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Comment by ctdonath | Hacker News Reader

The whole self-appointed "fact checker empowered to cancel" movement has to stop. Far too much fair disagreement, and objective truths, have been maliciously "cancelled" for not adhering to a given narrative on public forums.

I get that "freedom of the press" does not include freedom to use someone else's press, and the owner has the absolute right to decide who may use his press. That said, we have a legal differentiation between "publisher" and "common carrier", and by culling §230-protected content in a clearly biased manner Facebook etc is establishing themselves as "publisher" culpable for libelous & criminal content.

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Facebook fact checked a friend's locket that her mother gave her. It was bizarre. She posted a photo of the locket, Facebook blurred the photo and added a 'Independent fact checkers have determined this is false information' warning. The problem? The locket has a quote on it by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Apparently independent fact checkers are unable to verify that Emerson ever said the quote so it had to be blurred for our protection. Whether the quote is accurate or not, it's strange that Facebook is now policing gifts people give their children.

> by culling §230-protected content in a clearly biased manner Facebook etc is establishing themselves as "publisher" culpable for libelous & criminal content.

No, they aren't. True, if it were not online, Facebook's involvement with selection of which provided content to promote might make them a publisher (it's kind of hard, because both bookstores and other distributors and publishers, offline, actively select content in very biased ways, but face very different liability regimes). But while you reference “§230-protected content”, you fail to understand the operative language of § 230: “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.” Note that there is no “unless, as a provider, they choose to promote that content in a ‘clearly biased’ manner” caveat. Just a bar against the provider being treated as a publisher of content that originates from someone else.

You omit the qualifications for that exemption, which speak heavily toward good faith and minimal impact, which FB/T/etc are going way beyond and will likely have to defend in court with difficulty.

> You omit the qualifications for that exemption

No, I don't, because there aren't any that are relevant here.

> which speak heavily toward good faith and minimal impact

No, 230 has an additional immunity for good faith effort by a provider or user to restrict access to material “the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected” [47 USC § 230(c)(2)], which is in addition to the blanket protection from being treated as a publisher [42 USC § 230(c)(1)]. But note that since this is for material the provider feels is objectionable, the “good faith” involved is nothing like neutrality. There is no “good faith” caveat of any kind on the immunity in § 230(c)(1).

“Minimal impact” doesn't figure into it at all; neither the phrase nor any condition or restriction accurately summarized by it appears anywhere in § 230. That's complete fabrication.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230#

Mountain_Skies' anecdote above certainly does not meet any form of "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable", nor does (say) any of the objective reporting & fair discussion of the Kyle Rittenhouse incident, or other commonplace views normalized among fully half the population.

Arbitrary culling of content which does not constitute "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable" is exactly what "publisher" applies to, and which is the point of this thread.

We can agree to disagree, while watching Kyle Rittenhouse sue Facebook (maybe not quite into oblivion, but the number of digits in the settlement check should be striking) and the court clarify exactly which of us is right to what degree. Popcorn?

The quote that got Facebook's independent fact checker's wrath: “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

There might be some extra context here. When I searched for Ralph Waldo Emerson censor Facebook, older articles about James Woods and Donald Trump using a very different Emerson quote popped up. Tech companies censored those so it may have made them overly sensitive to anything involving Emerson, perhaps even using automated systems that are still running (the locket photo that was sanitized for our protection was posted earlier this week).

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