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Comment by lgleason | Hacker News Reader

If they want editorial discretion, then they are publishers...no section 230. If they want to be common carriers then they should not be making editorial decisions.

Ironically, if they had not taken steps as egregious and suspending the account of the current president of the US these laws would never have been considered by FL or TX.

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The point of 230 was to eliminate the "publisher" distinction. Otherwise, you can't eliminate spam withouth accepting liability for whatever psycho comments.

If anyone wants to delete spam or kick people off their own servers, why should they be denied?

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/publisher-or-platform-...

>If they want editorial discretion, then they are publishers...no section 230. If they want to be common carriers then they should not be making editorial decisions.

If any post in this discussion called for it, this one does[0][1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25697823 (9 January, 2021 -- 439 points, 304 comments)

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...

Imagine if you time-travelled back to 2002, before Reddit and Facebook, when the internet had thousands of unconnected phpBB forums.

I happen to think the Porsche Cayenne is an ugly midlife-crisis-mobile driven by assholes. Should the Porsche Owners Club phpBB forum be permitted to censor my speech, when I want to share my opinion that Cayenne owners can suck a fat one?

In 2002 the answer would be obvious - it's no problem if they censor me, there's like 1000 other forums I can go to.

Are things really so different these days?

It shouldn't matter even if there truly is nowhere else for you to go. There were zero forums in 1860 and yet we still figured out how to call each other race traitors in pamphlets. The first amendment right is to not have the government police your speech (often nowadays extended beyond speech to influence), it does not give you a positive right to force anyone else to spread your speech.

More than that, forcing someone else to spread your speech when they don't want to is a DIRECT violation of their first amendment right, of the "government forcing you to say things" kind.

You cannot make "free speech is an ideal" without breaking someone else's free speech.

> Are things really so different these days?

Yes, hugely different. No-one joins the Porsche Owners Club because they want to hear what the US President says about national policy. If the Porsche Owners' Club kicks you out, it doesn't really affect your life - official/important announcements aren't posted there, you're not going to get asked about your membership in a job interview. These huge platforms explicitly aspired to be the town square of the internet, not a private members' club; they need to accept the responsibility that comes with that.

These companies want their cake and they want to eat it, too. They want to be treated as a publisher when it comes to making editorial decisions, but they also want to be treated as a dumb pipe when it comes to liability for the content that they publish. They're Schrödinger's Forums: Both publishers and non-publishers, depending on which one helps them.

section 230 does allow platforms the ability to remove unwanted content

What, particularly, was egregious about suspending the account of someone who violated their TOS a hundred times over?

This seems so obviously correct to me. The issue seems to be big companies wanting to have it both ways and screwing everyone else.

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