Re:Judges Rule Big Tech's Free Ride on Section 230 Is Over
by zahlman on Thursday August 29, 2024 @05:28PM
(#41395474)
> The HN moderation team makes a lot of editorial choices, which is what gives HN its specific character. For example, highly politically charged posts are manually moderated and kept off the main page regardless of votes, with limited exceptions entirely up to the judgement of the editors. For example, content about the wars in Ukraine and Israel is not allowed on the mainpage except on rare occasions. dang has talked a lot about the reasoning behind this.
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.
Re:Judges Rule Big Tech's Free Ride on Section 230 Is Over
by mr_toad on Friday August 30, 2024 @02:38AM
(#41398238)
> 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.
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).