48,165 research outputs found
In Defense on Online Intermediary Immunity: Facilitating Communities of Modified Exceptionalism
In the ten years since its enactment, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA) has become perhaps the single most significant statute in the regulation of online content, and one of the most heavily criticized. Many early commentators criticized both Congress, for its apparent inability to craft the more limited statute it intended, and the courts, for interpreting the statute broadly and failing to limit its reach. Later commentators focus more clearly on policy concerns, contending that the failure to impose liability on intermediaries fails to effectuate principles of efficiency and cost avoidance.
This article takes the opposing view, in defense of broad Section 230 immunity. It argues that the immunity provisions of Section 230 play a significant role in broader questions of Internet governance. Specifically, Section 230 immunity provides a means of working within the sovereign legal system to effectuate many of the goals, ideals and realities of the Internet exceptionalism, cyberlibertarian movements. By mitigating the imposition of certain external legal norms in the online environment, Section 230 helps to create the initial condition necessary for the development of a modified form exceptionalism. With the impact of external norms diminished, Web 2.0 communities, such as wikis and social networks, have emerged to facilitate a limited market in norms and values, and to provide internal enforcement mechanisms that allow new communal norms to emerge. Section 230 plays a vital role in this process of building heterogeneous communities that encourage collaborative production and communication. Efforts to reform or restrict Section 230 immunity are therefore unnecessary and unwise
In Defense on Online Intermediary Immunity: Facilitating Communities of Modified Exceptionalism
In the ten years since its enactment, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA) has become perhaps the single most significant statute in the regulation of online content, and one of the most heavily criticized. Many early commentators criticized both Congress, for its apparent inability to craft the more limited statute it intended, and the courts, for interpreting the statute broadly and failing to limit its reach. Later commentators focus more clearly on policy concerns, contending that the failure to impose liability on intermediaries fails to effectuate principles of efficiency and cost avoidance.
This article takes the opposing view, in defense of broad Section 230 immunity. It argues that the immunity provisions of Section 230 play a significant role in broader questions of Internet governance. Specifically, Section 230 immunity provides a means of working within the sovereign legal system to effectuate many of the goals, ideals and realities of the Internet exceptionalism, cyberlibertarian movements. By mitigating the imposition of certain external legal norms in the online environment, Section 230 helps to create the initial condition necessary for the development of a modified form exceptionalism. With the impact of external norms diminished, Web 2.0 communities, such as wikis and social networks, have emerged to facilitate a limited market in norms and values, and to provide internal enforcement mechanisms that allow new communal norms to emerge. Section 230 plays a vital role in this process of building heterogeneous communities that encourage collaborative production and communication. Efforts to reform or restrict Section 230 immunity are therefore unnecessary and unwise
The Effect of Social Distancing on the Reach of an Epidemic in Social Networks
How does social distancing affect the reach of an epidemic in social
networks? We present Monte Carlo simulation results of a capacity constrained
Susceptible-Infected-Removed (SIR) model. The key modelling feature is that
individuals are limited in the number of acquaintances that they can interact
with, thereby constraining disease transmission to an infectious subnetwork of
the original social network. While increased social distancing always reduces
the spread of an infectious disease, the magnitude varies greatly depending on
the topology of the network. Our results also reveal the importance of
coordinating social distancing policies at the global level. In particular, the
public health benefits from social distancing to a group (e.g., a country) may
be completely undone if that group maintains connections with outside groups
that are not following suit
Quantifying the relevance of different mediators in the human immune cell network
Immune cells coordinate their efforts for the correct and efficient
functioning of the immune system (IS). Each cell type plays a distinct role and
communicates with other cell types through mediators such as cytokines,
chemokines and hormones, among others, that are crucial for the functioning of
the IS and its fine tuning. Nevertheless, a quantitative analysis of the
topological properties of an immunological network involving this complex
interchange of mediators among immune cells is still lacking. Here we present a
method for quantifying the relevance of different mediators in the immune
network, which exploits a definition of centrality based on the concept of
efficient communication. The analysis, applied to the human immune system,
indicates that its mediators significantly differ in their network relevance.
We found that cytokines involved in innate immunity and inflammation and some
hormones rank highest in the network, revealing that the most prominent
mediators of the IS are molecules involved in these ancestral types of defence
mechanisms highly integrated with the adaptive immune response, and at the
interplay among the nervous, the endocrine and the immune systems.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure
Impact of spatially constrained sampling of temporal contact networks on the evaluation of the epidemic risk
The ability to directly record human face-to-face interactions increasingly
enables the development of detailed data-driven models for the spread of
directly transmitted infectious diseases at the scale of individuals. Complete
coverage of the contacts occurring in a population is however generally
unattainable, due for instance to limited participation rates or experimental
constraints in spatial coverage. Here, we study the impact of spatially
constrained sampling on our ability to estimate the epidemic risk in a
population using such detailed data-driven models. The epidemic risk is
quantified by the epidemic threshold of the
susceptible-infectious-recovered-susceptible model for the propagation of
communicable diseases, i.e. the critical value of disease transmissibility
above which the disease turns endemic. We verify for both synthetic and
empirical data of human interactions that the use of incomplete data sets due
to spatial sampling leads to the underestimation of the epidemic risk. The bias
is however smaller than the one obtained by uniformly sampling the same
fraction of contacts: it depends nonlinearly on the fraction of contacts that
are recorded and becomes negligible if this fraction is large enough. Moreover,
it depends on the interplay between the timescales of population and spreading
dynamics.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figure
Collective versus hub activation of epidemic phases on networks
We consider a general criterion to discern the nature of the threshold in
epidemic models on scale-free (SF) networks. Comparing the epidemic lifespan of
the nodes with largest degrees with the infection time between them, we propose
a general dual scenario, in which the epidemic transition is either ruled by a
hub activation process, leading to a null threshold in the thermodynamic limit,
or given by a collective activation process, corresponding to a standard phase
transition with a finite threshold. We validate the proposed criterion applying
it to different epidemic models, with waning immunity or heterogeneous
infection rates in both synthetic and real SF networks. In particular, a waning
immunity, irrespective of its strength, leads to collective activation with
finite threshold in scale-free networks with large exponent, at odds with
canonical theoretical approaches.Comment: Revised version accepted for publication in PR
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