You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 of the CDA

> (c) Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material (1) Treatment of publisher or speaker > 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.

Wouldn't repealing Section 230 mean more censorship and restrictions as the liability would be too great to be on the hook for what some random account might decide to publish, no?

[1] Here is a recent discussion about 320 from a few lawyers and an YouTuber who used to work for the mainstream media:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a5H1A65wOM

As you will see if you watch the video, it is much more nuanced than the aggregate straw-man set up by the article.

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The crux of the issue is that Section 320 was drafted with a lot of assumptions in mind. At the time the Web was a fledgling thing. At the time Section 230's practical effect was to empower emerging platforms to do some common-sense moderation without fear of being held liable for all content they distributed.

Does the law still has this effect? Yes, it does. But that is no longer the primary effect in terms of how this law affect most of the people out there. Today its primary effect is to give an impenetrable legal shield to giant tech corporations that engage in deliberate society-wide manipulation of information. That is what most people out there are unhappy about, even if they don't quite know how to phrase it.

But then I saw this passage:

> The "user" protections get less attention, but they're right there in the important 26 words. "No provider or __user__ of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker...." That's why there are cases like Barrett v. Rosenthal where someone who forwarded an email to a mailing list was held to be protected by Section 230, as a user of an interactive computer service who did not write the underlying material that was forwarded.

I didn't know that! I guess I was wrong about Section 230 :)

It seems like a stretch given that the law states that they can’t be considered the publisher of “information” provided by others, but possible as these sites are the ones engaged in picking content.

The article mentions the roommates.com racial discrimination case. I wonder what a court would do if a site had some black box algorithm that ended up consistently showing a feed of rooms in one zip code to whites and rooms in another zip code to blacks, never overlapping.

Edit- My point being- it might be possible to hold Facebook/Twitter/YouTube liable for the information in their feeds, particularly that which is surfaced out of order or from people a user isn’t subscribed to. But I’m not lawyer, nor do I play one on TV.

Section 230 certainly encouraged centralization of the internet. Without it, platforms would be liable for content they hosted, which would be financially unviable.

Instead, people would have to self-host their own content on their own infrastructure. (230 provides no protection for people that do that.)

In addition to preventing the big monopolies from arising, this would have made censorship and surveillance much more difficult.

As it is, we’re in a situation where even the speech of the POTUS is beholdent to corporate censors.

The rest of the DMCA drastically shifted the balance of power toward copyright holders (and was also designed to increase consolidation of the industry); section 230 was necessary to offset that. I’d be happy to see the whole law repealed, though it would have the side effect of shattering the business models of the big tech monopolies. Repealing 230 but not the rest of the DMCA would be madness.

However, I do believe that social media feeds and the companies or people that thrive on them are a cancer on society that need be to regulated into hell and never brought out again.

If people are going to get upset about recent events and how companies are reacting, I would really prefer it if they focus on what the root cause is, instead of trying to get a one up on their enemies.

Where it does come around to Section 230 is that the way that they can (ab)use their power is tied to what they do and laws like it : an ISP with several billion customers but under net neutrality and common carrier laws would probably still be less problematic than current Facebook/Twitter/YouTube.

To address those trying to repeal it:

• Some people think that if 230 was repealed, websites would moderate less. That's false. Because of the liability for users' posts, big websites would be forced to moderate more. And small websites would shut down out of fear of lawsuits.

• Some people think that 230 must be repealed because websites are moderating too much. Well, the great thing about 230 is you can create your own websites. If you want to make your own free-speech forum and watch it be filled with far-right insurrectionists like all the other ones, you can, and you won't assume much liability for it. On the other hand, if 230 was repealed, you would not have this option, and the big tech companies you don't like would censor your friends for the same reasons they do today.

I don't think everyone using Twitter and Facebook is good but this can't be solved by making it hard to run small forums.

I also think it's dangerous to try to force people to run their forums with “fair” moderation. Free speech is important as a right to stop the state using violence against you. Being kicked out of a private group because you're disruptive, mean or faked your speedrunning scores, is on the other hand no great injustice that the law should interfere with.

Good article though.

It's more so the idea, that the right wing believes that Social Media is unfairly applying their moderation rules targeting the right side of the political spectrum. They want these these rules (even if it's more censorship) applied evenly to both right and left speech.

While what we have right now is not "free" speech, even moderated speech has a bias and both sides point to the other when it comes to these rules being applied unfairly. Repealing 230 is a way to hurt who they see as responsible - the companies running the services as they are the one who apply these moderation rules unfairly.

This entire thing is just because of a pissing match between Twitter/FB and Donald Trump. Why doesn't he just an alternative? I thought Parler was supposed to be the "free speech platform"? I'm sure his audience would follow him, and I'd wager a lot of them are already there.

This entire "fight" about S230 is completely bonkers.

If section 230 is no big deal, let's just repeal it. What's the hoopla about it, then? Why are companies so adamant to protect it?

The section itself is very broad, but the impetus for the passing of Section 230 was to protect free speech by removing liability concerns for what others say online.

> On July 23, 2013, the attorneys general of 47 states sent Congress a letter requesting that the criminal and civil immunity in section 230 be removed. The ACLU wrote of the proposal, "If Section 230 is stripped of its protections, it wouldn't take long for the vibrant culture of free speech to disappear from the web." [1]

So, apparently big tech has killed that vibrant culture and in 2021, I think we can declare it dead. Tens of thousands of people are getting purged from social media, others alienated, ostracized, and shadow banned. There is a concerted effort to manufacture consent through targeted algorithmic hijacking of free speech. And so, we find ourselves in a situation where the current situation is UNTENABLE.

A free society cannot have its discourse completely dominated by a handful of corporations. This is a civil rights issue. I'm sorry, some people want to weasel out of this with arguments of technicality.

Technically, before labor laws were passed in the 20th century, there was nothing wrong with asking someone to work 60-70 hours a week and paying them the same rate. There was nothing illegal about paying someone 10 cents an hour prior to minimum wage laws. But we realized that some broad protection for certain workers rights were worth intervening in the free market for.

That is the issue of the 21st century. We are the content producers on social media. We should have rights to not be deplatformed. And no, it's not acceptable to arbitrarily empower a handful of corporations to decide what is acceptable speech and what is not. If the speech is not illegal, it should be protected. And in the U.S. we have broad, broad protections for speech for an extremely important reason. Cannot forget that. Too many societies have fallen to tyranny as a result of free speech restriction. Tens of millions perished for the right to speak freely. That can't be understated or forgotten. Ever. The 21st century deserves a movement for a digital bill of rights.

[1] https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/privacy-and-surv...

But what should replace it? Perhaps something that does make the distinction between what is a platform and a publisher. That could be difficult.

I'd most likely go for something tapered, so that smaller sites had more protections / less responsibilities and larger sites less protection/more responsibility, in order to promote competition because I think lack of competition is the main problem. So if small sites retained section 230 protection and larger sites didn't, perhaps that would produce better outcomes. Thus, I'm completely against stamping down on Parler and Gab, and any other upstart in the space. The more competitors the better, in my view.

proceeds to say "you're wrong" a gazillion times

I largely agree with the specific legal analysis in this guide. And it's nice to see a lawyer encouraging people who are not lawyers to read a law for themselves. But freely mixing legal analysis and political opinion, in a snarky format with debunker tone, isn't responsible. Law degrees don't turn our policy views into anointed fact.

The section on "big tech" isn't legal analysis. The fact that a law doesn't call out a specific group doesn't mean that such a group won't specifically benefit, or suffer, in practice. The fact that Section 230 doesn't have any language about company size or market share doesn't mean the law doesn't benefit them, benefit them more than smaller players, or benefit them in ways competitors in other industries don't enjoy. There are arguments both ways there. It's not all the lawyers on one side, and everybody who hasn't read the law on the other.

We know which side Mike's on. Reducing Section 230 claims to "a narrow set of frivolous lawsuits" was really cringey. Have a look at some of the cases that had folks reconsidering Section 230, back before Trump was even a candidate for president. The whole section where that jab appears is a straw man. I've not met anybody who thinks companies are totally immune from all laws.

Lots of

If you said this, you are wrong.

Great, but I didn't say the sky is green, I said it wasn't always blue.

If you, the platform, are in charge of what I see, then you are a publisher.

If you, the platform, add comments to what I write, you are editorializing, and you are a publisher.

Publishers should not have 230 protections.

He could schedule a press conference at any time and have his words plastered all over Twitter within minutes by journalists.

Twitter as a platform made a choice, as a private entity. This choice is legally protected. Likewise Apple and Google both have the right to ban apps like Parler from their app stores under the same protections.

Nobody is banning "conservative" speech. What they are banning is outright lies, racist rhetoric, and calls for organized violent action.

If that has become synonymous with conservatism and the Republican party, then I would say that their "political movement" needs to be dismantled.

From a pure logic standpoint, there is something that bugs me with the argument that moderation isn't the same as producing content. A website's moderation policy could be that, on any given day, any message other than "The archduke is a corrupt autocrat responsible for the assassination of members of the political opposition" -- which might be libel -- will be deleted by the content moderation team. The next day, the moderation policy might be that the only message that will not be deleted by the moderation team should be "Furthermore, the archduke is having a secret affair with his first cousin".

The platform doesn't publish any content in this scenario, it merely awaits for some random anonymous account, on which no liability will be assessible, to post the unique string of characters that is allowed by the content moderation policy on that day.

Of course, what I'm setting up here is a bit of a beard fallacy [1]. Laws are not enforced by algorithms and a human (in particular a judge) is perfectly capable of distinguishing between a content moderation policy that bans profanity and one that bans all but one string of character.

Beard arguments are everywhere, human-made categories always have fuzzy boundaries. However, some categories have sharper boundaries than others. There is very little ambiguity as to what "running a red light" means for a motor vehicle, even though Buridan's paradox [2] tells us that there could be. There may be a continuous curve, but the slope is very steep, creating a sharp distinction between "running a red light" and "not running a red light".

The slope from moderation policy to content publisher is not as steep of a slope. While everyone might agree that banning, say, profanities is not really a form of speech, and while everyone might agree that my cute hack above is really just speech, there are many intermediate points where reasonable people might disagree.

Generally these uncharted areas get progressively cleared up through lawsuits creating precedent which creates uncertainty, and introduce layers and layers of complexity.

My own feeling is that when the delineation of a category requires an accumulation of special cases, exceptions, distinctions, clarifications, it generally means that it does not map to something fundamental or important. A large part of software engineering consists in finding the right abstractions to think about a problem, and when one leaks that badly, it's generally and indication that one is thinking about the problem wrong. My hunch is that the fundamental issue lies in the concept of liability for libel in the first place.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan%27s_ass#Application_to...

With the assumption that it means to argue for keeping 230, they failed to convince me that it was a necessary piece of regulation. Yes, they corrected many misconceptions, but at the end of the day there is still a key argument against 230, and it goes like this:

There are a lot of things posted by 3rd parties on websites that lead to harmful outcomes. Companies that leave that content up are able to make profit from the views/clicks generated. They have already demonstrated the ability to moderate content, they chose not to do so when it’s not favorable to their profit. Why should I protect platforms or give them the option to not moderate harmful content? If you’re making a profit from it, that’s part of your product and you should hold some liability. This wouldn’t absolve 3rd parties that post harmful content from also having liability because the courts regularly rule on splitting liability and deciding which people hold which portion of blame. Repealing 230 allows us to hold companies accountable for leaving harmful content up when they could have taken it down, it would not require the courts to fine them every time something bad happens- it would just give the courts the option to do so when it’s the right call. As of now, 230 is too strong of protection.

I know they can do it. We have real time profanity filtering in video game chat, social media automatically detects faces for tagging, I know with a few automated solutions and a team of mods (paid and/or volunteer), and online platform can do a reasonable job. HN does a great job with surprisingly few mods. Reddit does it and has a pretty robust process for addressing harmful subreddits. YouTube polices non-advertiser-friendly content, I know they could moderate more if required. Sure, some things slip through the cracks, but maybe a competent defense and a reasonable court can decide that a company isn’t liable for one-off failures, provided it has good processes in place to catch most of the issues. Like Ford isn’t held liable every time someone crashes a car and dies, they are only held liable when they are aware of their cars being dangerous and not doing anything about it- but after issuing a recall, the liability is back on the car owner for not getting it fixed. Anyway, the courts and lawyers are well equipped to decide questions of liability without Section 230.

I guess the other thing I want to come back around to that the article didn’t really address, is that right now the protection seems unbalanced/one-sided because it protects platforms from choosing not to moderate, but it doesn’t force them not to moderate. IMHO, if the Facebooks and Twitters are allowed to say “we don’t have the ability to police our content” then they shouldn’t be deplatforming controversial people like Alex Jones. It’s hypocritical to say that tech companies need protections and then be in favor of kicking people off. I’m not actually sad when someone like Jones or Trump gets the ban hammer. But I have a hard time justifying allowing companies to have moderation power and then allowing them to choose only to use it when a situation gets so bad that it affects their profit. Like, you can’t be watching the a house burn while holding a fire hose and not expect me to be mad when you decide to water your garden instead. If you’re actually unable to moderate, you had better not be making headlines by moderation. Because it seems to me like you’re begging the question- oh, so you clearly can moderate some things, let’s figure out how much money you made while ignoring the harm you were causing up until that point.

What I’m actually in favor of by the way, is repealing the wholesale protection of Section 230 and replacing it with something that requires a reasonable level of moderation, or provides a little bit of protection for companies that have made a good attempt at moderation. That would be a much better incentive for companies than the incentive 230 currently provides.

> Law text: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher.”

People who want Section 230 repealed or modified want to be able to make the legal argument that by actively banning certain speech while elevating other speech, social media companies ARE acting as publishers. The law doesn’t need to define publisher again. We already have an understanding of what publishers do: they selectively choose and publicize OTHER people’s content.

What am I missing? Whether or not it’s justified, the reason some people want it repealed seem obvious to me.

Interesting that the first couple of paragraphs talk about a meme, a viral idea he can assume we'll know of because we're all so connected online. Also refers to another popular online article in the same format he liked and adopted. Disconnecting someone from social media feels like it may only be helping their cause.

I think our social networks are too centralised and it's a problem, particularly because people can be accuraretly targeted with misinformation, as well as the social media algos displaying things out of order (i.e. their order). Unfortunately it's a truism that there are plenty people who are not empirically sceptical of what they read online and they're only too happy to share it.

As much as I don't agree with Trump on pretty much everything, I think he has a point about social media being arbiters of truth is a problem. I'm also a Brit so say very little about other country's party/policies. If only we could accurately measure reasons why people stormed Capitol Hill. My hunch is that information read online is the primary motivator, weighed in with the fact how information discovery is heavily entrenched in social media.

I would make platforms liable for their content (or at least greater emphasis on them taking an active role) and yes, I appreciate that would make them untenable as they currently stand, but I'm sure there's plenty of strong counterpoints that'd make me reconsider. At the very least, viral content's virality could perhaps be limited. Can't recall the last viral thing I saw that wasn't trivial but was positive. Social media has a lot of power at the moment.

But also kind of funny that the resource does a great job explaining what 230 is not — while a terrible job of what it is.

At this point, I have no idea what Section 230 is.

I’m not a lawyer and I don’t really care for the details of this. Hell, I barely understand how a bill is actually turned into law.

Though, I do know that the POTUS vs Twitter showdown today has put a bittersweet taste in my mouth.

I hope they pass a new law whatever it is.

I would even bet Jack is too to take the pressure off. He’s extremely measured every time I hear him speak, and I would bet he secretly wants a law explicitly forbidding him from being content cop.