Edit: I mean that being prohibited from editorial interference seems like a pretty long distance from being essentially completely protected in editorial interference.
I guess there are arguments to be made about how far apart these might be conceptually, but what would the country/world look like without Safe Harbor? We may be about to find out.
Is your concern focused on the idea that the law shouldn't incentivize sites to interfere editorially with users' expression, or some other aspect?
This still seems to be point-of-view neutrality on the government's part: an anti-fooist site that removes fooist comments gets the same immunity as a fooist site that removes anti-fooist comments (or a neutral site that removes neither). Is your view that it's wrong for the government to, in a sense, help the fooist site in the first place even though it's equally willing to help the anti-fooist site in the same way? Does that mean that there shouldn't ever be a subsidy for "newspapers" (open to any newspaper regardless of its editorial line or policies), but only for "neutral newspapers" (that don't editorialize)?
If a website can curate what is said so that it is visibly filled with defamatory material about a specific target, the organization curating the material maintains complete immunity from what would otherwise destroy a newspaper or any other organization that is actually liable for what is printed in it.
I don't think this should be possible for any organization, regardless of who they are. This immunity should require an extreme impartiality on behalf of the website. It's meant to protect organizations from speech they don't control -- when they assert any control over that speech, it's now their speech.
IOW, the message can be crafted by the platform even if the words are provided by the users.
Platforms may or may not be slanted people can pick a different platform if they don't like their current ones slant or make their own. People ought to have no right to have a platform to be neutral in what communication they facilitate between their users and any attempt to enforce that is inevitably going to devolve into being slanted towards those with the juice to hire the lawyers to suppress speech.
Just as an article made of quotes would.
And if the message in the feed/article is libelous, it's shameful (though perhaps legal) to hide beyond the argument "I was only quoting other people."
I have a lot of sympathy for the idea that a neutral service should not automatically be responsible for the content it unknowingly transfers on behalf of a small minority of its users. This principle would support common carrier status for services like post delivery or phone networks.
But I also think we have to be careful not to go too far. The potential damage caused by an online distribution network in terms of sharing material that should not be shared is many orders of magnitude greater in terms of potential reach and rate of distribution than the analogous damage caused by a postal or phone service. We shouldn't assume that a reasonable balance between responsibility and safe harbour in one context is necessarily still a good balance in a different context.
Today's big IT businesses make staggering amounts of money from their online services. Some of those services, like YouTube, include significant amounts of illegal content, and sometimes that content was part of the main attraction that got the service established in the first place. I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that the operators of such services shouldn't get a complete pass on facilitating substantial amounts of illegal activity just because policing their services more effectively or at least providing enough resources to respond quickly when they are actively informed of a problem would be inconvenient or cost them money.
The same goes for disruptive businesses like Airbnb and Uber. I have nothing against the disruption itself, where someone is using innovative business models that take advantage of modern technology to compete with established big players. However, I do have something against innovative business models that offer a certain advantage over incumbents only because they don't follow the same rules as everyone else. If some of those rules are no longer fit for purpose then they should be changed or removed appropriately, but then they should be changed or removed for everyone, too.
1) Yeah that works great until someone uploads content about children being sexually abused and you can't take it down because taking it down is a non-neutral action (censorship).
2) Same, but non-consensual pornography of someone's ex.
3) Same, but advocating a clear and immediate desire to commit violence.
4) Same, but "fighting words" (a well known exemption when said to someone's face to free speech protections).
5) Same, but obscenity.
There are some very, very massive flaws of that nature with your position and I'd continue but I think you are getting the idea. Such things don't only impact the speaker and therefore create a situation where the provider should (in theory) censor them.
Similarly, such things have been ruled to be outside of the bounds of "free speech" in the US by the judicial system.
That isn't the same thing as a sealed point-to-point non-public delivery of a message and to imply it is equal and equivalent is disingenuous.
Your concept would in fact basically either go laughably unenforced or destroy many to many communication on the internet as we know it as there would be no large channels for distributing any information of any sort as showing anything that couldn't be shown on nickalodeon would be an unacceptable risk in a world where most communication has few viewers and earns no/little money.
Once again I am at a loss to understand what is so bad about the way things are that this seems like a good solution.
> > The immunity must be limited to sites that are neutral, in the same way that non-political religious organizations are tax-exempt. Why? Because to claim that a site isn't responsible for a user's content is fine, until the site starts editing, censoring or weighting certain points of view. When the site loses its neutrality it ceases to be a conduit of content and instead becomes content. Indemnification from liability for a specific point-of-view is, I feel, an abridgment of free speech and I believe it is unconstitutional.
> Indemnification from liability for a specific point-of-view is, I feel, an abridgment of free speech and I believe it is unconstitutional.
That would be the case if the government was deciding who could be indemnified based on content, but that isn't what's going on.
Consider what you would be doing to search engines. Their entire purpose is to sort content by relevance. There is no opinion-free way to do that, otherwise every search engine would have exactly the same results. You want to impose liability on Google and Bing because they index the whole internet and the internet has bad stuff on it?
Yes. If you found some, i don't know, child pornography, say, lying in the street, then went around showing it to people saying, "hey, look what I found", that would be considered illegal/repugnant/stupid, right? Why should that same action analogized to the digital domain be any less illegal/repugnant/stupid? I don't think it is.
These arguments via analogy are so worthless, so without substance that it is usually a massive waste of time to try to explain to the originator the ways in which the analogy differs from reality so I will simply ask you to come back with an argument based on reality instead.
Religious organisations aren't tax-exempt because they're non-political, they're tax-exempt because they operate as not-for-profit charities.