I appreciate how the complaint goes into the vagueness of "journalistic enterprise", but I think there's even more to be mined. I mean, "an entity doing business in Florida" qualifies if "publishes online at least 100 hours of audio or video and has at least 100 million viewers annually"? Does PornHub do business in Florida?
The bill text, having been written by people who neither know nor care what words mean, says that
A social media platform may not take any action to censor, deplatform, or shadow ban a journalistic enterprise based on the content of its publication or broadcast.
The definitions of censor, deplatform and shadow ban are, of course, ludicrous, but look at the first way that an entity can qualify to be a "journalistic enterprise":
Publishes in excess of 100,000 words available online with at least 50,000 paid subscribers or 100,000 monthly active users;
What's to stop a social-media company from declaring themselves a "journalistic enterprise" and then saying that removing fact checks and warning tags would constitute a shadow ban?
I haven't heard anything new about this in a while. I wonder if the plan is to let it quietly become law without a signature; as I understand it, that's what would happen if DeSantis takes no action after 15 days of officially receiving it (which must have been later than the morning of Thursday the 6th). But surely the point of it is the culture-war flag-waving, so the signing ought to happen with some spectacle, right?
Nobody outside of academic publishing knows how it works, and when they find out, their reaction can be quite surprised ("You mean you don't get paid!?"). In a law-enforcement community that doesn't know how a lot of scientists feel about the system we're stuck in, and that wouldn't care if they did, publishers' claims that it's all a nefarious foreign influence operation could go a long way.
Research idea for machine learning: train a program to recognize which party a bad Internet-regulation proposal came from based on its announcement. I bet you could get pretty good results just by keyword-matching.
Just once, I'd like to see one of these bills that offers even a minimal justification for the numbers it throws about. Annual revenue of more than $250,000? More than 10,000 monthly active users? Why draw the lines there, instead of anywhere else? For that matter, let's see an explanation of what an "active user" is. Are lurkers who create an account but don't post "active"? How do we count anonymous contributors, like the people who make edits to Wikipedia pages without creating accounts and whose edits are logged by their IP address? One IP address could be many people, and one person could use many IP addresses....
Germany is working on implementing Article 17, which makes significant changes in European copyright law. This has created an exciting opportunity to clarify that fan fiction is legal under German copyright law.
The German government has sent a draft bill to the two houses of Parliament. The final vote is planned for the beginning of May. The government proposal makes clear that nonprofit websites like the Archive of Our Own should not be required to get licenses from copyright owners, as commercial websites like Facebook and YouTube will have to do. The draft bill also proposes to explicitly legalize fan fiction, fan art, and many other transformative works, as part of the EU exception for “caricature, parody and pastiche”.
There is one problem, and one risk. The problem is that the proposal includes language that is not required by Article 17 and that could be confusing and unduly restrictive of the ability to engage in caricature, parody and pastiche. This language restricts caricature, parody and pastiche “to the extent required by the specific purpose,” which would invite second-guessing of an artist’s purpose by courts and copyright claimants. Fan fiction, like caricature, parody and pastiche in general, has its own artistic existence and courts should not ask whether a work of fan fiction takes “too much” of the characters.
The risk is that some lobbyists are asking for a remuneration requirement for caricature, parody and pastiche—including fan fiction and fan art—even if they are not posted on commercial websites. The consequences of a payment requirement would be perverse: it would favor commercial platforms over nonprofits such as the Archive of Our Own and Wikipedia. This is because users could freely upload fan fiction, fan art, memes etc. to YouTube or Facebook, because the commercial platform would already be paying a collecting society through the implementation of Article 17, but the same users would have to pay a collecting society if they wanted to upload the same fan fiction, fan art or memes to their personal website or to a nonprofit website such as Archive of Our Own. In practice, the law would strengthen the big commercial platforms by creating an incentive for internet users to close down their private websites, leave nonprofit platforms such as AO3, and move their activities to a Facebook group instead. [...] We believe that the law should not add an additional condition, not part of Article 17, to the exception for parody, caricature and pastiche, saying that uses should only be allowed “to the extent required by the specific purpose”. This wording only serves to muddy the waters, because it is very difficult for a user to determine the extent of the use of a work that is “required” for the purpose of fan fiction, fan art, and other transformative uses. Likewise, we believe that the law should protect individual fans and noncommercial websites, and fight against the dominance of Facebook and YouTube, by rejecting a compensation requirement for the exception for parody, caricature and pastiche.
What a fantastic way to put millions of people's personal data at risk without providing a gram of real protection for anyone.
In addition to the other ways in which it is terrible, this also sounds like another entry in the "Facebook and Twitter are the Internet" mode of completely broken thinking. Does anyone who wants to start a Mastodon instance have to be a passport repository?
There also seems to be a think-of-the-children proposal with anti-encryption vibes moving through the EU's incomprehensible policy-making system. All I've really found about it has been the statements of Pirate Party MEPs opposed to it, so read advisedly, I suppose.
This bit at the end of the Axios story linked in the post caught my eye:
Smaller tech companies and online sites will balk at any Section 230 changes, even if considered narrow. The biggest companies have the greatest ability to respond and adapt to legislation.
This manages to be absolutely true and yet gallingly phrased. It still puts the emphasis on "tech companies", rather than people. The mindset at work is that the Internet is a medium for commerce, not communication.
Yeah, bipartisan bad ideas make me even more worried then Democratic bad ideas. I'm drafting a letter to my senators (Warren and Markey) about all this, because I'm an academic and writing is my thing. Going to try making the pitch that the rush to legislate without careful study first is off-brand. We need to be hearing from activists who have used the Internet to organize in support of marginalized groups, software developers who know what's technically feasible and what isn't, journalists who have learned to see through corporate and political spin, even (gasp) lawyers who have actually argued Section 230 cases. Instead, the conversation has been shaped by pundits out to make a buck, politicians arguing in the worst faith ("Big Tech is censoring conservatives, a noun a verb Critical Race Theory"), and the CEOs of corporations that ought to be broken up anyway. Passing laws that will further entrench the current major players while simultaneously going after them on antitrust grounds is, as Mr. Spock would say, not logical.
And even if it can be measured in a semi-robust way, it's such a ... bizarrely nonindicative number to put so much weight upon. Not every reader of a news website hangs out in their comment section --- very probably, most don't. Most people who read Wikipedia don't edit it. The challenges of content moderation, and the potential risk to the public of any given bit of user-contributed content, scale at best vaguely and imprecisely with "monthly unique visitors".
My hackles go up a bit whenever it sounds like a law would make a particular technology mandatory, or effectively so. Let's say that I run a nonprofit with a substantial website. I'm not beholden to any advertisers; my donors care about the importance of our mission, not click rates and page impressions. We provide longreads of lasting relevance, so we're not really concerned with most performance metrics. Accordingly, our "analytics" needs are modest, mostly geared to predicting what our upkeep costs will be. We have no need to track "unique" views --- but suddenly, we're legally liable if we don't!
(I know of a community website for higher mathematics research that gets ~300,000 page views per month. All it would take is Tucker Carlson going on a rant about the moral degeneracy of math teachers, and they could break a million, I'm sure.)
Again, this is only one problem among many that have been pointed out.
It is a comparatively small point among the galaxy of bad points that is this proposed law. But to me it seems indicative of the lack of thought or care that apparently went into the drafting process. It's a "wait, why?" moment.
But, the terms say that you're a small business if you "received fewer than 1,000,000 unique monthly visitors" and that's "during the most recent 12-month period." How do they define "unique visitors"? The bill does not say, and that's just ridiculous, as there is no widely accepted definition of a unique monthly visitor, and every tracking system I've seen counts it differently.
As far as I know, nobody in a quarter-century of trying has invented a meaningful way to quantify website traffic, and every method for putting a supposedly precise number to it is an advertising gimmick. Why on Earth would we write a reliance upon an ad gimmick into federal law? It's like changing the penalties for a crime based on the quantity of bad vibes that it generated.
Here's a wild idea: Why don't we have a National Commission on Internet Regulation before we try to write legislation?
On the post: Senator Wicker Introduces Bill To Guarantee The Internet Sucks
He wants a guest slot on Tucker Carlson.
On the post: First Legal Challenge To Florida's Unconstitutional Social Media Moderation Law Has Been Filed
I appreciate how the complaint goes into the vagueness of "journalistic enterprise", but I think there's even more to be mined. I mean, "an entity doing business in Florida" qualifies if "publishes online at least 100 hours of audio or video and has at least 100 million viewers annually"? Does PornHub do business in Florida?
On the post: Disney Got Itself A 'If You Own A Themepark...' Carveout From Florida's Blatantly Unconstitutional Social Media Moderation Bill
The bill text, having been written by people who neither know nor care what words mean, says that
The definitions of censor, deplatform and shadow ban are, of course, ludicrous, but look at the first way that an entity can qualify to be a "journalistic enterprise":
On the post: Disney Got Itself A 'If You Own A Themepark...' Carveout From Florida's Blatantly Unconstitutional Social Media Moderation Bill
I haven't heard anything new about this in a while. I wonder if the plan is to let it quietly become law without a signature; as I understand it, that's what would happen if DeSantis takes no action after 15 days of officially receiving it (which must have been later than the morning of Thursday the 6th). But surely the point of it is the culture-war flag-waving, so the signing ought to happen with some spectacle, right?
On the post: Elon Musk Makes It Clear Starlink Won't Have The Capacity To Disrupt U.S. Broadband
Disrupting astronomy turns out to be easier than disrupting the broadband industry. Who knew?
On the post: FBI Got Access To Sci-Hub Founder's Apple Account
Nobody outside of academic publishing knows how it works, and when they find out, their reaction can be quite surprised ("You mean you don't get paid!?"). In a law-enforcement community that doesn't know how a lot of scientists feel about the system we're stuck in, and that wouldn't care if they did, publishers' claims that it's all a nefarious foreign influence operation could go a long way.
See also Shoshana Wodinsky's story in Gizmodo, Archivists Want to Make Sci-Hub 'Un-Censorable'.
On the post: New Jersey State Legislators Think They Can Get Trump Back On Facebook By Passing A Stupid Social Media Moderation Bill
Research idea for machine learning: train a program to recognize which party a bad Internet-regulation proposal came from based on its announcement. I bet you could get pretty good results just by keyword-matching.
On the post: Bad Section 230 Bills Come From Both Sides Of The Aisle: Schakowsky/Castor Bill Would Be A Disaster For The Open Internet
Just once, I'd like to see one of these bills that offers even a minimal justification for the numbers it throws about. Annual revenue of more than $250,000? More than 10,000 monthly active users? Why draw the lines there, instead of anywhere else? For that matter, let's see an explanation of what an "active user" is. Are lurkers who create an account but don't post "active"? How do we count anonymous contributors, like the people who make edits to Wikipedia pages without creating accounts and whose edits are logged by their IP address? One IP address could be many people, and one person could use many IP addresses....
On the post: Minister Behind Canada's Social Media Bill Now Says It Will Regulate User Generated Content
Guilbeault has made backtracking noises, and there seems to be more kicking around by committee underway.
On the post: Disney Got Itself A 'If You Own A Themepark...' Carveout From Florida's Blatantly Unconstitutional Social Media Moderation Bill
You missed the opportunity to go with "Scrollercoaster". :-)
On the post: It Took Four Months And Thousands Of Dollars To Overturn One Manifestly Stupid Upload Block: Imagine How Bad It Will Soon Be With EU Copyright Directive's Blanket Use Of Filters
Apropos, there's an interesting post today from the Organization for Transformative Works, who run Archive Of Our Own (AO3):
On the post: Wall Street Analysts Say Musk's Starlink Poses No Real Threat To Traditional Broadband
So, traditional broadband is safer than astronomy.
On the post: Australian Government Proposes Stripping Internet Users Of Their Anonymity
What a fantastic way to put millions of people's personal data at risk without providing a gram of real protection for anyone.
In addition to the other ways in which it is terrible, this also sounds like another entry in the "Facebook and Twitter are the Internet" mode of completely broken thinking. Does anyone who wants to start a Mastodon instance have to be a passport repository?
On the post: UK Child Welfare Charity Latest To Claim Encryption Does Nothing But Protect Criminals
There also seems to be a think-of-the-children proposal with anti-encryption vibes moving through the EU's incomprehensible policy-making system. All I've really found about it has been the statements of Pirate Party MEPs opposed to it, so read advisedly, I suppose.
On the post: Beware Of Facebook CEOs Bearing Section 230 Reform Proposals
This bit at the end of the Axios story linked in the post caught my eye:
This manages to be absolutely true and yet gallingly phrased. It still puts the emphasis on "tech companies", rather than people. The mindset at work is that the Internet is a medium for commerce, not communication.
On the post: PACT Act Is Back: Bipartisan Section 230 'Reform' Bill Remains Mistargeted And Destructive
Re: Re:
Yeah, bipartisan bad ideas make me even more worried then Democratic bad ideas. I'm drafting a letter to my senators (Warren and Markey) about all this, because I'm an academic and writing is my thing. Going to try making the pitch that the rush to legislate without careful study first is off-brand. We need to be hearing from activists who have used the Internet to organize in support of marginalized groups, software developers who know what's technically feasible and what isn't, journalists who have learned to see through corporate and political spin, even (gasp) lawyers who have actually argued Section 230 cases. Instead, the conversation has been shaped by pundits out to make a buck, politicians arguing in the worst faith ("Big Tech is censoring conservatives, a noun a verb Critical Race Theory"), and the CEOs of corporations that ought to be broken up anyway. Passing laws that will further entrench the current major players while simultaneously going after them on antitrust grounds is, as Mr. Spock would say, not logical.
On the post: The Internet Is Not Just Facebook, Google & Twitter: Creating A 'Test Suite' For Your Great Idea To Regulate The Internet
Archive Of Our Own.
On the post: PACT Act Is Back: Bipartisan Section 230 'Reform' Bill Remains Mistargeted And Destructive
afterthought
And even if it can be measured in a semi-robust way, it's such a ... bizarrely nonindicative number to put so much weight upon. Not every reader of a news website hangs out in their comment section --- very probably, most don't. Most people who read Wikipedia don't edit it. The challenges of content moderation, and the potential risk to the public of any given bit of user-contributed content, scale at best vaguely and imprecisely with "monthly unique visitors".
My hackles go up a bit whenever it sounds like a law would make a particular technology mandatory, or effectively so. Let's say that I run a nonprofit with a substantial website. I'm not beholden to any advertisers; my donors care about the importance of our mission, not click rates and page impressions. We provide longreads of lasting relevance, so we're not really concerned with most performance metrics. Accordingly, our "analytics" needs are modest, mostly geared to predicting what our upkeep costs will be. We have no need to track "unique" views --- but suddenly, we're legally liable if we don't!
(I know of a community website for higher mathematics research that gets ~300,000 page views per month. All it would take is Tucker Carlson going on a rant about the moral degeneracy of math teachers, and they could break a million, I'm sure.)
Again, this is only one problem among many that have been pointed out.
On the post: PACT Act Is Back: Bipartisan Section 230 'Reform' Bill Remains Mistargeted And Destructive
Re: Re:
It is a comparatively small point among the galaxy of bad points that is this proposed law. But to me it seems indicative of the lack of thought or care that apparently went into the drafting process. It's a "wait, why?" moment.
On the post: PACT Act Is Back: Bipartisan Section 230 'Reform' Bill Remains Mistargeted And Destructive
As far as I know, nobody in a quarter-century of trying has invented a meaningful way to quantify website traffic, and every method for putting a supposedly precise number to it is an advertising gimmick. Why on Earth would we write a reliance upon an ad gimmick into federal law? It's like changing the penalties for a crime based on the quantity of bad vibes that it generated.
Here's a wild idea: Why don't we have a National Commission on Internet Regulation before we try to write legislation?
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