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Comment by mrighele | Hacker News Reader

Yes they did. I am talking about the Internet.

It used to be that anybody could post anything on the Internet. If it was something illegal sooner or later the state FBI/a Judge/Whatever would come for you, but it was a matter between you and the law. Your Internet provider, your hosting provider, etc. couldn't care less because they were not involved in your activity, in the same way that the post office is not to blame if you send an explosive letter using their service.

That's Section 230. While it's an USA-specific law it was in the spirit followed also in most of the other Western countries.

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> It used to be that anybody could post anything on the Internet.

This was never the case. We had occasional law enforcement contact back in the 90s when I ran a gaming vBulletin board in high school. Your IP was trivially traced to a physical landline location and VPNs were in their infancy, and Facebook.com didn't get HTTPS by default until well into the 2000s (after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firesheep).

Section 230 protects the ISPs and websites from liability, not the posters. It made it safer to host potentially actionable user-generated speech at scale, not harder.

> Section 230 protects the ISPs and websites from liability, not the posters.

I know. That's not what I am complaining about.

I am not an anarchist. I am fine with enforcement asking an ISP, a website, a forum, whatever to remove content because it breaks some law.

What I am complaining about is: it used to be that a platform would let you use it as you saw fit. If you were doing something illegal sooner or later law enforcement would come after you but then the platform wouldn't care much because it was YOUR fault not theirs.

The exception to this was very high level. e.g. phpBB forums with moderators. But those where not platform. They were quite small in size. I consided something like Youtube closer to an ISP or a Registar than a bulletin board. You cannot really escape them.

It used to be that those would only act after the fact (as you said). Only recently (past 10 years) they started to proactively censor their content. It is not completely their fault, they have been pressured to do so, but still they have.

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