Which has already happened in our country. I said that as a rhetorical device to lay the groundwork for my point, not as a thing that needs to happen in the future. We have standards about bad content which are largely (if not perfectly) correct. The place where we have a massive problem is in how we deal with it.
Yes, I said this literally right before the part you quoted:
There's plenty of room for debate on exactly what it is and how to define bad content, but we can safely take as a given that there is some content that needs to be taken down, and that some standard to define such content should be established.
The question then becomes, by what mechanism should content be found to offend against this standard and required to be removed?
But taking away CDA 230 protections in such cases would create lots of new harms in the form of takedowns.
Perhaps, but judicially-mandated takedowns are exactly what we need to fix the far, far greater problem of extrajudicial takedowns.
I don't think any reasonable person would claim that there does not exist any content that is unworthy of being posted online. There's plenty of room for debate on exactly what it is and how to define bad content, but we can safely take as a given that there is some content that needs to be taken down, and that some standard to define such content should be established.
The question then becomes, by what mechanism should content be found to offend against this standard and required to be removed? The current system of DMCA takedowns is a massive mess from beginning to end, for reasons I shouldn't need to explain to anyone on this site, yourself least of all! But then what is the alternative?
The only alternative to a system of extrajudicial takedowns is a system of judicially-mandated takedowns. And before someone inevitably says it, yes, this article is about defamation whereas the DMCA is about copyright, but even raising that objection illustrates the problem: having multiple different mechanisms and rules overcomplicates the system. Better to have one unified system with one unified set of rules.
As for the other objection:
As we've discussed in the past, people started forging court orders, or suing "fake" defendents who would immediately admit guilt and "settle" the case, just to get a court order that could be sent to a site to remove content.
This is true. But as you have also discussed in the past, people, both website administrators and judges, are beginning to wise up to this tactic. Its days are numbered, especially if people start going to jail for fraud when they do it.
Oh come on. It's undisputed that they didn't originally come from here any more than the Europeans or the Africans now living here did. That's hardly expert-level material.
Here's where things get weird, though. In every other case of large population migrations, we see a clearly-defined pattern: emigrants arrive at some point, establish their civilization there, and begin to spread out from the point of origin, and the further you get from the origin, the less advanced the people are culturally and technologically. The reason for this is intuitively obvious: before the advent of industrial-age transportation technology, (and even for a good while after it, as seen in North America,) transporting resources over long distances was difficult, expensive, and unreliable, so the further you got from the core of civilization, the harder it became to get their help to build up infrastructure for your own civilization.
Here's where things get weird with Native Americans, though: most scientists agree that they migrated from East Asia to Alaska over an ice bridge during the last Ice Age, but we don't see the expected pattern of technology high culture radiating south and east from Alaska. That pattern does exist in pre-Colombian Native American civilization, but the "point of origin" is in Central America.
No, statistics are most definitely not "proof." What they are is a point of evidence, which may or may not be valid depending on the integrity of the methods by which the data was gathered and analyzed, and may or may not actually support the point which the person citing them is attempting to support.
You can find statistics to "prove" virtually any proposition, no matter how absurd, which is why the term "lying with statistics" is a thing.
(Pedantic note, to head off the inevitable misrepresentation from the usual suspects: I did not in any way say here that statistics are useless or invalid; only that they can't automatically be relied upon as authoritative, but rather that they provide a piece of evidence to be considered as one of many.)
OK, this is just weird. I'm all for CDA 230 protections, but this specific case takes it way too far and IMO is applying it all wrong.
Protection from liability means that they can't be sued for this (so *of course* they won't be a party to the lawsuit in question!) and end up having to pay damages if someone writes a defamatory post on their site, which is exactly as it should be, but defamation is still defamation. If it's been found to be defamatory in a court of law and the court ordered it taken down, how does CDA 230 mean that they get to ignore that? That's not intermediary liability protection; that's contempt.
Yet another case where the term "hate speech" can be best understood by prepending the words "I" or "we". They're not worried about actual hate speech; they're worried about "we-hate" speech.
"We hate speech that disrespects our flag."
"We hate speech that disrespects our religion."
"We hate speech that we arbitrarily decide is something promoting terrorism."
I hope I don't need to go into how not verifying someone made this gay man a target for harassment and violence. I shouldn't have to, as it is the entire point of the article. If you're going to raise points like that, try making sure they're not equally valid for both sides of the debate first.
Well, when I signed up for the dating site where I ended up meeting my wife, they had a number of verification measures in place to make sure I was who I said I was, for the protection of their (thousands or tens of thousands of) users. I can only assume that a sex hookup site is very similar in technical execution, if not in character, so I don't see any reason why this should be an insurmountable problem.
Not sure about 230 specifically, but I can definitely see a valid negligence claim here. If the site, which is specifically a hookup site where people go to look for sex, allowed someone to set up a profile for someone else, without doing any due diligence to verify that the person setting up the profile is in fact the person featured in the profile, well... the potential for malicious actors to abuse this to sexually assault somebody by proxy ought to have been obvious from the beginning.
On the post: Supreme Court Refuses To Hear Case That Threatened CDA 230
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On the post: Arizona The Latest To Explore Dumb Porn Filter Law, This Time To Help Fund Trump's Fence
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Unfortunately they do exist, and they have some degree of a following. Google "open borders" if you've got some free time (and a strong stomach.)
On the post: Supreme Court Refuses To Hear Case That Threatened CDA 230
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Yes, I said this literally right before the part you quoted:
On the post: Author Ken MacLeod: Please Don't Pass The EU Copyright Directive In My Name
Re: I thought this was Kevin MacLeod for a minute.
On the post: Supreme Court Refuses To Hear Case That Threatened CDA 230
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Perhaps, but judicially-mandated takedowns are exactly what we need to fix the far, far greater problem of extrajudicial takedowns.
I don't think any reasonable person would claim that there does not exist any content that is unworthy of being posted online. There's plenty of room for debate on exactly what it is and how to define bad content, but we can safely take as a given that there is some content that needs to be taken down, and that some standard to define such content should be established.
The question then becomes, by what mechanism should content be found to offend against this standard and required to be removed? The current system of DMCA takedowns is a massive mess from beginning to end, for reasons I shouldn't need to explain to anyone on this site, yourself least of all! But then what is the alternative?
The only alternative to a system of extrajudicial takedowns is a system of judicially-mandated takedowns. And before someone inevitably says it, yes, this article is about defamation whereas the DMCA is about copyright, but even raising that objection illustrates the problem: having multiple different mechanisms and rules overcomplicates the system. Better to have one unified system with one unified set of rules.
As for the other objection:
This is true. But as you have also discussed in the past, people, both website administrators and judges, are beginning to wise up to this tactic. Its days are numbered, especially if people start going to jail for fraud when they do it.
On the post: Parody Washington Post Leads To Bogus Legal Threat, And A Reminder Of An Old Internet Lawsuit
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On the post: Remember When Ajit Pai Said Killing Net Neutrality Would Boost Network Investment? About That...
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Here's where things get weird, though. In every other case of large population migrations, we see a clearly-defined pattern: emigrants arrive at some point, establish their civilization there, and begin to spread out from the point of origin, and the further you get from the origin, the less advanced the people are culturally and technologically. The reason for this is intuitively obvious: before the advent of industrial-age transportation technology, (and even for a good while after it, as seen in North America,) transporting resources over long distances was difficult, expensive, and unreliable, so the further you got from the core of civilization, the harder it became to get their help to build up infrastructure for your own civilization.
Here's where things get weird with Native Americans, though: most scientists agree that they migrated from East Asia to Alaska over an ice bridge during the last Ice Age, but we don't see the expected pattern of technology high culture radiating south and east from Alaska. That pattern does exist in pre-Colombian Native American civilization, but the "point of origin" is in Central America.
On the post: FBI Forensic Experts Claim Mass-Produced Jeans And Shirts Are As Distinct As Fingerprints And DNA
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No, statistics are most definitely not "proof." What they are is a point of evidence, which may or may not be valid depending on the integrity of the methods by which the data was gathered and analyzed, and may or may not actually support the point which the person citing them is attempting to support.
You can find statistics to "prove" virtually any proposition, no matter how absurd, which is why the term "lying with statistics" is a thing.
(Pedantic note, to head off the inevitable misrepresentation from the usual suspects: I did not in any way say here that statistics are useless or invalid; only that they can't automatically be relied upon as authoritative, but rather that they provide a piece of evidence to be considered as one of many.)
On the post: Supreme Court Refuses To Hear Case That Threatened CDA 230
Protection from liability means that they can't be sued for this (so *of course* they won't be a party to the lawsuit in question!) and end up having to pay damages if someone writes a defamatory post on their site, which is exactly as it should be, but defamation is still defamation. If it's been found to be defamatory in a court of law and the court ordered it taken down, how does CDA 230 mean that they get to ignore that? That's not intermediary liability protection; that's contempt.
On the post: Herrick V. Grindr – The Section 230 Case That's Not What You've Heard
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On the post: Remember When Ajit Pai Said Killing Net Neutrality Would Boost Network Investment? About That...
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On the post: US Media Companies Engaging In Proactive Censorship Of Content Ahead Of India's New Hate Speech Laws
Re: Re: Re: hmm
On the post: US Media Companies Engaging In Proactive Censorship Of Content Ahead Of India's New Hate Speech Laws
"We hate speech that disrespects our flag."
"We hate speech that disrespects our religion."
"We hate speech that we arbitrarily decide is something promoting terrorism."
On the post: Lucasfilm Steps In After FanFilm That Tried To Follow The Rules Was Claimed By Disney Over Star Wars Music
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This. Exactly this. It would appear that somebody has never heard of Chesterton's Fence...
On the post: Lucasfilm Steps In After FanFilm That Tried To Follow The Rules Was Claimed By Disney Over Star Wars Music
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My pointless question? I'm not the one asking that question; I'm the one calling him on it.
Do you even forum, bro?
On the post: Max Schrems Files New Privacy Complaints That Seem To Show The Impossibility Of Complying With The GDPR
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On the post: Herrick V. Grindr – The Section 230 Case That's Not What You've Heard
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On the post: Herrick V. Grindr – The Section 230 Case That's Not What You've Heard
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I hope I don't need to go into how not verifying someone made this gay man a target for harassment and violence. I shouldn't have to, as it is the entire point of the article. If you're going to raise points like that, try making sure they're not equally valid for both sides of the debate first.
On the post: Herrick V. Grindr – The Section 230 Case That's Not What You've Heard
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On the post: Herrick V. Grindr – The Section 230 Case That's Not What You've Heard
Not sure about 230 specifically, but I can definitely see a valid negligence claim here. If the site, which is specifically a hookup site where people go to look for sex, allowed someone to set up a profile for someone else, without doing any due diligence to verify that the person setting up the profile is in fact the person featured in the profile, well... the potential for malicious actors to abuse this to sexually assault somebody by proxy ought to have been obvious from the beginning.
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