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Comment by lgleason | Hacker News Reader

This is why we can't have nice things. The social media platforms took things too far. Most republicans would be in favor of the platforms not being liable for content if they don't censor. Most and both political sides would probably also agree that they should be taking steps to protect minors from child predators etc., and that was the intent behind 230 protections. The social media platforms took 230 beyond what is was initially intended for as a premise to weaponize it against people who's politics they don't agree with. Obviously with that kinds of a loophole 230 was not well thought out from that regard and would need a re-write.

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CDA 230 exists because the Wolf of Wall Street was trying to censor evidence of his crimes. He got one ruling against Prodigy saying moderation makes you liable for defamation; and another from Compuserve saying no moderation means no liability.

Let me be very clear about how the law would work sans CDA 230: any time someone does not like what you are saying, they can sue the platform you host it on to get you censored. The only platforms resistant to this would be ones full to bursting with spam. This is already really bad. If you want a partial repeal, i.e. one where platforms are still allowed to "protect minors from child predators", I'm not sure that'll pass muster at SCOTUS. Selectively removing speech protections based on content is a no-go.

Furthermore, platforms being able to take down political speech they disagree with is not a "loophole". That's just what moderation is. The whole point of a moderator is to silence the loudest voices, so that others may speak.

Section 230 was written without limitation on the kind of censorship allowed because it was an end-run around Constitutional prohibition of government content favoritism that had destroyed previous censorship laws and waa (correctly) suspected would endanger much of the rest of the law it was incorporated into.

If you want to allow the kind of private censorship S230 was intended to protect, and stay within the First Amendment, S230 is what you get.

230 isn't a loophole, it's a requirement for any business on the web. You cannot even have product reviews without something like 230.

So it turns out, inconveniently, "Children need protection from predators" and "People need protection from bigots" are two sides of the same coin.

It's all politics and it always was. Claiming one is "common sense" and one is "political" misses what "political" means.

I think S230 set a pretty good tone in biasing in favor of the right of the service owner to set the tone over-and-above within the constraints of the law (for a simple practical reason: if you don't give them that right, they'll just stop providing the service). But that does mean that when your provider decides that, say, debating the humanity of trans folks is no longer acceptable, we toe the line there or we start our own service.

Thanks for your input on this, especially for S230. I never understood the concept that a private business has to entertain or host content that they do not want on their site.

If a friend invited me to their house I can start calling their wife a fat cow and tell them how ugly I think their children are. It doesn't mean they have to put up with it or accept that sort of speech on their private property. That doesn't mean he censored me or inhibited my freedom of speech.

Well, did your friend invite you there saying his house was a place for you to share your mind?

For me, it's an issue of scale. Your friend is a single person (or family). Twitter is a gigantic, faceless corporation (okay, Elon Musk makes it less faceless, but you know what I mean) that tries to cater to everyone—in effect, it tries to be a commons. Can we consider it one? Should we? Should we make a law that says once a social media company gets to a certain size, it can't censor anything anymore if that content is legal?

I'm generally against additional regulation. I don't think, for instance, a small pro-life forum should be forced to allow pro-choice people to spew vitriol, nor vice versa. I'm hesitant to say the same for a giant company like Twitter or Facebook. There, I think it might be more appropriate to have comprehensive filtering and self-moderation tools vs. shutting people out completely (assuming their behavior is legal).

A lot of these issues stem from the fact that, until recently, society has never had to grasp these issues. Our laws are not equipped to handle these sorts of questions. Especially when that question ultimately is "When does a private company become a public service and, therefore, must abide by the laws and regulations applicable to all public services?"

My statements, while I myself do not necessarily agree with them, are what I view as possible when operating within the current legal framework our government has built for these private companies.

To me, if the government wants to hold a private company to the standard of a public service, then that private company must fully, legally, and entirely become (somewhat) a public service. I view that as becoming a service similar to the United States Post Office.

It's allowed to continue to operate as a company but has to comply with government regulations (whatever those may be). That also means that its goal is not profit generation. It can still charge users for certain services if it wishes but is no longer able to sell user data, and it must remain revenue-neutral.

This is a fair analogy but I think it could go further: your friend shouldn't be required to take what you say, print it out, and hand copies to everyone else that comes in to their house. They can say no, you can't do this here and I won't repeat it.

And I think this is perfectly acceptable when the service in question is one out of many. The reason why it is so contentious today is that a few megacorps have effectively come to define what "the Internet" is for the majority of people, though, and their ability to exclude content translates to extreme amount of political power in practice - so much so that it should not be tolerated in a free society.

But the solution to this problem is not to force those private service providers to be hands-off, but to make sure that none of them are big enough that it matters. Which the political forces that are pushing for these laws won't do, because their political economy boils down to "capitalism good, anti-monopoly bad", and that inevitably leads to the present state of affairs in practice.

> The social media platforms took 230 beyond what is was initially intended for as a premise to weaponize it against people who's politics they don't agree with.

So what? You're taking it as a given that "if a website moderates content in a way I don't like, the government must step in and force them to do moderation in a different way I do like"; I don't accept that premise at all, it's quite totalitarian in both concept and real-world execution.

Most Republicans want to censor just different things, just look at all the book bannings across the country. There are tons of things that lefty people complain about being censored on social media but we don't here about it because left-wing media is nowhere near as powerful as right-wing media. (The main lie in a lot of these discussions is that corporate media is lefty.)

Speaking as another leftie, corporate media is very much culturally left. But there is a big disconnect between cultural left and economic left now, to the point where the rhetoric of the former is used to distract from the latter.

Id like an example because i don't buy it. Unless you count something like reporting that scientists say climate change is real.

I mean, pick pretty much any cultural issue on which there is a clear left/right political split. Abortion, LGBT rights etc.

>The social media platforms took 230 beyond what is was initially intended for as a premise to weaponize it against people who's politics they don't agree with.

So what? And I mean that quite seriously.

To clarify, I despise the big social media platforms and refuse to use them even if that inconveniences me (and occasionally it does). At the same time, those platforms have the same free speech rights that I do, and curtailment of their free speech (and property) rights (in this case, the right not to publish/amplify the speech of others) also curtails my free speech (and property) rights.

And since I want to protect my own rights, I support the right of those rapacious scumbags to moderate/censor on their own private property.

If platforms are going to be editors then they don't need section 230 protection.

You're right, these companies do have the right to censor speech that they disagree with. However, if they do that, then they are responsible for any speech that they do not censor. So for instance, if someone posts a libelous statement on Reddit, and Reddit doesn't remove that statement, then victim of libel should be allowed to sue Reddit directly, instead of just suing whoever made that post.

I think I'd agree if the circumstances are the same, and on request a libel was not taken down for you when it was for other people. The same circumstances including being on the same subreddit, being caught by the same auto-filter, being notified in the same way, at least.

So, for example if libel against you wasn't caught by a particular filter then that's not bias against you, and so they are not party to the libel (unless you can show the filter was specifically designed to fail to catch libels against you).

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