The litigious nature of Americans is well-known.
It's good that the lawyers are salivating over the "big" social-media liability here.
But outside of the USA, distributed social media, like Mastodon and other ActivityPub services, will hardly notice because it's not worth anyone's effort to take a site of 50 users to court to glean compensatory damages; that can't be enforced in the USA anyway.
It's true that sites like Techdirt will be targeted, but that's what you get for establishing a company in a law-less regime. You made your bed, now lie in it.
In my humble opinion, Mike waxes eloquently, as a front-man for Bluesky, that the American law of section 230 is being assaulted, but no other country will notice as this resolves over the long tail of social media.
Thanks Mike for delving into the details of how their algorithms work. Anecdotally, I did note a preponderance of "extreme" articles in my feed that has since toned down a bit.
Naive me thought it was my reactive comments that caused it...now I know better.
They may ostensibly be collecting the information to avoid self-harm, but the real question is how wide that information will spread beyond the Chinese walls of the organization. I, for one, wouldn't trust Facebook to not capitalize on such information. Such is the nature of corporate America.
If the Article 29 Working Party doesn't reject this out of hand, I expect this will lead to:
- another court challenge from Max Schrems
- Data Protection Authorities will do their job and start taking unilateral action
- the legal departments of some American companies will start a flurry of click-through privacy policy rewriting, since most of them have been couched in terms of we'll do whatever we consider reasonable with your data in order to not be actionable, and now these will be subject to obligations and rights guarantees that are actionable under the Alternative Dispute Resolution mechanism
- the "annual joint review" kangaroo court, since it has no authority or enforcement provisions, being dropped entirely because nobody will want to take on the Sisyphean task of being the NSA police without a big gun
Surely the court transcript is a matter of public record.
Perhaps one of the over 150,000 lawyers in the UK with access to the Newcastle crown court transcripts for June 25, 2012 could simply look it up and confirm or deny some of the points in the anonymous blog post that has since been taken down.
Otherwise, I would consider this input as highly suspect.
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by Rick O'Shea.
long tail
The litigious nature of Americans is well-known. It's good that the lawyers are salivating over the "big" social-media liability here. But outside of the USA, distributed social media, like Mastodon and other ActivityPub services, will hardly notice because it's not worth anyone's effort to take a site of 50 users to court to glean compensatory damages; that can't be enforced in the USA anyway. It's true that sites like Techdirt will be targeted, but that's what you get for establishing a company in a law-less regime. You made your bed, now lie in it. In my humble opinion, Mike waxes eloquently, as a front-man for Bluesky, that the American law of section 230 is being assaulted, but no other country will notice as this resolves over the long tail of social media.
this explains a lot
Thanks Mike for delving into the details of how their algorithms work. Anecdotally, I did note a preponderance of "extreme" articles in my feed that has since toned down a bit.
Naive me thought it was my reactive comments that caused it...now I know better.
unintended consequences is right...
I can visualize the gun lobby slavering over Facebook Ads Manager questions like:
Select individuals with:
☐ suicidal tendencies
☐ low self esteem
☐ actualization anxiety
They may ostensibly be collecting the information to avoid self-harm, but the real question is how wide that information will spread beyond the Chinese walls of the organization. I, for one, wouldn't trust Facebook to not capitalize on such information. Such is the nature of corporate America.
next steps
If the Article 29 Working Party doesn't reject this out of hand, I expect this will lead to:
- another court challenge from Max Schrems
- Data Protection Authorities will do their job and start taking unilateral action
- the legal departments of some American companies will start a flurry of click-through privacy policy rewriting, since most of them have been couched in terms of we'll do whatever we consider reasonable with your data in order to not be actionable, and now these will be subject to obligations and rights guarantees that are actionable under the Alternative Dispute Resolution mechanism
- the "annual joint review" kangaroo court, since it has no authority or enforcement provisions, being dropped entirely because nobody will want to take on the Sisyphean task of being the NSA police without a big gun
only one qualifying comment
Perhaps that result had something to do with the prize only being available in the U.S.
Lost my interest as soon as I saw that.
validity check
Surely the court transcript is a matter of public record.
Perhaps one of the over 150,000 lawyers in the UK with access to the Newcastle crown court transcripts for June 25, 2012 could simply look it up and confirm or deny some of the points in the anonymous blog post that has since been taken down.
Otherwise, I would consider this input as highly suspect.