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> if you're in a real rush, just read Section (c)(1), which is only 26 words, and is the part that basically every single court decision (and there have been ma

• conistonwater 6y ago
  Yes, I believe that's why it was introduced in the first place because that used to be a problem. The EFF has a summary of its history [1] and the case was [2]. [1] https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/legislative-history https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/legislative-history [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prodigy_Services_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prod....
• banana_giraffe 6y ago
  Yep, that was the original fear after a couple of landmark cases against CompuServe (no filters, so they were ruled not liable for what people said), and Prodigy (they had a team of editors filtering content, so it was ruled they were liable for what ended up on their platform).
• Nathanba 6y ago
  the idea I think is that certain platforms would emerge that have to allow all content or get into legal trouble. Even if those are just base layers such as an ISP
• erichocean 6y ago
  Every alternative to Twitter is shittier. It's practically a law of nature.
  • scruple 6y ago
    Twitter itself, today, is a shittier version of itself, a decade ago.
    • npunt 6y ago
      In a way though so is life.
      • conistonwater 6y ago
        If you extrapolate backwards, imagine how good life must have been in the 80's.
        • marcus_holmes 6y ago
          we were too busy imagining how good life was in the 60's to enjoy the 80's properly
  • h_anna_h 6y ago
    This is quite wrong. The fediverse is a lot better, has less noise, and much less toxic than twitter.
    • yokaze 6y ago
      Wait till it gets more popular. Same as with the whole internet.
    • cecja 6y ago
      The fediverse much less toxic? I think your server isn't federated.
    • gurkendoktor 6y ago
      I really wanted Mastodon to take off, but none of the people who discuss anything of consequence moved there (because they didn't want to lose their reach). Instead, I only found people in the fediverse that post smalltalk about their daily lives. Which isn't bad! But these people will not be affected by section 230 either way. Intuitively I expected political dissidents would move off Twitter first, but I can see how the opposite happened instead.
• Meekro 6y ago
  You're right, repealing section 230 would result in more censorship, not less. But I think "repeal section 230" has been shorthand slogan for a more detailed set of proposals (much like "defund the police" doesn't mean $0 budgets for all law enforcement). For example, see the DoJ's proposal to amend and clarify section 230 [1] [2]. Among other changes, they suggest limiting the extent to which a platform can moderate content while retaining the protection. Under this rule, if Twitter chooses to moderate aggressively then they lose the 230 protection, while a competitor that limits its moderation to illegal content and viagra spam could still receive the 230 protection. [1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-unveils-proposed-section-230-legislation https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-unveils-pr... [2] https://www.justice.gov/ag/department-justice-s-review-section-230-communications-decency-act-1996 https://www.justice.gov/ag/department-justice-s-review-secti...
  • conistonwater 6y ago
    Wait, so is the idea of those proposals that the federal government or the courts or the lawyers are going to be in charge of deciding what counts as aggressive moderation as opposed to regular moderation? Is that supposed to be better? Also, your comment is confusing because "limiting moderation to illegal content and viagra spam" was the legal limit before section 230, if I understood correctly, so it's not making it clear what the difference is between "clarifying" and "repealing".
    • Meekro 6y ago
      The proposal still lets platforms moderate on certain grounds, a repeal would mean that a platform can't moderate for any reason other than "illegal content" if it wants to keep the protection. The law currently says that a platform can moderate material that is "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected." That "otherwise objectionable" has been interpreted as a catch-all that lets platforms moderate on any grounds at all. The DoJ proposal removes the catch-all and add "unlawful" and "promotes terrorism" to the list. So if you moderate for a reason on that list, you keep the protection. If you moderate for other reasons, you lose it. And yes, I'm sure we'd see plenty of litigation on what constitutes harassment, terrorism, etc.
• blargmaster42_8 6y ago
  They are purging all none CCP voices as we write. Fear of more censorship is no longer relevant.
• meekrohprocess 6y ago
  No, I don't believe so. Any individual can easily create a website and publish whatever they like. It costs maybe $100/year and takes a couple of hours for an inexperienced user to set up a Wordpress blog with manually-moderated comments. Nobody's speech would be censored if Section 230 were repealed. Instead, platforms would be treated as though they had consciously decided to publish every publically-available comment/file upload/post/etc. That would probably mean manually moderating everything, and rejecting a lot of it for capricious reasons. But honestly, I am not convinced that that would be a bad thing. It would certainly encourage more people to create their own publishing mediums, and it might help break up the titanic oligarchs that currently occupy the market. Put it this way: I would happily give up sites like HN to remove the business model that makes mass-scale social media viable. Sites like Twitter and Facebook have inflicted unconscionable harm on our collective humanity, and they have demonstrated a complete inability to self-regulate.
  • notahacker 6y ago
    If Section 230 were repealed the business model of selling ads around user generated content would still exist, but it would cost enough in lawyers to kill off the smaller forums that actually wanted to moderate properly, and you could be sued over the manually moderated comments in your WordPress blog.
    • inglor_cz 6y ago
      I have a WordPress blog and a separate forum for comments. If I were responsible for comments, I would do either of two things: a) just shut down the forum, b] use a paid commenting service that would come with moderation. This means that people who would want to comment would probably pay some fee for that privilege. Accidentally, b) is unusual for us, but a quite sustainable model. Surely more sustainable than current "show ads for free stuff", which seems to be hitting its limits.
      • danShumway 6y ago
        > use a paid commenting service that would come with moderation. Note that a side effect of this is that you would no longer have moderation control yourself. And how many of those paid services would exist, given the legal costs of running them? What makes you think there wouldn't in practice be the same centralization that we see today -- one or two paid services that handle moderation for the entire Internet because only they have the lawyers necessary to do so. The only difference would be that every independent forum that didn't use them would be opening themselves up to significant legal risk. At least right now if I set up a forum with Open Source software on a Linode server, I don't need to worry that turning off Google Captcha or avoiding a 3rd-party centralized service for my comments will get me sued.
• zerocrates 6y ago
  Basically the issue prior to 230 was that the major precedents worked out like this: if you didn't moderate at all, you were not treated as a publisher and were not liable for the speech of your users. But if you did do some moderation/blocking, you could be seen as a publisher of the things you didn't block. So you have a kind of "all or nothing" type of situation. The problem is: in terms of legal risk, "just allow everything" is safer, since it's quite expensive or even infeasible to completely moderate the platform. But Congress wanted to encourage internet companies to do moderation for things like pornography and other "indecent" content (this is part of the Communications Decency Act, after all), which is why this "Good Samaritan" section exists: to remove the specter of liability that could arise from even light-touch moderation. (But note that despite that title, the language is broad and not conditional on the presence or absence of any moderation scheme.) Repeal has a few possibilities, one of which is as you said, just eliminate user-controlled content completely from some spaces, or moderate it extremely heavily (like requiring manual review before something is posted). But, the other extreme is also possible, of totally removing moderation to escape liability the other way around.
  • marcinzm 6y ago
    >But, the other extreme is also possible, of totally removing moderation to escape liability the other way around. No it's not a possibility. Social media is paid for by advertising and no large advertiser wants to have their ads show up next to child pornography. Just look at what happened with Youtube.
    • betterunix2 6y ago
      Unmoderated forums also lose users to moderated forums, because nobody wants to sift through a pile of trolls, nazis, pedophiles, etc. just to find something on-topic. I have seen it happen with Usenet, with any number of loosely moderated mailing lists, websites, and so forth. Users want some degree of moderation, and advertisers are going to gravitate toward the platforms with the most users.
  • modmans2nd 6y ago
    Let’s not forget, companies still have to remove child porn due to other statues so a repeal of 230 would still result in theoretical liability.
• heavyset_go 6y ago
  > Wouldn't repealing Section 230 mean more censorship and restrictions as the liability would be too great to be on the hook for what some random account might decide to publish, no? Yes, no one is going to run a service that hosts user created content if doing so means that they can be raided by the FBI in the middle of the night should a user find it funny to upload illegal content to a company's servers. Only entities that can throw millions or billions of dollars at censoring illegal content would take on the risk of hosting user uploaded content on their own servers.
  • drawkbox 6y ago
    > Yes, no one is going to run a service that hosts user created content if doing so means that they can be raided by the FBI in the middle of the night should a user find it funny to upload illegal content to a company's servers. Which that ends up in regulatory capture areas that prevent new competition and innovation. Taken beyond digital content, making the producer of a service or good liable for what a user/consumer may do is a horrible precedent. If any crime is committed or problematic content uploaded, the user is committing the crime and responsible for the content not the whole service. Already there are massive moderation services that are here and more coming. Is this something we really want beyond just removing content that incites violence or is illegal and taken down when notified. Trying to pre-empt everyone's user generated content and take it down is problematic for many reasons including competition and allowing smaller/medium players in the game. Most of the systems are sufficient that just have reporting that can be removed by users if the content does violate rights rules like inciting violence, illegal content or copyright infringement. We all know how auto AI driven or and overzealous competition falsely reporting moderation can end up with systems like Youtube's copyright strike system, essentially a harshly tunes and easily exploited system by bad actors. We have to be very careful and it is safer on the side of less moderation and blaming users not the service. If we don't, big players already established could easily use this as regulatory capture and even stifle competition by merely uploading content to competitive services that will then get them in trouble. Wholesale shutting down services or making the barrier to entry too high and costly with massive moderation services that amount to regulatory capture will prevent competition and stifle freedoms, instead of blaming users that are creating the problems, that is the wrong way. If we blame the services we can end up with a chilling effect on sharing ideas, information and content besides just obliterating competition. We are going to turn the internet and freedom into an authoritarian Vogon-tastic bureaucratic Borg if we aren't careful. A hands-off system, with reporting or blocking systems for content that is offensive/illegal which are already common, is the best way. We don't want any of that Vogon poetry. Any system of sufficient size will have bad things, you deal with those bad things individually not shut the whole thing down. Karl Popper's take on this: > The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly paradoxical idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
• libraryatnight 6y ago
  yes, that's what shut down craigslist personals.
  • redis_mlc 6y ago
    What shut down craigslist personals was the intersection of several US puritanical events: 1) The Backpage takedown. (The early mainstream press turned out to be questionable.) 2) States Attorneys viewing CL personals as a kind of "attractive nuisance," despite CL hiring moderators and promoting a safer environment for workers. 3) States Attorneys viewing closing CL personals as an easy win to show they're tough on crime at election time 4) States Attorneys viewing closing CL personals as step two in playing whack-a-mole with related sites. Note how there was no way to work with the States Attorneys, despite effort from the CL founder and an overall safer environment for workers through moderation. The law was used as a blunt instrument, where public policy was needed.
• ehnto 6y ago
  > Wouldn't repealing Section 230 mean more censorship and restrictions as the liability would be too great to be on the hook for what some random account might decide to publish, no? I can't tell you what it means for US law, as I don't know what laws surround this. I can tell you that the lack of safe harbor laws has stopped me from making certain technology products in my country though, as the risk is too great. Give people an upload mechanism and inevitably it will receive material that could land you in jail. Maybe it comes from users, maybe it comes from bots, it doesn't matter. If you're on the hook, it's a no brainer to not get involved if there are no laws protecting your platform from liability.
• cm2187 6y ago
  I think the rationale is rather to hurt big tech if they are perceived to suppress conservative opinions. The business model of any social media would likely collapse if they are liable to everything said on their platform. Or at least I believe it is the assumption.
• wilde 6y ago
  This is why it was a “bipartisan” position endorsed by both Trump and Biden.