This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Saturday, May 27th, 2023.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Supreme Court has weighed in, sort of, in suits, claiming that when online platforms use algorithms to serve content,

that they're effectively giving up federal legal protections.

Cato's Will Duffield and Jennifer Huddleston discuss the cases and what is next at the High Court.

This case, at least from the outside looking in, from my nubes perspective, was about essentially

the degrees separation between these various platforms

and their and radical behavior from the people who watch videos or may watch some videos on the platform

and to what extent the platform could be held responsible for the decisions that some people make to be radicalized based

upon what they were recommended by an algorithm on the sites like YouTube or Twitter.

Is that basically what the court was addressing or was it something a little different?

Yes, in Gonzales v Google, the central issue was whether or not Section 230 protected platforms

algorithmic recommendation of content or if in relying on algorithms to

recommend it the content became the platform's own.

And so there is a real concern here that in exposing platforms to liability for algorithmic recommendation or curation of any kind, it would end up suppressing

all sorts of controversial or borderline speech from algorithmic. of to sort through the mass of online speech.

And so the case had the potential with this theory of harm

as focus on algorithms to really upend

how the internet works today.

Thankfully, it didn't go that way.

And we could see that it was from the very beginning

considered to be a particularly important case.

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