Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> The whole reason they have this protection is so they CAN let anyone post without fear of litigation.

No, the reason they have it is so that they can moderate without fear of litigation; before 230 unmoderated content generally did not expose companies to liability unless they knew of unlawful content (distributor model), but any attempt at moderation made them liable for everything on the site, whether or not they had specific knowledge (publisher model); 230 specifically was passed to negate liability as a publisher for user submitted content even if the platform engage in moderation.

View on HN

Could site owners freely decide who's allowed to post to their site without 230? Seems to me the ability to ban unwanted users would enable a decent degree of moderation without direct control over what's posted. It wouldn't have to be all-or-nothing, you could always give an offending poster the opportunity edit or remove a post to avoid a ban. Would that be a viable way to moderate a community?

Fair point and well said. I would call it a stretch to lock the account of a US newspaper until said newspaper removed a story it "printed". I know anyone can post a link from someplace supporting nearly any position but can we agree the Business Insider is at least not the national enquirer?

https://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-ny-post-remains-...

Moderation is a long way from outright ban-hammering a US newspaper over their posting of a news story. What Twitter specifically did here more or less makes them an unofficial editor at NYPost. Thats not acceptable.

Ask yourself this simple question - if the roles were reversed and Twitter was run by a Republican and they locked the Washington Post's account because it printed an unfavorable article about Donald Trump - what would you call that action?

Two media companies having a dispute and one stopping carrying the other for a while happens all the time in the TV industry. I don't see much of a connection to 230 at all on this issue. Once we wade into this particular nonsense we have to bring up Twitter's own first amendment issues - you're gonna force them to put certain things on their own platform? - and get into a whole other can of worms.

The real action to take here is antitrust type stuff to limit the size of any single media outlet or platform anyway.

It’s certainly a call to action, but all too often each reply in a thread like this is just coming at it from the legal side when the parent was coming at it from the moral side (or vice versa). This is one of those situations - the comment you’re replying to is only explaining how it works currently.

The thing about the moral side is that we already have a bunch of jurisprudence around the 1st amendment.

Yes, companies aren't bound by it legally, but it'd be a great moral guide to follow if that's what they're after.

Why should someone running a website be able to moderate without fear of litigation when someone publishing a print magazine is not able to moderate without fear of litigation?

Did 230 say anything about that or did the law have no stated reason for that difference?

Print magazines aren't attempting to moderate 2-10 novels per second either. Isn't it much more commonplace for print magazines to exercise editorial control over every piece of content, conferring on themselves in some sense (at least as far as these laws are concerned) a degree of accountability?

It is not just much more commonplace but obligatory for print magazines to exercise that control. A print magazine can't say, send me slander, send me libel, send me copyright violations, send me terrorist threats, if they agree with my personal political slant, I will print them all no questions asked.

Why can't a print magazine do that, but a website can? Did 230 say anything about why those are treated differently?

> Why can't a print magazine do that, but a website can? Did 230 say anything about why those are treated differently?

The law itself doesn't, because laws generally don't. The discussions around the law offered a number of reasons; one basic deontological idea, as I recall, was that a website moderating user content was functionally more like a choosing which third-party publications to offer than actually publishing. But probably the more significant argument was consequentialist, that if companies were liable for everything if they tried to moderate at all, the into viable large scale sites would be completely unmoderated, with no attempt to preemptively identify illegal and offensive content. And that's why it was included as part of the Communications Decency Act.

It's because the user on a website is understood to be representing themselves, not the organization that created the website. The intent of section 230 was to codify this distinction in representation into the law.

On the other hand, a print magazine hires employees to produce a bespoke product sold to the public, so whatever they publish in the magazine is understood to be a representation of the magazine company. In fact, the owner of a website would indeed be liable for posting infringing content if it were understood that the site owner was representing themselves (e.g. if I posted stolen photos from your laptop onto my self-hosted blog).

is a social media site really comparable to a newspaper? a newspaper has an editor who decides what goes into it, there's no "user generated content" outside their control

Reply on news.ycombinator.com