Posted by randycupertino 1 day ago
"If you need info on people at Harvard just ask - people just submitted it, I don't know why. They 'trust me', dumb fucks"
"I'm going to fuck them [Winklevoss], probably in the ear"
"You can be unethical and legal and that's how I live my life haha"
Making each of these liable really makes it easy to destroy your competition or enemies - commit crime via such methods, they suffer.
This is not true in the case where the newspaper knows it is a scam, right? So as soon as Facebook says "we've reviewed this scam ad you notified us of, but found it complies with our terms and conditions", they're pretty clearly knowingly participating.
Why continue to simply not understand law then get upset when, well, you don’t understand law, or the claims you’re making?
The larger the company, the larger the obligation they have to be a good citizen.
talking about morality and obligation in the context of meta, one of the most vile and evil corporations ever is not going to get us anywhere
[0] https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
The concerned is one of consistency in how media is regulated. E.g. Facebook, is the worlds largest media company, and it truly acts and behaves as a publisher now. It acquires its content from an army of paid and unpaid providers. They may be individuals, often they are influencers, often they may be nefarious agents and companies. It then decides how to place that content in it's "publication", which just happens to be an app and website. It goes out and tells the market, "I have this great publication in which you can place ads!". It then sells ads to those people, and makes a decision on how to place those advertisements inside its publication alongside that content that it acquired.
So how is it not a publisher? And why should it be regulated to any kind of different standard from other publishers?
If Section 230 were gone tomorrow, it would likely only be the Facebooks of the world who would survive, as only they could afford the lawyers necessary to fend off frivolous defamation lawsuits. No sane person would run a free web forum where they agree to be considered the “publisher” and therefore the liability for anything some rando posts.
Certainly I think there is a case that could be argued that when a web site says they explicitly screen and approve every piece of content, which as far as I know is what these ad tech companies claim to do with their ads, that it does create a duty of care which should not exist for UGC which is approved and moderated later. But I’m not currently aware of anyone arguing this point in court. Certainly that would be the thing to do first. Otherwise all these knee-jerk “reform S230” remarks are advocating for solving a cockroach infestation by dropping nuclear bombs on the city.
Therefore you could save all your other questions and statements.
Legal definitions can should change in order to keep up with society and technology.
It’s nuts how many people simply don’t read or think.
Walmart can say, for example, they know they’ll lose 3B to theft. That doesn’t mean they are wanting it, or allowing it, or know exactly which item will be stolen when and where. It means, given their scale, and from evidence they gather after the fact, this is an estimate of what happens when they have so many locations.
Now go read carefully, and don’t make stuff up about what you read, and think about the facts presented.
Publisher, in the legal sense, has a long history, and content providers are not that any more the the word arm in the legal sense means human arms.
I wish people would simply learn to read a little law instead of routinely not understanding simple concepts.
Your analogies don’t hold. There’s no act of content reproduction (the essence of publication), as there is with the examples I provided. DMCA is about copyrightable subject matter.
So how about you knock it off with the attitude?
I’m guessing Meta and the public both have attorneys, and I suspect all those attorneys also know the answer.
It's an interesting question as to whether Meta's act of selective republication of others' content constitutes its own content. This matter hasn't been adjudicated; I expect it will be in the fullness of time.
Parties and their attorneys disagree on legal and factual questions all the time. Meta has a position; others may differ. These disagreements are why we have a dispute resolution system (i.e., the courts) in the first place.
I'd emphasize that the scummiest sites with zero moderation never needed Section 230! Section 230 is what allows you to have some moderation (e.g. banning spammers) without suddenly becoming entirely liable for anything that passes the filter.
Blindly reverting Section 230 means eliminating that moderate position, splintering sites into:
1. Ones that abandon moderation entirely in favor of chaos. Maybe you can salvage something by giving opt-in filtering tools to individuals, but you'll still have the problem of someone using your site to store ten terabytes of the Bee Movie.
2. Ones that demand participants sign a serious legal document promising to pay for any problems before they can submit anything.
3. Ones which remove almost all expressive ability, beyond narrow things like like/upvote features.
If you're earning almost 200 billion dollars a year directly from the posting of a certain type of content, you can afford basic moderation to avoid obvious scams and fraud.
For example, suppose someone pays $/month for Cubic Zirconia Membership Tier on a site that boosts their posts over the hoi polloi.
That person makes a post hyping up their company or product with a link. Isn't that also a "paid advertisement", just with a different payment scheme? What happens if their product is a scam or otherwise legally-problematic? If gets Section 230 protection, how can we prevent sites/advertisers from abusing the new definition?
I could LLM this up but eh. It won't actually convince Googlers to do the right thing so it'll just stay a terrible idea.
I can't remember the last time I saw an ad on instagram that wasn't some kind of scam.