[eli]

Pick any definition you like. If recommendation systems come with existential legal risks for a small company, then only the biggest companies can afford to run them.

Or think of it this way: How is Mastodon supposed to take on larger social networks without recommending people to follow? Should every Mastodon server operator be legally liable for recommending someone harmful?

[ericmay]

My definition would be that they're all bad and there is no good use for them because the end results are harmful - more spend/engagements I view in the same way I would "more smoking". Any algorithm or curation excluding perhaps based on latest or "most views" or something similar would be a recommendation as far as I'm concerned.

But I'm just not sure how or why online platforms get to have their cake and eat it too. If the NYTs publishes a story that eating Tidepods is healthy and encourages kids and parents to do so, they get sued. If Facebook creates an algorithm that causes the same or similar to happen they get a free pass. They either have to be a public speech platform where anyone can say anything as long as it isn't literally breaking the law, or they have to follow the same rules as other entities that curate content. If you want to say "why not both?" then that's fine but you have to apply that to all entities, not just online content.

[eli]

You don't use the algorithmically generated and ranked HN homepage? You scroll through pages and pages of every new submission?

If you said something libelous about me on HN, I can sue HN for publishing and promoting the comment?

A platform that "allows everything that isn't breaking the law" is a platform that is 99% spam.

[notafraudster]

I don't think there should be blanket immunity for anything simply because an algorithm did it. Let's just imagine there wasn't. Imagine that you could, in principle, sue a website over their promotion of illegal content. I would think on a fact-specific basis, HN would have a very good defence against liability even absent blanket immunity.

You could imagine the kind of elements that might matter for a fact pattern that would emerge from a deposition: revenue and size of website, proportion of website revenue directed towards moderation, percentage of requests that identify illegal material that are responded to, manner of response, tools provided to users, the types of content actually hosted on the site, nature of the algorithm itself, discussions that were had internally about access to harmful content. HN is a text-based website (which also mitigates the harm claim), it gets maybe in the orbit of a few hundred submissions a day, the vast majority of possible harm is when a submission is connected to a topic likely to cause legal issues, and in my experience such topics are typically flagged within a few minutes and removed quickly. There's no mechanism to directly communicate with users, there is no mechanism to follow users, there's no mechanism to change what you see on the front page based on what you clicked before. Everyone is exposed to the same content.

By contrast, thinking about the companies that are actually the target of these lawsuits I was at the TASM (Terrorism and Social Media) 2022 conference -- some of my research is adjacent to this but I've never done any work on terrorism and my social media work involves alt-tech stuff, not the big social media platforms -- where the keynotes were harm policy leads for Europe for Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, all of whom made it clear that their position was that it is incumbent on academics and government agencies to identify harmful content and work with social media, because every region has their own unique content challenges and it's not possible for Tech companies to handle those at a global scale. A question was asked of the panel that went something like "Meta was, as it admits, instrumental in spreading the violence-inciting messages that drove the anti-Rohingya pogroms in Myanmar. The defense is that Meta wasn't prepared for, or staffed for, detecting issues in a single small market, and things snowballed quickly. You could hire 100 full time content people in that country for the salary of a single person sitting on the panel or a single SWE, so how could resource constraints be the issue?" and the answer was "We're already devoting enough resources to this problem." I think that's an incredibly shitty answer to the question, and I think a deposition could surface exactly this kind of logic, and to me that would be a fact pattern that supports liability. I hope they get their pants sued off in every jurisdiction that allows it. It's clear an aversion to staffing is a huge part of the issue.

So from my perspective, I think the typical process for resolving civil liability + reasonable assumptions about how courts should interpret fact patterns is likely to get to outcomes I'm plenty happy with.

(In the two cases in front of SCOTUS right now it seems like the victims, who have basically no evidence connecting the perpetrators of the violence to the social media services used, would win: the argument seems to be of the form "some terrorist killed my family member, and some other terrorists got radicalized online, ipso facto social media is liable". I don't think that'd be a winning case with or without s.230)

[ericmay]

> If you said something libelous about me on HN, I can sue HN for publishing and promoting the comment?

Why is it different if a "newspaper" does it if HN is curating the content algorithmically? I'm honestly not sure what the difference is.

[warkdarrior]

If all that's allowed is "latest" or "most views", I will keep uploading my content to your platform and bot-voting/-viewing it to keep it at the top of everyone's feed.

[ericmay]

These are solvable problems - for example requiring registration before posting. But I'm not moved at all by the technical problem because the technical problem isn't what is in question, it's the promotion and curation of content algorithmically.

Either way I think we're going to see a big swing back to authoritative sources because the very technical problems you mention will be taken advantage of by new tools and so the already meaningless content will not even be generated by humans. The Internet in the sense of "publishing content" will be meaningless and unprofitable [1].

[1] Obviously there will exist use cases where this is not the case

[pixl97]

'registration', what does that mean exactly? Only people with government validated IDs are allowed to post in the internet in the US? This sounds strangely in conflict with the both the first amendment and the use of anonymous materials historically as is part of our national identity.

Really everything that you're saying doesn't have shit to do with authoritative sources, but authoritarian sources. If you're a big nice identified company, or you're a member of "the party" you get to post permitted information. If you're not, well, better learn how to post those pics of a your senator pulling some crap on the darknet.

[ericmay]

> 'registration', what does that mean exactly? Only people with government validated IDs are allowed to post in the internet in the US?

You can just register anonymously like you do on HN. Though for social media sites or similar having "verified human" seems like not just a good idea but ultimately the direction we'll go.

> Really everything that you're saying doesn't have shit to do with authoritative sources, but authoritarian sources.

You are really jumping the gun here so I'm not going to respond to your points here since I wasn't making those.