Section 230 is Good, Actually

The post says that online services are different from print services, but this law does not specify how. Those could be added on.

Is there a line an online service can cross that makes it a publisher?

Now that we are into a fully centralized world, a twitter (maybe unintentionally) has become one of the main highways in the information resources being transported.

The question of whether Twitter, FB are private companies are next to the point.

There can always be a size restriction? no. of users etc?

Also how a twitter or a facebook might fare without Section 230 needs some thought? Maybe it is good for the internet

I’ll defend Section 230 once the sites start holding up their end of the bargain and rigorously protect. And if those sites start editorializing, then anything should be fair game.

Yeah, it seems to me that socialization just doesn't scale Internet-style. There's no intrinsic need for massive platforms like Twitter and Facebook. They're kind of just "skins" over the underlying inter-networked machines anyway, not fundamental elements of "the online experience". They just happened. Like an oil spill.

TFA pretty much admits that the problem is "impossible":

> Compare this with YouTube, whose users upload at least 400 hours of video [pdf] every minute, an impossible volume to meaningfully vet in advance of publishing online.

Maybe social stuff like this doesn't scale. I've said it before: if this were a hardware or software problem we (tech/engineer types) would have realized already that we're trying to do the impossible. We set up the Gordian NP Hard knot and then are stunned when it proves intractable.

> But an additional purpose of Section 230 was to eliminate any distinction between those who actively select, curate, and edit the speech before distributing it and those who are merely passive conduits for it.

I think that distinction is very important and should be recognized in law. At the very least, services should be required to label their content "We Vetted This" vs. "We're Just a Conduit for This".

The issue with the editorializing (which has become absurdly aggressive on the part of the 230 platforms) is that it weakens the defense that these corporations have enjoyed in shunting the liability onto their users. Within hours, all the platforms would be litigated into oblivion for the actions of the users in the absence of 230 protections.

The EFF are paid-for apologists for (some) corporations and gadflies against (other) corporations.

>And Section 230 doesn’t only allow sites that host speech, including controversial views, to exist. It allows them to exist without putting their thumbs on the scale by censoring controversial or potentially problematic content. And because what is considered controversial is often shifting, and context- and viewpoint- dependent, it’s important that these views are able to be shared. “Defund the police” may be considered controversial speech today, but that doesn’t mean it should be censored. “Drain the Swamp,” “Black Lives Matter,” or even “All Lives Matter” may all be controversial views, but censoring them would not be beneficial.

This verbal sleight of hand of conflating speech protections with this liability shield enjoyed by these multi-trillion dollar corporations is most clearly used by the EFF in their paid-for chatter about how this "could" be used to silence speech. No, it couldn't be. The proposed amendments to 230 that have gained the most traction extend the liability shield to services with fewer numbers of users. That means that the proposed amendments would not do what the EFF says that it would do, which would be to silence small websites. Unless the speech infringes copyright or breaks some other statute such as those against libel/defamation/threats of violence, the removal of the 230 liability shield would have no impact. If you are an independent web host, you are already liable for your speech and if you pay for a conventional hosting provider, they will be protected by 230 no matter what.

https://www.hawley.senate.gov/sites/default/files/2019-06/En...

The proposed Hawley amendment would only impact companies that meet at least one of these three criteria:

>‘‘(A) had more than 30,000,000 active monthly users in the United States; (B) had more than 300,000,000 active monthly users worldwide; or ‘(C) had more than $500,000,000 in global annual revenue

230 is about shifting liability to users and protecting mega-corporations. The EFF is being disingenuous and deceptive in this press release made on behalf of its donors. The part of this release that is accurate is that 230 is not "at odds" with the First Amendment. While there are cultural concerns about whether or not the tech company actions are in line with the spirit of open debate, it is not really related to the First Amendment.

The issue is that by actively moderating so much of the platform content and shaping what discussions are allowed, the companies are severely weakening their argument that they are not legally liable for the content that users publish outside of the bare requirements of the DMCA and the case law concerning the types of facilities they must have to handle copyright disputes. Modifying 230 is a recognition that when these platforms take an active hand in moderating content, modifying content, and publishing content, they should be held to the traditional liabilities of publishing content -- and those liabilities tend to be related to copyright rather than to speech per se.

The EFF and its donors want to portray the issue as concerning speech rather than liability for what would overwhelmingly turn out to be copyright infringement. These are not the same things. If the companies want to maintain their immunities related to distributing content like child porn and illegally copied files, they must also avoid heavy handed moderation if they are operating at the scale described in the most popular proposed amendments so far. If they are not operating at the scale in the proposed amendments, literally nothing changes for them and they are still protected by the liability shield.

The 230 beneficiaries under scrutiny want to continue shifting liability to their users while also gaining greater editorial control over what those users post and how that content is presented to other users. They want to continue to reap enormous profits with this legal privilege while ensuring that their users remain liable for content. You, the little guy, can be sued, whereas they, the big guy, cannot be sued for crimes committed using their network.

Again, 230 is not about speech: this fundamental conflation is a beloved legal trick of corporate America, whether it is being used to extend the power of copyright law beyond reasonable historic bounds or to otherwise exploit the vagaries and loopholes in copyright law to make more money.

How is it any less eliminative for decentralized services? If you have a private moderated forum (e.g. HN), or even a small one with only 5000 users, that's still more than enough to attract spam and trolls. So the small forum operator deletes the spam and the trolling.

If that makes them responsible for everything everybody says on that forum, first of all, they're screwed. People will post some liability-inducing material while the forum operator is on vacation and they'll get thrown in jail for hosting it. Small forum operators don't have the resources or the risk tolerance to put up with that, so they'll fold, and leave the huge centralized ones to pick up their user base.

Worse, to avoid the liability the ones that remain will over-censor. We already see this with the DMCA. Even transparently fraudulent takedowns are typically executed anyway because it's not worth the risk if you're wrong or the resources of proving you're right. Web forums aren't courts; they aren't a valid entity to be making complex lawful speech determinations in an accurate way, and they won't, so instead they'll do something despicable.

But you also can't use forums that don't moderate at all, because they're immediately overrun with spam and trolls.

The actual problem with these centralized entities is not that they do moderation. It's that they're centralized. Break them up.

That's not true at all. The law was created because lots of sites big and small were being dragged into lawsuits over comments or posts made by their users. The nuisance cost alone was having a chilling effect and courts were divided about liability.

The law is very straightforward and obviously good: liability lies with the person making the statement, not with the person hosting the platform.

Repealing it would mean the cost of hosting any user-provided content would be far too high to be worth doing. Even something as simple as a product review would subject the site (and their hosting provider) to liability.

Disallowing curation is the same as dropping 230 altogether. A provider could not organize content.

If you want to punish/curb Twitter, Facebook or whoever, then do that.

Don’t nuke the entire internet.

If not, then you want other people to be able to host these content for you. And they won't want to be liable for what you are saying.

This isn’t the UK; free speech in the US is number 1.

It’s far more fundamental than any legislation will fix. America is built on aristocratic protectionism like every other nation. Things like the Constitution allowing for copyright protection for a limited time is made effectively forever given the perspective of an average human life span.

It will always end up being gamed.

Personally, I’m tuning out more from consumerism and “the tech industry”. Even before covid I’d grown sick of what became circular debates over big O and comp sci 101 in tech, and routine office life.

I’m learning musical instruments and writing creatively. Ditched my TV. Things like 230 are useful for big tech Corp. Not me. Let them defend it. I’m not interested in performing unpaid political lobbying for them.

Disclosure: personal opinion, ianal.

Personally I am of the radical opinion that the source of all this evil is advertisement. I'd simply forbid it. Advertisement is the reason why social media try to increase engagement. It uses advanced manipulation techniques and recent psychological research.

The net would cost people 2 more dollars per month but would be a much saner place without advertisement.

This is actually an interesting point. What counts as an "interactive computer service"? If I have a wordpress-hosted instance, are they a service? I host my own website; is Digital Ocean liable because they're hosting my web server? How far up does it actually go?

That's not that much. We can do a lot with speech to text as a starting point. And you can easily detect if speech to text isn't working very well.

And for those that are graphic you can do image detection. It's not out of reach.

Someone's misinformation os another's hard truth. A Flat Earther considers any evidence of a round earth to be false.

Explain?

Section 230 just says that you can't be held accountable for what other people say. How can you "abuse" that?

If Facebook/Twitter/Google are first hand saying/pubishing their own speach, then they can be held accountable for that.

Under what scenario will Bernie be deplatformed? Because Section 230 isn't anything new or upcoming.

It’s just an example of moderation that most people already understand. It’s the same if people wanted to create a woodworking forum and remove off-topic posts about goulash.