This violates the 1st amendment by compelling speech. If you want to pass such a law, section 230 isn't your biggest obstacle.
>All state contract law that would enable legal action to enforce a contract or terms of service that a party felt were violated by the moderator.
Nothing in section 230 prevents contract enforcement. In fact, courts that threw out other counts because of section 230 have addressed contract breach counts separately. See e.g. https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2019/12/breach-of-cont...
>Even just a state law that says "you must give users a window of 24 hours to export their data and leave."
Perfectly permitted. They wouldn't have to display the content publicly, which would mean they're not an interactive computer service for the purpose of that section. For someone making confident assertions about what's obvious, they fail to point to court cases that actually interpret the law that way.
To fix the original title: the First Amendment is a censorship law, not Section 230. Or at least, the First Amendment constitutionally protects internet websites that censor their users. It's called freedom of association.
Of course, that's only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to people misunderstanding the law. As the article that birthed this thread illustrates. Which only reiterates the need for our nation's civics classes to do a better job.
A state law regulating such contracts - which is in essence what this might be, as they concern EULAs - especially to the really limited extent that we're talking merely about not deleting content for a short period of time, in a content neutral fashion - that doesn't shout first amendment issue to me anyhow. Even if it required (or strongly promoted) keeping content up, I'm not sure there would be an issue (though there might be).
Here, e.g. a quick google finds a link (hopefully a reliable source, but I'm not vouching for it...) about the kind of things that can survive a first amendment challenge: https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1023/time-place... - sounds to me like requirements to keep content online temporarily to allow for dispute resolution would be no less impermissible that the converse which is already in the DMCA (effectively albeit indirectly requiring content to be taken down upon the mere accusation of copyright infringement). Also, the part about the takedown requests should give some idea as to technicalities that in effect regulate speech while technically not doing so, and those could be applied here too - DMCA after all does not require compliance with takedown requests, it merely makes it economically non-viable to fail to comply, even if the request is in bad faith.
While the first amendment may be spiritually related to laws like this, I'm not convinced it's a serious impediment either way, even if the outcome is a pretty serious chilling effect. The loopholes are too large, and the first amendment simply too narrowly focused on government impositions to reliably protect from indirect restrictions. To be transparent: I'm not saying it couldn't be a protection, just that I don't see it as obvious, and since IANAL, I'm not comfortable assuming it's a relevant factor here, although it certainly could be.
Re DMCA, as you note, there's no requirement to take down content after receiving a notice. You can't be held liable for ignoring a notice. You just lose the safe harbor granted by DMCA for those that choose to comply with such notices.
OP had three distinct laws that I analyzed separately. I feel like you're conflating it into one mega-law and saying that the first amendment doesn't cover everything.
Also, the "reasonable person" standard doesn't sound content neutral to me.
And exactly that could work in reverse too; a non-requirement strong incentive to leave content up, by tilting the liability scales the other way, or even by imposing additional civil liability by the platform to the poster (not the government!).
The point being not that that is likely to pass congress nor something to morally aim for, but rather that the first amendment won't prevent it either: i.e. if congress wants to intervene, it has the power to. I'm not saying the original article has it's details legally water-tight, but rather that it seems implausible that reasonable legislators couldn't come up with a sufficiently first-amendment proof construction.
And the point of that is that we shouldn't be distracted by first amendment issues. They're not going to matter for regulating platforms, as the DMCA kind of proves, if that's what congress wants. So what do we want? What should we as a society want? That's the hard question, and any (reasonable) answer to that is likely not going to impacted by the first amendment.
In the absence of the safe harbor, companies would be taking down far more content, not less.
Same if section 230 was narrowed.
Can you propose an actual law that you believe would be constitutional and would have the effect you're claiming?
The point being: if you want to propose an alternative to the DMCA, worrying about the first amendment at this stage is premature.
In essence your criticism boils down to: copy-pasting this blog post as law and thus disregarding its intent would result in a law that violates the first amendment. But it's (A) not clear the form of very limited compelled speech you point to would be struck down (again there clearly have been exceptions that have not been struck down - a quick google finds stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turner_Broadcasting_System,_In..., but many other cases too - and you haven't explained why you believe this is any different), and more crucially (B) it's mostly irrelevant to the point of the article, which is about how the author views parts of the DMCA as ways to censor speech, and how he believes that's problematic. Applying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity - we should be trying to read the post in its "best, strongest possible interpretation" - i.e. not split hairs on a technicality that doesn't really affect the core argument.
The author is critiquing Section 230, not the DMCA. They're making some extremely strong claims, and in particular saying certain things are obvious or extremely likely. It doesn't cite any cases and each of its examples appear wrong. The core argument is dead wrong. 230(c)(2) is barely even cited in court, most cases cite (c)(1) because the good faith standard is difficult to establish.
I'll note that you're mainly nitpicking one of my three critiques and haven't addressed the other two.
> Being charitable doesn't mean I need to assume that every censorship proposal written by a non-lawyer somehow complies with the 1st Amendment if I add enough epicycles.
Of course not - I think your view on the matter is simply focused more on legal details, when the author seems to be focused on the outcomes of said laws. So, e.g. when you correctly point out he's not citing anything... I'm not sure it's relevant, because his interpretation of 230 as censorship doesn't rely on it violating the first amendment, but rather on indirect effects that allow censorship by platforms. I'm not sure this argument is very strong - but that's the interesting argument anyhow.
> I'll note that you're mainly nitpicking one of my three critiques and haven't addressed the other two.
That's because that's the one I object to, not the other two. And I'm not objecting because you're wrong, but because (I believe) it's missing the point. I don't think the article makes a strong case, but if you read the article, he's trying to make some case that s230 curtails free speech (irrespective of the the constitution - free speech in practical reality, not theory) - his proposed remedies are not central to the thesis. Yet by focusing on those, we've ignored the thesis, and that's my issue with criticisms like this.
I mean: it's fair to say I'm nitpicking one specific issue - but so are you with respect to the original article, and in a way that derails the discussion.
Sorry for derailing... your points; in retrospect it wasn't worth it (the original article isn't making very clear points). I guess I get triggered by people going off on legal tangents (I feel like that happens a lot). Then again, hard to criticize an argument you've made when my very criticism is open to the same objections.
Anyhow - thanks for clarifying the issues with his interpretation of 230 - there aren't a lot of places left you can still discuss stuff like this without devolving into deeply held partisan beliefs; I appreciate your level-headed response.
My response to that part was that it's consistent with Section 230 as well as long as it doesn't have to be displayed publicly.
If the requirement is to display it publicly, then I suspect platforms will respond by adding a delay before content is published in the first place, or restricting distribution while leaving the content up (so you'd need to go directly to that page to see it.)
Although the law purports to grant this permission, it did not need to. The constitution's free speech protections are sufficient to grant companies the right to decline to publish whatever they choose to. Although the government can compel speech in certain specific circumstances -- think medical disclosures -- generally they cannot compel political speech. State laws cannot override the constitution in this regard.
It is incorrect to conflate "hosting" with "speech", it is already obvious that being hosted on YouTube is not an endorsement by Alphabet corporation.
What about large platforms based in other countries with a strong user base in the US, or vice versa? Do you force tech companies based internationally to comply with US law for content moderation purposes globally, or just for US residents? If not, what's to stop Facebook from moving their offices to Canada and continuing their business model as-is?
I fail to see how this is an even remotely reasonable assertion.
Conversely, there's even more regulations and more importantly, rights, that apply to every company. One of those is freedom of speech, i.e., the ability to not be forced to publish on a private platform the views of everyone.
Like a standard can be used by all.
Or a Foss project can be used by all.
It's not about forcing someone. It's about forcing mega-corporations that provide what could be termed essential infrastructure to modern life.
There is a lot of precedent. Banks, electricity companies, railway operators, ... cannot arbitrarily refuse to serve customers. I see nothing immoral and fully support extending this to big tech (while not suppressing competition of course, i.e. it should only affect companies once they reach a certain size).
Railways, electricity lines etc are monopolies, there is just one possibility, it's not feasible to build a new one. These should be regulated.
Facebook, Google, etc are not providing anything crucial, there are billions of people living without it, and there are thousands of (worse but functioning) alternatives, and anyone can switch by simply entering a different address into the address bar.
These are bad examples in a discussion about speech protections... those businesses are providing services, not just engaging in speech.
Also, those businesses _do_ act to arbitrarily refuse to serve people. My bank sent me a letter last year saying that in ~10 days my account will be closed and they'll send me a check with the account contents. No reason, no appeals.
The problem here isn't really Section 230 in particular, it's the market power these companies have in general. It's not just censorship, it's also high fees and lack of customer service and lock-in / barriers to entry created by vertical integration.
And this isn't a natural monopoly like the power grid. Federation gives the same economies of scale as long as the dominant network is federated. So the better solution to these companies isn't to mess with Section 230, it's to break them up.
In addition, no bank is required to give you a $1 loan even if you have an 850 FICO score. No electricity company is required to keep supplying you with 1 MWh of electricity a month even if you can pay for it. No rail company is required to get a consumer from A to B if the company doesn't serve those areas or doesn't want to. They're not legally required to provide services to anyone and everyone indiscriminately. What they're not allowed to do is pull a bait-&-switch.
In short a company, CAN arbitrarily discriminate against you but cannot do so systematically, not withstanding a legal "business interest" exception.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama
When public communication is dominated by a few forums that happen to be privately owned and being banned from these forums ensures that nobody hears you, then actual practical exercise of free speech requires that these forums be viewpoint-neutral.
I'm convinced that all these people who show up on every HN and cheerlead for private censorship would be ecstatic about repealing the first amendment itself. Either you support the ability of ordinary people to express unpopular ideas as a practical matter or you don't.
I've met nobody with a principled commitment to free speech who nevertheless argues that the likes of Google and Facebook should be able to control the public conversation.
A more recent and more relevant precedent that cuts against your argument.
Btw I would be sad to see the first repealed, but I'm happy enough with Google and Facebook's moderation powers. So now you've met one person who has a principled commitment to free speech who thinks that Google and facebook should be allowed to moderate content.
As for your support for Google and Facebook moderation: don't you think support for the purpose of free speech requires that people be capable of exercising that freedom at a practical level? What's the point of the first amendment protections free speech protections when it's a dead letter from the perspective of message dissemination?
The purpose of the first amendment is that the government can't throw you in jail for speech (freedom of speech, freedom of the press) and you can decide who you collaborate with (freedom of association). That's it. End of story. There's no thought or word put towards other people having to play nice with you about what you say.
Why shouldn't the government be able to do that? What is the principle that motivated the restriction you described? The concept of free speech is a lot bigger than the government.
And no, it's not deeper then that. The constitution is a dry document pertaining solely to organizing a government. It's the entire purpose of the document.
One day, people are going to see private censorship from social media companies as the same kind of antiquated barbarism. "Of course," they will say, "a few unelected managers in tech companies shouldn't get to control the public conversation".
The ability to speak without getting arrested in important because it's only by examining ideas that we separate the good ones from the bad ones. When social media companies make it impossible to have real conversations about certain ideas, they damage the ability of society to make good decisions.
Go deeper. Why is it bad that the king be able to throw you in jail for insulting the king? You could make an argument that insulting the king undermines faith in the state and should therefore be punished. You can come up with an argument for anything. Why is it that we should reject this argument for king-insulting being a crime?
The purpose of promoting free speech is to ensure that the ideas we adopt as truth are well tested against other ideas and correspond to some degree to reality. Mass social media censorship breaks the marketplace of ideas.
That is not apparently true? Generally speaking the disinformation stuff is to prevent blatantly false conspiracy theories from being circulated widely? In any case, you're still free to talk about those ideas, you just don't necessarily have access to the level of circulation you might otherwise.
Historically, this seems pretty reasonable to me. When the constitution was written, if you had a fringe idea, you could shout it on the streetcorner and tell all your friends in person, but it was time-consuming work. Unless you had access to capital, you were probably not going to have your ideas printed and spread beyond what you personally were able to accomplish via direct communication.
I don't think the founders had it as a goal that every idea would be maximally disseminated. That's not what free speech was about, and, for me, that's not what free speech ought to be about.
Twitter is used by about 1 in 10 Americans and doesn't make decisions about who or what to restrict from it's platform based on Facebook's content moderation standards. IMO the idea that a handful of private companies with completely different business models and content moderation policies have a 'collective monopoly' on public communication is ridiculous.
I have the opposite opinion: these companies do collectively cartelize public speech. People who get banned from one platform are frequently banned from others soon after, especially if notorious. These companies also all have content policies prohibiting the same constitutionally-protected speech, e.g. on some subjects relating to the recent election.
Censorship doesn't have to be binary to be censorship: an environment in which your reach is reduced to practically nothing if you have one viewpoint and amplified into the stratosphere where you have the opposite viewpoint is an environment antithetical to the purpose of the first amendment, which is about creating an open and honest marketplace for ideas. Being able to talk about some idea in your kitchen but not on the internet is an inadequate level of free speech protection for today's world.
There's nothing wrong with requiring neutrality from social media companies. Common carrier regulations wouldn't violate their free speech rights: these corporations aren't speaking in their own voices, but are instead carrying the speech of others. And besides: corporations are not natural persons and we should abridge their rights in order to preserve the rights of real people.
Can you give us a few examples?
>These companies also all have content policies prohibiting the same constitutionally-protected speech
As someone has already pointed out to you, the constitution protects you from the government, not from the moderation of a private company who you choose to publish your opinions on.
>Censorship doesn't have to be binary to be censorship: an environment in which your reach is reduced to practically nothing if you have one viewpoint and amplified into the stratosphere where you have the opposite viewpoint is an environment antithetical to the purpose of the first amendment, which is about creating an open and honest marketplace for ideas
You just described every cable news outlet in the United States. The idea that freedom of speech means 'requiring neutrality' is just painfully misinformed. You can talk about literally anything you want on the internet. But you're conflating a few social media platforms with vastly different moderation policies, user bases, and business models into one mass of 'public communication'.
>There's nothing wrong with requiring neutrality from social media companies.
I couldn't disagree more. Who will be the decider in what 'neutrality' means? Because that's about as loaded of a political term as you can get in this day and age. I don't understand what an even remotely reasonable interpretation of this policy would be where individual private companies were forced to publish or barred from removing content that goes against their content moderation policy.
I feel confident that 1 in 10 Americans is more people than lived in the aforementioned company town. The relevant market isn't "America" but rather that audience on Twitter. Can you reach some of the same people via Facebook? Perhaps. But not all of them. And my suspicion is that the number you can't is still quite a lot larger than the number of people who lived in that company town.
What you're saying has nothing to do with the analogy GP was making which was that the private company had a monopoly on sidewalks in the town, but Twitter doesn't control all of the sidewalks in town, it controls about 10% of them. And even if the aggregation of Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Discord run about 90% of the sidewalks, those companies are all independent of each other and have their own business models and content moderation policies. Plus, new sidewalks are being built all the time. Discord and Reddit have grown in popularity vastly in more recent years, at what point do we add new companies into this tangled analogy, or take them out?
They control 10% of the sidewalks in the country. That's way more than the company town ever did -- it's hundreds of towns worth of sidewalks.
And you as a speaker can't use the Facebook sidewalks instead of Twitter unless they had all the same people walking on them (e.g. were part of the same federated system), which they're not. If you want to reach your entire audience, you have to use both at once. Twitter can evict you from an audience bigger than Texas with no other way to reach them, and your argument is that a monopoly on Texas is only 10% of the country.
Yeah you're really not getting this. I'm not trying to be rude but you seem to not be understanding what I mean at all.
>Twitter can evict you from an audience bigger than Texas with no other way to reach them, and your argument is that a monopoly on Texas is only 10% of the country.
That's not my argument at all, the argument is that if the private company had only owned 10% of the sidewalks in town, the court would have ruled that they had every right to tell her to distribute her materials elsewhere(it explicitly says this was the reasoning behind their decision). It was only because one private corporation literally had a monopoly on sidewalks in the town that the court saw differently.
>And you as a speaker can't use the Facebook sidewalks instead of Twitter unless they had all the same people walking on them
But they do have the same people walking on them...
>If you want to reach your entire audience, you have to use both at once.
This is a bit of a catch-22, no? Your 'entire audience' is everyone that you can reach. If Twitter objects to your content, they can bar you from their (relatively small, to point out the analogy again) share of 'sidewalks', but there are still a vast number of other sidewalks 'in town' that you can advertise on.
>Twitter can evict you from an audience bigger than Texas with no other way to reach them
Who are these people that Twitter denies access to the rest of the internet? You are perfectly capable of reaching anyone who uses Twitter through another social media service, or setting up your own website/newsletter/Discord channel/podcast/blog/etc.
I think this is the part you're not getting. The set of people who use Twitter is not a strict subset of the set of people who use Facebook. There are people who use Twitter and not Facebook or vice versa. A large number of people.
> This is a bit of a catch-22, no? Your 'entire audience' is everyone that you can reach.
Not at all. Your 'entire audience' is everybody everywhere. If a given platform has a monopoly over any subset of people, they have a monopoly. Some people use Twitter and Facebook and Reddit, and none of them have a monopoly over that subset of people, but some people use only Twitter. And if Twitter was federated (like email) this wouldn't happen at all, because there would be no users exclusive to Twitter since you could reach all the same users using any other provider of the federated protocol.
> If Twitter objects to your content, they can bar you from their (relatively small, to point out the analogy again) share of 'sidewalks', but there are still a vast number of other sidewalks 'in town' that you can advertise on.
Which, again, the same people don't walk down, so you can no longer speak to them.
> You are perfectly capable of reaching anyone who uses Twitter through another social media service, or setting up your own website/newsletter/Discord channel/podcast/blog/etc.
You're saying that the company town doesn't deny you from speaking to anyone on the sidewalks of another town, so you can just have the people you want to speak to go to another town and speak to them there. The obvious problem in this case being that the network effect prevents people from doing this. You would have to convince everyone to move at once or hardly anyone does.
I guess your argument is 'your audience is literally everyone and if someone refuses to use a service besides Twitter you should be legally obliged to reach that person even if Twitter wishes to remove your content from it's platform for violations of their content moderation policy', which is absolutely insane to me.
>You're saying that the company town doesn't deny you from speaking to anyone on the sidewalks of another town,
That isn't what I'm saying _at all_, so I guess we're done here.
Also, I have to stress that this is just wrong. You just said 'Twitter has a monopoly over the subset of Americans that use Twitter exclusively' but it _doesnt_. Those users can choose to access your content on Facebook, Reddit, email, or anywhere else _with no obstruction_.
The network effect is the obstruction. It's a medium for discussion. You're on Twitter, having a conversation with a set of specific individuals. Some of them disagree with you and you are trying to convince them of your position. You are responding to public claims that they made about you.
Now Twitter decides that you're guilty of crimethink and you are invited to start your own website. But who is going to go there? The things you write there don't appear in anyone's feed as a rebuttal to the dubious claims being made against you on Twitter. If one person shows up to engage with you, they find no community and no multi-party discussion happening there, so they leave, and so does the next person.
And the people making the dubious claims against you are happy to see you go and have no reason to follow, because now they can preach to their audience of millions without encountering any criticism from anyone who disagrees with them. Meanwhile someone builds anti-Twitter which has all the same problems but a different political alignment, exacerbating the polarization of the country by preventing anyone from engaging with anyone who doesn't share the same set of preconceived notions, because both sites ban anyone who disagrees with The Preferred Party and there is nowhere that people with genuine disagreements can hash them out without one of them getting booted.
Just because certain platforms are popular doesn't really change things from a legal or a moral perspective, and it might be because of their editorial discretion that they are popular in the first place.
1) assert some control over the content, thus showing you are engaged with it, meaning you can be held liable for it; or
2) do nothing and avoid sharing any guilt.
My go-to example of a Section 230 defense is a library sued by a mom whose kid looked at internet porn on the library's computers. It's not the library's fault there's porn on the internet, so even if they had policies and safeguards trying to prevent this, it doesn't make sense to punish them.
Flagged because the article is completely, demonstrably wrong in its legal analysis and because another of these flame wars is not making any of us smarter.
Ok, I'ma stop right there.
I've followed (US) lawblogs for years, and I've learnt solidly exactly and only 2 things:
1) If you're arrested, immediately ask for a lawyer and then keep your mouth shut. Anything else out of your mouth will bring pain to you and your lawyer. Doesn't matter if you're innocent, shut up.
2) We should listen to software developers opine about the law as much as we should listen to lawyers opine about software development. Even lawyers and judges get law wrong more than one might expect. A non-lawyer has no hope.
If you want to know what a law means, listen to a lawyer who works in that area, otherwise you run a bad risk of being made stupider merely for having paid attention.
I know my harsh tone will turn some people off, but if this PSA helps anyone avoid actual trouble with the law, I am okay with that.
Seems directed but not sure at whom.
Would you mind showing some links to this? Seems rather hyperbolic, to me, but I'll keep an open mind about it.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+censor...
The reason that some people (like myself, admittedly) are upset about extremist views being censored is not because we agree with the extremist views, but because censorship starts with the views that "everyone" can agree to censor; communists, ethno nationalists, anarchists; for example, then it expands to suppress religious minorities, atheists, sexual minorities, racial minorities, etc, etc. Censorship is then used to suppress even the discussion of whether censorship is correctly applied.
Once that mechanism is in place, the censorship inevitably expands to include information that is inconvenient or embarrassing to those who control the censors.
Witness the persecution of Julian Assange, for example.
The ability of private corporations to suppress ideas in social media is unprecedented. If FAANG, Twitter and PayPal get to determine the bounds of acceptable discourse, how do you know it's going to go the way that you personally approve of? What protects your speech?