Repealing Section 230 won’t do what anyone wants

The problem with all of the repeal proposals is that none of them actually address the problem.

Suppose you're a search engine. One of the search hits is making a factual claim. The search engine naturally has no way to validate the claim. That would require an investigation, giving the accused an opportunity to defend their claim and then having a neutral arbiter make a decision. This essentially describes a trial in court.

We already have civil litigation. If you prove a defamation claim, you can have the court order it to be removed by the host or search engine.

Anything Congress could do about this would be an attempt to end run around the First Amendment, i.e. de facto require private companies to operate a shadow court system and then pretend the First Amendment doesn't apply even though it's being instituted through legislation.

It should be obvious why we don't want this -- if the government is imposing penalties only for not censoring things then you're going to get one-sided suppression of dissent, but if you punish them for over-censoring too then you're just cloning the actual court system and might as well use the real one.

The root of the problem here isn't Section 230. It's that these platforms are too large, so that any mistake they make gets amplified across a billion people instead of a million. Break them up.

Twitter banned accounts for challenging the effectiveness of wear masks because they are "anti-science", yet it didn't do a thing when people were challenging CNN/WHO/CDC's messages that wearing masks was unnecessary and would cause public panic in March 2020.

I'd support repealing of section 230 jsut for this level of double standards.

230 was written for a pre-algorithmic feed age where user content was displayed in a fixed context setup by the provider. The provider chose the frame, the user the painting.

Now users send content to a machine that is constantly making new frames to better match the pictures it is given. The picture is still the picture - still made by the user, but the site bears more responsibility for its presentation because its 'framing' is based on the contents / reaction to the picture. However, I do not think a total transformation has occurred. Choosing how to display the picture doesn't change its contents.

Writing a law that sensibly engages with the huge diversity of algorithmic strategies would be difficult even for skilled legislators (if only we had some!). Maybe the answer is in formalizing shadowbanning in some way?

If the algorithm simply prioritizes say the most upvoted comment, is that the same? Or how about prioritizes the most watched/liked video?

I ask this because it’s basically impossible to not prioritize content unless a website is a mere directory of user information with no search box. Where do you think the distinction lies between being responsible for user engagement and not?

There's more depth to the subject.

any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected;

That's section 230.

Yes if it's defamatory or libel. Then section 230 is explicitly allowing the platforms to censor.

The 2 sides of the problem come when it's speech that isnt listed right there. It can be offensive, unpopular, or controversial but section 230 does not allow the platforms to censor those subjects. Section 230 outright says constitutionally protected.

So the main problem is that platforms have illegally broken good Samaritan protections and have effectively removed their section 230 protection on their own.

However, that's problem #2. Section 230 never made allowances for punishment or lawsuits. If Twitter lost their section 230 protection, they stop existing the next day. That's the only punishment but that would be tremendous wealth destruction.

To be clear about freedom of information in general, I think competing theories on things like coronavirus and election fraud should be entirely tolerated, especially when the only apparent consensus comes from blindly “trusting the officials” who are just other human beings. It’s very ivory tower and dystopian of them to want to push a narrative of stability when really there’s so much we don’t know.

The idea that we aren’t adults who should be able to question and audit things and have free agency seems like it’s not even on the table anymore which is sad. We’re all walking our liberties into the grave just to avoid uncomfortable topics.

Like Cypher in the Matrix, ignorance is bliss, plug my body back in!

the core concept of section 230 is that an expressed idea in any form has an author and it's inherently implied that the author endorses that idea by expressing it, but no one else in the chain delivering/amplifying that idea to others necessarily endorses it. the author, then, has liability but the intermediates don't.

where it falls apart is dealing with "exceptions". these exceptions are really separate rules about what kinds of content are so egregious as to apply liability to the intermediates in the chain, piercing their liability shield. there's also contention around the plausible deniability provided by section 230 that allows the platforms to express ideas through others (e.g., editorial decisions).

you could reasonably argue that an editorial decision is expressing an idea (perhaps different from the curated content's ideas) in itself, and therefore applies liability to the intermediate itself for that editorial decision (e.g., racism as a emergent property of a platform).

these kinds of granularities are why i'm partial to the idea of writing regulations as an intent statement (like the above core concept), a descriptive, not prescriptive, elaboration of that intent statement and its major facets, and then numerous examples that give shape to the hyperplanar function without trying to delineate it exactly (and inevitably imperfectly; that is, accepting that it's necessarily imperfect). the populace and (if need be) judges can competently interpolate/extrapolate between the given intent, description, and examples (this takes away power from lawyers as mediators of law, which is a reason it's resisted).

If Twitter doesn’t have liability for the speech, then it belongs to the speaker and Twitter should have no obligation to censor it. They can’t have it both ways.

Likewise Twitter and Facebook should be paying their users for providing content that they profit off of, like newspapers pay reporters. Then they can have standing to choose what they want to publish.

> Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo, 418 U.S. 241 (1974), was a United States Supreme Court case that overturned a Florida state law requiring newspapers to allow equal space in their newspapers to political candidates in the case of a political editorial or endorsement content.

For good or ill, §230 bypasses court hearings and due process and so I wonder if it is

a) itself an unconstitutional denial of rights to the users, or

b) actually just fine legally, however an overturning of it would not necessarily be an assault on the First Amendment, only on this congressional shortcut

My "reform" of §230 would be to add on to this congressionally mandated shortcut with some form of due process to the users whose court rights have been bypassed -- if a site wants to use §230 protections, then they have to provide some form of due process to users, perhaps a timely takedown/suspension/banning appeals process, held in the open

If a site doesn't want to provide that, then they can avail themselves of the First Amendment and their §230 immunities are stripped and they are open to lawsuits.

They are thinking that they want to control all content online, that's all.

They just aren't going to tell you that.

If they were actually trying, then we don't have much to fear from them.

You've been on HN for a decade. Repealing Section 230 would kill it just as dead as the other social media platforms.

We don’t bans or destroy things just because they contain narcissistic people. We certainly shouldn’t lump all social media into this camp.

I think companies would be very honest if there was risk of repeated and consistent infractions.

I wholly believe in reform which brings some power back to the consumer.

No, I want to challenge cancel culture and all the other radical activism that’s plaguing the country.

If you want to affect real change let’s reintroduce FCC fairness doctrine and prohibit the Sinclair group from giving talking notes to local media outlets.

The media is far more toxic than social media.

This is fucking nuts. The good answer is for people to stop giving so much credence to anonymous speech without thorough analysis, or at most to have a more streamlined process to get it taken down if it's not defended.

I could live with that, but I get the feeling those calling for Sec 230 abolition want something entirely different.

I’m also not entirely sure what sort of “liability” people are talking about. In the US, there is very little liability for any sort of speech. Insults, no matter how gross and objectionable, are generally protected as simply being subjective opinions, for example. So is blatant racism.

Only statements of facts that are false, made knowingly and with malicious intent, are actionable. I believe very little of what people object to on social media actually falls under that definition.

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/fbi/turns-out-4chan-not-...

230 doesn’t immunize commenters from liability for the words they post online. It protects the platform, while also allowing them to moderate.

Post-230, platforms would have to zealously moderate to avoid repercussions. You think bots are a little too aggressive today. Imagine those auto-van dials turned up to 11 if Twitter bore direct responsibility for every word tweeted out.

And I am not convinced that social media is something that we will miss. A decentralised approach with lots of independent websites, each responsible for their own opinion, is probably a healthier ecosystem.

It would make such a poor communication channel that using it would require some other communication channel that's better in every way and hasn't been found to agree what the supposed communications meant first (so why not just use that?), could only have been set up with the help of a subcontractor of a subcontractor who Trump had no reason to trust and yet who insisted no such thing happened, and all the evidence fits the alternative explanation of the DNS lookups being a normal response to receiving normal marketing emails about Trump hotels. About five publications rejected it for these reasons before it got published. Yet when it did, the New York Times got so much heat for pushing back in the gentlest way possible against the Clinton campaign's demands for the FBI to investigate - which went viral on social media - by saying that the FBI had looked into it and concluded all the evidence was consistent with normal marketing emails that they eventually said it was the wrong decision and they wouldn't do it again. And the only thing that was described as a conspiracy theory by the mainstream press was the idea that all the evidence was consistent with the normal operation of email systems, even though that's what most technical people concluded regardless of political affiliation.

There was some really heinous bullshit around the legitimacy of the 2016 election as well, which meant the press really didn't have a leg to stand on when then opined about how dangerous it was for Trump to undermine the legitimacy of the 2020 one. Though of course that didn't stop them.

If I post defamatory stuff on my website I can be sued. If I do the same on your website, you can be sued unless you fall under that 230 regulation.

So this is the choice between "social media is liable for what you say and will therefore censor you" and between "you are liable and can therefore be sued".

The option "nobody can get sued" doesn't exist, because although there is free speech, there are limits to it (which get breached on a few times a minute on big platforms). I am not saying whether that is a good thing or not, that is just the current state of affairs. And as the author stated: if you are basing what you say on the truth you might be able to say a lot more (than e.g. if you are spouting weaponized propaganda which is factualy wrong)

We are living in weird times if a good faith argument really involves assuming conservatives want to make a class of businesses part of the public sector. Something seems off with your reasoning, but if you're right then I'm all about it!

Do that and soon every post will be about diet pills or AMAZING OFFER MAKE $$$$$ FROM YOUR COMPUTER CLICK HERE!!!!

How would that work? If reddit loses its 230 protection, then this The_donald-only reddit alternative would also lose its 230 protection.

Additionally, I'm concerned whether reddit could exist at all. Would every single comment need to be human-moderated before it's posted? That doesn't seem feasible, and seems likely to kill reddit.