Liability is not the only reason Google might choose to censor Covid keywords. They might do it because their users expect them to. They might do it because they think it's the right thing to do. They might do it because they care more about blocking disinformation than allowing useful information. They might do it because a programmer has been working on this really cool censoring algorithm and they want to test it in production. They might do it because they're tired of people talking about Covid on their platforms and want it shut down in general.
Section 230 applies to every major/minor platform in the US, granting all of them immunity from liability for most content. And yet, virtually all of them from Facebook to 4Chan, from Youtube to Pornhub, from Reddit to tiny 200-member Wordpress forums -- all of them censor some content. So liability is clearly not the only motivation for platforms to moderate, otherwise every comment section would be 8Chan.
Censorship of any content implies approval of all remaining content. One can't be protected from liability as a common carrier if one is curating.
So if you have been provably harmed by anything Google has served you, you can sue the owner of the content and join Google as a defendant.
(Not a lawyer.)
No, that's literally the opposite of current US law. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
Moderation does not imply endorsement of remaining content. It only implies disapproval of the rejected content.
There are plenty of people who who would like to change the current legal system, but (thankfully) by either grace, luck, or perseverance they have so far been prevented from doing so.
Does taking a third of the revenues imply endorsement?
The goal of Section 230 is to allow companies to moderate. It was based on two cases: one where a company that tried to moderate harmful content got stuck with liability, and one where a company that did no moderation at all got off by calling itself a platform.
The point of Section 230 is that you should be able to moderate a forum you run or remove malware from the Ubuntu repositories without opening yourself up to liability. There is no exception to Section 230 based on revenue. If you put a paywall up on your forum, you don't suddenly become liable for slander that someone else posts.
I am not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice, but if you really wanted to find a way around that, probably the best strategy would be to argue that the company was purposefully disseminating unlawful content. A lot of old pirate hosting sites got hit with this. They weren't liable because they were publishers, they were liable because lawyers argued that piracy was the only reason their services existed, and that in some cases the companies had gone far as to encourage their own employees to upload pirated material.
So I'm not going to make a 100% black-and-white blanket statement; there are ways you could get around Section 230. But none of them really apply to Google. Google isn't building its own ads for Covid misinformation, and it would be hard to argue that banning the Covid keyword was evidence that they actually wanted misinformation to spread.
If Google takes 30% of revenues from all apps on the play store, should it not assume 30% of product liability for the content found therein? It seems like a common sense rule, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it is anywhere in law, or that civil courts apply it.
If you put up a paywall on your forum, and it is a platform for libel, you damned well should be liable, at minimum to the extent to which you profited from the wrongful behavior, and possibly lessened by the extent to which any libel is usually moderated away.
If the moderation in place is so strict that it is producing significant false positives, why should the false negatives be protected? Having both is a symptom of sloppy, insufficiently earnest moderation.
I would assume from the actions of Twitter that they implicitly endorse content from people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and I would assume from Facebook that they implicitly endorse misinformation campaigns. They are making money on their failure to moderate to their own published standards. Should that be legally protected? Section 230 presumably makes no exception for lazy, insufficient moderation.
But legally, you aren't. Both Compuserve and Prodigy, the companies that Section 230 are based on, were commercial services that made money. Section 230 is a blanket protection, it doesn't have an exception built in to open liability back up in the case of lazy, insufficient moderation.
That's been upheld pretty consistently since the law was created. In particular, in 2008:
> Immunity was upheld against claims of fraud and money laundering. Google was not responsible for misleading advertising created by third parties who bought space on Google's pages. The court found the creative pleading of money laundering did not cause the case to fall into the crime exception to Section 230 immunity.
Scrolling through the case law since Section 230 was founded, you'll see that many of the cases it was used in involved commercial entities that profited from their services.
> If the moderation in place is so strict that it is producing significant false positives, why should the false negatives be protected?
Because that was the intention of the original law. The thought was that if moderation creates liability, companies won't do it. If scanning for malware makes Google liable for malware under some ruling that their moderation isn't "complete", then there's no incentive for Google to scan for malware in the Play Store. And if nobody moderated anything, the Internet would become a cesspool of malware, spam, pornography, advertisements, misinformation, hate speech, and general poor content.
Of course, some people think the Internet already is a cesspool in that regard, but my feeling is they don't have a good grasp on how much worse the problem could be.
Section 230 was created specifically to protect services who tried to moderate content, but who didn't do a perfect job, because (the thought was) imperfect moderation is better than nothing. It didn't come with a clause that said that companies would lose their protection if they were accidentally banned the wrong person, or if they had inconsistent standards, or if their standards were lazy.
> Should that be legally protected?
Legally, it is protected. Should is a separate question, and people are free to believe whatever they want. There is no shortage of Democrats and Republicans in Congress right now who are asking that same question, although the two parties seem to have radically different, incompatible ideas about what the world is going to look like when the protection goes away. And then there are a few people like Barr who mostly just care about using 230 as a proxy to attack encryption, which is at least a nonpartisan goal that the DOJ has consistently pursued across multiple presidencies.
But the point is, whatever these people's motivations, if you really think that Section 230 was a mistake, it's not impossible that you might be able to get a world without it in the future -- and then we'll all find out whether or not it was a good idea. Just expect some hefty resistance from people like me, as well as from organizations like the EFF and ACLU.