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Comment by Meekro | Hacker News Reader

The proposal still lets platforms moderate on certain grounds, a repeal would mean that a platform can't moderate for any reason other than "illegal content" if it wants to keep the protection. The law currently says that a platform can moderate material that is "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected." That "otherwise objectionable" has been interpreted as a catch-all that lets platforms moderate on any grounds at all.

The DoJ proposal removes the catch-all and add "unlawful" and "promotes terrorism" to the list.

So if you moderate for a reason on that list, you keep the protection. If you moderate for other reasons, you lose it. And yes, I'm sure we'd see plenty of litigation on what constitutes harassment, terrorism, etc.

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Does this mean if a sports fan comes into my forum about programming and starts making sports threads, I cannot moderate that away, or else face legal action? Does it also mean HN could face legal action according to its current rule set?

This is the definitive question that has to be asked of anybody proposing a repeal of 230. I personally dislike 230, and have from the beginning, but anybody who doesn't have a direct and complete answer to this question isn't being serious.

edit:

I personally think that the answer is to standardize terms-of-service documents and to make them into real legal statements that both the website visitor and owner can make claims regarding, and that those statements be registered with a federal agency. The standardization should be so tight that filing it should be a matter of picking from drop down menus on a form, and the implications of each choice should be common knowledge and taught in school. The form should be able to be filled out anonymously (as "owner of [X] site.")

If you run a site without having filed one, though, you would lose legal protections as a publisher based on modding behavior. If somebody filing suit can point out any decisions that have been defined by law as constituting a specific degree of editorial control (examples: spam-control, abuse-control, subject-control, position-on-a-subject-control, arbitrary-control, etc.) then they will be responsible for libel/tort claims as a site for individual posts. A site that has filed a terms-of-service will get the benefit of the doubt, and the ability to push liability onto completely onto posters or maybe even individual mods.

Those requirements would either be too onerous to run the walled gardens of Web 2.0 at scale and small players will have a profitable business opening again, or the big dogs would be forced to really bureaucratize or democratize, and small players will have a profitable business opening by providing them modding services at the forum level.

I was a founding member of the egcs steering committee. When we were creating the rules, we had a debate over whether we should have a specific list of offenses that would allow us to ban someone: some wanted a specific list, others just wanted a supermajority to vote the person out. We settled on a 3/4 vote of steering committee members. I wrote the justification, saying that we shouldn't be stuck if someone came up with a new and creative way to cause damage.

And sure enough, we only banned one person ever. We banned him because he made a series of scary threats against the release manager, including "I know where you live", but these threats were made off-list, it was a campaign of personal harassment because no one wanted this idiot's patches. Suppose we had forgotten to include threats of violence off-list in our expected set of rules? And remember, we were talking about our mailing lists, which are forums according to section 230. So, would we lose our section 230 protections under your proposal?

> I personally think that the answer is to standardize terms-of-service documents and to make them into real legal statements that both the website visitor and owner can make claims regarding, and that those statements be registered with a federal agency.

In other words, you want to create more regulations that websites have to abide by. All that does is favor the big players even more than they're favored now.

> Those requirements would either be too onerous to run the walled gardens of Web 2.0 at scale

No, they would be too onerous for any websites other than the huge walled gardens to meet. All you're doing is setting up another form of regulatory capture.

> or the big dogs would be forced to really bureaucratize or democratize

Or they'll just buy the regulations that favor them, the same way they do now.

Yes, except for the fact that 1st amendment protections would still exist. How much protection that actually provides is unknown and it would need to be litigated to find out.

Suffice to say a redraft which means that you'll have to go to court to determine what types of content you are and aren't allowed to moderate without the side effect of becoming responsible for everything people say on your web property is not an improvement.

What does that mean? Off-topic discussion does not fall outside of the 1st Amendment, and a restriction of the 1st Amendment to try and classify that as somehow less deserving of protection -- that would be a much greater curtailment of 1st Amendment rights than anything Facebook has done.

Bluntly, "would need to be litigated to find out" isn't an acceptable answer given that the people giving this answer are the same people proposing the legislation.

Courts don't decide what the law is, they interpret it. You have to have an idea of what you want the law to be, you can't kick that off to the courts. They're trying to interpret your intention and the letter of the law you propose, not the other way around.

What legal action would you be concerned about?

If your forum had money, you’d be a sitting duck for someone claiming their rights were violated and demanding compensation.

And they’d have to prove it in a court of law.

Or once they obtain a judgement, seize your domain name.

Spamming would go under harassment in most cases.

> I'm sure we'd see plenty of litigation on what constitutes harassment, terrorism, etc.

Let me predict how terror will end up being defined:

Promote storming the Capitol - No

Promote a free Palestine - Yes

Any fight against US oppression - No

This is getting downvoted, probably because it's pushing an unrelated agenda, but there's an important principle here that both Democrats and Republicans don't seem to understand: at some point, the other party just 100% is going to seize control of the government. It is going to happen.

Donald Trump's administration openly considered declaring BLM a terrorist group. I don't want someone like that deciding what does and doesn't count as neutral speech. That is a thousand times more dangerous to me than Facebook making the same decision.

It is startlingly naive for people not to understand that terrorism laws and 'neutral-speech' laws will be used against causes they agree with. Republicans in particular are kind of jumping the gun by encouraging the government to get involved with speech literally during a period where they no longer control the presidency, or the house, or the senate.

You obviously didn’t bother reading the article

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