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Wednesday, February 08, 2023

How the Supreme Court ruling on Section 230 could end Reddit as we know it

 ‘Tis an old saying, “The Devil hides behind the cross”

~Cervante

The devil says ‘Only I can fix it.’


Elizabeth Farrelly spoke at the Balmain Institute about cronyism, uglification, sprawl, heritage destruction, habitat clearing and urban heat: perhaps it is time for a reset at St Thomas




Astronomers Say They Have Spotted the Universe’s First Stars Quanta


Landmark vaccine for honeybees Bangkok Post


Christine Lagarde: ECB press conference – introductory statement Bank of International Settlements


MICROBIOME NEWS:  Youth binge drinking linked to gut microbiome changes.


How the Supreme Court ruling on Section 230 could end Reddit as we know it MIT Technology Review: “February, all eyes will be on the biggest players in tech—Meta, Google, Twitter, YouTube. A legal provision tucked into the Communications Decency Act, Section 230 has provided the foundation for Big Tech’s explosive growth, protecting social platforms from lawsuits over harmful user-generated content while giving them leeway to remove posts at their discretion (though they are still required to take down illegal content, such as child pornography, if they become aware of its existence).



 The case might have a range of outcomes; if Section 230 is repealed or reinterpreted, these companies may be forced to transform their approach to moderating content and to overhaul their platform architectures in the process. But another big issue is at stake that has received much less attention: depending on the outcome of the case, individual users of sites may suddenly be liable for run-of-the-mill content moderation. Many sites rely on users for community moderation to edit, shape, remove, and promote other users’ content online—think Reddit’s upvote, or changes to a Wikipedia page. 

What might happen if those users were forced to take on legal risk every time they made a content decision?  In short, the court could change Section 230 in ways that won’t just impact big platforms; smaller sites like Reddit and Wikipedia that rely on community moderation will be hit too, warns Emma Llansó, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Free Expression Project. “It would be an enormous loss to online speech communities if suddenly it got really risky for mods themselves to do their work,” she says…”


  1. “Art is artifice plus, one hopes, a hint of genius… Such hints can shine through… in the most unlikely, indeed the silliest places. There is of course no reason why AI should not also be such a place” — Justin E.H. Smith (University of Paris 7) defends AI art, sort of
  2. “I do not think a degenerated scholasticism is the right historical metaphor for our time and era. I think late antiquity Hellenistic philosophy is where we should see ourselves” — “We are in a syncretic age. And I believe that is why we will soon be forgot,” says Liam Kofi Bright (LSE)
  3. “Ethics are mostly an afterthought for… profit-driven organisations, a compliance hoop they must jump through. Tasioulas and the crew of philosophers he has assembled are arguing that ethics should be foundational” — The Times profiles Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in AI
  4. “Now, how does one inspect the unobservable / With tools meant to detect the world measurable?” — “Hard Problem of Consciousness” is a new catchy tune by philosophical songstress Hannah Hoffman
  5. Over the past 25 years, the number of students at Wake Forest increased by 40%, but the number of students majoring or minoring in philosophy increased by 300% — a profile of the philosophy program at Wake Forest touches on, among other things, its strategies for increasing enrollment
  6. The philosophy of comics (comic strips, comic books) — questions and comments from nine philosophers
  7. The do’s and don’ts of writing about women in the history of philosophy — from Sandrine Bergès (Bilkent)