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Comment by jay_kyburz | Hacker News Reader

I can't speak to the legality or meaning of section 230, but I can share my somewhat controversial opinions about how I think the internet should operate.

The author points out that the publisher of a book of mushrooms cannot be held responsible for recommending people eat poisonous mushrooms. This is OK I guess because the author _can_ be held responsible.

If the author had been anonymous and the publisher could not accurately identify who should be responsible, then I would like to live in a society where the publisher _was_ held responsible. I don't think that's unreasonable.

Over on the internet, content is posted mostly anonymously and there is nobody to take responsibility. I think big tech needs to be able to accurately identify the author of the harmful material, or take responsibility themselves.

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Yeah, it's illegal to shout "fire" in a crowded theater, but if you hook up the fire-alarm to a web-api, the responsibility for the ensuing chaos disappears.

It is not illegal to shout "fire" in a crowded theater. That was from an argument about why people should be jailed for passing out fliers opposing the US draft during WWI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...

It essentially is, you’ll get a disorderly conduct charge (the Wikipedia article confirms this). You’ll also be held liable for any damages caused by the ensuing panic.

You can contrive situations where it falls within the bounds of the law (for instance, if you do it as part of a play in a way that everyone understands it’s not real) but if you interpret it the way it’s meant to be interpreted it’s breaking a law pretty much anywhere.

>The author points out that the publisher of a book of mushrooms cannot be held responsible for recommending people eat poisonous mushrooms.

I don't think this is true at all. If a publisher publishes a book that includes information that is not only incorrect, but actually harmful if followed, and represents it as true/safe, then they would be liable too.

From the article.

>I know I’ve discussed this case before, but it always gets lost in the mix. In Winter v. GP Putnam, the Ninth Circuit said a publisher was not liable for publishing a mushroom encyclopedia that literally “recommended” people eat poisonous mushrooms. The issue was that the publisher had no way to know that the mushroom was, in fact, inedible.

"We conclude that the defendants have no duty to investigate the accuracy of the contents of the books it publishes. A publisher may of course assume such a burden, but there is nothing inherent in the role of publisher or the surrounding legal doctrines to suggest that such a duty should be imposed on publishers. Indeed the cases uniformly refuse to impose such a duty. Were we tempted to create this duty, the gentle tug of the First Amendment and the values embodied therein would remind us of the social costs."

How odd, that's not the case for defamation, where publishers have a duty to investigate the truth of the statements they publish. What's going on in the ninth circuit?

>> Over on the internet, content is posted mostly anonymously and there is nobody to take responsibility.

I sometimes suggest that the internet should start from strongly verifiable identity. You can strip identity in cases where it makes sense, but trying to establish identity is very hard. When people can be identified it make it possible to track them down and hold them accountable if they violate laws. People will generally behave better when they are not anonymous.

“We should dox everyone on the internet” is definitely not a take I expected.

That take has been around since Facebook's real name policy as what seemed like a good idea at the time. It failed to make people behavior any better. Yet absolute idiots keep on thinking that if we just make the internet less free it will solve all of our problems and deliver us into a land of rainbows, unicorns, and gumdrops where it rains chocolate. For god's sake stop doing the work for a dystopia for free!

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