Legally wsj nyt twitter vogue and instagram are completely different despite clearly being the same product.
It’s insane these platforms aren’t the same.
If you don’t believe this compatible free speech on the internet, post content you don’t think belongs on the internet here and see how quickly the community gets rid of you.
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.
Those words make sense and indeed worked well when "information content providers" remained more or less neutral with regards to what content they provided beyond some common-sense rules.
The problems really started when algorithmic feeds appeared, where the provider now assumes an editorial role and is able to tailor the content to each user individually, with no oversight nor accountability.
A news outlet understands that there’s tons of stories daily they could report on, and they have to selectively choose those based on their target markets. I don’t see how social media sites are any different other than being able to be _more_ specific.
People like to disparage social media platforms they don’t use, but forget that the sites they do use are playing under the same laws.
> If you don’t believe this compatible free speech on the internet, post content you don’t think belongs on the internet here and see how quickly the community gets rid of you.
You’re missing the point. The moderators and/or community getting rid of someone after they posted the content is too late. It would have been up and available for a while. The content would have already been “published” and the liability already triggered in a world where no Section 230 like protections existed.
If you like being able to post things online on websites you don’t own, you need protections like this to exist.
The people who rail against Section 230 and "censorship" have it exactly backwards, if they got their way and 230 went away, instead of having specific content removed they wouldn't be able to post anything at all.
Maybe federated social media? You’d only want to host people you actually trust, but maybe that isn’t so bad.
Edit: I think it is not that surprising that people misunderstand 230, specifically 230c2. We have:
* A constitution that prohibits restrictions by the government on free speech
* Provides “decency” restrictions on speech in some cases
* An exception for sites that act more like communication service providers, as long as they don’t editorialize, which considers the content they host not their speech
* A Good Samaritan exception for sites to do moderation, so their edits and redactions are not interpreted as editorializing
An exception to an exception to an exception is easy to misunderstand.