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Comment by john_minsk | Hacker News Reader

If they want to be private someone will take them to court for advertising drugs or something like that. They should have stayed neutral.

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That’s impossible. Congress exempted the entire internet from court on something like this. Look at the communications decency act.

only if they stay neutral. This goes beyond that.

This podcast goes into a lot of detail on what the CDA says: https://legaltalknetwork.com/podcasts/make-no-law/2019/08/de...

That's a common myth, and is completely wrong. In fact, it is almost 180 degrees wrong.

Before section 230, there had been a couple of court cases. One held that a particular provider was not liable for anything posted on it, because it did not do any filtering or blocking at all. Another held that a different provider was liable for what users posted, because it did do some filtering and blocking.

Congress felt these outcomes were wrong, and section 230 was specifically meant to make providers not liable for user provided content, regardless of whether or not they did any filtering or blocking.

And yet sites that aggregate illegal content are taken down by the government all the time, despite hosting none of it themselves. If you filter the wrong way, the government will hold you liable.

The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet:

"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."

-Section 230

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Twenty-Six-Words-That-Created-Interne...

I agree, that this would have been the better option for them. Now they are stuck with their conent-screening frams, and censoring algorithms. It's a mess.

Still. Even if they did take that turn. I don't think they would have stayed truly neutral. Lot's of ways to penalize competition without banning them from your platform. A wolf is a bad shepherd.

If they do nothing, someone will take them to court for promoting false information about COVID-19 that gets someone killed.

There is no win-win scenario on policy enforcement when a company gets big enough.

Nothing will come of this though, and the masses will continue to bleat about them being private entities that are allowed to do this.

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