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NY Times Joins Lots Of Other Media Sites In Totally And Completely Misrepresenting Section 230

from the seriously,-guys? dept

So, about a week ago, the NY Times properly mocked politicians for totally misrepresenting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This week it needs to mock itself. Reporter Daisuke Wakabayashi wrote a piece provocatively titled (at least as it was originally published) Why Hate Speech On The Internet Is A Never Ending-Problem, with a subhead saying: “Because this law shields it.” And in case you believed it might be talking about some other law, between the head and the subhead it showed part of the text of Section 230 (technically, it showed Section (c)(1)).

If you want to see how badly the NY Times botched this, just check out the current headline on the piece. It’s pretty different. Now it says: “Legal Shield for Websites Rattles Under Onslaught of Hate Speech.” Even that’s… not great. Also, the NY Times added the following whopper of a correction notice:

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the law that protects hate speech on the internet. The First Amendment, not Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, protects it.

Yeah. So that’s kind of a big deal. The original version blamed Section 230 — a bill currently under attack from both sides of the aisle — for somehow being the root cause of hate speech online, saying it’s what “protected” it. And now the article admits in the fine print that, oh, whoops, actually it’s that old 1st Amendment that protects it. Kind of a big difference, and one that completely undermines the entire point and thrust of the original article. That’s a pretty massive fuck up

Of course, it’s not entirely clear who is to blame here. Editors, not reporters, tend to write the headlines, so it’s very likely that the incorrect headline came from the editorial team at the NY Times, and not Wakabayashi himself. After all, the article itself suggested that he had done some research on the matter, including speaking to Section 230 expert Jeff Kosseff, who spends much of his time these days debunking myths about 230. It also notes the actual history of Section 230, and how it was designed in order to encourage content moderation, not block it. Of course, you would not get that from that original headline, which suggested something very, very different.

Law professor and the UN’s expert on free speech, David Kaye, wrote an excellent piece in response to the NY Times piece detailing not just the problems with that original headline, but some other important points regarding the idea that Section 230 is somehow responsible for hate speech:

But that headline? Does hate speech persist online because Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act ?shields it?? I?m sorry, Times readers; if you were looking for an easy fix to online hate, this isn?t it.

From there he goes on to list four important questions anyone looking to regulate “hate speech” online needs to answer. You can read his entire piece for explanations of each question, but I’ll just list them out there:

Too often people get stopped at that first one, with some sort of “well, it’s obvious” kind of response. And that would be great if that were so, but it’s not. And when you combine the first and second questions, we’ve noticed quite a pattern, in that when governments get to define hate speech, they quite frequently use it to target critics, the marginalized, and the powerless. I mean, it’s not like we have a ton of articles showing just that.

And, given that Kaye’s final question is what to do about Trump and other public officials, a related “5th” question might be why would you want a government led by someone like Trump, who has shown a propensity to ratchet up tensions and hate, deciding what counts as hate speech? Because he (and his supporters) certainly would argue that nothing he says should count as hate speech. To them it’s either everyone else “misinterpreting” him, or it’s a joke. Or, I guess, sometimes they’ll just lie and claim “fake news.”

But there’s a bigger point here. Taking away Section 230 certainly doesn’t do anything to stop hate speech online. Making platforms liable for content could very likely increase that kind of speech online for a variety of reasons. First of all, as noted, at least in the US, it’s protected by the 1st Amendment. And some of the proposals to modify Section 230 are premised on the idea that platforms need to leave up all speech that is protected under the 1st Amendment. That would certainly lead to much more of the kind of speech that the NY Times is apparently concerned about.

Other proposals try to put some sort of “knowledge” standard on the speech. And, in such cases, you go back to a standard where platforms are encouraged to just look the other way and deliberately blind themselves to avoid having any kind of “knowledge.” It’s hard to see how that makes any sense at all.

The whole point of Section 230 — which the NY Times of all papers should understand — is that it created an important balance to try to enable the most “good” speech possible, while limiting the most “bad” speech. And it did so in a very clever way — by letting the various internet platforms decide how best to meet that balance, rather than by dictating what is and what is not “good” and “bad” speech. Different platforms can and do create their own standards. That has been incredibly valuable not just for free speech online, and not just for innovation on the internet, but also in allowing for widespread experimentation with platform moderation.

It’s too bad that rather than educate its readership about all of that, the NY Times decided to jump on the misleading (and simply incorrect) bandwagon claiming that 230 is somehow to “blame” for bad stuff online.

Filed Under: free speech, moderation, new york times, section 230, social media

NYTimes Draws Connection Between Beastie Boys Lawsuit & Patent Trolls, Realizes IP Hinders Innovation

from the about-time dept

Following the unfortunately-timed sampling lawsuit against the Beastie Boys, I expressed hope that the high-publicity situation would call more attention to serious issues in copyright law as it pertains to sampling and other forms of art that directly build on what came before—though I haven’t exactly been holding my breath. To my surprise, though, it seems like the story has had an even more profound effect over at the New York Times: a recent piece uses the Beastie Boys lawsuit as a starting point to talk about oppressive copyright laws, tech patent trolls, and the fact that more intellectual property does not automatically mean more innovation.

Most of the article won’t be anything new to Techdirt readers, but it’s great to see these essential topics getting more attention in mainstream news sources—especially coming from a journalist who has previously espoused the RIAA/MPAA’s bogus piracy stats:

Patents on inventions, like copyrights on songs, are not granted to be fair to their creators. Their purpose is to encourage innovation, a broad social good, by granting creators a limited monopoly to profit from their creations. While companies like Apple may believe they are insufficiently compensated for their inventions, the evidence often suggests otherwise. The belief that stronger intellectual property protection inevitably leads to more innovation appears to be broadly wrong.

…

Like “Paul’s Boutique,” the software that drives smartphones is composed of a vast array of ideas from multiple sources. Everybody infringes to some extent on everybody else. Overly strong intellectual property laws that stop creators from using earlier innovations could slow creation over all and become a barrier for new technologies to reach the market.

There are a few oddities to the piece—it’s not always clear on the distinction between copyright and patents, and it also makes the assertion that “software patents will never be banned, of course”—despite the very real possibility that software patents will be massively restricted in the future. But what’s really great to see is the understanding from NYTimes that these issues are connected: an anti-competitive attitude and the “ownership mentality” are endemic to intellectual property as a whole, not just the specifics of certain areas of law, and the problem really does need to be addressed at that basic level, starting with the incorrect assumption that more IP equals more innovation. Now if only lawmakers would start listening.

Filed Under: beastie boys, intellectual property, new york times, patent troll, smartphone
Companies: apple, tuf america

Publications Slowly Realizing That Freeing Up Archives Makes Sense

from the took-'em-long-enough dept

Here at Techdirt we have over ten years worth of content, all available for anyone to read, and as we certainly get a fair amount of traffic to those back archives. While we don’t pay that much attention to ad revenues (our business isn’t advertising), access to those archives (mainly from Google searches or links from other sites into a specific older story) represent a fair chunk of our page views and ad revenue. With that in mind, it’s been quite surprising to see so many publications try to lock up their archives — either (worst of all!) taking down old stories completely or trying to lock them up behind a pay wall. Luckily, it looks like more and more publications are recognizing that this is a bad business strategy. The article is in the NY Times, which only recognized this very issue a few months ago. Prior to that, it charged for access to its archives, but since opening it up has seen traffic shoot up and ad revenues appear to be following. The article also mentions how Newsweek has had a lot of success opening up its archive, and Sports Illustrated is getting set to make its own archive available later this week. For all of those publishers who worry that there isn’t enough ad revenue online, it makes little sense to sit on so much inventory. These days, you need to work on using Google to help drive more traffic, not suing it to stop sending traffic. What better way to make money off your archive than getting a lot more people to look at it?

Filed Under: advertising, archives, new york times, publications, sports illustrated