I was struck by a thought while reading the article- are the feeds of social media companies actually protected under section 230? My Facebook feed is more than just a simple serving of my friends content, it’s a work in and of itself (like a collection of essays).
It seems like a stretch given that the law states that they can’t be considered the publisher of “information” provided by others, but possible as these sites are the ones engaged in picking content.
The article mentions the roommates.com racial discrimination case. I wonder what a court would do if a site had some black box algorithm that ended up consistently showing a feed of rooms in one zip code to whites and rooms in another zip code to blacks, never overlapping.
Edit-
My point being- it might be possible to hold Facebook/Twitter/YouTube liable for the information in their feeds, particularly that which is surfaced out of order or from people a user isn’t subscribed to. But I’m not lawyer, nor do I play one on TV.
It seems like a stretch given that the law states that they can’t be considered the publisher of “information” provided by others, but possible as these sites are the ones engaged in picking content.
The article mentions the roommates.com racial discrimination case. I wonder what a court would do if a site had some black box algorithm that ended up consistently showing a feed of rooms in one zip code to whites and rooms in another zip code to blacks, never overlapping.
Edit- My point being- it might be possible to hold Facebook/Twitter/YouTube liable for the information in their feeds, particularly that which is surfaced out of order or from people a user isn’t subscribed to. But I’m not lawyer, nor do I play one on TV.