You cant expect to have immunity under section 230 if you arent going to provide "good samaritan" blocking and screening of offensive material.
The exemption is what has allowed the internet to become what it has today. Lawmakers have already threatened to change this in the past. I'd much rather they see the current law already handles bad actors than for them to introduce something "new".
* edit to fix typo
That is the actual law: https://transition.fcc.gov/Reports/tcom1996.txt
> Thermale protects against the government compelling speech.
What compelled speech?
For those who don't want to try to find in that nearly 50000 word bill that is a massive mix of additions and diffs updating a large part of telecommunication law, here is a link to where the small section that is relevant to this discussion ended up in codified in the US code [1].
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
Clarification: I am not saying that their interpretation of Section 230 is correct. I am just saying that the link they provided to the text of Section 230 is in fact a link to the text of Section 230.
>You cant expect to have immunity under section 230 if you arent going to provide "good samaritan" blocking and screening of offensive material.
In fact the law does not obligate service providers to moderate at all (except in accordance with a few narrow laws around sex trafficking, IP, and some criminal stuff). It does say that IF you moderate:
> 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.
The phrase "offensive material", doesn't mean offensive to ME in particular or to a "reasonable person" necessarily but in context if means offensive to the service provider.
Compelling the company to disclose their internal moderation discussions is compelled speech. The 1st amendment provides broad protections here. The argument that their internal moderation discussions are like ingredients in a physical product is really flimsy.
This is actually incorrect. Section 230 _allows_ blocking and screening, but doesn't _require_ it.
That's it. Nothing about "publisher vs platform" or whatever. The entire point of the law, as designed, and intentionally, was to prevent every single website owner from being in violation of child porn laws. It is an EXTRA freedom, given to website operators.
Imagine Youtube's Content ID auto-moderation, but removing all text content as well. "yay"