Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., introduced legislation Wednesday to give Americans the ability to sue major tech companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter if they engage in selective censorship of political speech.
The Limiting Section 230 Immunity to Good Samaritans Act, cosponsored by Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., Mike Braun, R-Ind., and Tom Cotton, R-Ark., would stop such companies from receiving immunity under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, unless they update their terms of service to promise to operate in good faith.
The bill would allow users to sue companies for breaching that contractual duty of good faith, and it would make them pay $5,000 plus legal fees to each user who prevails in a case against them.
On a separate track -- reflecting renewed pressure on these companies out of Washington -- the Justice Department is recommending that lawmakers consider new legislation that would hold tech giants liable for content posted online. Any such legislation would roll back legal protections the online platforms have possessed for decades.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/haw...tech-companies
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In August, Paula Bolyard, a supervising editor at the conservative news outlet PJ Media, published a story reporting that 96% of Google search results for Donald Trump prioritized “left-leaning and anti-Trump media outlets”.
Bolyard’s results were generated according to her own admittedly unscientific methodology. She searched for “Trump” in Google’s News tab, and then used a highly questionable media chart that separated outlets into “left” and “right” to tabulate the results. She reported that 96 of 100 results returned were from so-called “left-leaning” news outlets, with 21 of those from CNN alone. Despite this dubious methodology, Bolyard’s statistic spread, and her story was picked up by a Fox Business Network show.
A few days later, Donald Trump tweeted that Google results were “RIGGED” against him, citing Bolyard’s figure.
For Francesca Tripodi, professor of sociology at James Madison University, anecdotal evidence of anti-conservative bias spreads as fact through the media in part because of a deep misunderstanding of how bias in search engines and content moderation practices work. “These algorithms are very complex and not at all intuitive,” she says. “They weigh things like how many people are linking to an article, what key words appear in the headline, and what specific phrases people are using in their search.
If you search for Donald Trump and receive mostly negative results, Tripodi explains, it isn’t because Google executives are censoring pro-Trump voices, but because most Google users are seeking or linking to this particular type of news item. “In other words, Google is biased but its bias skews towards the type of results people want to see. Search results are kind of like a public opinion poll about what news matters. The company depends on being good at measuring precisely this. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t keep using their services.”
Tripodi, who published a report on media manipulation for the New York-based research institute Data & Society, also explains that so-called anti-conservative “censorship” on social media can often be explained by random glitches in moderation practices taking place at scale.
This year, the conservative media company PragerU accused YouTube and Facebook of “deliberate censorship of conservative ideas” after a number of their videos were taken down. Tripodi reviewed several of the videos and found that there were plausible, non-ideologically motivated explanations for why they were removed.
“One of the videos began with a woman saying the word ‘rape’. This might’ve been picked up by some automated system and then sent for review to a third-party moderator in the Philippines. When you only have three seconds to make a decision about content, you’re not questioning whether the video is promoting conservative views,” she says. “You’re mostly worried about the word ‘rape’.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...ve-bias-claims
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My understanding of Google is that it wants to show the user the best possible sites - based on size, link backs, traffic etc ..
When I search "2A" -- i dont want to be shown a million basement made crap websites and have to sift through them. I want to see the most accurate, largest, most official websites.
Search "current civil rights" -- I dont want to go to some SJW 2 page website that 20 people have visited total.
This just seems like some conservative wag the tail type stuff to try and make it seem like there is some huge nefarious deep state war on conservatives.
Rawr rawr .. theres a war against conservatives .. rawr rawr .. liberal media .. rawr rawr .. media is the enemy .. rawr rawr ...
on top of that ... google is a private company.
I would imagine conservatives would want to limit govt intrusion into the capitalist system.
But no .. crickets from the group that claims they are for less govt, free capitalism, reduce the debt etc ...
06-17-2020, 03:51 PM
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