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Comment by whatthesmack | Hacker News Reader

Except that nearly 100% of political donations from Twitter employees go to Democrats, so it is Democrat-aligned people making the decision about who get silenced and who gets high visibility on Twitter, which influences the extremists that try to get people fired. Heck, Democrat politicians have directly advocated this sort of activity, including physical violence.

Electing Republicans might get Section 230 updated to require platforms to be platforms and not a mix of all the benefits of platforms and none of the downsides of being publishers that are not neutral in silencing certain perspectives.

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Section 230 has nothing to do with the whole "cancellation" stuff. You still haven't mentioned anything that would result in less "cancellation" if Republicans were in power.

Also, I don't know why you are so eager to prevent platforms from performing moderation. Section 230 is quite simple, it means that social media companies can moderate without being responsible for their user's content. No free social media company can feasibly moderate all of their user's content, the math simply doesn't work out in terms of moderation effort per dollar in advertising revenue. Companies would have to stop moderating. The removal of 230 would lead to the total destruction of social media in the tech industry as consumers don't want to go on unmoderated platforms like 4chan.

A lot of this anti-230 stuff feels like 4chan users angry that the general public doesn't like 4chan and are thus demanding that the government ban all of 4chan's competitors.

> A lot of this anti-230 stuff feels like 4chan users angry that the general public doesn't like 4chan and are thus demanding that the government ban all of 4chan's competitors.

It doesn't just feel like it, Republicans passing state-level “lets try to work around 230” laws have had them enjoined on First Amendment grounds supported by their explicit statements of pretty much exactly the attitude you describe as the motivation for the laws.

> Except that nearly 100% of political donations from Twitter employees go to Democrats, so it is Democrat-aligned

Yes, because we live in a market-socialist utopia where the giant firms that dominate the economy are controlled by democratic vote of their workers, not some dystopian system, let’s call it “equitism”, where society is organized around the interests of and firms are run by equity owners who generally are not the same people as the workers.

And also in a world where campaign spending is entirely by official campaigns with disclosed donors, not by notionally independent groups spending unlimited money with no requirement for tracking and reporting expenditures or donations.

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