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Comment by dude187 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, that's the point. Create a negative outcome for companies that perform politically biased censorship, as many do. It gained a ton of popularity during covid because so many were against the government banning public assembly. Yet the only remaining avenues for broad speech censored views that went against the CDC's demands

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> [have the government] Create a negative outcome for companies that perform politically biased censorship

Let’s not leave out an important few words.

No, the government does not create the negative outcome. It is simply an act of removing broad protections granted to a social media company from hosting illegal content. When it's clear that the assumption they have little control over the overall content are not true, because the act to censor to politically slant said content.

The risk comes completely from their members and the ones who may sue them

Why has the focus been purely on instances of perceived political bias if this isn’t just a pretext for punishing the wrong type of perceived political bias? Shouldn’t any demonstration of content control cause the same loss of protection (and cause the same fervent calls for loss of protection)? This would include removing illegal content. Removing illegal content, under your theory, should cause a platform to lose protection from hosting illegal content.

Well that's a bit of a chicken and egg. You only get "protection" from accidentally hosting illegal content if you never host any illegal content in the first place?

The idea is that if you have time to shape the slant of your community, you have no excuse for letting illegal content faster

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