I think this is a mistaken understanding of the ruling. In this case, TikTok decided, with no other context, to make a personalized recommendation to a user who visited their recommendation page. On HN, your front page is not different from my front page. (Indeed, there is no personalized recommendation page on HN, as far as I'm aware.)

I don't see how this is about personalization. HN has an algorithm that shows what it wants in the way it wants.

But the basis of this ruling is basically "well the Moody case says that curation/moderation/suggestion/whatever is First Amendment protected speech, therefore that's your speech and not somebody else's and so 230 doesn't apply and you can be liable for it." That rationale extends to basically any form of moderation or selection, personalized or not, and would blow a big hole in 230's protections.

Given generalized anti-Big-Tech sentiment on both ends of the political spectrum, I could see something that claimed to carve out just algorithmic personalization/suggestion from protection meeting with success, either out of the courts or Congress, but it really doesn't match the current law.

    Trump registered as a Republican in 1987;[ a member of the Independence Party, the New York state affiliate of the Reform Party, in 1999; a Democrat in 2001; a Republican in 2009; unaffiliated in 2011; and a Republican in 2012.

The only puzzling thing is why Musk thinks Trump will honour the deal once he is elected and doesn't need him Musk any more. I guess he figures Musk figures he has a lot of money, and can keep bribing him.

Trump's brilliance is he has seemingly convinced a good chunk of conservative America and perhaps yourself that he has a ideology, it is theirs, and that he will implement it even if it comes at some cost to himself.

I see a lot of people saying this is a bad decision because it will have consequences they don't like, but the logic of the decision seems pretty damn airtight as you describe it. If the recommendation systems and moderation policies are the company's speech, then the company can be liable when the company "says", by way of their algorithmic "speech", to children that they should engage in some reckless activity likely to cause their death.

And they probably didn't think through how this particular argument could affect other areas of their business.

Importantly, this does not mean that before the Third Circuit decision platforms could just curate any which way they want and government couldn't regulate at all -- the mandatory removal regime around CSAM content is a great example of government regulating speech and forcing platforms to comply.

The Third Circuit decision, in a nutshell, is telling the platforms that they can't have their cake and eat it too. If they want to claim that their algorithmic feeds are speech that is protected from most government regulation, they can't simultaneously claim that these same algorithmic feeds are mere passive vessels for the speech of third parties. If that were the case, then their algorithms would enjoy no 1A protection from government regulation. (The content itself would still have 1A protection based on the rights of the creators, but the curation/ranking/privileging aspect would not).

This ruling is a natural consequence of the NetChoice ruling. Social media companies can't have it both ways.

> If that were the case, then their algorithms would enjoy no 1A protection from government regulation.

Well, the companies can still probably claim some 1st Amendment protections for their recommendation algorithms (for example, a law banning algorithmic political bias would be unconstitutional). All this ruling does is strip away the safe harbour protections, which weren't derived from the 1A in the first place.

Would it? The TV channels of old were heavily regulated well past 1st amendment limits.

Cable was never regulated like that. The medium actually mattered in this case

> TikTok, Inc., via its algorithm, recommended and promoted videos posted by third parties to ten-year-old Nylah Anderson on her uniquely curated “For You Page.”

Winding up in the same place as the defendant would require making a unique, dynamic, individualized BB for each user tailored to them based on pervasive online surveillance and the platform's own editorial "secret sauce."

Where is the algorithmic recommandation that differs per user on HN?

In other words, the Supreme Court decision mentions editorial decisions but no court case has yet backed up if that means editorial decisions in the HN front page sense (as in mods make some choices but it’s not personalized.) Common sense may say mods making decisions is editorial decisions but it’s a gray area until a court case makes it clear. Precedence is the most important thing when interpreting law, and the only precedence we have is that it pertains to personalized feeds.

Although HN's algorithm depends (mostly) on user input for how it presents the posts, it still favours some over others and still runs afoul here. You would need a literal 'most recent' chronological view and HN doesn't have that for comments. It probably should anyway!

@dang We need the option to view comments chronologically, please

That said, the feature you requested is already implemented but you have to know it is there. Dang mentioned it in a recent comment that I bookmarked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41230703

To see comments on this story sorted newest-first, change the link to

https://news.ycombinator.com/latest?id=41391868

instead of

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41391868

I don't think the feature was that unknown. Per Wikipedia, the CDA passed in 1996 and Slashdot was created in 1997, and I doubt the latter's moderation/voting system was that unique.

You might like this then: https://hckrnews.com/

If you child porn that gets shared via direct links then that is bad even if nobody can see it, but it is much much worse if you start recommending that to people as well.

It's rarely if ever going to be the case that there is some distinct unit of code called "the algorithm" that can be separated and considered legally distinct from the rest of the codebase.

I don't think timestamps are, in any way, construed editorial judgement. They are a content agnostic related attribute.

"(2)Civil liability No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of— (A)any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or"

Algorithmic ranking, curation, and promotion are not.

The FYP algorithm that's contested in the case surfaced the video to the minor without her searching for that topic, following any specific content creator, or positively interacting (liking/favoriting/upvoting) with previous instances of said content. It was fed to her based on a combination of what TikTok knew about her demographic information, what was trending on the platform, and TikTok's editorial secret sauce. TikTok's algorithm made an active decision to surface this content to her, despite knowing that other children had died from similar challenge videos, they promoted it and should be liable for that promotion.

I even think it would count if the only moderation you did on your Lionel model train site was to make sure that most of the conversation was about Lionel model trains, and that they be treated in a positive (or at least neutral) manner. That degree of moderation, for that purpose, would make you liable if you left illegal or tortious content up i.e. if you moderate, you're a moderator, and your first duty is legal.

If you're just a dumb pipe, however, you're a dumb pipe and get section 230.

I wonder how this works with recommendation algorithms, though, seeing as they're also trade secrets. Even when they're not dark and predatory (advertising related.) If one has a recommendation algo that makes better e.g. song recommendations, you don't want to have to share it. Would it be something you'd have to privately reveal to a government agency (like having to reveal the composition of your fracking fluid to the EPA, as an example), and they would judge whether or not it was "editorial" or not?

[edit: that being said, it would probably be very hard to break the law with a song recommendation algorithm. But I'm sure you could run afoul of some financial law still on the books about payola, etc.]

I'm not sure that's quite it. As I read the article and think about its application to Tiktok, the problem was more that "the algorithm" was engaged in active and allegedly expressive promotion of the unsafe material. If a site like HN just doesn't remove bad content, then the residual promotion is not exactly Hacker News's expression, but rather its users'.

The situation might change if a liability-causing article were itself given 'second chance' promotion or another editorial thumb on the scale, but I certainly hope that such editorial management is done with enough care to practically avoid that case.

Personalisation simply matches users with the content the algorithm thinks they want to see. Moderation (which is typically also an algorithm) tries to remove harmful content from the platform altogether.

The ruling isn't saying that Section 230 doesn't apply because TikTok moderated. It's saying Section 230 doesn't apply because TikTok personalised, allegedly knew about the harmful content and allegedly didn't take enough action to moderate this harmful content.

These algorithms aren't matching you with what you want to see, they're trying to maximize your engagement- or, its what the operator wants you to see, so you'll use the site more and generate more data or revenue. Its a fine, but extremely important distinction.

You can't be licensing user content to AI as it's not yours. You also can't be undeleting posts people make (otherwise it's really reddit's posts and not theirs).

When you start treating user data as your own; it should become your own and that erodes 230.

undeleting is bad enough, but they've edited the content of user's comments too.

It is theirs. Users agreed to grant Reddit a license to use the content when they accepted the terms of service.

If it does any customization based on what it knows about you, or what it tries to sell you because you are you, then it would be liable.

Yep., recommendation engines would have to be very carefully tuned, or you risk becoming liable. Recommending only curated content would be a way to protect yourself, but that costs money that companies don't have to pay today. It would be doable.

This could very well be true for TikTok. Of course "selection" would include liked videos, how long you spend watching each video, and how many videos you have posted

And on the flip side a button that brings you to a random video would supply different content to users regardless of "selections".

An account otherwise identical made two days later is going to interact with a different stream. Technically deterministic but in practice no two end up ever being exactly alike, (despite similar people having similar channels.)

The "answer" will turn back into tv channels. Have communities curate playlists of videos, and then anyone can go watch the playlist at any time. Reinvent broadcast tv / the subreddit.

That kind of sounds... great? The only instance where I genuinely like to have a recommendation engine around is music steaming. Like yeah sometimes it does recommend great stuff. But anywhere else? No thank you

Ranking: A group of people share a ouija board, and together make selections.

Suggestion: A singular entity clips together media to create a new narrative, akin to a ransom note.

If the sum of the collection of content more than its parts, if is different in strength not kind, or self reenforcing, it's really hard to distinguish where the algorithm ends and the voters begin.

> "What does all this mean for Anderson’s claims? Well, § 230(c)(1)’s preemption of traditional publisher liability precludes Anderson from holding TikTok liable for the Blackout Challenge videos’ mere presence on TikTok’s platform. A conclusion Anderson’s counsel all but concedes. But § 230(c)(1) does not preempt distributor liability, so Anderson’s claims seeking to hold TikTok liable for continuing to host the Blackout Challenge videos knowing they were causing the death of children can proceed."

As-in, Dang would be liable if say somebody started a blackout challenge post on HN and he didn't start censoring all of them once news reports of programmers dieing broke out.

https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/mopaqabzypa/...

Does TikTok have preempt this category of videos in the future or simply respond promptly when notified such a video is posted to their system?

Do you think its reasonable for social media to send videos to people without considering how harmful they are?

Do you even think its reasonable for search engine to respond to a specific request for this information?

In general, judges will be ultimately responsible for evaluating whether "any", "sufficient", "appropriate", etc. actions were taken in each future case judgement they make. As with all things legalese, it's impossible to define with certainty a specific degree of action that is the uniform boundary of acceptable; but, as evident here, "none" is no longer permissible in that set.

(I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice.)

This has interesting higher-order effects on free speech. Let's apply the same ruling to vaccine misinformation, or the ability to organize protests on social media (which opponents will probably call riots if there are any injuries)

But I mean what do you expect from a group of judges that themselves have written they're moving away from precedent?

I think that is quite generous. I think it is a deliberate reinterpretation of what the order says. The order states that 230(c)(1) provides immunity for removing harmful content after being made aware of it, i.e., moderation.

It’s still curated, and not entirely automatically. Does it make a difference whether it’s curated individually or not?

I enjoyed the communities around farming, homesteading, homeschooling of kids, classic litterature etc... but oh no, someone said some naughty words? lets shut it down.

... being manipulated by the algorithm (per this judges decision).

It would be perfectly legal for a platform to choose to allow a user to decide on their own to filter out spam.

Maybe a user could sign up for such an algorithm, but if they choose to whitelist certain accounts, that would also be allowed.

Problem solved.

The pro-science crowd seems incapable of providing a proof any given scientist is that important. Same old social politics norms inflate some deflate others and we confirm our survival means we special. Ones education is vacuous prestige given physics applies equally; oh you did the math! Yeah I just tell the computer to do it. Oh you memorized the dialectic of some long dead physicist. Outstanding.

There’s a lot of ego driven banal classist nonsense in tech and science. At the end of the day just meat suits with the same general human condition.

They may lose 230 protection, sure, but probably not really a problem here. For Facebook et al, it's going to be an issue, no doubt. I suppose they could drop their algos and bring back the chronological feeds, but, my guess is that wouldn't be profitable given that ad-tech and content feeds are one in the same at this point.

I'd also assume that "curation" is the sticking point here, if a platform can claim that they do not curate content, they probably keep 230 protection.

Specifically, every political or science thread that makes it, is raided by 4chan. 4chan also regularly pushes anti/science and anti-education agenda threads to the top here, along with posts from various alt-right figures on occasion.

Seems pretty sparse to me, and from a casual perusal, I haven't seen any actual calls to raiding anything here, it's more of a reference where articles/posts have happened, and people talking about them.

Remember, not everyone who you disagree with comes from 4chan, some of them probably work with you, you might even be friends with them, and they're perfectly serviceable people with lives, hopes, dreams, same as yours, they simply think differently than you.

4chan is very well known for brigading. It is also well known that using 4chan as well as a number of other locations, such as discord, to post links for brigades are an extremely common thing that the alt-right does to try to raise the “validity” of their statements.

I also did not claim that only these opinions come from 4chan. Nice strawman bro.

Also, my friends do not believe these things. I do not make a habit of being friends with people that believe in genociding others purely because of sexual orientation or identity.

Also the alt-right is a giant threat, if you categorize everyone right of you as alt-right, which seems to be the standard definition.

That's not how I've chosen to live, and I find that it's peaceful to choose something more reasonable. The body politic is cancer on the individual, and on the list of things that are important in life, it's not truly important. With enough introspection you'll find that the tendency to latch onto politics, or anything politics-adjacent, comes from an overall lack of agency over the other aspects of life you truly care about. It's a vicious cycle. You have a finite amount of mental energy, and the more you spend on worthless things, the less you have to spend on things that matter, which leads to you latching further on to the worthless things, and having even less to spend on things that matter.

It's a race to the bottom that has only losers. If you're looking for genocide, that's the genocide of the modern mind, and you're one foot in the grave already. You can choose to step out now and probably be ok, but it's going to be uncomfortable to do so.

That's all not to say there aren't horrid, problem-causing individuals out in the world, there certainly are, it's just that the less you fixate on them, the more you realize that they're such an extreme minority that you feel silly fixating on them in the first place. That goes for anyone that anyone deems 'horrid and problem-causing' mind you, not just whatever idea you have of that class of person.

What are you expecting it to show? That site removes all content after a matter of days.

For the record, ensuring that those who wish to genocide LGBT+ people are not the majority voice on the internet is absolutely not “a worthless matter”, not by any stretch. I would definitely rather not have to do this, but then, the people who dedicate their lives to trolling and hate are extremely active.

I don't frequent 4cuck, I use soyjak.party which I guess from your perspective is even worse, but there are of plenty of smart people on the 'cuck thoughbeit, like the gemmy /lit/ schizo. I think you would feel right at home in /sci/.

HN is also heavily moderated with moderators actively trying to promote thoughtful comments over other, less thoughtful or incendiary contributions by downranking them (which is entirely separate from flagging or voting; and unlike what people like to believe, this place relies more on moderator actions as opposed to voting patterns to maintain its vibe.) I couldn't possibly see this working with the removal of Section 230.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubby,_Inc._v._CompuServe_Inc.

Along those lines then then an upvote i.e. endorsement would be protected, up to any point where it violated one of the free speech exceptions, e.g. incitement.

HN engages in the former but not the latter. The big three engage in the latter.

Or.. are you suggesting there's more to how this works? Is dang watching votes and then making decisions based on those votes?

"Editorial control" is more of a term of art and has a narrower definition then you're allowing for.

The same applies to comments on HN. Comments are not moderated based purely on legal or certain general "good manners" grounds, they are moderated to keep a certain kind of discourse level. For example, shallow jokes or meme comments are not generally allowed on HN. Comments that start discussing controversial topics, even if civil, are also discouraged when they are not on-topic.

Overall, HN is very much curated in the direction of a newspaper "letter to the editor" section, then more algorithmic and hands-off like the Facebook wall or TikTok feed. So there is no doubt whatsoever, I believe, that HN would be considered responsible for user content (and is, in fact, already pretty good at policing that in my experience, at least on the front page).

This is meaningfully different in kind from only excluding posts that reflect certain perspectives on such a conflict. Maintaining topicality is not imposing a bias.

Maintaining topicality is literally a bias. Excluding posts that reflect certain perspectives is censorship.

Even mentioning certain topics, such as Israel's invasion of Palestine, even when the mention is on-topic and not disruptive, as in this comment you are reading, is practically a death sentence for a comment. Not because of votes, but because of the moderators. Downvotes may prioritize which comments go in front of moderators (we don't know) but moderators make the final decision; comments that are downvoted but not removed merely stick around in a light grey colour.

By enabling showdead in your user preferences and using the site for a while, especially reading controversial threads, you can get a feel for what kinds of comments are deleted by moderators exercising. It is clear that most moderation is about editorial control and not simply the removal of disruption.

This comment may be dead by the time you read it, due to the previous mention of Palestine - hi to users with showdead enabled. Its parent will probably merely be down voted because it's wrong but doesn't contain anything that would irk the mods.

Comments are marked [flagged] [dead] when ordinary users have clicked on the timestamp and selected "flag." So user downvotes cannot kill a comment, but flagging by ordinary non-moderator users can kill it.

TikTok. Facebook. Twitter. YouTube.

All of these have their algorithms specifically curated to try to keep you angry. YouTube outright ignores your blocks every couple months, and no matter how many people dropping n-bombs you report and block, it never endingly pushes more and more.

These company know that their algorithms are harmful and they push them anyway. They absolutely should have liability for what their algorithm pushes.

As if it was something bad. 4chan has /g and it's absolutely awesome.

For HN, Dang's efforts at keeping civility don't interfere with Section 230. The part relevant to this ruling is whatever system takes recency and upvotes, and ranks the front page posts and comments within each post.

For example the qanon conspiracy nuts got moderated out of /pol/ for arguing in bad faith/just being too crazy to actually have any kind of conversation with and they fled to another board (8chan and later 8kun) that has even less moderation.

Yep, 4chan isn't bad because "people I disagree with can talk there", it's bad because the interface is awful and they can't attract enough advertisers to meet their hosting demands.