Internet Intermediary Liability in Defamation
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Given the broad meaning of publication in defamation law, internet intermediaries such as internet service providers, search engines, and social media companies may be liable for defamatory content posted by third parties. This article argues that current law is not suitable to dealing with issues of internet defamation and intermediary responsibility because it is needlessly complex, confusing, and may impose liability without blameworthiness. Instead, the article proposes that publication be redefined to require a deliberate act of communicating specific words. This would better reflect blameworthiness and few intermediaries would be liable in defamation under this test. That said, intermediaries profit from content, and they have the capacity and flexibility to respond to defamation in a way that courts cannot. The paper therefore also proposes a regulatory framework called notice-and-notice-plus. This would require intermediaries to forward a notice of complaint to content creators, and only to remove content in limited circumstances.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it