Wanna Make Big Tech Monopolies Even Worse? Kill Section 230
eff.org
eff.org
(1)Treatment of publisher or speaker: 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.
(2)Civil liability : No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
(A)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; or
(B)any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).[1]
If you squint at paragraph B, this is actually a reasonable loophole for adblocking, if you consider behavioral advertising to be objectionable.
Wouldn't we just go back to algorithmic feeds being liable but dumb pipes not being liable?
Without this clause, the thinking goes, when you post on Facebook (i.e. when Facebook shows your content to others), you are posting as Facebook.
Google can't and shouldn't be responsible for the factual accuracy of sites that it indexes and shows to users.
Consider e.g. what happens when libelous content is indexed.
AI generated content is a different story, and I would not expect a court to lean towards Section 230 protections for such content. But user generated content, or content index, scraped, or otherwise reproduced verbatim from real humans is a different story.
If you want publishers penalized for revenue generation that comes from illegal content, then it seems appropriate to draft a law that requires attribution of said revenue to specific pieces of content, and the ability to use this in discovery.
Consider defamation. Often, the difference between a defamatory and non-defamatory statement is truth. Expecting websites to distinguish true statements from false ones is a non-starter.
Let's say my family has a horrible experience with a youth pastor. I post about it on facebook to warn people in my community. If my claims are false, they're almost certainly actionable defamation. If my claims are true, disallowing them to mitigate Facebook's potential liability is also bad, but not in a way that affects Facebook.
However, and this is a big, big HOWEVER, it is simultaneously true that section 230 also immensely benefits those same massive network-effected tech monoliths and lets them profit IMMENSELY from the spread of truly harmful content. Misinformation about COVID being the most prescient and recent example for most people probably, propaganda from all sides that continues radicalization and polarization, and also tons of harassment campaigns arranged across sites and services too numerous to name, the most vile content you can think of in whatever stripe comes to mind for you, etc. etc., Section 230 prevents any of the websites that are caught distributing it from being held liable. And I cannot envision a situation where being held legally culpable for such material would not directly incentivize, and with ZEAL, those tech monoliths to get the shit under control.
It's clear merely market share, advertiser dollars fleeing platforms, and public outcry has not been sufficient for many of these companies to stop such things. That being the case, while I understand the opinions expressed here and sympathize with many of them, and I too have a deep, nostalgic connection to the early weird Internet, I feel it's simply too costly to continue allowing the internet to remain as wild as it is. The corrosive effects of these things on both our society at large and people as individuals continue to unravel and be more and better studied, and while I would never say we need to ban the Internet and Social Media entirely, I think it's very safe to say something like this technology has operated unregulated for far too long.
I would not be the person I am today without early unfettered access to an uncensored Internet, and I say that both as a blessing, and a curse. It gave me at once access to early technology that's turned into a prosperous career, while also afflicting me with a lifetime of mental scars of varying severity and intrusive thoughts of things I saw and cannot forget. I struggle to label this trauma, but it's certainly not a good thing I carry.
I don't know exactly what the solution here is. I think there should be some level of deniability and good-faith "we didn't know this was an issue" that these providers should have. However I feel it's also important that we're able to with legal mechanisms, say for example that Instagram is knowingly profiting off of whatever harmful content, to such a degree where there is no plausible explanation for how they didn't know, and to turn that into a legal action. This isn't really my field, so I don't know how you necessarily do that. But if that's truly impossible (which I doubt) then I feel sunsetting section 230 is the only real path forward.
I agree that I also don’t know what the answer is, but getting rid of Section 230 is definitely not the answer. The answer is in some other kind of regulation, and this push to kill 230 is madness and the people pushing it don’t understand what it would actually do!
> Misinformation about COVID being the most prescient and recent example for most people probably, propaganda from all sides that continues radicalization and polarization, and also tons of harassment campaigns arranged across sites and services too numerous to name, the most vile content you can think of in whatever stripe comes to mind for you, etc. etc., Section 230 prevents any of the websites that are caught distributing it from being held liable. And I cannot envision a situation where being held legally culpable for such material would not directly incentivize, and with ZEAL, those tech monoliths to get the shit under control.
Disinformation is not illegal. Even if platforms had joint liability for disinformation, that liability is...zero. There is nothing in US law that prohibits disinformation. Rather, there is a Constitutional right to speak without state sanction, e.g. the First Amendment.
Likewise: the vast majority of harassment (as in > 99.9%) does not rise to the level of illegal conduct, and where it does, the cases are fact intensive and the relief is almost certainly injunctive, which is to say, if you prove to a court that certain conduct is illegal harassment, the best you can hope for is that the judge will order the harasser to cease.
Which is to say: the two kinds of content you worry about the platforms carrying, for which you think shared liability will present some remedy, are legal to carry and there is no liability, shared or otherwise, for hosting it.
For avoidance of doubt, I am profoundly concerned about both harassment and disinformation... And also getting rid of CDA 230 will not create a legal obligation on the platforms to do anything about either.
> Instead, we want to focus on what we see as a glaring omission in the co-sponsor’s argument: how central Section 230 is to ensuring that every person can speak online.
Again, this is a disingenuous argument in that it ignores the issue of the monopoly power of the biggest Big Tech.
The distinction between "publisher" and "common carrier" has to be sharpened, and maybe (hear me out here) if a company is big enough that its acquisitions have to be scrutinized by the FTC for market-controlling power, then it's also tending to deserve "common carrier" treatment. Just a thought.
Lets stay with "Kill Section 230" and it's consequences.
Kill 230 and Big Tech (or any tech) has to choose one or the other, that being the distinction before the Internet.
There is no choice. Common carrier thing you suggest does not appear if Section 230 is removed. Big Tech would become publisher. They would permaban everything even slightly unconformable and be fine.
Small forums would disappear. You can't run small forum if you can be sued.
Big Tech being a publisher means that their user-generated content would drop to the level of "Letters to the Editor" in the NY Times. Thus their revenue would dry up, too, because all those teen-agers walking around staring at their phones are doing so because they or their friends or someone they admire has content on there. They're not looking at passive media.
Or sites like Wikipedia, running mastodon instance, blogging, ..
Those who have money to sue, like Saudi Arabian government, Israel, or billionaires and lobby groups would have a field day.
They had writers. Usually those were not employees. They had to lawyer-ize everything they printed. If you sent in a Letter to the Editor, they had to scrutinize that, too, and call you to be sure you really wrote it.
If you're saying it's so important that people with no skill whatsoever be able to say whatever they want with no liability to the company that prints it; furthermore, that that company be able to monetize their content: I guess we're disagreeing. I don't think the world would be any worse off if that were no longer the case. In fact, we'd probably be better off.
There is no way that scales IMO.
I don't think a post-section 230 web is pessimistic but that's my opinion. We shall see I suppose.
If that turns out not to be the case, we could always reinstate 230.
perhaps "redefine" would have been a better word than "sharpen."
There certainly IS a distinct difference. The discussion point was "monopoly power makes you more likely to resemble a common carrier."
As an aside, one reason I think 230 pretty much correct is that authoritarians on both sides of the spectrum want to axe it, but for different reasons.
i.e. it's not a binary.
I mean, you can make the argument “I don’t like big tech so I want to make it impossible for them to legally function while allowing any user-generated content” but I’m not sure most would agree.
https://www.economicliberties.us/press-release/icymi-scotus-...
In short, the law’s intent has been perverted. The idea that these providers are simply neutral carriers of content evaporates the minute they decide what you do and don’t see and how much of it.
The piece you link is ... weird. First, it doesn't really describe the problem it's trying to solve. Then it presents some very vague policy prescriptions like "site[s] should be regulated by sector-specific rules that apply to that particular line of business".
A core premise of this argument is that 230 is bizzare exception to pretty clear core rules that we typically have on things like libel and product liability.
There’s just absolutely no argument at this point that these platforms are fundamentally consequential commercial enterprises. The create products, and profit from them, and those products and and do hurt people and cause horrible effects, but this law designed to preserve free speech utterly insulates them from any consequences of their profit making enterprise.
It’s just bizarre. Like the Washington Post can be sued for publishing content that’s harming people and wrong, but Google can’t?
If my kids are exposed to pedophiles every time they go to Chuck E Cheese, and they know about it and don’t do anything I can sure as hell can sue them. But not if it happens on Instagram? Why?
Probably not, if you ask the authors of the law [1].
> The idea that these providers are simply neutral carriers of content evaporates the minute they decide what you do and don’t see and how much of it.
Even if a platform chooses to present itself as neutral and subsequently "fails" to be neutral, Section 230 doesn't make the platform any more liable for user-generated content than if the platform hadn't presented itself as neutral in the first place.
[1] https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/sen-wyden-a...