People worry about Net Neutrality because it was a fantastically successful astroturfing campaign by internet media companies. No similar campaign against FOSTA-SESTA succeeded.
Same with Russia paying for anti-fracking activism in the Aughts: https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/596304-invest...
Fracking is bad for the environment. Balancing 'the United States and Earth will not become inhabitable to humans within 500 years' with 'our oil companies want cheaper product and less overhead' is a pretty big challenge, but it's safe to say that Russia is more interested in short-term gains than the US is (and is a large part in why the US is pushing EV adoption).
Because the small mastodon instance does not have any assets behind it or make any profits that make it worth filing a law suit, and because there are many small mastodon instances, any legal campaign would have to go against many small operators with no assets or profits to seize, and thus nothing to gain.
Decades of legal battles between the MPAA/RIAA and unlicensed content distributors demonstrate this very well. The media monopolies never won anything against small operators and gave up (except for public relations stunts) and were only ever able to force large companies into paying them royalties.
Section 230 only protects large companies, not small operators. Small operators can be taken out by a SLAPP lawsuit irregardless of the law if it is really in someone's interest to do so.
If you are willing to be even slightly clever you will figure out that this is an easily solvable problem.
Just do what the EU did, or Texas did, and remove/modify section 230 protections only for very large social media companies, defined as have literally 10s of millions of users.
That way, the small platforms are protected, and the large ones that are the problem actors, have to change.
Problem solved.
No need to worry about this straw man position of "look how bad things would be if we do the dumb thing and didn't implement the easy to figure solution that solves most of the complaints!".
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prod....
The fact there's only a single badly litigated case that is obsolete as heck to justify a law that got Trump elected and has a death toll in the hundreds is a great example of how little real justification 230 has.
If it was repealed tomorrow and Facebook had to choose between these two paths, which would they choose?
A: keep moderation; anytime someone posts something libelous, they're responsible for damages
B: no moderation; they let anything and everything go so that they become a service provider and thus aren't considered to be editorializing or approving the content people post
It's safe to say that 230 being gone would require every single website with UGC to choose between the two options. If you think it could be revised instead, feel free to suggest such.
The articles posted on HN discussing this very topic bring this up, so reading them is worthwhile instead of simply dismissing the entire thing as “big tech bad.”
The entire pitch for 230 is a wild astroturf project. And as a recent non-American pointed out, it's paper thin when you realize no other country has an equivalent immunity law, and all of them allow user generated content.
A comedic example is the claim I've seen that Mastodon servers can't survive without Section 230, but the largest one is in Germany, where no such blanket immunity exists.
It does however mean that if you do get sued over third party content on your site, you will probably lose, which is an expensive possibility for any small site operator.