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Everyone here is saying 1A doesn't constrain private parties. But that's missing the heart of PragerU's claim. Section 230 gives internet platforms immunity fo

Everyone here is saying 1A doesn't constrain private parties. But that's missing the heart of PragerU's claim. Section 230 gives internet platforms immunity for what users post. But at the same time, platforms want to moderate their content selecting which views are acceptable and which are not. These are inherently conflicting things. Section 230 gives special protection on the assumption that platforms aren't involved in selecting what users post. But then with the other hand, platforms are selecting what users post via their content guidelines. We have common carrier provisions for other communication mediums with no liability (ex. TV, ISP's). And we have liability for communication mediums with editorial control (ie. Newspapers, Magazines). Tech companies are running up the center and making huge profits with an unfair legal advantage that no other communication medium gets. Newspapers have to vet their classifieds and editorials. Facebook/YouTube/etc doesn't. And that is inherently unfair. So either Congress or the Courts need to fix the law. And it's fair game for the courts, because the law is not being applied correctly to these platforms, given their abuses.

deleted 7y ago
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rhcom2 7y ago
> Section 230 gives special protection on the assumption that platforms aren't involved in selecting what users post. I don't believe that is true. There is nothing in the law that says the platforms can't select or edit what their users post. > 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.
- jaywalk 7y ago
  I don' believe your interpretation is correct. I believe the law assumes that platforms are treating all content equally. But they're not. Even if the content was originally provided by someone else, the platform is making the decision to promote some content and demote other content. In other words, they are making active decisions about what content they'd like to have appear on their supposedly neutral platform.
  - kelnos 7y ago
    > I believe the law assumes... That's not how law works. The law, as written, does not require -- or even say anything about -- treating all content equally. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was written specifically to find a middle ground between "common carrier" and "publisher". It's actually very simple and very readable for a layperson[0]: > 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. That's it; that's the full text. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communications_Decency_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
    - jaywalk 7y ago
      Laws are written by people, and people make assumptions. When I say "the law assumes" I obviously meant "the people who wrote the law assumed." People expose unintended loopholes in laws all the time, because the people who wrote the laws assumed certain things that ended up not being correct.
      - kelnos 7y ago
        I don't agree that the people who wrote the law assumed that at all. The actual text of the law gives no indication of that. But regardless, neither you nor I have any idea what was in the heads of lawmakers at the time, so any such speculation is useless. All we have is the text.
  - rhcom2 7y ago
    > I believe the law assumes that platforms are treating all content equally. Can you cite anything about the law that supports this?
belltaco 7y ago
This argument has become a meme at this point. EFF debunks it. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/no-section-230-does-not-require-platforms-be-neutral https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/no-section-230-does-no... >These are inherently conflicting things. Section 230 gives special protection on the assumption that platforms aren't involved in selecting what users post. But then with the other hand, platforms are selecting what users post via their content guidelines. No. If HN removes spam or off topic content or anything else, it does not automatically mean that it's suddenly liable for someone posting libel and getting sued over it. That wasn't the intent of the law from the text, and it was never interpreted that way.
- neuland 7y ago
  EFF's word is not god. I like them, but you make it sound like it's a settled debate. I'm here to say there's another side and present that viewpoint. As you many imagine, I agree with Sen. Cruz's line of question from the article you linked. And I don't think EFF's solution is viable. They suggest that Facebook should make their policies more transparent and give users more control over what they see. But this misses the entire point. Facebook/YouTube/etc are in a monopoly position. They've proven that they are nakedly partisan, and they have no intention of acting in good faith. Platforms should not be allowed to discriminate on any viewpoint or legal content. They can still provide tools for advertisers to choose what content their ads appear next to. And they can still provide tools for users to choose what they see. But discriminating on some viewpoints and not others is anathema to a public forum. And you can read Section 230 that way.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - kelnos 7y ago
    I'm not sure where you (or Sen. Cruz) are getting this interpretation from. Section 230 exists because Congress recognized that the then-only options of "common carrier" and "publisher" were too binary and didn't account for anything in between. It explicitly allows owners of content platforms that have moderation/curation in place to avoid liability for what their users publish. I'm not saying it's good that companies like Google and Facebook can shape public discourse by suppressing views with political viewpoints they don't like, and I do think that should be addressed, but Section 230 is what explicitly allows them to do that, not the opposite.
magicalist 7y ago
> Section 230 gives special protection on the assumption that platforms aren't involved in selecting what users post as has been pointed out in other comments[1], this isn't true, and is also irrelevant to PagerU's first amendment argument, which definitely was the heart of their claim. [1] e.g. root at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22434592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22434592
mech1234 7y ago
I wasn't aware that this claim was central to the suit, thanks for that. Many people here are not focusing on that claim. EDIT: Per other replies, it seems like that claim has a large amount of direct evidence against it. I think it is interesting that in some long-term sense there is pressure for the government's regulatory reach to move farther up the network layer stack. ~50+ years ago it was clear that telephone lines were a natural monopoly and required regulation. Over time this transferred to ISP's, over time this may transfer to "platform websites", which currently to me seems like a pretty dang vague category. It would be very strange for an Elizabeth-Warren-esque tech regulatory crackdown to occur without guaranteeing certain freedoms of speech for users.
iron0013 7y ago
You are once again spreading a variation on the lie that there is some magical legal difference between a “platform” and a “publisher” that somehow limits a company’s ability to control what its users do on that company’s own servers. There is no such distinction, legally.
gregd 7y ago
You're also wrong in that these are not inherently conflicting things. A platform can moderate their content AS WELL AS have immunity from what their users post.
RestlessMind 7y ago
I will repeat a comment I made on another article: treat certain surfaces of social media companies, mainly the user specific pages (Donald Trump's twitter page, PewDiePie's YT channel etc) as a platform; treat other surfaces which are generated based on algorithms and not directly by individual users (FB feed, YT watch feed, reddit homepage etc) as a publisher. That way, social media companies won't be responsible for what their users upload. But they will be responsible for what they present to their users to optimize clicks / engagement / revenue etc.
- iron0013 7y ago
  No, they won’t, because the conservative “platform” vs “publisher” meme has no basis in legal reality.
xoa 7y ago
How the heck do such wild, ludicrously wrong misunderstandings propagate when it's so trivial to just pull up a search engine or Wikipedia or the like and type "Section 230" and see the law itself (as well as subsequent court rulings and ample discussion)? This post is nearly completely wrong. First, here is what Section 230 actually says: >Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act >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. Note there are no requirements for "neutrality", or for perfection or any other such thing. "Section 230 gives special protection on the assumption that platforms aren't involved in selecting what users post" is completely incorrect. A service that carries anything neutrally short of a lawful order is covered under Common Carrier status, which is a different thing. Before 230, Internet services faced two choices: to be perfectly neutral and engage in no moderation and thus not be responsible under common carrier, or else to engage in moderation, fail to be 100% perfect at it, and after inevitably having something bad posted get sued for it and end up being ruled the "publisher or speaker". This would destroy all real time user content posting, and potentially user content posting in general. The point of 230 was precisely to allow imperfect and biased moderation and content enforcement by real time (or close) private platforms without assuming legal responsibility for what users published. Quite arguably more than any other law in existence it's what made the modern Internet possible.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  > How the heck do such wild, ludicrously wrong misunderstandings propagate Hypothesis: in the modern era, perhaps thanks to strong belief in freedom of speech and support for said belief baked into our mass bidirectional communications tools on the internet, false beliefs can easily outstrip true facts on publicly-accessible fora because false beliefs greatly outnumber true facts.
tzs 7y ago
> We have common carrier provisions for other communication mediums with no liability (ex. TV, ISP's). And we have liability for communication mediums with editorial control (ie. Newspapers, Magazines). ...and we have bookstores, which can choose to not carry books on certain subjects, but are not generally liable for the content of the books they do carry. Online forums seem to me to be more like bookstores than either common carriers or newspapers.
- jaywalk 7y ago
  I'm not aware of any bookstore that allows anyone off the street to come in and put their own books up for sale in their store.
  - throwaway4220 7y ago
    Maybe because they're hard to find :) But actually you can self-publish a book and convince the store owner to sell it. It's not easy by any means, but not impossible. One of my more organized classmates in college sold his bound notes at the school bookstore for a decent sum.
    - UncleMeat 7y ago
      > and convince the store owner to sell it That's the key bit. The store owner can say "no".
  - xbdead 7y ago
    You mean a consignment bookshop? I know of several.
  - tzs 7y ago
    I'm not really sure that is relevant. The question is how much control can you exercise over the content that is presented or carried by your service without incurring liability for that content. The OP was saying that choosing what content is allowed => liability (such as with newspapers), and ! liability => not choosing (such as with common carriers). My point is that bookstores do get to choose, but do not generally incur liability, showing that the idea that except for internet under section 230 everything else follows a simple liability <=> choosing model is not really accurate.
weare138 7y ago
> These are inherently conflicting things. Section 230 gives special protection on the assumption that platforms aren't involved in selecting what users post. But then with the other hand, platforms are selecting what users post via their content guidelines. They're not contradictory, they're unrelated.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

rhcom2 7y ago

> Section 230 gives special protection on the assumption that platforms aren't involved in selecting what users post. I don't believe that is true. There is nothing in the law that says the platforms can't select or edit what their users post. > 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.

jaywalk 7y ago
I don' believe your interpretation is correct. I believe the law assumes that platforms are treating all content equally. But they're not. Even if the content was originally provided by someone else, the platform is making the decision to promote some content and demote other content. In other words, they are making active decisions about what content they'd like to have appear on their supposedly neutral platform.
- kelnos 7y ago
  > I believe the law assumes... That's not how law works. The law, as written, does not require -- or even say anything about -- treating all content equally. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was written specifically to find a middle ground between "common carrier" and "publisher". It's actually very simple and very readable for a layperson[0]: > 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. That's it; that's the full text. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communications_Decency_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
  - jaywalk 7y ago
    Laws are written by people, and people make assumptions. When I say "the law assumes" I obviously meant "the people who wrote the law assumed." People expose unintended loopholes in laws all the time, because the people who wrote the laws assumed certain things that ended up not being correct.
    - kelnos 7y ago
      I don't agree that the people who wrote the law assumed that at all. The actual text of the law gives no indication of that. But regardless, neither you nor I have any idea what was in the heads of lawmakers at the time, so any such speculation is useless. All we have is the text.
- rhcom2 7y ago
  > I believe the law assumes that platforms are treating all content equally. Can you cite anything about the law that supports this?

belltaco 7y ago

This argument has become a meme at this point. EFF debunks it. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/no-section-230-does-not-require-platforms-be-neutral https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/no-section-230-does-no... >These are inherently conflicting things. Section 230 gives special protection on the assumption that platforms aren't involved in selecting what users post. But then with the other hand, platforms are selecting what users post via their content guidelines. No. If HN removes spam or off topic content or anything else, it does not automatically mean that it's suddenly liable for someone posting libel and getting sued over it. That wasn't the intent of the law from the text, and it was never interpreted that way.

neuland 7y ago
EFF's word is not god. I like them, but you make it sound like it's a settled debate. I'm here to say there's another side and present that viewpoint. As you many imagine, I agree with Sen. Cruz's line of question from the article you linked. And I don't think EFF's solution is viable. They suggest that Facebook should make their policies more transparent and give users more control over what they see. But this misses the entire point. Facebook/YouTube/etc are in a monopoly position. They've proven that they are nakedly partisan, and they have no intention of acting in good faith. Platforms should not be allowed to discriminate on any viewpoint or legal content. They can still provide tools for advertisers to choose what content their ads appear next to. And they can still provide tools for users to choose what they see. But discriminating on some viewpoints and not others is anathema to a public forum. And you can read Section 230 that way.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- kelnos 7y ago
  I'm not sure where you (or Sen. Cruz) are getting this interpretation from. Section 230 exists because Congress recognized that the then-only options of "common carrier" and "publisher" were too binary and didn't account for anything in between. It explicitly allows owners of content platforms that have moderation/curation in place to avoid liability for what their users publish. I'm not saying it's good that companies like Google and Facebook can shape public discourse by suppressing views with political viewpoints they don't like, and I do think that should be addressed, but Section 230 is what explicitly allows them to do that, not the opposite.

magicalist 7y ago

> Section 230 gives special protection on the assumption that platforms aren't involved in selecting what users post as has been pointed out in other comments[1], this isn't true, and is also irrelevant to PagerU's first amendment argument, which definitely was the heart of their claim. [1] e.g. root at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22434592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22434592

mech1234 7y ago

I wasn't aware that this claim was central to the suit, thanks for that. Many people here are not focusing on that claim. EDIT: Per other replies, it seems like that claim has a large amount of direct evidence against it. I think it is interesting that in some long-term sense there is pressure for the government's regulatory reach to move farther up the network layer stack. ~50+ years ago it was clear that telephone lines were a natural monopoly and required regulation. Over time this transferred to ISP's, over time this may transfer to "platform websites", which currently to me seems like a pretty dang vague category. It would be very strange for an Elizabeth-Warren-esque tech regulatory crackdown to occur without guaranteeing certain freedoms of speech for users.

iron0013 7y ago

You are once again spreading a variation on the lie that there is some magical legal difference between a “platform” and a “publisher” that somehow limits a company’s ability to control what its users do on that company’s own servers. There is no such distinction, legally.

gregd 7y ago

You're also wrong in that these are not inherently conflicting things. A platform can moderate their content AS WELL AS have immunity from what their users post.

RestlessMind 7y ago

I will repeat a comment I made on another article: treat certain surfaces of social media companies, mainly the user specific pages (Donald Trump's twitter page, PewDiePie's YT channel etc) as a platform; treat other surfaces which are generated based on algorithms and not directly by individual users (FB feed, YT watch feed, reddit homepage etc) as a publisher. That way, social media companies won't be responsible for what their users upload. But they will be responsible for what they present to their users to optimize clicks / engagement / revenue etc.

iron0013 7y ago
No, they won’t, because the conservative “platform” vs “publisher” meme has no basis in legal reality.

xoa 7y ago

How the heck do such wild, ludicrously wrong misunderstandings propagate when it's so trivial to just pull up a search engine or Wikipedia or the like and type "Section 230" and see the law itself (as well as subsequent court rulings and ample discussion)? This post is nearly completely wrong. First, here is what Section 230 actually says: >Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act >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. Note there are no requirements for "neutrality", or for perfection or any other such thing. "Section 230 gives special protection on the assumption that platforms aren't involved in selecting what users post" is completely incorrect. A service that carries anything neutrally short of a lawful order is covered under Common Carrier status, which is a different thing. Before 230, Internet services faced two choices: to be perfectly neutral and engage in no moderation and thus not be responsible under common carrier, or else to engage in moderation, fail to be 100% perfect at it, and after inevitably having something bad posted get sued for it and end up being ruled the "publisher or speaker". This would destroy all real time user content posting, and potentially user content posting in general. The point of 230 was precisely to allow imperfect and biased moderation and content enforcement by real time (or close) private platforms without assuming legal responsibility for what users published. Quite arguably more than any other law in existence it's what made the modern Internet possible.

shadowgovt 7y ago
> How the heck do such wild, ludicrously wrong misunderstandings propagate Hypothesis: in the modern era, perhaps thanks to strong belief in freedom of speech and support for said belief baked into our mass bidirectional communications tools on the internet, false beliefs can easily outstrip true facts on publicly-accessible fora because false beliefs greatly outnumber true facts.

tzs 7y ago

> We have common carrier provisions for other communication mediums with no liability (ex. TV, ISP's). And we have liability for communication mediums with editorial control (ie. Newspapers, Magazines). ...and we have bookstores, which can choose to not carry books on certain subjects, but are not generally liable for the content of the books they do carry. Online forums seem to me to be more like bookstores than either common carriers or newspapers.

jaywalk 7y ago
I'm not aware of any bookstore that allows anyone off the street to come in and put their own books up for sale in their store.
- throwaway4220 7y ago
  Maybe because they're hard to find :) But actually you can self-publish a book and convince the store owner to sell it. It's not easy by any means, but not impossible. One of my more organized classmates in college sold his bound notes at the school bookstore for a decent sum.
  - UncleMeat 7y ago
    > and convince the store owner to sell it That's the key bit. The store owner can say "no".
- xbdead 7y ago
  You mean a consignment bookshop? I know of several.
- tzs 7y ago
  I'm not really sure that is relevant. The question is how much control can you exercise over the content that is presented or carried by your service without incurring liability for that content. The OP was saying that choosing what content is allowed => liability (such as with newspapers), and ! liability => not choosing (such as with common carriers). My point is that bookstores do get to choose, but do not generally incur liability, showing that the idea that except for internet under section 230 everything else follows a simple liability <=> choosing model is not really accurate.

weare138 7y ago

> These are inherently conflicting things. Section 230 gives special protection on the assumption that platforms aren't involved in selecting what users post. But then with the other hand, platforms are selecting what users post via their content guidelines. They're not contradictory, they're unrelated.