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What would really change if Section 230 was repealed? Facebook and Twitter are already moderating + flagging content on their own. Now they just would be held..

What would really change if Section 230 was repealed? Facebook and Twitter are already moderating + flagging content on their own. Now they just would be held... legally liable for bad/opinionated fact checking? I doubt that would up in court?

olliej 6y ago
it's more that it would make them legally liable for the content itself, unless they stopped moderating and filtering. Currently if someone posts a shitty review, the company can sue them, not Facebook. That's what 230 does. If you remove section 230, then Facebook itself becomes liable for the comment. So now if the comment actually is libelous then Facebook would have to pay money. Unless they don't filter or moderate - filtering includes spam, etc. YCombinator would become liable for comments on hacker news - because it filters spammers. Facebook might be able to afford the presumably heavy handed filtering, but ycombinator probably can't, and a basic dev blog almost certainly can't, so would have to remove support for comments. Public bug reports also can't filter spam bug reports, for the same reason.
nobody9999 6y ago
>What would really change if Section 230 was repealed? Facebook and Twitter are already moderating + flagging content on their own. Now they just would be held... legally liable for bad/opinionated fact checking? I doubt that would up in court? What would change if section 230 were repealed? Well, among many other things, if you have a git repo and you delete any PRs (say, someone posts spam or links to porn or other material irrelevant to the repo and its underlying purpose), you can then be sued if someone (not you) posts a bug report or an opinion about anything that a third-party doesn't like. Or if you host a mirror of lkml[0] and Linus posts a snarky response to a patch merge request, without section 230, you can be sued. Or if you host a web site and someone posts a comment to which a third-party objects, without section 230, you can be sued. I'm not sure how you feel about that, but that's not the kind of world in which I want to live. [0] https://lkml.org/ https://lkml.org/

olliej 6y ago

it's more that it would make them legally liable for the content itself, unless they stopped moderating and filtering. Currently if someone posts a shitty review, the company can sue them, not Facebook. That's what 230 does. If you remove section 230, then Facebook itself becomes liable for the comment. So now if the comment actually is libelous then Facebook would have to pay money. Unless they don't filter or moderate - filtering includes spam, etc. YCombinator would become liable for comments on hacker news - because it filters spammers. Facebook might be able to afford the presumably heavy handed filtering, but ycombinator probably can't, and a basic dev blog almost certainly can't, so would have to remove support for comments. Public bug reports also can't filter spam bug reports, for the same reason.

nobody9999 6y ago

>What would really change if Section 230 was repealed? Facebook and Twitter are already moderating + flagging content on their own. Now they just would be held... legally liable for bad/opinionated fact checking? I doubt that would up in court? What would change if section 230 were repealed? Well, among many other things, if you have a git repo and you delete any PRs (say, someone posts spam or links to porn or other material irrelevant to the repo and its underlying purpose), you can then be sued if someone (not you) posts a bug report or an opinion about anything that a third-party doesn't like. Or if you host a mirror of lkml[0] and Linus posts a snarky response to a patch merge request, without section 230, you can be sued. Or if you host a web site and someone posts a comment to which a third-party objects, without section 230, you can be sued. I'm not sure how you feel about that, but that's not the kind of world in which I want to live. [0] https://lkml.org/ https://lkml.org/