nilay patel

@reckless.bsky.social

Editor-in-chief of The Verge, host of Decoder, cohost of The Vergecast. I am in love with spectacle.

@reckless.bsky.social

Trump 2 antitrust is like, giant mergers require no oversight and AI companies do not need any narrow exceptions to antitrust law to coordinate on safety, but the White House press pool must provide duplicative independent cameras covering speeches or else ummmmmm consumer prices will rise

@reckless.bsky.social

tbf he did open the whole convo by talking about staggering corruption, and we only got to 230 bc it is like a talisman for policymakers who say it prevented social media regulation and they can't repeat that with AI, etc etc. (but I disagree!)

@reckless.bsky.social

ha fair -- i mean we obviously agree on that. but the pressure of this competition certainly hasn't led big platforms to moderate more. if anything they are doing less and less, even when it comes to hilariously over the line AI copyright infringement

@jmiers230.bsky.socialReposted by @reckless.bsky.social

Can we like impeach trump instead? Or do literally anything else? Surely the Democrats aren't this bored.

nilay patel@reckless.bsky.social

Asked Sen @schiff.senate.gov about getting rid of 230, and he suggested there might be immunity if a platform has "best practices." Just gonna go ahead and tag @jkosseff.bsky.social @klonick.bsky.social @noupside.bsky.social @masnick.com now bc dying for their reax www.theverge.com/podcast/1004...

We’ve had Sen. [Ron] Wyden on the show many times to talk about Section 230. I won’t go too far down that rabbit hole. The dynamic there was that Section 230 provided the immunity that you’re describing, but it was immunity for speech that would otherwise be illegal. And so it was speech that was defamatory. There’s a whole category of speech that isn’t illegal. Are you saying that taking the 230 immunity away from the social platforms would somehow make them moderate lawful but awful speech? And I bring this up because I’m very curious about how you would apply it in the AI case as well. Yeah, no, I think that is the case. That part of their argument was, “ We want to take down really nasty, offensive, racist content, but we will be afraid to do so if you don’t give us immunity. So give us immunity, and we’ll take all that bad stuff down.” They got immunity. And I don’t know if you’ve been on X lately; it’s a cesspool. So giving them broad immunity did not allow them to enforce their community policies. And the First Amendment prohibits the government from dictating speech or prohibiting you from saying things. It doesn’t prohibit a private party from saying, “We don’t want racist content on our platform.” So there’s no problem with a private platform saying, “That violates our policy. We’re not going to post it.” And they’re not utilizing that immunity in a good way. So why should they continue to have it? Now, we may want to create a safe harbor for companies that are meeting best practices and standards. So we may want to narrow 230 instead of getting rid of it. What is the analogy in terms of AI? I’m not sure what the analogy is.Now, we may want to create a safe harbor for companies that are meeting best practices and standards. So we may want to narrow 230 instead of getting rid of it. What is the analogy in terms of AI? I’m not sure what the analogy is. Let me draw you the connection that I’ve been thinking about a lot. In the case of social media and Section 230, the immunity was that the platforms would not be responsible for the speech of the users. So I would post something horrible about you, and you couldn’t sue Mark Zuckerberg. This is the thing that has broadly enabled the social media platforms at scale. I opened Instagram today, and it is all but making the content for me. And in fact, a lot of content on Instagram is being generated by Meta. It is obviously their speech. And somewhere between having your Muse go and make Instagram for you, and Meta synthesizing all of the product recommendations and generating content all by itself, is a liability for Meta. It is outside of the Section 230 shield. That is their speech. And you can draw a lot of distinctions there. If I fully automate my Instagram account with my Meta agent, is that my speech, Meta speech, or the AI model’s speech? Who knows? But it might not be under 230. So you would be outside of the immunity shield. And I’m just curious if you think that will meaningfully alter how they moderate. I agree with your analysis, but I think it’s a difficult enough legal analysis that they feel they’ve got the money to stop, or slow down, effective litigation. Meta, or any of these other companies, decides how they want to amplify certain content. So let’s say it’s content that I generated. Is it still solely my speech if Meta spends a fortune to amplify it to so many users who wouldn’t have heard it, but for Meta making that decision, or is it now both of our speech? I’m not sure exactly where that line is. If it’s obviously purely Meta content, then it’s pretty simple, but there are going to be a lot of cases in between. Bu…
@reckless.bsky.social

I do accept that the idea of creating a market for moderation through immunity basically failed, though - network effects and switching costs just don’t allow for it

@reckless.bsky.social

I keep getting told that we can't fail to regulate AI like we did social media and I keep asking about the First Amendment problems that meaningfully kept that from happening. I thought Schiff did try and engage on that here, which was nice. But also

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