Newspapers have restricted what they publish for centuries.
They don't allow libellous, defamatory, salacious or inappropriate comments for example.
So it sounds 'new tech' hasn't really changed anything.
They don't allow libellous, defamatory, salacious or inappropriate comments for example.
So it sounds 'new tech' hasn't really changed anything.
They've always done some editing and removal of certain content.
In this particular case, was anything modified or censored though? It seems more like Trump had his say, and Twitter had theirs. Is Trump saying that Twitter can't also express themselves on their platform?
There are degrees to moderation, but not to liability. This black or white approach doesn't seem appropriate. They should be liable in a degree proportional to the moderation they introduce.
Twitter isn't liable for illegal content posted by their users, as long as they take it down in time and make good faith efforts to keep it from being posted in the first place. If they weren't free from liability then a service like Twitter would need heavy human moderation and be extremely expensive to operate - perhaps it wouldn't exist at all.
That's the only reason this non-liability exists. It has nothing to do with moderation or censorship. Twitter, as any other web property, have the right to curate their platform and make it pleasant for their other users. It's their personal property.
If someone uploads their library of child porn encoded to base64 split across tons of tweets, do you want Twitter to have a choice between removing that content and continuing to operate?
We have 3 options here:
1. No moderation allowed whatsoever on a site without a court order. That obviously leads to a terrible, toxic community with lots of reprehensible content that the average person wouldn't want to participate in.
2. A good faith effort at moderation. This allows the most reprehensible, highest-impact content to be removed and allows users to participate in the moderation process.
3. No content can be published without moderation, on any site anywhere. Want to post a Facebook status? Have fun paying $20 for the privilege of waiting 48 hours for a human to review it.
All of this is irrelevant though, because this executive order is not targeted at censorship. It's targeted at a private individual who voluntarily, for free, passed on a message from one person to many other people and decided to tell them "this seems fishy, you might want to read up on it."
In the specific example of child porn, would removing it be protected speech and a copyrightable work? To my knowledge, no, it is not.
However telling someone "this seems fishy, you might want to read up on it.", attached to someone else copyrighted work, is to me speech. It is also a copyrightable work if its original enough. It could also be a defined as a derivative work if it includes major copyrightable elements of the original, which in this context is likely.
The difference between removing child porn and creating derivative work is one that I don't think courts will have a problem to distinguish between. Both may end up being described as moderation, but the outcome, intent and context is very different.
That's very different from, say, a public restroom where people write on the walls. The owner of the restroom is not responsible for what people write on their walls.
Newspapers also have zero obligation to convey the words of the President, and by frequently contextualise them.
Absolutely. And they don't say "we're just a platform transporting information", they restrict what they publish.
> They don't allow libellous, defamatory, salacious or inappropriate comments for example.
They do. And they get sued for it, and they can lose, see Gawker. Precisely because they are not like Twitter.