Hacker News Reader

Comment by qball | Hacker News Reader

>there are ongoing discussions at the European Union level

I suspect that if the EU really does implement this, the US will likely make it against US law to obey media censorship requests from other countries against speech that the First Amendment protects. They probably should have done that a little while ago (curating content under the request of a foreign government should be one of those things that revoke your Section 230 privileges), but better late than never.

Other countries dictating what can and cannot be said on US services is already a big problem, and will only get worse, and the EU's bargaining position is much weaker than China's given that the vast majority of EU citizens use US services.

View on HN

It is not constitutional for the US to make it illegal to remove content. Regardless of why you would remove it.

The 1st Amendment cuts both ways there - you can't be punished for removing something from your billboard. That's your freedom as a US entity to decide what you express. The reasoning behind why you removed content (a violation of your website's terms, a request from a foreign government, contractual obligation with McDonalds to not host Pink Slime videos in exchange for $1MM a year) doesn't matter from a constitutional perspective. So the US government revoking a protection of an existing US law as punishment for an expression (removing content) would be an unconstitutional violation of free expression.

They can certainly make it illegal to pay any fines, though.

Also, >you can't be punished for removing something from your billboard.

Sure you can, you can just be treated as a "curator" rather than a "publisher" and thus liable for your curated collection. That's the whole point of S. 230, after all.

There is nothing in S. 230 that distinguishes between curators and publishers. It says:

> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

"Information content provider" is:

> The term “information content provider” means any person or entity that is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of information provided through the Internet or any other interactive computer service

In fact, the point of S. 230 was to allow sites to block and filter offensive material without that making them liable for the material that their filtering or blocking did not remove. There's a decent history of how this came about on Wikipedia [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...

Removing content when you don't want but are required to do so seems like non-free expression. Although it might be difficult to distinguish between content being removed due to legal requirements vs just not wanting to host the content.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com