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Comment by sircastor | Hacker News Reader

I think it’s mostly been because they’ve been fed a lot false narrative about what section 230 is. It’s been circulating that 230 somehow is allowing companies like Twitter and Facebook to censor whom they wish, and that is resulting in some kind of repression of conservative viewpoints (in the US).

I don’t think people (including those who have been pushing for it’s repeal) understand the consequences of its elimination.

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Section 230 does allow companies to censor who they wish on their sites.

Section 230 provides that sites have no liability for user content, and they have no liability for moderating user content, subject to some limited exceptions for certain types of prohibited content, or prohibited moderation.

With existing case law, in my mind repealing section 230 without replacement would mean going back to the old standard, which was more or less don't moderate and have no liability for user content, or moderate perfectly, because you are liable for content your moderation missed. You would probably also have some liability to users whose content you moderated off, but I don't know that I've seen a case with those specifics.

Before 230 the standard was "let's hope we dont make anyone mad enough they want to come after us". All online locations where people can post content in any form have to be moderated. This idea of a "neutral platform" is imaginary.

FOSTA/SESTA already impose moderation requirements regardless of what section 230 says.

Yes this is about right. 230 allows moderation, but does not obligate it. Pretty much leaves full discretion to the platform and moderating one thing is not a commitment to moderate anything else.

One is the key examples that highlighted the need for this was Jordan "Wolf of Wall Street" Belfour's company suing Prodigy for allowing users to talk negatively about it on message boards.... and winning! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Pr...

I feel like it's silly to not to carve out legal space for social media to be something other than a common carrier.

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