Republicans working on legislation to strip Twitter of liability protections
thehill.com
thehill.com
My reading of the prospects for actual passage of this bill are approximately a butterfly fart in a tornado.
This is most likely what is sometimes called a "message bill": legislation that is not actually expected to pass but is introduced anyway in an attempt to score political points.
https://www.city-journal.org/html/platform-or-publisher-1588...
Applying this rule to single companies that act out seems so incredibly dangerous.
This legislation is a bit of a joke and aimed at a certain audience. It's obviously illegal.
Yet if you remove those posts, suddenly you become liable for anything posted on the rest of your forum. It's going to kill every small community on the internet.
I suspect HN would be included in that.
I am curious if the courts will agree if annotating tweets with a fact check is editorializing.
The way I understand it, they are not censoring people, the people claiming to be "shadow banned" and "twitter deleting my followers" and "I get no traction on my tweets", are misunderstanding Twitter, or technology, or both. There's a huge misunderstanding of how large twitter is, how many tweets flow through, and how many people are tweeting. My understanding is based on personal research. What's yours based on?
I thought about going into one of the many particular individuals that have been banned, that is well know to most people except exceptional researchers like you, but I figured it would just be easy to start you with a video
People are objecting because they think it should only be used to censor ideas the objectors don't like, not things the platform operators don't like.
that's about the most generation take on his feed I could imagine
edit: people seem to be misunderstanding what I'm saying, or maybe misunderstanding what is being implied in the article.
Section 230 is GOOD, and it is something freedom-fighters have advocated for for a long time. What I'm saying is that freedom-advocates have been in favor of using the threat of losing 230 protection as a way of compelling platforms not to censor speech that they don't like.
If Twitter / Wikipedia is legally vulnerable for bad claims, such as by Rush Limbaugh, then Twitter would feel incentivized to remove such risky individuals from the platform. If Rush Limbaugh were held responsible for his statements, he may feel poorly about freely disclosing his narratives.
So basically: no you can't just remove that anti-government, anti-corporate, etc. stuff, because once you do that you are no longer protected, so you better let EVERYBODY speak (within reason) so or else.
Sites under section 230 are well-within their rights to curate content. They're just not responsible FOR content posted on their platform. It seems like you have an objective misunderstanding of how section 230 works.
For example, HN is a platform covered by section 230 as well. If HN removes political content, do you believe that HN should have its section 230 rights revoked?
And back during the Christchurch shootings when there were proposed limitations to section 230 to make companies liable for hate speech on their platform, there was an uproar from the internet freedom advocates that this would result in censorship and less free speech.
Gosh what an ugly URL. It's the lobbying reports for Twitter. The biggest internet "freedom" advocates are the paid lobbyists of the tech industry.
Citation for claim?
Are we next going to say google is responsible for the search results it provides, when it's just indexing the internet and returning the best match algorithmically?
HN is going to start being responsible for every piece of garbage someone posts?
The great irony is that if you strip a company of their section 230 protections, doesn't that just mean that they're going to censor more things on their platform since they're now liable? Why wouldn't they remove Trump from Twitter entirely if they could be held liable for his rants? Of course then you're said to be 'biased' against Trump, which then circles back to the first step.
Which seems to me might be the endgame here. Get Twitter to ban Trump and now you have a lot of red meat for his fervent fanbase.
Dorsey gets told "We'll call this all off, say that we've decided not to interfere with free speech, but from now on you never contradict the president, you never contradict any Republican leader, and you start posting fact-checks more often on Democrats". That's the Trump strategy, typically. Deals. Always making deals.
And Dorsey knows he has to play the game, because his major shareholders will all be quietly informed that the deal was out there, and he didn't take it. He'd lose his job if he didn't agree. And if he goes public, Trump can say "I sat down with the man and tried to work out a fair deal, but he refused!", playing the victim.
Donald Trump is not a brilliant man, but he is very, very good at this game because he does not let ethics, norms, or laws get in his way.
Very well put.
I don't think Trump has completely thought this through. Twitter is how he communicates with his base. What would he use instead?
Please, oh please, don't throw me in the briar patch!
Like I get that Twitter employees are mad and frustrated but they undermined themselves by throwing their weight around.
How far down the rabbit hole of moderation = abuse of power do we want to go? Should platforms have zero control? What's stopping HN from becoming filled with off-topic images of cats outside of HN abusing their power to censor low-quality posts?
Trump's motive is questionable, but the outcome of this is definitely better for the society. Many social media has not check and balance due to that 230. Now we the people able to check and balance while getting paid handsomely for doing so. Just see how CNN behave before and after Sandmann.
On the other hand, and maybe its due to my lack of knowledge on the 230, how's report-and-remove of posts different? Twitter already has mechanisms to remove flagged content so how's this incident different (apart from being blatantly political).
Lastly, does anyone know if Facebook and YouTube are also protected under 230? I imagine that GOP wants to make an example of Twitter but for the sake of consistency Facebook and Youtube should get the same treatment.
My understanding that any website on the internet that allows users to post content is protected under 230. Including Hacker News, which then becomes potentially liable for any content posted if its removed.
They already do? Comments on NYTimes articles are covered under Section 230 just as comments made on Facebook or Twitter.
The NY Times also enjoys 230 immunity if they host comments on their site. Literally every site on the internet that has comments (including HN) have this protection.
...and every other site on the internet, including this one. Or IRC channels, or Discord, or search engines...
They're not required to, of course. They are exercising their right to free speech. They are also not required to publish, amplify or otherwise create a platform for any speech they don't want to.
This is flat out wrong. If Twitter posted something that was libelous, or a Twitter employee wrote something libelous they would be subject to libel.
This is so wrong, it verges on being misinformation.
Twitter does not have absolute immunity from liability.
Can you post a link to the bit of CDA 230 that you think prohibits moderation? What court case makes you think that a site can't have CDA230 protection if it starts removing content?
Here is a breakdown: https://imgur.com/gallery/wPsPtd7
The tweet "corrections" seem unwise, because those seem to not be immune from cvil liability under section 230 being that they fail the 3rd prong of section 230 where "defendant (Twitter) must not be the 'information content provider' of the harmful information at issue". So if someone posts libel on Twitter, you can't sue Twitter, but if Twitter "corrects" someone's tweet with something that is actionable libel, couldn't you sue them then?
I’m reasonably mad at Twitter for this because they’ve punched a hornets nest and opened the door to making the lives of every site massively more painful and complicated because the pendulum feels like it’s about to swing the other way where any form of moderation is going to be rebranded as editorial and make the web worse overall.
Do you reject the existence of an objective reality?
This is all because they DARED fact check lie number 2129317?LOL
I now know Twitter, the company’s, stance on the issue because they posted their views on top of someone else’s tweet in a way that nobody bit Twitter can do. Twitter can take a stance and even use their official Twitter account to sing it loud and proud but they wielded their power in away that makes it very clear that Twitter is in control.
You're really being duped here. Its not about "twitter posting their views". This isn't a question of who's opinion may or may not be right. Trump is continuously posting verifiably false information that could kill people. The idea that a single person on earth could object to fact checking these things, that again, will cause more deaths, is just stunning. Stop with the awkward 1984 act. You and I both know you're being completely disingenuous.
On the contrary, Twitter has repeatedly failed to enforce their own rules/TOS, primarily to benefit a single extremist political faction.
Wait for what? Twitter has been deleting tweets for years.
Saying we won’t host content about X that doesn’t come from $authority is very different than using their privileged position to put a banner next to any X video with their stance.