What are the recommendation algorithms?<p>I've read a couple of articles covering this court case, and the algorithms are talked about, justices have wondered if they are neutral or not. But nobody has asked "What is the algorithm?"<p>We don't know. It could be code that makes recommendations based on similar users, or it could be someone in a basement picking what to push on people based on some agenda, or the algorithm can use any of those hundreds of advertising categories they sort people into - show white people this video, married people this video, people in this country something else, these voters something over here, make exceptions for famous people or the government or the establishment, what some rich person paid us to push, etc. These algorithms affect everything from pop culture to elections to genocides to school bullies and teenage suicides.<p>We have no idea what these big tech companies are doing, except that they are the new mass media, they don't want to accept any responsibility for their actions, and profit is more important to them than social externalities.
It is nice to imagine a huge successful social media site that charged a small monthly fee aggressively working to make people happy.<p>Instead of aggressively monetizing "engagement" with advertising via physiological engineering and manipulation. Matching each person to the most addictive content, customized to that person's mental weaknesses.<p>I.e. creating and leveraging mental health issues is their goal.
My recollection of history is that 230 popped out of the need to protect ISPs (which were originally smaller businesses) from someone doing something illegal through their servers. Until then, if I recall correctly (and it's entirely probable I don't), then even things like forfeiture laws could come into play. You're a mom and pop ISP, you host some websites on pizza box Sparc servers, and suddenly the FBI is scooping it up while busting and internet crime ring. I don't think Google should be held liable if I put up something illegal.<p>But I don't see how you can argue the algorithm is entirely neutral, if the algorithm is to drive engagement. The algorithm is not recommending a random video with 'cooking' in its description. It's going from 'cooking', to 'eat more vegetables', to 'have you considered vegetarianism,' eventually to 'vegan purity must be maintained - meat eaters must die' and 'we gloriously behead a poultry farmer.' At some point, when you're making decisions about what to recommend, you're no longer just passively hosting content.<p>Even if the algorithm wasn't intentionally written to turn people into a radical vegetablists, at some point it shouldn't matter. And (again, my recollection) Google didn't jump up and say "Gadzooks! You're right! We shall cease immediately for we are not evil (despite our handle-bar mustaches)" They, and other social content companies, fought the changes. So it's not as if they were ignorant of what they were doing.<p>Meh - I think some of the other posters are right - they'll kick it down the road and hope it goes away.
Separate data storage and provision from curation!<p>This creates several new business models and opportunities for improvement<p>YouTube, et al, simply ingests, stores, and provides videos with extensive metadata profiles for query, but without any search or editorial/optimization algorithms<p>A separate business layer of 'channels' or 'networks' provide curated content from the host database business using the metadata and user preferences.<p>Imagine the 'wild animal' channel, or 'cool videos from the 70s' channel<p>The channel layer survives by meeting the market segment demands and received subscription fees or advertising revenue<p>The host also can also inject ads or charge subscription fees for access to the metadata for channel queries.<p>Neither layer violates section 320<p>Separating data hosting and curation creates an entirely new media market and opportunities for consumer choice<p>Like the phone and airline monopoly breakups, I suspect this change requires legislative action
According to the article, it was a 2.5 hour hearing and we have just a few quotes chosen by the reporter/editor. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they are a good representation.<p>I read the lawsuit (it's on the Supreme Court website). A lot of those questions relate to arguments being made by the plaintiff about how to let them win without destroying Section 230 entirely.<p>So, this is my prediction: they will "win" because the Supreme Court is going to "clarify" the definition of terms in Section 230. It will not have much of any impact on sites like HN or Reddit, but Google/MS will have some real issues unless... They go all-in on LLMs. But they had better get them right, because those things have zero protection. Oh, and FB/Twitter are toast.<p>Get ready, things will be interesting...
It's worth noting that the Supreme Court reviews two kinds of cases: constitutional issues and regulatory interpretation issues, which is where language is vague or different legislation conflicts.<p>From my reading of Gonzalez, it's strictly the latter kind. The good part of that is that whatever the outcome Congress could turn around tomorrow and overrule it with new legislation so it really doesn't matter.<p>Google in particular has done a very good job of painting things like recommendations and search result ranking as "oh it's the algorithm". But who coded the algorithm? As we saw with the Panda update [1] targeting low-quality content farms, subjectivity comes into the algortihm in deciding what is and isn't good content.<p>Ultimately this case is deciding if the result of a recommendation algorithm represents content in its own right. I imagine a sbuejctive test will come out of this case that will be fairly narrow and match what companies are doing anyway. The CDA requires this already. There has to be a process to report and takedown content.<p>When looking at how the Supreme Court rules on cases you can pretty reliably answer that from a materialistic perspective. Opening up tech companies to a conflagration of litigation is of no benefit to corporations so that probably won't happen.<p>In this case, the Anti-Terrorism Act refers to "international terrorism". That's an interesting carve out for domestic terrorism like, say, mass shootings, attacking infrastructure like power stations, bombing abortion clinics or, you know, insurrection.<p>It is worth having a discussion about the biases that creep into recommendation algorithms because they're quite real and we've created a pipeline for radicalizing people sometimes into violence (eg Alexandre Bissonnette, Scott Roeder [2], Payton Gendron [3]).<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/panda-update/" rel="nofollow">https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/bill-oreillys-dangerous-war-against-dr-tiller-107722/" rel="nofollow">https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/bill...</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fox-news-tucker-carlson-fresh-scrutiny-buffalo-mass-shooting-rcna29084" rel="nofollow">https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fox-news-tucker-carlson...</a>
I don't understand, say, sites like Facebook or Twitter are private companies, who let users store their messages/photos/videos for free (they earn the money in other ways) on their premises.<p>Good, but let's remember that it's still their property, they just let users use it, according to their own rules. The protection from lawsuits gives the tech giants more power with less responsibility.<p>I believe the world would be a better place if web properties took more responsibility of what happens on their premises. The internet would skew back to smaller web properties, and a centralized media giant would not be able to close anyone down because they don't like them.<p>Tech savvy people would make their own web properties, others would use it. It may or may not be connected by a federated communication protocols, but the important piece is that they own the property and be responsible of what happens there. E.g. if you invited your grandma to your forum -- be responsible of what she writes there.<p>PS: Of course, illegal content can still be closed down (e.g. through hosting providers and domain registrars), but not by a whim of a private corporation.