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Comment by pchristensen | Hacker News Reader

This article explains how it would probably work opposite of his goals - https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/trump-executive-...

Basically, if content companies become liable for the content their users post, they will have to become much more heavy handed in what they remove. Trump has benefited more than anyone from how little social media companies actually police content.

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I don’t think the current POTUS is smart enough to see it either way, but counterpoint: who prosecutes the offenses? FBI? DOJ? Both are lead by people abbointed by the current POTUS and have been beaten down into submission to his authoritarian impulses. If a lawsuit is brought, ultimately it would end up in SCOTUS, which also has a 5-4 majority in his favor.

So IMO this is going to let him continue to abuse social media to spread conspiracy theories while incentivizing social media companies to remove or ban users that even slightly tie the line, or invent rules and accuse such users of breaking them.

American institutions are not as strong as people think. They are squishy organizations manned by humans; and thus they can be corrupted. All of this stuff is very well studied by the way, it is straight out of the authoritarian playbook.

For those who want to argue the other way, consider the simple fact that he has not divested of his private businesses and continues to profit spectacularly from them and it’s not even on the news anymore.

> but counterpoint: who prosecutes the offenses?

CDA 230 protects Twitter against lawsuits for content their users post. Without 230, anyone who felt libeled (i.e. Joe Scarborough) could sue Twitter in civil court.

Actually, this may be what he wants. You force them to take heavy action handed responses (likely censoring). Then complain loudly about the coordinated efforts of social media giants against them. Sell it as the "establishment strikes back", walk your way to reelection.

There's no reason to think that they wouldn't be bullied and cajoled into keeping up one "side's" volatile posts and taking down the other's, precedent or reasonableness be damned. Particularly if that becomes the path of least federal blowback and shareholder impact.

This is how corporate ownership might try to incorporate toxic culture worldwide. They cannot do this if not for the cheerleading and silent 2/3 majority, that is currently not being bullied. Note: What a bully do to someone else by your support or lack of opposition, you will most likely be the next bully's victim. This is kind of karma: Don't expect to ever change the scorpion's own nature. Since Western individualistic cultures haven't really confronted bullies yet, this is the defining moment. There is nothing here that haven't already been subjected to other cultures in the past.

It's a good sentiment but I'd expect most companies to be more purely shorter term profit driven, especially under consistent and relentless pressure.

That they would eventually kowtow to their own nation's ideological pressure the same way they would eventually do so for, say, Saudi Arabia's or China's government to ensure unmolested access.

Even if the majority of users/citizens aren't part of the bullying clique, the people with the rod and the carrot are.

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