I posted this because I think that I like this law ..large corporations shouldn't be in the business of deciding what speech is acceptable...
What about the press? The press isn't a person, either. What about political parties? What about your family? What is the limit? Two people? Four? How many people does one need to gather together under common interests before their rights are nullified, and replaced by some other set of rights governing "entities" like businesses, religions, political parties, etc?
There's a very good reason the First Amendment refers to "the people" and not individual persons - because it makes no sense to deny the existence of rights in aggregate. Yes, the press has rights, despite being an abstract entity, because it - along with religious groups, political parties and businesses, represent collections of people, and thus is synonymous with the rights of the sum of the individuals making up those entities.
A business choose to offer 'carrying speech' service to public, so it should offer that service in impartial and fair manner. That is pretty basic consumer protection approach (at least in Europe, i have an impression that US has lower standards).
> Should a newspaper allow anybody to have a say in its op ed section
That is completely different / incomparable case. Social networks publicly offer service to anybody, while op-ed sections are individually offered on newspaper discretion.
I am ok with social networks to use their discretion on which messages they promote/recommend (as that is in principle discretion-based decision), but not for mechanistic functionality like 'distribute message to followers'.
> Are there any exceptions to your rule of not moderating, such as illegal content or violence against specific people?
It is acceptable if a service has rules and enforce them, but then it should also be acceptable to sue a service that does arbitrary moderation (either excessive outside of its own rules, or doing selective enforcement of rules).
Also, there is an argument that such rules should not be discriminatory.
A publisher isn't forced. They choose the speech they like and censor what they dont like. They are liable for what they say. So when CNN for example published lies about that maga kid... maga kid got a nice payout from them.
A platform though isn't a publisher and isn't liable for content; they get this liability protection by agreeing they cannot censor speech. The only allowed censorship is over reasonable good faith efforts. When twitter had extreme examples of lies about maga kid, he cants sue twitter.
If these platforms could censor speech, they could operate exactly like a publisher but without liability? That's not how it works. What a disaster if you made publishers not liable by pretending to be platforms. So yes, you must force platforms to accept all speech with very limited good faith moderation.
I would have thought the normal use of "platform" would be similar to "interactive computer service" and Section 230 is very explicit: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider"
In essence the point of section 230 is to allow social media platforms to provide content while not being considered the publisher.
Again there is no distinction between "platform" and "publisher". Go read the actual law.
Not quite right. Section 230 says that online services are not considered publishers when they provide services that allow other people to publish information online (ie, when they act like a platform, though the law doesn't use this term).
However, they are considered publishers of content they create themselves.
Thus the distinction between publisher and platform is who creates the content.
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
There is a legal distinction between a "computer system" that includes any normal usage of platform and a publisher. That's what the actual law says. Section 230 is surprisingly legible if you haven't read it yet.
Do you remember 1996? There were a lot of systems then that would absolutely qualify as social media today, even if the term wasn't used then. Those things are what section 230 addresses.
You seem to be making some sort of pedantic strawman argument and I can't tell what you're really trying to convey. Instead of phrasing it as a negative, is there something you're trying to positively affirm?
Ok so how do you differentiate the liability protection Twitter has and CNN doesn't?
Also why do you believe Judge William Orrick of San Francisco is wrong? There is literally case law confirming the distinction between platform and publisher.
Note, this is the problem with the 'disinformation governance board'.
Which specific case law are you referring to? Please provide an actual citation because I don't think anything in my comment contradicted an opinion by Judge Orrick.
It's completely different... one allows everyone and then bans the ones they don't like...
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/05/984440891/justice-clarence-th...
https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/masterpiece-cake...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44361162
Precedents have been set exactly the other way. This law looks like conservatives having a hissy fit that this time around market forces are keeping them from dominating all conversations, so they're making laws to enforce their social dominance.
Given you might be in a position where nobody will sell you bandwidth and nobody will register your domain name, "just build it yourself" becomes "just build an entire network infrastructure provider, domain registrar, hosting company and website". Don't forget that Parler, a relatively milquetoast 'free speech' website, was kicked off some pretty core internet infrastructure and was denied access by dozens of others. "Just build your own AWS and internet backbone!" is now your argument.
As others have pointed out, the pro-censorship activists generally also hypocritically support free speech when it comes to their issues -- such as forcing private businesses to bake cakes they disagree with, or forcing retail companies to stock books with certain themes.
A few months ago I would have called the "pro-censorship" label hyperbole. The folks who support censorship on social media have a few decent, good-faith-sounding arguments in favor of censorship. The primary argument being something like "I'm not in favor of censorship, but censorship by corps isn't unconstitutional!". But as soon as it seemed clear that Elon would buy Twitter, the mask came off and those same people who claimed they weren't in favor of censorship were openly bemoaning the end of the pro-censorship regime.
Parler[0] and Gab[1] are still alive and well. In other words, despite being kicked off, they still managed to survive.
[0]: https://parler.com/
[1]: https://gab.com/
[0]: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/05/17/author-of-texas-social-m...
Are you saying that the companies ban people because the company itself decides to promote those users more then others because of their own algorithm?
Just get rid of the algo? (They want the algo to control speech, but it looks likes it failing on them...)