An excellent decision. If it had gone the other way we likely would have seen social media websites shutdown entirely and comments disabled from YouTube. This also would have directly affected anyone in the U.S. that wanted to run an instance of Lemmy (or any federated instance that users could post content on).
The rulings were in regards to Section 230 which was a law passed in 1996 aimed at protecting services which allow users to post their own content.
The supreme court tackled 2 different cases concerning this:
- Whether social media platforms can be held liable for what their users have said.
- This was very specific to whether algorithms that refer tailored content to individual users can cause companies to be considered as knowingly aiding and abetting terrorists (if their pro-terrorist content is referred to other users).
I may check out more of the reading. I think it’s tricky in your example. I have doubts about how unbiased any algorithm is likely to be, we already have documented cases of algorithms being biased in ways that get people in trouble. So we can’t treat an algorithm as inherently neutral. Given people and increasing complexity of algorithms I’m unsure it’s philosophically possible to make a neutral algorithm, certainly not one that works like youtu.be does.
So, to the extent the algorithm preferred content you could be liable for, the developer could be liable. Except for most open source (and closed source) licenes disclaim liability and put it on the entity running the software. I think we ought to look at how this was hashed out with physical machines and take many cues from that to where the liabilities could fall. Some regulated fitness for purpose for sales anyway might actually help society. IMO.
In terms of liability I feel like the locus has to be who is running the robot. Who owns it? Again, the robot is basically an employee.
The algorithm is of course one of those things like obscenity - hard to define, but our legal system muddles through with that. If I’m writing the law simple posting via date, however implemented would not count as me being a publisher. Anything you claim a trade secret in or sell as part of your products that chooses what to show is a judgment that makes you a publisher. Basically think about if you had a person do it - can you give them a short set of rules to do it such that it takes no experience or training? Then it’s not judgement. If it takes pages of a decision tree, or a gut feeling after lots of experience to pick what goes where, then it is a judgment, and publisher rules should apply. I think sorting based on a tag applied by someone outside your org should not trigger you being a publisher because your org isn’t picking what to show - you’re showing everything. And the things that make this especially true for YouTube is that it automatically chooses what to show you next, and also gives a shortlist of what you should watch next. I think it could avoid being a publisher if it just stopped after a video, and you had to click back to the listing page to pick another or do a new search. Like the Google search works. I just think YouTube is way more like cable than a local billboard with different ads oer day.
But all of this is in my opinion predicated on there being any liability in what you’re publishing. Because I’m not asking for a new liability, just the same publishers already have. If Fox News is liable to Dominion I don’t think that should change if it had been “robots” peddling the lies. Even if it was all automated online.
And this I think is actually what kills these cases - it’s not at all clear to me that you should be liable for anything you show people. But if we take this up we should be consistent with other publishers imo.