4 ms·
For anyone who wants to actually look at Section 230, it's relatively short: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/t
by dsaavy 6y ago
For anyone who wants to actually look at Section 230, it's relatively short: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
It seems like the relevant parts of the discussion are:
(b) Policy
(3)to encourage the development of technologies which maximize user control over what information is received by individuals, families, and schools who use the Internet and other interactive computer services;
and then this one:
(c)Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material
(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]
(c)Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material
(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.
- roywiggins 6y agoAdditionally to this: for anyone who wants to assert that there's some implied requirement of "neutrality," I invite them to read what the authors of the law had to say quite recently. "The first is that Section 230 does not require political neutrality. Claiming to "interpret" Section 230 to require political neutrality, or to condition its Good Samaritan protections on political neutrality, would erase the law we wrote and substitute a completely different one, with opposite effect. The second is that any governmental attempt to enforce political neutrality on websites would be hopelessly subjective, complicated, burdensome, and unworkable. The third is that any such legislation or regulation intended to override a website's moderation decisions would amount to compelling speech, in violation of the First Amendment" (pg 17) https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7213938-2020-09-17-Cox-Wyden-FCC-Reply-Comments-Final-2.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7213938-2020-09-17-C...
- sleepysysadmin 6y agoI'm not a lawyer, but that's what confuses me. Section 230 doesn't need to be changed; twitter violated it quite obviously. Blocking the NYPost article was not in good faith. It wasn't obscene. It was harassing or violent. Twitter should by this definition lose their Section 230 protections. Good luck operating Twitter without those protections.