lawsuit here is about radicalization but if we’re pursuing companies who do that, I’d start with Fox News.
This wasn’t just a content issue. Reddit actively banned people for reporting violent content too much. They literally engaged with and protected these communities, even as people yelled that they were going to get someone hurt.
I think the design of media products around maximally addictive individually targeted algorithms in combination with content the platform does not control and isn’t responsible for is dangerous. Such an algorithm will find the people most susceptible to everything from racist conspiracy theories to eating disorder content and show them more of that. Attempts to moderate away the worst examples of it just result in people making variations that don’t technically violate the rules.
With that said, laws made and legal precedents set in response to tragedies are often ill-considered, and I don’t like this case. I especially don’t like that it includes Reddit, which was not using that type of individualized algorithm to my knowledge.
Attempts to moderate away the worst examples of it just result in people making variations that don’t technically violate the rules.
The problem then becomes if the clearly defined rules aren’t enough, then the people that run these sites need to start making individual judgment calls based on…well, their gut, really. And that creates a lot of issues if the site in question could be held accountable for making a poor call or overlooking something.
The threat of legal repercussions hanging over them is going to make them default to the most strict actions, and that’s kind of a problem if there isn’t a clear definition of what things need to be actioned against.
Bullshit. There’s no slippery slope here. You act like these social media companies just stumbled onto algorithms. They didn’t, they designed these intentionally to drive engagement up.
Demanding that they change their algorithms to stop intentionally driving negativity and extremism isn’t dystopian at all, and it’s very frustrating that you think it is. If you choose to do nothing about this issue I promise you we’ll be living in a fascist nation within 10 years, and it won’t be an accident.
It’s the chilling effect they use in China, don’t make it clear what will get you in trouble and then people are too scared to say anything
Just another group looking to control expression by the back door
There’s nothing ambiguous about this. Give me a break. We’re demanding that social media companies stop deliberately driving negativity and extremism to get clicks. This has fuck all to do with free speech. What they’re doing isn’t “free speech”, it’s mass manipulation, and it’s very deliberate.
It’s incredibly ironic that you’re accusing people of an effort to control expression when that’s literally what social media has been doing since the beginning. They’re the ones trying to turn the world into a dystopia, not the other way around.
This is the real shit right here. The problem is that social media companies’ data show that negativity and hate keep people on their website for longer, which means that they view more advertisement compared to positivity.
It is human nature to engage with disagreeable topics moreso than agreeable topics, and social media companies are exploiting that for profit.
We need to regulate algorithms and force them to be open source, so that anybody can audit them. They will try to hide behind “AI” and “trade secret” excuses, but lawmakers have to see above that bullshit.
Unfortunately, US lawmakers are both stupid and corrupt, so it’s unlikely that we’ll see proper change, and more likely that we’ll see shit like “banning all social media from foreign adversaries” when the US-based social media companies are largely the cause of all these problems. I’m sure the US intelligence agencies don’t want them to change either, since those companies provide large swaths of personal data to them.
While this is true for Facebook and YouTube - last time I checked, reddit doesn’t personalise feeds in that way. It was my impression that if two people subscribe to the same subreddits, they will see the exact same posts, based on time and upvotes.
Then again, I only ever used third party apps and old.reddit.com, so that might have changed since then.
Mate, I never got the same homepage twice on my old reddit account. I dunno how you can claim that two people with identical subs would see the same page. That’s just patently not true and hasn’t been for years.
Quite simple, aniki. The feeds were ordered by hot, new, or top.
New was ORDER BY date DESC. Top was ORDER BY upvotes DESC. And hot was a slightly more complicated order that used a mixture of upvotes and time.
You can easily verify this by opening 2 different browsers in incognito mode and go to the old reddit frontpage - I get the same results in either. Again - I can’t account for the new reddit site because I never used it for more than a few minutes, but that’s definitely how they old one worked and still seems to.
It’s probably not true anymore, but at the time this guy was being radicalized, you’re right, it wasn’t algorithmically catered to them. At least not in the sense that it was intentionally exposing them to a specific type of content.
I suppose you can think of the way reddit works (or used to work) as being content agnostic. The algorithm is not aware of the sorts of things it’s suggesting to you, it’s just showing you things based on subreddit popularity and user voting, regardless of what it is.
In the case of YouTube and Facebook, their algorithms are taking into account the actual content and funneling you towards similar content algorithmically, in a way that is unique to you. Which means at some point their algorithm is acknowledging “this content has problematic elements, let’s suggest more problematic content”
(Again, modern reddit, at least on the app, is likely engaging in this now to some degree)
Reddit is the same thing. They intentionally enable and cultivate hostility and bullying there to drive up engagement.
But not algorithmically catered to the individual.
Which is even worse because more people see the bullying and hatred, especially when it shows up on a default sub.
And ironically the gun manufacturers or politicians who support lax gun laws are not included in these “nets”. A radicalized individual with a butcher knife can’t possibly do as much damage as one with a gun.
Yeah, but algorithmic delivery of radicalizing content seems kinda evil though.
This appears to be more the angle of the person being fed an endless stream of hate on social media and thus becoming radicalised.
What causes them to be fed an endless stream of hate? Algorithms. Who provides those algorithms? Social media companies. Why do they do this? To maintain engagement with their sites so they can make money via advertising.
And so here we are, with sites that see you viewed 65 percent of a stream showing an angry mob, therefore you would like to see more angry mobs in your feed. Is it any wonder that shit like this happens?
It’s also known to intentionally show you content that’s likely to provoke you into fights online
Which just makes all the sanctimonious screed about avoiding echo chambers a bunch of horse shit, because that’s not how outside digital social behavior works, outside the net if you go out of your way to keep arguing with people who wildly disagree with you, your not avoiding echo chambers, you’re building a class action restraining order case against yourself.
People have been fighting online long before algorithmic content suggestions. They may amplify it, but you can’t blame that on them entirely.
The truth is many people would argue and fight like that in real life if they could be anonymous.
I’ve long held this hunch that when people’s beliefs are challenged, they tend to ‘dig in’ and wind up more resolute. (I think it’s actual science and I learned that in a sociology class many years ago but it’s been so long I can’t say with confidence if that’s the case.)
Assuming my hunch is right (or at least right enough), I think that side of social media - driving up engagement by increasing discord also winds up radicalizing people as a side effect of chasing profits.
It’s one of the things I appreciate about Lemmy. Not everyone here seems to just be looking for a fight all the time.
You may have gotten this very belief from this comic
Systemic problems require systemic solutions.
Sure, and I get that for like, healthcare. But ‘systemic solutions’ as they pertain to “what constitutes a crime” lead to police states really quickly imo
The article is about lawsuits. Where are you getting this idea that anyone suggested criminalizing people? Stop putting words in other people’s mouths. The most that’s been suggested in this thread is regulating social media algorithms, my locking people up.
Drop the melodrama and paranoia. It’s getting difficult to take you seriously when you keep making shit up about other people’s positions.
I don’t believe you’ve had a lot of experience with the US legal system
Do you not think if someone encouraged a murderer they should be held accountable? It’s not everyone they interacted with, there has to be reasonable suspicion they contributed.
Also I’m pretty sure this is nothing new
I didn’t say that at all, and I think you know I didn’t unless you really didn’t actually read my comment.
I am not talking about encouraging someone to murder. I specifically said that in overt cases there is some common sense civil responsibility. I am talking about the potential for the the police to break down your door because you Facebook messaged a guy you’re friends with what your favorite local gun store was, and that guy also happens to listen to death metal and take antidepressants and the state has deemed him a risk factor level 3.
I must have misunderstood you then, but this still seems like a pretty clear case where the platforms, not even people yet did encourage him. I don’t think there’s any new precedent being set here
Rulings often start at the corporation / large major entity level and work their way down to the individual. Think piracy laws. At first, only giant, clear bootlegging operations were really prosecuted for that, and then people torrenting content for profit, and then people torrenting large amounts of content for free - and now we currently exist in an environment where you can torrent a movie or whatever and probably be fine, but also if the criminal justice system wants to they can (and have) easily hit anyone who does with a charge for tens of thousands of dollars or years of jail time.
Will it happen to the vast majority of people who torrent media casually? No. But we currently exist in an environment where if you get unlucky enough or someone wants to punish you for it enough, you can essentially have this massive sentence handed down to you almost “at random”.
Depends on what you mean by “encouraged”. That is going to need a very precise definition in these cases.
And the point isn’t that people shouldn’t be held accountable, it’s that there are a lot of gray areas here, we need to be careful how we navigate them. Irresponsible rulings or poorly implemented laws can destabilize everything that makes the internet worthwhile.
Everyone on lemmy who makes guillotine jokes will enjoy their life sentence I’m sure
Is there currently a national crisis of Jacobins kidnapping oligarchs and beheading them in public I am unaware of?
No
Unfortunately
Literally no one suggested that end users should be arrested for jokes on the internet. Fuck off with your attempts at trying to distract from the real issue.
I think the distinction here is between people and businesses. Is it the fault of people on social media for the acts of others? No. Is it the fault of social media for cultivating an environment that radicalizes people into committing mass shootings? Yes. The blame here is on the social medias for not doing more to stop the spread of this kind of content. Because yes even though that won’t stop this kind of content from existing making it harder to access and find will at least reduce the number of people who will go down this path.
I agree, but I want to clarify. It’s not about making this material harder to access. It’s about not deliberately serving that material to people who weren’t looking it up in the first place in order to get more clicks.
There’s a huge difference between a user looking up extreme content on purpose and social media serving extreme content to unsuspecting people because the company knows it will upset them.
Is it the fault of social media for cultivating an environment that radicalizes people into committing mass shootings? Yes.
Really? Then add videogames and heavy metal to the list. And why not most organized religions? Same argument, zero sense. There’s way more at play than Person watches X content = person is now radicalized, unless we’re talking about someone with severe cognitive deficit.
And since this is the US… perhaps add easy access to guns? Nah, that’s totally unrelated.
“Person watches X creative and clearly fictional content” is not analogous in any way to “person watches X video essay crafted to look like a documentary, but actually just full of lies and propaganda”
Don’t be ridiculous
So it’s the severe cognitive deficit. Ok. Watching anything inherently bad and thinking it’s ok to do so becauses it seems legit… that’s ridiculous.
I mean, yes. People are stupid. That’s why we have safety regulations. This court case is about a lack of safety regulations.
Nah. This isn’t guilt by association
In her decision, the judge said that the plaintiffs may proceed with their lawsuit, which claims social media companies — like Meta, Alphabet, Reddit and 4chan — ”profit from the racist, antisemitic, and violent material displayed on their platforms to maximize user engagement,”
Which despite their denials the actually know: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-knew-radicalized-users-rcna3581
Also worth remembering, this opens up avenues for lawsuits on other types of “harm”.
We have states that have outlawed abortion. What do those sites do when those states argue social media should be “held accountable” for all the women who are provided information on abortion access through YouTube, Facebook, reddit, etc?
I just would like to show something about Reddit. Below is a post I made about how Reddit was literally harassing and specifically targeting me, after I let slip in a comment one day that I was sober - I had previously never made such a comment because my sobriety journey was personal, and I never wanted to define myself or pigeonhole myself as a “recovering person”.
I reported the recommended subs and ads to Reddit Admins multiple times and was told there was nothing they could do about it.
I posted a screenshot to DangerousDesign and it flew up to like 5K+ votes in like 30 minutes before admins removed it. I later reposted it to AssholeDesign where it nestled into 2K+ votes before shadow-vanishing.
Yes, Reddit and similar are definitely responsible for a lot of suffering and pain at the expense of humans in the pursuit of profit. After it blew up and front-paged, “magically” my home page didn’t have booze related ads/subs/recs any more! What a totally mystery how that happened /s
The post in question, and a perfect “outing” of how Reddit continually tracks and tailors the User Experience specifically to exploit human frailty for their own gains.
Yeah this happens a lot more than people think. I used to work at a hotel, and when the large sobriety group got together yearly, they changed bar hours from the normal hours, to as close to 24/7 as they could legally get. They also raised the prices on alcohol.
Its not reddit if posts don’t get nuked or shadowbanned by literal sitewide admins
Yes I was advised in the removal notice that it had been removed by the Reddit Administrators so that they could keep Reddit “safe”.
I guess their idea of “safe” isn’t 4+ million users going into their privacy panel and turning off exploitative sub recommendations.
Idk though I’m just a humble bird lawyer.
What about shutting down the whole internet?
Sweet, I’m sure this won’t be used by AIPAC to sue all the tech companies for causing October 7th somehow like unrwa and force them to shutdown or suppress all talk on Palestine. People hearing about a genocide happening might radicalize them, maybe we could get away with allowing discussion but better safe then sorry, to the banned words list it goes.
This isn’t going to end in the tech companies hiring a team of skilled moderators who understand the nuance between passion and radical intention trying to preserve a safe space for political discussion, that costs money. This is going to end up with a dictionary of banned and suppressed words.
This is going to end up with a dictionary of banned and suppressed word
Do you have some examples?
It’s already out there. For example you can’t use the words “Suicide” or “rape” or “murder” in YouTube, TikTok etc. even when the discussion is clearly about trying to educate people. Heck, you can’t even mention Onlyfans on Twitch…
Heck, you can’t even mention Onlyfans on Twitch…
They don’t like users mentioning their direct competition
Plus more demands for brackdoors in encryption.
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Judge hasn’t ruled yet, this was just them saying the case has some merit and won’t be dismissed. This will go to trial, after which the judge will make their ruling.
Reading comprehension is important. As is a highschool level understanding of how our legal system works.
What is it with libs and their inability to understand what the term “radicalize” mean?
It’s really simple. The white supremacist content this little alt-right child terrorist was watching wasn’t radical - it was reactionary. Ie, right-wing and therefore anti-radical.
Come on libs, tell me… is this really so hard to get?
Radical politics denotes the intent to transform or replace the fundamental principles of a society or political system, often through social change, structural change, revolution or radical reform.[1] The process of adopting radical views is termed radicalisation.
The word radical derives from the Latin radix (“root”) and Late Latin rādīcālis (“of or pertaining to the root, radical”). Historically, political use of the term referred exclusively to a form of progressive electoral reformism, known as Radicalism, that had developed in Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries. **However, the denotation has changed since its 18th century coinage to comprehend the entire political spectrum, **though retaining the connotation of “change at the root”.[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_politics
Seems like the word fits for his politics.
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If you believe that white supremacy is a fundamental principle of society then I suppose that yes, such a person would not have been “radicalized” from that perspective.
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I followed your reasoning back to it’s origin and agreed that your premise leads to your conclusion. Not sure why that warranted sarcasm and insult.
Whelp. The inbreeding has gotten this one. Sit down before you pop an embolism.
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Suck on an unwashed sock, you puppet.
Oh look… a white supremacist has shown up.
Tonight we investigate the hacker known as 4chan. More at 9.
I gave up reporting on major sites where I saw abuse. Stuff that if you said that in public, also witnessed by others, you’ve be investigated. Twitter was also bad for responding to reports with “this doesnt break our rules” when a) it clearly did and b) probably a few laws.
I gave up after I was told that people DMing me photographs of people committing suicide was not harassment but me referencing Yo La Tengo’s album “I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass” was worthy of a 30 day ban
I remember one time somebody tweeted asking what the third track off Whole Lotta Red and I watched at least 50 people get perma’d before my eyes.
The third track is named Stop Breathing.
I TAKE MY SHIRT OFF AND ALL THE HOES STOP
BREATHIN’accessing their Twitter accounts WHEH? 🧛♂️🦇🩸sLatt! +*
On youtube I had a persistent one who only stopped threatening to track me down and kill me (for a road safety video) when I posted the address of a local police station and said “pop in, any time!”
Laws vary between countries. A lot of stuff that doesn’t break US countries will ersily break the laws of multiple european countries.
That’s true, but a lotnof things are illegal eeverywhere. Sexual Harassment or death treads will get you a lawsuit in probably every single country of the world.
Lawsuits are for civil cases. If someone breaks a law, they’re charged by authorities at their discretion.
Laws against threats to kill, rape and assault tend to be pretty constant across the world… 🤷♂️
Goddamn right they do. Meta should be sued to death for the genocides too.
Platforms should be held responsible for the content their users publish on them, full stop.
So if some random hacker takes over your network connection and publishes illegal content which then leads back to you, you should be held responsible. It’s your platform after all.
If it’s your server, then yes you should have responsibility with how you deal with said content.
How much of a responsibility? Is a token effort enough or should you be charged with a crime for not trying hard enough?
Content creators should be held responsible for their content. Platforms are mere distributors, in general terms, otherwise you’re blaming the messenger.
Specific to social media (and television) yes, they bank on hate, it’s known - so don’t use them or do so with that ever dwindling human quality called critical thinking. Wanting to hold them accountable for murder is just dismissing the real underlying issues, like unsupervised impressionable people watching content, easy access to guns, human nature itself, societal issues…
Then user generated content completely disappears.
Without the basic protection of section 230, it’s not possible to allow users to exist or interact with anything. I’m not sure you could even pay for web hosting without it.
Are the platforms guilty or are the users that supplied the radicalized content guilty? Last I checked, most of the content on YouTube, Facebook and Reddit is not generated by the companies themselves.
most of the content on YouTube, Facebook and Reddit is not generated by the companies themselves
Its their job to block that content before it reaches an audience, but since thats how they make their money, they dont or wont do that. The monetization of evil is the problem, those platforms are the biggest perpetrators.
Its their job to block that content before it reaches an audience
The problem is (or isn’t, depending on your perspective) that it is NOT their job. Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit are private companies that have the right to develop and enforce their own community guidelines or terms of service, which dictate what type of content can be posted on their platforms. This includes blocking or removing content they deem harmful, objectionable, or radicalizing. While these platforms are protected under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which provides immunity from liability for user-generated content, this protection does not extend to knowingly facilitating or encouraging illegal activities.
There isn’t specific U.S. legislation requiring social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit to block radicalizing content. However, many countries, including the United Kingdom and Australia, have enacted laws that hold platforms accountable if they fail to remove extremist content. In the United States, there have been proposals to amend or repeal Section 230 of CDA to make tech companies more responsible for moderating the content on their sites.
this protection does not extend to knowingly facilitating or encouraging illegal activities.
if it’s illegal to encourage illegal activities it’s illegal to build an algorithm that automates encouraging illegal activities
Repealing Section 230 would actually have the opposite effect, and lead to less moderation as it would incentivize not knowing about the content in the first place.
I can’t see that. Not knowing about it would be impossible position to maintain since you would be getting reports. Now you might say they will disable reports which they might try but they have to do business with other companies who will require that they do. Apple isn’t going to let your social media app on if people are yelling at Apple about the child porn and bomb threats on it, AWS will kick you as well, even Cloudflare might consider you not worth the legal risk. This has already happened multiple times even with section 230 providing a lot of immunity to these companies. Without that immunity they would be even more likely to block.
The argument could be made (and probably will be) that they promote those activities by allowing their algorithms to promote that content. Its’s a dangerous precedent to set, but not unlikely given the recent rulings.
Yeah i have made that argument before. By pushing content via user recommended lists and auto play YouTube becomes a publisher and meeds to be held accountable
Not how it works. Also your use of “becomes a publisher” suggests to me that you are misinformed - as so many people are - that there is some sort of a publisher vs platform distinction in Section 230. There is not.
Oh no i am aware of that distinction. I just think it needs to go away and be replaced.
Currently sec 230 treats websites as not responsible for user generated content. Example, if I made a video defaming someone I get sued but YouTube is in the clear. But if The New York Times publishes an article defaming someone they get sued not just the writer.
Why? Because NYT published that article but YouTube just hosts it. This publisher platform distinction is not stated in section 230 but it is part of usa law.
This is frankly bizarre. I don’t understand how you can even write that and reasonably think that the platform hosting the hypothetical defamation should have any liability there. Like this is actually a braindead take.
Any precedent here regardless of outcome will have significant (and dangerous) impact, as the status quo is already causing significant harm.
For example Meta/Facebook used to prioritize content that generates an angry face emoji (over that of a “like”) - - as it results in more engagement and revenue.
However the problem still exists. If you combat problematic content with a reply of your own (because you want to push back against hatred, misinformation, or disinformation) then they have even more incentiive to show similar content. And they justify it by saying “if you engaged with content, then you’ve clearly indicated that you WANT to engage with content like that”.
The financial incentives as they currently exist run counter to the public good
is the pusher guilty? last time I checked he didn’t grow the poppies or process them into heroin.
That’s why we have separate charges for drug manufacturing and distribution.
Those sites determine what they promote. Such sites often promote extreme views as it gets people to watch or view the next thing. Facebook for instance researched this outcome, then ignored that knowledge.
Good. No quarter for fascists, violent racist or their enablers.
Conspiracy for cash isn’t a free speech issue.
for fascists, violent racist or their enablers.
Take a good long look in the mirror (and a dictionary printed before 2005) before you say things like this.
Fuck off, symp.
Glow harder.
They’re appealing the denial of motion to dismiss huh? I agree that this case really doesn’t have legs but I didn’t know that was an interlocutory appeal that they could do. They’d win in summary judgement regardless.
I don’t understand the comments suggesting this is “guilty by proxy”. These platforms have algorithms designed to keep you engaged and through their callousness, have allowed extremist content to remain visible.
Are we going to ignore all the anti-vaxxer groups who fueled vaccine hesitancy which resulted in long dead diseases making a resurgence?
To call Facebook anything less than complicit in the rise of extremist ideologies and conspiratorial beliefs, is extremely short-sighted.
“But Freedom of Speech!”
If that speech causes harm like convincing a teenager walking into a grocery store and gunning people down is a good idea, you don’t deserve to have that speech. Sorry, you’ve violated the social contract and those people’s blood is on your hands.
“But freedom of speech”
If that speech causes harm like convincing a teenager walking into a grocery store and gunning people down is a good idea, you don’t deserve to have that speech.
In Germany we have a very good rule for this(its not written down, but that’s something you can usually count onto). Your freedom ends, where it violates the freedom of others. Examples for this: Everyone has the right to live a healthy life and everyone has the right to walk wherever you want. If I now take my right to walk wherever to want to cause a car accident with people getting hurt(and it was only my fault). My freedom violated the right that the person who has been hurt to life a healthy life. That’s not freedom.
In Canada, they have an idea called “right to peace”. It means that you can’t stand outside of an abortion clinic and scream at people because your right to free speech doesn’t exceed that person’s right to peace.
I don’t know if that’s 100% how it works so someone can sort me out, but I kind of liked that idea
Very reasonable, close to the “Golden Rule” concept of being excellent to each other
This may seem baseless, but I have seen this from years of experience in online forums. You don’t have to take it seriously, but maybe you can relate. We have seen time and time again that if there is no moderation then the shit floats to the top. The reason being that when people can’t post something creative or fun, but they still want the attention, they will post negative. It’s the loud minority, but it’s a very dedicated loud minority. Let’s say we have 5 people and 4 of them are very creative time and funny, but 1 of them complains all the time. If they make posts to the same community then there is a very good chance that the one negative person will make a lot more posts than the 4 creative types.
What about youtube? That had actually paid those people to spread their sick ideas, making the world a worst place and getting rich while doing it.
Ok…don’t complain to me later when the thing you like gets taken down.
Not just “remain visible” - actively promoted. There’s a reason people talk about Youtube’s right-wing content pipeline. If you start watching anything male-oriented, Youtube will start slowly promoting more and more right-wing content to you until you’re watching Ben Shaprio and Andrew Tate
I got into painting mini Warhammer 40k figurines during covid, and thought the lore was pretty interesting.
Every time I watch a video, my suggested feed goes from videos related to my hobbies to entirely replaced with red pill garbage. The right wing channels have to be highly profitable to YouTube to funnel people into, just an endless tornado of rage and constant viewing.
The algorithm is, after all, optimized for nothing other than advertisements/time period. So long as the algorithm believes that a video suggestion will keep you on the website for a minute more, it will suggest it. I occasionally wonder about the implications of one topic leading to another. Is WH40k suggested the pipeline by demographics alone or more?
Irritation at suggestions was actually what originally led me to invidious. I just wanted to watch a speech without hitting the “____ GETS DUNKED ON LIKE A TINY LITTLE BITCH” zone. Fuck me for trying to verify information.
One thing to consider is that conservatives are likely paying for progressives to see their content, and geeks tend to have liberal views and follow the harm principle without many conditions.
Otherwise, it really shows the demographics of the people who play Warhammer. Before my sister transitioned, she played Warhammer and was a socialist but had a lot of really wehraboo interests. She has been talking about getting back into it, but she passes really well and imagines how it would go with the neckbeards.
it legit took youtube’s autoplay about half an hour after I searched “counting macros” to bring me to american monarchist content
Oh are we doing kings now?
Vote for me for King, I’ll make sure there’s a taco truck on every corner.
I’ll vote for you if you make me the Marquess of Michigan
… Deal. But I reserve the right to turn the upper peninsula in to my own personal resort.
Deal, but Michigan gets Cleveland then. I feel like Cleveland for the UP is a fair trade
YouTube is really bad about trying to show you right wing crap. It’s overwhelming. The shorts are even worse. Every few minutes there’s some new suggestion for some stuff that is way out of the norm.
Tiktok doesn’t have this problem and is being attacked by politicians?
So, I can see a lot of problems with this. Specifically the same problems that the public and regulating bodies face when deciding to keep or overturn section 230. Free speech isn’t necessarily what I’m worried about here. Mostly because it is already agreed that free speech is a construct that only the government is actually beholden to. Message boards have and will continue to censor content as they see fit.
Section 230 basically stipulates that companies that provide online forums (Meta, Alphabet, 4Chan etc) are not liable for the content that their users post. And part of the reason it works is because these companies adhere to strict guidelines in regards to content and most importantly moderation.
Section 230©(2) further provides “Good Samaritan” protection from civil liability for operators of interactive computer services in the good faith removal or moderation of third-party material they deem “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.”
Reddit, Facebook, 4Chan et all do have rules and regulations they require their users to follow in order to post. And for the most part the communities on these platforms are self policing. There just aren’t enough paid moderators to make it work otherwise.
That being said, the real problem is that this really kind of indirectly challenges section 230. Mostly because it very barely skirts around whether the relevant platforms can themselves be considered publishers, or at all responsible for the content the users post and very much attacks how users are presented with content to keep them engaged via algorithms (which is directly how they make their money).
Even if the lawsuits fail, this will still be problematic. It could lead to draconian moderation of what can be posted and by whom. So now all race related topics regardless of whether they include hate speech could be censored for example. Politics? Censored. The discussion of potential new laws? Censored.
But I think it will be worse than that. The algorithm is what makes the ad space these companies sell so valuable. And this is a direct attack on that. We lack the consumer privacy protections to protect the public from this eventuality. If the ad space isn’t valuable the data will be. And there’s nothing stopping these companies from selling user data. Some of them already do. What these apps do in the background is already pretty invasive. This could lead to a furthering of that invasive scraping of data. I don’t like that.
That being said there is a point I agree with. These companies literally do make their algorithm addictive and it absolutely will push content at users. If that content is of an objectionable nature, so long as it isn’t outright illegal, these companies do not care. Because they do gain from it monetarily.
What we actually need is data privacy protections. Holding these companies accountable for their algorithms is a good idea. But I don’t agree that this is the way to do that constructively. It would be better to flesh out 230 as a living document that can change with the times. Because when it was written the Internet landscape was just different.
What I would like to see is for platforms to moderate content posted and representing itself as fact. We don’t see that nearly enough on places like reddit. Users can post anything as fact and the echo chambers will rally around it if they believe it. It’s not really incredibly difficult to radicalise a person. But the platforms aren’t doing that on purpose. The other users are, and the algorithms are helping them.
Moderation is already draconian, interact with any gen Z and you gonna know what goon, corn, unalive, (crime) in Minecraft, actually mean.
These aren’t slangs, this is like a second language developed to evade censorship from those platforms, things will only get worse.
