Do you think phone service providers should be sued for conversations their subscribers have? Similar thing.
Also without it you could sue companies like cloud flare, aws or anyone providing hosting infrastructure.
I think if they were just going to be ISPs then 230 should apply, but it seems odd that a company can select a piece of content and show it to a million people and then not be responsible. And then alternately, they can choose to remove content due to automated and manual rules, not required by law. It seems like they should either be regulated or not.
It seems off that if I solicit articles from random and print them out and mail them, I’m liable for libel. But if I review them all and publish them on a server then I’m no longer liable.
To be more precise, phone companies only block based on regulators and consistent (at least theoretically) rules based on legal authorities given to regulators.
New media isn't paid for by its consumers. Their computer, their rules. Nobody is wringing their hands over the decades of censorship by broadcast radio and television for "community standards".
I don’t think the need for regulation depends much on how much I pay to use the service or whether the publisher is responsible for content.
Another example is that even publishers of free newspapers get sued for libel.
In other words: they aren't expected to have actually read every word of every book they sell. Publishers, newspapers, etc, are. But if a book defames me on page 154, the law doesn't hold the bookstore responsible unless it knew. Once it does know, you could probably sue. But that's not the same as treating it like a publisher- it's a different standard.
It doesn't appear that they even have a duty to the buyer for it to be a good and useful work.
The duty you want to imagine is real would seem to be impossible to reasonably provide because the cost of paying out every time they were wrong would mean books would all cost $500 and in turn the book stores would all shut down. The only viable way to sell books would be to run a website overseas in a less insane jurisdiction selling epubs.
If you wanted to take it to the next level and enforce liability for anything that goes over the wire you could just give up 99.9% of content in the universe?
profit motive for recommendation/amplification is probably what damages humans at scale
It isn't their job --at least not what I think the job the US Constitution should protect-- to create their own version of what he said, embellish it or modify it in any way, in support or opposition.
I don't want news anchors to creatively interpret reality for me. I want facts. The interpretation is mine, not theirs. Most of them are politically biased liars.
If they have even an incidental financial benefit from this behavior and take human or algorithmic steps to encourage it on their platform, then yes.
> Also without it you could sue companies like cloud flare, aws or anyone providing hosting infrastructure.
And yet, telephone companies were explicitly not liable under previous doctrine without 230 even existing. The idea of a "common carrier" far predates section 230.
I think it's fair to ask if companies like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube should honestly deserve that common carrier status.
If a TV station had a call in show where the callers were pre-screened to be slanderous, would that be an example of a publisher or a common carrier?
I don't know the answers but it's not so obviously clear cut as running the pipes.
That presumes the account can be traced to a real person.
I'm all for having solid end to end identity verification, but that opens a lot of doors governments and companies dont want us to have. For one it makes end to end encryption easy, as its equivalent to ensuring you aren't being MITMed.
Not only that I think anonymity is important. Without you could also just as easily be threatened or harassed by people online. It cut both ways.
If someone threatens or harasses you online, and they are not anonymous you can take action. Like you say, both ways.
You can always have sites that drop your identity. It's technically easier to drop information than to verify it.
Section 230 also protects those providing infrastructure for the internet as they do not have common carrier status. Also where do you draw the line between hosting and not? I can use twitter and many other sites to host images. Alot these sites grew out of an easier to use means to host content.
Like what about sites like word-press and medium that also provide easy to use platforms for blogging. Should only the technically inclined be allowed to get hosting?