Why I changed my mind about Section 230

Section 1201, anti-circumvention, is pure evil. As with the Youtube-dl case: https://joindiaspora.com/posts/808cf690f8e801381778002590d8e... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24888234)

Section 512, content take-down, is a mixed bag. It protects small players, but also opens the door to abuse or abusive interpretations such as YouTube's Content ID. See the Adam Neely - Katy Perry incident:

https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/adam-neely-youtube-copyrig...

Discussed in this HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22489373

How would something like you're suggesting work?

Under what circumstances would it be appropriate to moderate and under what other circumstances would it be inappropriate? Just as importantly, who gets to decide what's appropriate/inappropriate?

And to whom would this apply? Section 230 applies to everyone, including you, me, HackerNews and your great aunt Sally.

If we limit section 230's applicability, who decides where it should apply and where it shouldn't?

I'm not objecting to your suggestion, I'd just like to understand how you see such a 'compromise' being implemented.

I'd welcome your thoughts!

Currently if someone posts a shitty review, the company can sue them, not Facebook. That's what 230 does. If you remove section 230, then Facebook itself becomes liable for the comment. So now if the comment actually is libelous then Facebook would have to pay money. Unless they don't filter or moderate - filtering includes spam, etc.

YCombinator would become liable for comments on hacker news - because it filters spammers.

Facebook might be able to afford the presumably heavy handed filtering, but ycombinator probably can't, and a basic dev blog almost certainly can't, so would have to remove support for comments.

Public bug reports also can't filter spam bug reports, for the same reason.

What would change if section 230 were repealed? Well, among many other things, if you have a git repo and you delete any PRs (say, someone posts spam or links to porn or other material irrelevant to the repo and its underlying purpose), you can then be sued if someone (not you) posts a bug report or an opinion about anything that a third-party doesn't like.

Or if you host a mirror of lkml[0] and Linus posts a snarky response to a patch merge request, without section 230, you can be sued.

Or if you host a web site and someone posts a comment to which a third-party objects, without section 230, you can be sued.

I'm not sure how you feel about that, but that's not the kind of world in which I want to live.

[0] https://lkml.org/

Also, the more effective solutions would diminish government power and is thus undesirable; restricting the ability of CloudFlare or hosting companies to turn away customers means that they no longer get to lean on CloudFlare to take down websites that they don't want, much like how they currently use financial institutions to do the same kind of thing (Operation Chokepoint).

On what basis do you make the judgement that section 230 was enacted to protect only small players?

That doesn't appear to have been Congress' intent at all.

In fact, while Congress was debating[1] section 230, Representative Christopher Cox[0] said:

"But another New York court, the New York Supreme Court, held that Prodigy, CompuServe's competitor, could be held liable in a $200 million defamation case because someone had posted on one of their bulletin boards, a financial bulletin board, some remarks that apparently were untrue about an investment bank, that the investment bank would go out of business and was run by crooks.

Prodigy said, ``No, no; just like CompuServe, we did not control or edit that information, nor could we, frankly. We have over 60,000 of these messages each day, we have over 2 million subscribers, and so you cannot proceed with this kind of a case against us.''

The court said, ``No, no, no, no, you are different; you are different than CompuServe because you are a family-friendly network. You advertise yourself as such. You employ screening and blocking software that keeps obscenity off of your network. You have people who are hired to exercise an emergency delete function to keep that kind of material away from your subscribers. You don't permit nudity on your system. You have content guidelines. You, therefore, are going to face higher, stricker liability because you tried to exercise some control over offensive material.''

Mr. Chairman, that is backward. We want to encourage people like Prodigy, like CompuServe, like America Online, like the new Microsoft network, to do everything possible for us, the customer, to help us control, at the portals of our computer, at the front door of our house, what comes in and what our children see. This technology is very quickly becoming available, and in fact every one of us will be able to tailor what we see to our own tastes."

Note that the folks Rep. Cox was talking about, Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy and Microsoft were the big boys back then.

So I'm not sure where you get the idea that only the small players were the intended beneficiaries of section 230.

To be clear, I have no objection if you (and others) think there should be changes to section 230, then we should have a discussion about what changes should be made and why.

I just think we should deal in facts and data and not make unsupported assertions about, well, anything -- especially when it comes to proposed legislative changes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Cox

[1] https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/1995/08/04/hou...