It’s hard to tell why automated feeds are treated differently to manual feeds. If a blogger repeated a libellous claim, they could be sued, even if their primary activity was curating other people’s opinions. Why companies that run algorithms that do the same thing at scale get a free pass is hard to fathom. These aren’t dumb pipes, but carefully programmed algorithms, tweaked for generating maximum engagement.

I would suggest that any service that provided a curated feed of content pushed to users, should be treated as a publisher and held liable for the content it promotes. Importantly, “curation” would include spam filtering.

Google News, Facebook and Twitter would all be deemed publishers under this rule. Search engines wouldn’t.

It would probably kill their business models, but that could well be a net gain for humanity.