11 ms·

The biggest takeaway, looking past the headline: “This week a federal appeals court, ruling in a case brought by conservative activists against social media co

by cdolan 6y ago

The biggest takeaway, looking past the headline: “This week a federal appeals court, ruling in a case brought by conservative activists against social media companies, affirmed that private websites are not public spaces and social media companies don't have First Amendment obligations. Any truly strong limits to Section 230 would almost certainly require action by Congress.”

microcolonel 6y ago
> affirmed that private websites are not public spaces and social media companies don't have First Amendment obligations FWIW this is only thematically related, the order concerns the distinction between immune or non-immune activities under Section 230. If you publish something defamatory on your blog, and you operate it, you may be liable. Section 230 is there to say that if a website merely retransmits your publication, it is not liable for it, so if you publish that same defamatory statement on Facebook, Facebook is not then liable. However, the argument with the executive order is that if you exercise a level of deliberate control over the content beyond some threshold, or you augment expression (like Twitter did the other day, adding links to contrary opinion pieces next to the President's opinion), you effectively become a publisher of that content. It's not a completely ridiculous idea either. Consider how diverse the expressions published to Twitter are; at some point it's not that different to choose not to publish some expression, than to express the complement of that expression yourself.
- cdubzzz 6y ago
  One potential outcome here -- social media platforms start _more actively_ banning users to prevent potential liability issues, thus fracturing the market. Highly doubt it will work out that way, but it would be nice (well, maybe...).
  - microcolonel 6y ago
    That would be a spectacular outcome, especially for anyone who likes ActivityPub and blogs, and wants to see them get a fresh shot of juice. I'm just glad the prevailing call isn't to delete Section 230 altogether, which I think would cause a bit of pandemonium (though maybe that would be a social good as well, and maybe Section 230 was the mistake that made the social media monster).
    - Goronmon 6y ago
      That would be a spectacular outcome, especially for anyone who likes ActivityPub and blogs, and wants to see them get a fresh shot of juice. Wouldn't this harm any of these activities, aside from situations where people are directly hosting their own content, because anyone hosting could be held liable for what gets posted?
      - cdubzzz 6y ago
        That's the rub. The fantasy seems great initially for the prospect of breaking up the far too large (in my opinion) social media behemoths but maybe also ruins things for all the potential little guys as well.
  - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    Hopefully it will lead to what happened on reddit: the worst go off to a competitor which then fails to gain mainstream attention (e.g. Voat, Gab, etc). While they’ll be in an echo-chamber (which isn’t a good thing at all), at least they won’t ruin other communities.
    - joeyrideout 6y ago
      > the worst go off to a competitor which then fails to gain mainstream attention (e.g. Voat, Gab, etc). Or, HN :)
    - glennvtx 6y ago
      The problem there is that these sites have become echo-chambers, where they breed extremism. These kinds of ideologies (E.G. Nazism) need to be exposed to the light, like a bacteria, in order to be shamed and debunked.
      - paulgb 6y ago
        This is a nice theory but are there any instances of Nazis being converted to normies because someone told them they were wrong on the internet? Instead what seems to happen is that normies get pulled into Nazi content because the recommendation algorithms on these sites see heated discussions as engagement and try to feed it.
        Izkata 6y ago
        The only study I'm aware of on that is on Youtube's recommendation algorithm, which found the opposite is true - it tends to steer people away from radicalization.
      - davidw 6y ago
        How does that work out though in practice? If I go to a bar and there's some guy screaming about his Nazi ideology and the owners don't kick him out, I'm going to just move on. If some social media platform is full of trolls and hatred and such... people are just going to go away. It becomes a 'race to the bottom'.
- nullc 6y ago
  It's kind of a ridiculous idea. Before S230 that was the case: Executing any editorial control risked you being concluded to be the publisher. Online providers said this is bullshit, we want be able to remove garbage -- lies, obscene material, defamation, etc. If moderating makes us publishers over everything on our site and legally liable, we can't do that. Make us immune so we can clean up the worst of things, and you can still always go after the actual sources. So I think it only makes sense to the extent that the world before S230 also made sense. But that's a world where sites like twitter probably couldn't have come into being. Without S230 the law is bizarre because it treated running a public venue as equivalently of being a publisher for everything that happened in it. It would be like if I ran a shopping mall and some member of the public came in and started calling you a paedophile that you could sue the mall simply because at other times I removed other people who were urinating on the walls.
  - Udik 6y ago
    On the other hand, there must be a limit on the amount of "moderation" you're allowed to perform before becoming a publisher. If you start labelling content as misleading (but don't remove it) or even if you privilege certain content instead of another (for example, you privilege social media posts advertising a product because it increases your revenue) then you could be considered a publisher. Let's put in another way: publishers used to produce content (as in select, solicit, remunerate) to further their interests (financial, but sometimes also political, or cultural). Now the big social networks don't need to produce the content, but they can tap into such an enormous amount of it that they can limit themselves to shaping it. Promote certain posts, reduce the visibility of others. The overall effect is the same. You could probably make Facebook or Twitter in a great cultural publications just by tweaking the algorithm that determines the visibility of the posts.
    - nullc 6y ago
      > On the other hand, there must be a limit on the amount of "moderation" you're allowed to perform before becoming a publisher. That isn't clear to me at all. The publisher is essentially the author from a liability perspective. I do agree (see my other post in this thread) that there are serious concerns about the moderation power of the operators of these massive online public forums. But that doesn't make treating them as the author from a liability perspective the right tool for dealing with that. Particularly because in most specific cases where their moderation power might be misused there is no question of liability. Imagine a site where everyone was always honest and nice, but the operator ruthlessly censored all posts by Georgists and S230 didn't exist. Okay, they'd be liable for their users posts-- but so what? There is nothing there for anyone to sue over. The Georgists would still be totally silenced.
- fluidcruft 6y ago
  Don't all these social media sites augment content with targeted ads?
- Corrado 6y ago
  Is this similar to how the phone company operates? As long as they just transmit your voice to the other party they can't be prosecuted for anything you say. But, as soon as they start listening in and commenting on your words they have to listen to everyone's conversations and comment on all the words. Obviously phone companies don't want to be responsible for everyone's words so they don't comment on anyone's words. The parallel would be Twitter commenting on a tweet. As long as they just pass the tweet on to other people, without commenting on it, then they aren't responsible for it's content. But as soon as they say "hey, this might be false information" about a specific tweet then they are responsible for the content of all tweets.
TheColorYellow 6y ago
Its an interesting thought experiment to assess in what ways Twitter is a "private website". It really is a public web space that is operated by a private company, but I can't help but feel that the nuances and similarities of what Twitter really is and what responsibility they truly hold in society is above the courts comprehension.
- thrusong 6y ago
  Do you have the right to stand in your community's biggest mall screaming racist things or does the property owner/operator have the right to remove you from the premise?
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    To play devil's advocate, you can't do that in a public park either. You can be arrested for disturbing the peace or some such. So I'm not sure it's necessarily about private vs public.
    - komali2 6y ago
      I'm not aware of it being illegal to stand on a soapbox and say racist things in a public park. If you're screaming at the top of your lungs, sure, maybe?
      - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
        Well, yeah, I suppose it depends how loud you're screaming. I was imagining someone shouting as loud as possible, which you'd definitely get stopped for in many places.
        laughinghan 6y ago
        Aren't you just talking about the volume then? You could be screaming the most wholesome things about unicorns and rainbows and still be loud enough to be a public nuisance, and loud enough that authorities will have the right to ask you to pipe down. In America, no matter how big of a community mall, management can always remove you for good reasons (using racial slurs, even at normal volume), silly reasons (they didn't like the color of your hat), or no reason at all, as long as it's not for a prohibited reason (because of your race). Whereas authorities cannot remove you from a public square for no reason or silly reasons, only for good reasons specifically identified by law (like public nuisance).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nostromo 6y ago
Be aware that the DC Circuit leans left, by a lot -- so it's an unsurprising result. The Supreme Court may eventually take one of these cases and come to a different conclusion.
- driverdan 6y ago
  Loomer's suit was never going to go anywhere regardless. It was completely baseless.
- JChase2 6y ago
  I'm not sure this is the case anymore. McConnell and Trump have been rapidly filling the courts with young, right leaning justices. See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/02/28/thanks-trump-liberal-ninth-circuit-is-no-longer-liberal/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/02/28/thanks-tru...
  - paulgb 6y ago
    The weird thing is that, a year ago, if you asked me where "private companies should be able to make their own decisions about what content they publish" falls on the spectrum, I would have considered it to be right of center. I guess it comes down to whether these justices are ideologically "right-leaning", or just Republican partisans.
  - roamerz 6y ago
    From my observations left leaning means apply liberal criteria to decisions. Right leaning means adhere to the Constitution and law of the United States of America.
    - pas 6y ago
      So in this case what does the Constitution say? And where does the Constitution say that a corporation spending money is speech?
      - Mirioron 6y ago
meragrin_ 6y ago
There is already a ruling by the Supreme Court where social media sites are referred as the modern public square. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/16pdf/15-1194_08l1.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/16pdf/15-1194_08l1.pdf
- anigbrowl 6y ago
  Phrasing in dicta isn't the same as a legal holding, though. It's a legitimate point, but not a dispositive one.
- gamblor956 6y ago
  Not, it doesn't. The case was about a government trying to restrict a sex offender from accessing web sites where he could engage in first amendment activities like commenting. The court ruled that they could not, absent a sufficient showing that the restrictions on the appellant's internet usage were necessary to prevent the sex offender from re-offending. In fact the express language of the ruling states that social media sites are a means for accessing the public square, not that these sites are the public square. Moreover, these dicta statements (i.e., non-binding commentary) are a direct reference to the first amendment mall cases, which similarly involved activities that could occur in a public square. The mall cases held that private malls could ban speech because they were private facilities, thus they were not public squares even though the public could (and frequently did) engage in traditional public square activities in the mall. TLDR: the private-public distinction matters for First Amendment law. The First Amendment only applies to public properties and public agencies, not private properties or persons.
hintymad 6y ago
I don't think that section 230 is about First Amendment. I thought it was about whether a company can be shielded from law suit on the content published on the company's website. That is, how to classify a company as a platform or as a publisher.
- threatofrain 6y ago
  First amendment is the issue as we're contemplating who should be liable for the consequences of bad speech. If FB is liable than FB is incentivized to censor risky people; if I'm liable then I might watch what I say on Yelp or Wikipedia. Right now we have a situation where the platform owner can collect the fruits of popularity, while the platform users experience basically no-liability gossip, such as empirical claims about businesses. Anyone who is hated broadly by the internet, whether just or unjust, would like FB to be liable no matter what is right or wrong, because holding hundreds of tiny individuals accountable for tiny wrongs over the web is a losing battle.
  - Fjolsvith 6y ago
    > while the platform users experience basically no-liability gossip, such as empirical claims about businesses. Not true. You can be sued for Libel on Twitter and Facebook [1]. https://slate.com/technology/2012/11/libel-on-twitter-you-can-be-sued-for-libel-for-what-you-write-on-facebook-and-other-social-media.html https://slate.com/technology/2012/11/libel-on-twitter-you-ca...
    - jaredklewis 6y ago
      I think the parent comment recognizes that but is saying there is "basically" no-liability because it is so impractical to sue a random internet commenters one by one. For sure, if you are Elon Musk and you claim on your twitter account that a world renowned diver is a pedophile, you might suffer real consequences. But if someone posts on my restaurant's yelp page a totally fabricated negative review, what are my options? Even let's say I have video or other evidence that disproves their assertion (unlikely), I will need to quantity the harm that this particular internet comment did to my business, which is in most cases nearly impossible. And all for what? A median wage worker isn't going to be able to cover my lawyers fee's (assuming I can prove malicious intent) before going into bankruptcy. What businesses really want is to be able to sue Yelp itself for libel. They want to say: "Yelp, you didn't quality control your comments, these reviews are being fabricated. After my 5 star rating dropped to 1, my business’s income plummeted, now pay up." I don't think it would be a good idea if our laws worked like that, but as the parent points out, the current situation is that the platforms are more or less immune to libel, and suing random internet commenters for libel makes no sense.
empath75 6y ago
Repealing section 230 would make twitter liable for publishing trump’s libelous murder accusations and incitement to violence. They’d be forced to ban him.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  I’m curious how that would turn out? What would happen if Trump was banned? While I’m against censorship, banning someone for not following your “code of conduct” is well within your rights.
  - incompatible 6y ago
    I'd guess Trump would move to a new platform, and take his social media circus with him. Twitter presumably wants to keep that traffic.
  - lastres0rt 6y ago
    The best example is what happened when Alex Jones found himself deplatformed -- although I think the simplest answer there is "too little too late".
- anewdirection 6y ago
  You mean enforcing section 230, but you are correct.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
hindsightbias 6y ago
It seems risky to take on the platform that got one elected. Perhaps this will end the same way codifying the word “Marriage” in the Defense of Marriage Act did. Nothing like Federalizing a word.

by cdolan 6y ago

microcolonel 6y ago

> affirmed that private websites are not public spaces and social media companies don't have First Amendment obligations FWIW this is only thematically related, the order concerns the distinction between immune or non-immune activities under Section 230. If you publish something defamatory on your blog, and you operate it, you may be liable. Section 230 is there to say that if a website merely retransmits your publication, it is not liable for it, so if you publish that same defamatory statement on Facebook, Facebook is not then liable. However, the argument with the executive order is that if you exercise a level of deliberate control over the content beyond some threshold, or you augment expression (like Twitter did the other day, adding links to contrary opinion pieces next to the President's opinion), you effectively become a publisher of that content. It's not a completely ridiculous idea either. Consider how diverse the expressions published to Twitter are; at some point it's not that different to choose not to publish some expression, than to express the complement of that expression yourself.

cdubzzz 6y ago
One potential outcome here -- social media platforms start _more actively_ banning users to prevent potential liability issues, thus fracturing the market. Highly doubt it will work out that way, but it would be nice (well, maybe...).
- microcolonel 6y ago
  That would be a spectacular outcome, especially for anyone who likes ActivityPub and blogs, and wants to see them get a fresh shot of juice. I'm just glad the prevailing call isn't to delete Section 230 altogether, which I think would cause a bit of pandemonium (though maybe that would be a social good as well, and maybe Section 230 was the mistake that made the social media monster).
  - Goronmon 6y ago
    That would be a spectacular outcome, especially for anyone who likes ActivityPub and blogs, and wants to see them get a fresh shot of juice. Wouldn't this harm any of these activities, aside from situations where people are directly hosting their own content, because anyone hosting could be held liable for what gets posted?
    - cdubzzz 6y ago
      That's the rub. The fantasy seems great initially for the prospect of breaking up the far too large (in my opinion) social media behemoths but maybe also ruins things for all the potential little guys as well.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  Hopefully it will lead to what happened on reddit: the worst go off to a competitor which then fails to gain mainstream attention (e.g. Voat, Gab, etc). While they’ll be in an echo-chamber (which isn’t a good thing at all), at least they won’t ruin other communities.
  - joeyrideout 6y ago
    > the worst go off to a competitor which then fails to gain mainstream attention (e.g. Voat, Gab, etc). Or, HN :)
  - glennvtx 6y ago
    The problem there is that these sites have become echo-chambers, where they breed extremism. These kinds of ideologies (E.G. Nazism) need to be exposed to the light, like a bacteria, in order to be shamed and debunked.
    - paulgb 6y ago
      This is a nice theory but are there any instances of Nazis being converted to normies because someone told them they were wrong on the internet? Instead what seems to happen is that normies get pulled into Nazi content because the recommendation algorithms on these sites see heated discussions as engagement and try to feed it.
      - Izkata 6y ago
        The only study I'm aware of on that is on Youtube's recommendation algorithm, which found the opposite is true - it tends to steer people away from radicalization.
    - davidw 6y ago
      How does that work out though in practice? If I go to a bar and there's some guy screaming about his Nazi ideology and the owners don't kick him out, I'm going to just move on. If some social media platform is full of trolls and hatred and such... people are just going to go away. It becomes a 'race to the bottom'.
nullc 6y ago
It's kind of a ridiculous idea. Before S230 that was the case: Executing any editorial control risked you being concluded to be the publisher. Online providers said this is bullshit, we want be able to remove garbage -- lies, obscene material, defamation, etc. If moderating makes us publishers over everything on our site and legally liable, we can't do that. Make us immune so we can clean up the worst of things, and you can still always go after the actual sources. So I think it only makes sense to the extent that the world before S230 also made sense. But that's a world where sites like twitter probably couldn't have come into being. Without S230 the law is bizarre because it treated running a public venue as equivalently of being a publisher for everything that happened in it. It would be like if I ran a shopping mall and some member of the public came in and started calling you a paedophile that you could sue the mall simply because at other times I removed other people who were urinating on the walls.
- Udik 6y ago
  On the other hand, there must be a limit on the amount of "moderation" you're allowed to perform before becoming a publisher. If you start labelling content as misleading (but don't remove it) or even if you privilege certain content instead of another (for example, you privilege social media posts advertising a product because it increases your revenue) then you could be considered a publisher. Let's put in another way: publishers used to produce content (as in select, solicit, remunerate) to further their interests (financial, but sometimes also political, or cultural). Now the big social networks don't need to produce the content, but they can tap into such an enormous amount of it that they can limit themselves to shaping it. Promote certain posts, reduce the visibility of others. The overall effect is the same. You could probably make Facebook or Twitter in a great cultural publications just by tweaking the algorithm that determines the visibility of the posts.
  - nullc 6y ago
    > On the other hand, there must be a limit on the amount of "moderation" you're allowed to perform before becoming a publisher. That isn't clear to me at all. The publisher is essentially the author from a liability perspective. I do agree (see my other post in this thread) that there are serious concerns about the moderation power of the operators of these massive online public forums. But that doesn't make treating them as the author from a liability perspective the right tool for dealing with that. Particularly because in most specific cases where their moderation power might be misused there is no question of liability. Imagine a site where everyone was always honest and nice, but the operator ruthlessly censored all posts by Georgists and S230 didn't exist. Okay, they'd be liable for their users posts-- but so what? There is nothing there for anyone to sue over. The Georgists would still be totally silenced.
fluidcruft 6y ago
Don't all these social media sites augment content with targeted ads?
Corrado 6y ago
Is this similar to how the phone company operates? As long as they just transmit your voice to the other party they can't be prosecuted for anything you say. But, as soon as they start listening in and commenting on your words they have to listen to everyone's conversations and comment on all the words. Obviously phone companies don't want to be responsible for everyone's words so they don't comment on anyone's words. The parallel would be Twitter commenting on a tweet. As long as they just pass the tweet on to other people, without commenting on it, then they aren't responsible for it's content. But as soon as they say "hey, this might be false information" about a specific tweet then they are responsible for the content of all tweets.

TheColorYellow 6y ago

Its an interesting thought experiment to assess in what ways Twitter is a "private website". It really is a public web space that is operated by a private company, but I can't help but feel that the nuances and similarities of what Twitter really is and what responsibility they truly hold in society is above the courts comprehension.

thrusong 6y ago
Do you have the right to stand in your community's biggest mall screaming racist things or does the property owner/operator have the right to remove you from the premise?
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  To play devil's advocate, you can't do that in a public park either. You can be arrested for disturbing the peace or some such. So I'm not sure it's necessarily about private vs public.
  - komali2 6y ago
    I'm not aware of it being illegal to stand on a soapbox and say racist things in a public park. If you're screaming at the top of your lungs, sure, maybe?
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      Well, yeah, I suppose it depends how loud you're screaming. I was imagining someone shouting as loud as possible, which you'd definitely get stopped for in many places.
      - laughinghan 6y ago
        Aren't you just talking about the volume then? You could be screaming the most wholesome things about unicorns and rainbows and still be loud enough to be a public nuisance, and loud enough that authorities will have the right to ask you to pipe down. In America, no matter how big of a community mall, management can always remove you for good reasons (using racial slurs, even at normal volume), silly reasons (they didn't like the color of your hat), or no reason at all, as long as it's not for a prohibited reason (because of your race). Whereas authorities cannot remove you from a public square for no reason or silly reasons, only for good reasons specifically identified by law (like public nuisance).

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

nostromo 6y ago

Be aware that the DC Circuit leans left, by a lot -- so it's an unsurprising result. The Supreme Court may eventually take one of these cases and come to a different conclusion.

driverdan 6y ago
Loomer's suit was never going to go anywhere regardless. It was completely baseless.
JChase2 6y ago
I'm not sure this is the case anymore. McConnell and Trump have been rapidly filling the courts with young, right leaning justices. See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/02/28/thanks-trump-liberal-ninth-circuit-is-no-longer-liberal/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/02/28/thanks-tru...
- paulgb 6y ago
  The weird thing is that, a year ago, if you asked me where "private companies should be able to make their own decisions about what content they publish" falls on the spectrum, I would have considered it to be right of center. I guess it comes down to whether these justices are ideologically "right-leaning", or just Republican partisans.
- roamerz 6y ago
  From my observations left leaning means apply liberal criteria to decisions. Right leaning means adhere to the Constitution and law of the United States of America.
  - pas 6y ago
    So in this case what does the Constitution say? And where does the Constitution say that a corporation spending money is speech?
    - Mirioron 6y ago

meragrin_ 6y ago

There is already a ruling by the Supreme Court where social media sites are referred as the modern public square. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/16pdf/15-1194_08l1.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/16pdf/15-1194_08l1.pdf

anigbrowl 6y ago
Phrasing in dicta isn't the same as a legal holding, though. It's a legitimate point, but not a dispositive one.
gamblor956 6y ago
Not, it doesn't. The case was about a government trying to restrict a sex offender from accessing web sites where he could engage in first amendment activities like commenting. The court ruled that they could not, absent a sufficient showing that the restrictions on the appellant's internet usage were necessary to prevent the sex offender from re-offending. In fact the express language of the ruling states that social media sites are a means for accessing the public square, not that these sites are the public square. Moreover, these dicta statements (i.e., non-binding commentary) are a direct reference to the first amendment mall cases, which similarly involved activities that could occur in a public square. The mall cases held that private malls could ban speech because they were private facilities, thus they were not public squares even though the public could (and frequently did) engage in traditional public square activities in the mall. TLDR: the private-public distinction matters for First Amendment law. The First Amendment only applies to public properties and public agencies, not private properties or persons.

hintymad 6y ago

I don't think that section 230 is about First Amendment. I thought it was about whether a company can be shielded from law suit on the content published on the company's website. That is, how to classify a company as a platform or as a publisher.

threatofrain 6y ago
First amendment is the issue as we're contemplating who should be liable for the consequences of bad speech. If FB is liable than FB is incentivized to censor risky people; if I'm liable then I might watch what I say on Yelp or Wikipedia. Right now we have a situation where the platform owner can collect the fruits of popularity, while the platform users experience basically no-liability gossip, such as empirical claims about businesses. Anyone who is hated broadly by the internet, whether just or unjust, would like FB to be liable no matter what is right or wrong, because holding hundreds of tiny individuals accountable for tiny wrongs over the web is a losing battle.
- Fjolsvith 6y ago
  > while the platform users experience basically no-liability gossip, such as empirical claims about businesses. Not true. You can be sued for Libel on Twitter and Facebook [1]. https://slate.com/technology/2012/11/libel-on-twitter-you-can-be-sued-for-libel-for-what-you-write-on-facebook-and-other-social-media.html https://slate.com/technology/2012/11/libel-on-twitter-you-ca...
  - jaredklewis 6y ago
    I think the parent comment recognizes that but is saying there is "basically" no-liability because it is so impractical to sue a random internet commenters one by one. For sure, if you are Elon Musk and you claim on your twitter account that a world renowned diver is a pedophile, you might suffer real consequences. But if someone posts on my restaurant's yelp page a totally fabricated negative review, what are my options? Even let's say I have video or other evidence that disproves their assertion (unlikely), I will need to quantity the harm that this particular internet comment did to my business, which is in most cases nearly impossible. And all for what? A median wage worker isn't going to be able to cover my lawyers fee's (assuming I can prove malicious intent) before going into bankruptcy. What businesses really want is to be able to sue Yelp itself for libel. They want to say: "Yelp, you didn't quality control your comments, these reviews are being fabricated. After my 5 star rating dropped to 1, my business’s income plummeted, now pay up." I don't think it would be a good idea if our laws worked like that, but as the parent points out, the current situation is that the platforms are more or less immune to libel, and suing random internet commenters for libel makes no sense.

empath75 6y ago

Repealing section 230 would make twitter liable for publishing trump’s libelous murder accusations and incitement to violence. They’d be forced to ban him.

colejohnson66 6y ago
I’m curious how that would turn out? What would happen if Trump was banned? While I’m against censorship, banning someone for not following your “code of conduct” is well within your rights.
- incompatible 6y ago
  I'd guess Trump would move to a new platform, and take his social media circus with him. Twitter presumably wants to keep that traffic.
- lastres0rt 6y ago
  The best example is what happened when Alex Jones found himself deplatformed -- although I think the simplest answer there is "too little too late".
anewdirection 6y ago
You mean enforcing section 230, but you are correct.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

hindsightbias 6y ago

It seems risky to take on the platform that got one elected. Perhaps this will end the same way codifying the word “Marriage” in the Defense of Marriage Act did. Nothing like Federalizing a word.