Section 230 needs an update. It needs to be made clear that hosing speech is not a liability.
"Recommending" speech with a black box algorithm that the user can't control or select IS a liability.

I'm usually a big fan of the EFF, but it's wrong on this one. If you decentralize to the limit -- i.e., such that each user is running their own instance for themselves -- it becomes okay for the service to become liable for the user's speech because the user and the service owner are one in the same. In reality, (extremely) federated social media is the only kind that can survive without Section 230 and thus repealing it entirely would be a win for the Fediverse.

(You could argue "but users won't go to the trouble of running their own instance," but to that I'd say "they will if the law doesn't give them any other choice, short of not participating at all.")

I was watching the bipartisan senate hearing on 230. Even Ted Cruz, and every witness there, said 230 should exist, but it needs AMENDED! And they want it to include AI companies. Meaning they'll be responsible for the content that users create.

I did a reacts video on this for folks that ate interested:

https://tubefree.org/w/aKkLkyiz8Spf2csNfgUkdK

Liability or Deniability? Platform Power as Section 230 Turns 30

' Upon announcing the hearing, Sen. Cruz said: “Big Tech—the most powerful companies on Earth—can exercise monopoly power to make views they dislike disappear and that should scare everyone. When it comes to viewpoint suppression, however, repealing section 230 might increase censorship. I look forward to hearing from our witnesses and discussing possible reforms to section 230 so online platforms are a free and open marketplace for ideas.” '

For those unaware

Section 230 says

"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."

Which is a long way to say that no one except the person who published something can be held liable and/or guilty for whatever they have published.

Thank for sharing, interesting article :)

I was watching the bipartisan senate hearing on 230. Even Ted Cruz, and every witness there, said 230 should exist, but it needs AMENDED! And they want it to include AI companies. Meaning they’ll be responsible for the content that users create.

I did a reacts video on this for folks that ate interested:

https://tubefree.org/w/aKkLkyiz8Spf2csNfgUkdK

Liability or Deniability? Platform Power as Section 230 Turns 30

' Upon announcing the hearing, Sen. Cruz said: “Big Tech—the most powerful companies on Earth—can exercise monopoly power to make views they dislike disappear and that should scare everyone. When it comes to viewpoint suppression, however, repealing section 230 might increase censorship. I look forward to hearing from our witnesses and discussing possible reforms to section 230 so online platforms are a free and open marketplace for ideas.” '

For all I respect the EFF hugely, isn't this just a US problem, as the world shifts away, the internet routes around the disruption and decentralization makes 230 a moot point for the rest of the world's open social web. Big Tech strengthening it's grip in the US will likely be a sand slipping through fingers moment as people jump ship.

A far greater threat IMO is de-anonymization via 'age restriction' laws, so appealing to governments world wide, so chilling of free speech, here's hoping that's also a sand slipping moment...

One issue I have with the EFF currently is that I personally believe that section 230 probably shouldn't protect algorithmic (as in, personalized or AI based) recommendation systems that go beyond rudimentary data sorting unless the training data for these systems are open source (and, therefore, auditable by lawyers or the government).

My only reason for mentioning this is to bounce off a discussion that Jon Stewart had with EFF rep Cindy Cohn in which the discussion resulted in the debate to what limits could be in place for recommendation systems. The interview is fascinating so you should watch it anyway, regardless of which side you take.

However, the EFF seems to think that recent attacks to Facebooks' ability to target vulnerable teens with targeted advertisements or content that increase self-shaming should be covered under section 230 based on that interview alone, arguing that the California lawsuit was a step in the wrong direction for Internet rights -- however, I disagree with this assessment and I think that, ultimately, putting restrictions on AI recommendation systems will actually help correct injustice in the current social media landscape for two key reasons.

1 - Recommendations are essentially endorsement. If facebook pushes political posts in your direction or if twitter feeds you elon musk posts or if youtube gives video recommendations based on videos you've liked in a relational way, they are effectively endorsing the content in a way the exceeds user agency or discoverability that section 230 is supposed to protect. In other words, I have a hard time feeling sympathy for social media companies that are using complex advertising data that they purchase (or sell) to push posts that they presume will keep users engaged in the platform and I think that goes beyond the section 230 assumption of UGC and how it is displayed. So, in contrast, a user subscribing to content from another user or community and seeing that as a result of a simple sorting algorithm should be section 230 covered as there's no blatant endorsement of the content; you're simply showing the user what they requested to see in the order that makes sense from a chronological or "likes per second" or whatever quantifiable metric you can provide.

2 - Algorithmic recommendations are lopsided and favor big data aggregators. This is something we deal with often when talking about the fediverse to regular non-technical people: Big data gets the benefit of hawking "assumptive" content to the users due to their scale and ability to buy advertising information on an individual, which leads to a scenario where they can architect the illusion of "activity" that does not reflect real-time activity. You see this in reddit and the like, where these services use the opaque nature of their infinite feeds to effectively make it appear that conversions are always ongoing and that there's no end to the discussion, which effectively locks in user engagement. I believe that these policies are enabled by the protections of section 230 as feeding a user down a negative or toxically positive feedback loop is rewarded in the market while other, more honest services (like lemmy, mastodon) that refuse to engage in this type of behavior will be unable to compete due to the scale of data needs (you need a lot of data to make assumptions on what people want to see) and the inability to capture user attention in a similarly hostile way. In other words, I don't believe it's true that section 230 protects both small-internet and big-internet alike.

Granted, this isn't to say that section 230 should be overturned, but I think an honest discussion on what level of protections it grants and extending it to make big tech companies a bit more wary of pushing questionable policies would actually help the open web compete against big-data web.