Comment by jimmydorry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimmydorry | Hacker News Reader

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That is also a matter for interpretation, I believe. This cuts to the heart of the raging platform vs publisher debate (section 230).

From my understanding, the current status quo is:

1. A platform can not moderate its content beyond removing illegal content that is brought to their attention;

2. A publisher can moderate and selectively cull what ever user content they like, but is held liable for any infringing content that breaks its ToS or the law.

This is a matter I strongly believe requires an update to relevant legislation and a clear / strong precedent that can be pointed to. It feels like social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) is trying to be both a platform and publisher when it suits them.

EDIT: Made the language a bit more neutral and closer alined to the current than the "should be". A child reply linked an article that is worth reading [1], however take it with a grain of salt, seeing as it's more opinion and interpretation of intent than a reading on application of the law as it is written. This issue has been simmering away long before 2016. It's only started to come to the foreground as the social media giants started moving closer to "publisher" than "platform". It would have been unthinkable to see Twitter, Facebook and Youtube "fact checking" and adding content below posts ten years ago.

I see this less as a partisan issue and more of a civil rights issue. I don't want to imagine a future where we have untouchable arbitrers of truth.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/21/18700605/section-230-inte...

Your summary of the "current status quo" is a reasonably accurate summary of the legal situation BEFORE S230 was passed, and is exactly what S230 was designed to remedy.

The current status quo, as I understand it, is:

1. Everybody (newspapers, social media) can be held liable for their OWN content (e.g. the NYT for their articles). 2. Nobody can be held liable for disseminating OTHER people's content (letters to the editor, tweets), whether or not they decide to filter some of that content out of their own volition. 3. (This is where my understanding gets murky) Once the disseminating entity has been made aware that something they disseminate is illegal (copyright violation, illegal pornography, etc), they bear some responsibility for stopping the further dissemination.

This is not what Section 230 says and it is never what Section 230 has said.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/21/18700605/section-230-inte...

You're going to need to be a bit more specific as your article offers a very similar interpretaiton of platform vs publisher (without using those terms), to what I presented. The only thing of note I see in your article is a "deep dive" into figuring out the "original intention" behind the law.

I believe modern application of a law should matter more than what the writers of the law were potentially thinking at the time.

>Then we get to these early internet services like CompuServe and Prodigy in the early ‘90s. CompuServe is like the Wild West. It basically says, “We’re not going to moderate anything.” Prodigy says, “We’re going to have moderators, and we’re going to prohibit bad stuff from being online.” They’re both, not surprisingly, sued for defamation based on third-party content.

>CompuServe’s lawsuit is dismissed because what the judge says is, yeah, CompuServe is the electronic equivalent of a newsstand or bookstore. The court rules that Prodigy doesn’t get the same immunity because Prodigy actually did moderate content, so Prodigy is more like a newspaper’s letter to the editor page. So you get this really weird rule where these online platforms can reduce their liability by not moderating content.

> I believe modern application of a law should matter more than what the writers of the law were potentially thinking at the time.

Section 230 has never been applied this way. Some people want to change it, but they haven't yet. There is no legal precedent that those people have to stand behind.

You're asking the courts to change the law based on executive preference. That's dangerous for a wide variety of reasons (ex-post-facto-ness, separation of powers, etc.)

In case you didn't understand the parent, section 230 was written to fix the issue that prodigy had. All section 230 does is protect people who moderate content from civil liability. That's it. The law itself doesn't distinguish platforms or publishers. It distinguishes first-party and third-party content (and gives you protection for third party content, even if you publish first party content and moderate the third party content). That's all.

Nothing about platforms or publishers, and nothing about categorizing a company as one or the other. Only protection around certain kinds of content.

From GP's article:

>Then we get to these early internet services like CompuServe and Prodigy in the early ‘90s. CompuServe is like the Wild West. It basically says, “We’re not going to moderate anything.” Prodigy says, “We’re going to have moderators, and we’re going to prohibit bad stuff from being online.” They’re both, not surprisingly, sued for defamation based on third-party content.

>CompuServe’s lawsuit is dismissed because what the judge says is, yeah, CompuServe is the electronic equivalent of a newsstand or bookstore. The court rules that Prodigy doesn’t get the same immunity because Prodigy actually did moderate content, so Prodigy is more like a newspaper’s letter to the editor page. So you get this really weird rule where these online platforms can reduce their liability by not moderating content.

There is precedent, but you are right in that the whole space has been allowed to act unchalleneged for so long. This is something that needs to change and we need a modern precedent to point at.

No, I'll reiterate my prior comment: Section 230 was written to fix that glitch. The law, as written, doesn't allow that to happen.

The cases you're citing predate the law, so they aren't precedent on how the law should be handled.

If you want actual precendent, here's some:

- https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/batzel-v-smith

- https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/universal-communicat...

- https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/perfect-10-inc-v-ccb...

- https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/parker-v-google-inc

- https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/ma-v-village-voice-m...

- https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/jurin-v-google-inc

That basically all says that the provider can't be held liable even if they moderate things, due to 230, the most recent in that list is from 2011, but there are more recent rulings that exist.

Here's matching precedent from 2018/19: https://www.lawfareblog.com/herrick-v-grindr-why-section-230...

Your understanding is the new interpretation of Section 230 being pushed by the ruling party in the US as justification for rewriting it and expanding the scope of what is actually a pretty targeted regulation. There's nothing in the actual text of Section 230 (which you can read in about a minute: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 sections C and F are the relevant bits) about fairness or equality of enforcement.

It is technically a "matter of interpretation" in that one major political party is reading things into the law that don't exist and so it's a very common interpretation, but ... they don't exist.

Thank you for the link. It had been a while since I had read the specifics of section 230, and the Overton Window certainly has shifted since then, when it comes to this topic.

The key part that stands out to me and after refreshing my memory of the particulars, should be interpreting where "good faith" ends with respect to censoring topics and people, and what the bounds of "objectionable content" is.

Deciding that some news articles cannont be shared or talked about (even privately via the platform) while allowing others in similar circumstances to be distributed, is surely far from ideal.

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