I think of spam as different from illegal or TOS-prohibited content, because the problem is not necessarily that spam is bad content per se. It’s that spam is in the wrong place – showing up in the inbox, news feed, or search results of someone who’s not interested. 2/
Thus demotion -- rather than removal – might be the right platform response. Demotion fixes the problem by putting content back in the ranking position that best correlates to the likelihood that a user actually wants to see it. 3/
(That analysis is complicated by the fact that platform engineers still might want to delete spam as a penalty for the creator’s bad behavior, rather than just gently demoting it back where it belongs.) 4/
Do others see it that way? Or is that a really web-search-based idea of the problem? Maybe on Twitter or Facebook or Reddit, spam is just junky content that should be deleted. 5/5
Very happy to hear responses off the record in whatever way or via DM. I'm not trying to do fact-finding or reporting here, just vetting how I look at the question. 6/5
Just to be clear, I’m asking the questions in the thread about demotion remedies. Not a request to educate me about spam generically. That maybe wasn’t clear from the first post.
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Probably I’m in that camp. If a few years pass and they prove super legit and useful I’d be open to the conversation. Bringing it up now is... Gauche? Gross? Creepy? Forfeiting credibility and goodwill? Something along those lines.
It’s also hard not to read this as policy advocacy. So many governments are looking for dispute resolution models that are cheaper than courts but more legitimate than platforms. And look who’s offering their services.
I am *really* excited about the Brazilian Supreme Court's Right to Be Forgotten case. I can't wait for Brazilian experts to weigh in and tell us more about the details, but the bottom line is that it's a constitutional rights-based rejection of RTBF claims. 1/
Brazil, like most countries, has cases where a personal privacy claim overrides the speaker's expression rights (or listeners' rights to access information). So I don't think the point is to say that can't happen. 2/
Rather, it's that the *process* for weighing privacy and expression rights matters. The Inter American Human Rights framework is particularly strong on this, and on expression rights generally. 3/
An easier example is a Googlebomb. When pranksters used SEO tactics to make the White House homepage be the first result for searches on "miserable failure" for example. searchengineland.com/google-kills-b… 2/
The problem isn't that the white house page was bad content or needed to be removed/demoted based on Google's disapproval of its message. It was that it wasn't the most relevant result, so changing ranking to move it down improved product functionality or search quality. 3/
Assorted observations on the #DSA. These track my own interests, so if you want an overview, look elsewhere. (If I see one, I’ll add it to the thread though.) 1/
I’d like to see a chart showing which obligations apply to which platforms, particularly at the smaller end of the range. It looks to me like some very burdensome obligations are going to fall on some very small entities. 2/
I know there are some Commission slides showing the obligations at the giant (VLOP!) end of the range. But that small end needs some serious attention IMO. 3/
I'm seeing a lot of discussion of the rules for "very large" platforms. But if I'm understanding right, a lot of the DSA's major new process rules apply to any platform with more than 50 employees. That ought to entrench incumbents quite nicely.
In platform content regulation, operational logistics are everything. That’s cropping up, inevitably, as the EU copyright filter wars heat up again this fall. 1/
You may recall that Copyright Directive Article 17 “resolved” the tension between rightsholders’ and users’ rights by simply mandating the impossible: platforms must “prevent” infringing uploads while simultaneously “in no way affect[ing]” legitimate uses. 2/
No filter in the world can actually achieve both those things. Even filter vendors told the Commission that. infojustice.org/archives/41930 3/