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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 se

• 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.
    • mpoteat 6y ago
      Does this mean if a sports fan comes into my forum about programming and starts making sports threads, I cannot moderate that away, or else face legal action? Does it also mean HN could face legal action according to its current rule set?
      • username90 6y ago
        Spamming would go under harassment in most cases.
      • agrajag 6y ago
        Yes, except for the fact that 1st amendment protections would still exist. How much protection that actually provides is unknown and it would need to be litigated to find out.
        • notahacker 6y ago
          Suffice to say a redraft which means that you'll have to go to court to determine what types of content you are and aren't allowed to moderate without the side effect of becoming responsible for everything people say on your web property is not an improvement.
        • danShumway 6y ago
          What does that mean? Off-topic discussion does not fall outside of the 1st Amendment, and a restriction of the 1st Amendment to try and classify that as somehow less deserving of protection -- that would be a much greater curtailment of 1st Amendment rights than anything Facebook has done. Bluntly, "would need to be litigated to find out" isn't an acceptable answer given that the people giving this answer are the same people proposing the legislation. Courts don't decide what the law is, they interpret it. You have to have an idea of what you want the law to be, you can't kick that off to the courts. They're trying to interpret your intention and the letter of the law you propose, not the other way around.
      • dd36 6y ago
        What legal action would you be concerned about?
  • leereeves 6y ago
    Making decisions like that is why we have courts. They are responsible for deciding whether a particular act was murder or self-defense, whether something is pornography or art, whether something is protected or forbidden by the Constitution, etc. They're far from perfect, but is it better to give the power to control digital communications to a few corporations?
    • kangaroozach 6y ago
      The answer depends on whether you are a radical or not. A hate filled SJW as well as a brainwashed NPC actually believes the ends justifies the means and their stone cold hatred of their “perceived” political enemies justifies total censorship and control over our “digital” public forums.
      • dang 6y ago
        Please don't post flamewar comments to HN. The site is overrun with this kind of thing at the moment, and we're banning accounts who do it. I'm not going to ban yours because it doesn't look like you've been making a habit of it, but please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the intended use of the site from now on.
    • modmans2nd 6y ago
      Section 230 doesn’t give social media any more power than they have under the first amendment. It is simply a shield from nuisance lawsuits.
      • leereeves 6y ago
        It does though. For example, it gives them the power to refuse to remove false information without being held responsible for it, which the first amendment does not give to publishers like the NYT.
        • jakelazaroff 6y ago
  • stale2002 6y ago
    > Is that supposed to be better? There already exists laws that act very similarly to what people are proposing. Specifically these laws are called common carrier laws, as they apply to phone systems, for example. Do you believe that the existing laws, that apply to phone networks, are tyrannical or worse or bad? I don't think it is unreasonable to consider how our existing laws, that most people find reasonable, such as the ones that already apply to phone companies, could be updated to the modern era, so as to apply to newer communication networks.
    • TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
      I don't think phone and Internet providers are the same as social networking sites. I'm happy to let people I don't like have their own websites. I don't want to be forced to let them use mine to post about how I should die.
      • ghaff 6y ago
        FWIW, Section 230 was added primarily so that ISPs and hosting providers wouldn't be liable for content on their sites given that social media as we know it today basically didn't exist.
        • mojzu 6y ago
          My understanding was the origins of section 230 were because of a couple of lawsuits that targetted ISPs for content that users posted on their services. One company moderated their content, they were found liable for libel in user content in court. The other company did not moderate their content, they were not found liable for their user content. Anecdotally one of these services was seen as the good one and the other as the crappy one because of their moderation policies. While social media didn't exist at the time in its current form, I'd argue this is still very relevant today. Without section 230 websites would only be able to moderate for illegal content, and there's a mountain of stuff you wouldn't want to see online that isn't technically illegal, and a lot of people who will try to put it in front of you if given the oppurtunity.
  • roenxi 6y ago
    Judges are the ones we all officially trust to make judgments. It isn't better as such to get them involved, but it might become necessary. I won't worry about technicalities, because I have no idea what they are. But it is becoming abundantly clear that the social media companies have political power and are willing to wield it if they think that it is appropriate, similar to newspapers and television. It is reasonable that the regulations for social and non-social media converge.
    • ceejayoz 6y ago
      > Judges are the ones we all officially trust to make judgments. That's not a good reason to DDoS them, though.
    • recny 6y ago
      The problem with leaving it to the courts is, people who own small niche forums can't afford to fight legal battles. This will leave an internet for those who can (i.e the big players).
      • humanrebar 6y ago
        Also, courts have a habit of leaving arcane technical details to regulators and then we end up back at government regulation of internet speech.
        • xxpor 6y ago
          The alternative is leaving it up to corporations so the current status quo doesn't seem that bad. (See everyone that wants to repeal Chevron deference)
          • humanrebar 6y ago
            Or the courts could insist the legislature does its job -- write legislation.
    • neltnerb 6y ago
  • danShumway 6y ago
    It's pretty revealing that many of the replies to this (and the general response whenever anyone brings up content that we obviously want to be moderated but that doesn't fall outside the 1st Amendment) can be summed up as, "well, we'll make an exception for that." In practice, this constitutes the government deciding what communities themselves are able to moderate and filter. That should terrify 1st Amendment advocates, for multiple reasons: ---- A) It's wildly abusable by corrupt governments, and both parties in the US believe that their opponents are corrupt. You don't even need to outright censor -- you can just classify one political group's speech as harassment and make your own speech un-moderatable. And importantly, when you do that, it doesn't just apply to one platform like Facebook, it applies to everyone. It applies to independent forums that are owned by the other party. Do you really want to give either Republicans or Democrats the ability to basically at-will strip 230 protections from opposition-run forums whenever they control all three houses? ---- B) It places a burden on the courts that courts are not designed for. Courts interpret laws, they don't create them. The implication behind that is that the people making the laws have a general understanding of their own intent, and the Courts try to figure out what that intent is and what the implication of the letter of the law is. It is unreasonable for people to propose legislation that they themselves don't understand, and then ask the courts to retroactively come up with an interpretation and a set of guidelines that make the laws work. It's backwards design that will lead to a lot of unintended consequences and dumb, harmful rulings. ---- C) Many of these exceptions being proposed even in this comment section are themselves contentious. It is not clear to me, at all, why pornography should have fewer 1st Amendment protections than hate speech. Both are harmful to children, both can gross people out, both cause discussions to degrade, both are things that people don't want on their platforms. Yet, there is a general assumption that of course platforms will be able to filter lewd content, they just won't be able to filter low-key racists and nazis. This is exactly the kind of content-favoritism that the 1st Amendment was designed to prevent. It is inherently problematic for the government to privilege certain categories of speech over others. The distinction between pornography and hate speech is one of the more blatant examples of hypocrisy, but the problem also comes up in more subtle ways when people talk about banning spam, as if comment spam, self-promotion, and off-topic discussion are some kind of clear categories that everyone agrees with -- they're not. Reddit, Hackernews, and Facebook all have very different definitions of what self-promotion and spam are. Which definition is correct? Which one should be baked into law? And why? Why is it more reasonable for us to come up with an ad-hoc definition of spam than it is for us to come up with an ad-hoc definition of hate speech? Why should spam deserve less protection under the 1st Amendment? ---- D) Finally, baking these exceptions and moderating decisions into law creates an environment where we're constantly chipping away at the 1st Amendment. The way that the US works right now is that we have extremely broad legal protections, but that the systems built on top of those laws provide additional subjective moderation controlled by the free market, by individual choices, and by communities themselves. This is a good system because universal moderation decisions are practically impossible. In short, it gives us breathing room and allows us to acknowledge that moderation is both important and subjective. When people tear away independent, private moderation decisions, the only thing that's left to protect people from harassment online is now the law. You lose that subjectivity and that acknowledgement that different forums need to be moderated differently. People who advocate that private platforms shouldn't be able to make their own moderation decisions should not be surprised to see increased calls for the government to get involved in making certain speech illegal. Even if you could force Twitter or HN to turn into 4Chan, people aren't going to tolerate that. They are going to go to the government and ask the government and the courts to make more speech illegal -- because that's the only avenue they'll have left to protect themselves. ---- I have not seen any proposal, from anyone, not just in general in comments, but from political activists, from bloggers, from lawyers -- I have not seen one single proposal for Section 230 reform that addresses those problems. They all propose an incredibly ambiguous set of restrictions on moderation and then fall back on, "we'll work the details out later." But when you're talking about restricting someone's fundamental Right to Filter[0], the details really matter. [0]: https://anewdigitalmanifesto.com/#right-to-filter https://anewdigitalmanifesto.com/#right-to-filter
• post_below 6y ago
  To be clear we're talking about the Barr era justice department in this context. The proposed changes would give the justice department a stick to shake at platforms they didn't like for political reasons. We hope that the justice department would act in good faith, without political influence, but we're fresh out of an intensive course on how naive it is to rely on that.
• TameAntelope 6y ago
  For what it's worth, "Defund the police" does literally mean "reduce funding to what we currently refer to as the police force" whereas "repeal section 230" couldn't (in your interpretation) literally mean "strike section 230 from the US code". The reality is what this article outlines towards the end; this is already covered by the 1st Amendment in large part, Section 230 does the bulk of its work in simplifying court proceedings. If section 230 were changed, it'd likely be unconstitutional anyway.
  • EE84M3i 6y ago
    >For what it's worth, "Defund the police" does literally mean "reduce funding to what we currently refer to as the police force" I think the relevant part is that one definition of "defund" is (from Google answer box/featured snippet, only provided definition): >prevent from continuing to receive funds. So some people upon first hearing the phrase "defund the police" understand it to mean "prevent the police from continuing to receive funds". Without any qualification, this is naturally understood to mean "all funds", which is not the concrete policy proposal behind (what seems to be most uses of) the phrase. I myself had this understanding of the phrase "defund the police" when I first heard it (which is not something that I would support) but I do support most of the concrete policy proposals behind the "defund the police" movement that involve reallocating funds from the police to social services and other programs. I would be hesitatant to use the phrase myself though, because this interpretation seems quite common among people not "extremely online".
    • virgilp 6y ago
      "Defund the police" is such a bad catchphrase, it does all sorts of disservices to the actual proposed measures. It sounds vengeful and petty, not thoughtful. It's also misleading - the purpose is not (or should not) be primarily to make sure police has less funds; it's to make sure social services and other programs have funds. Why not call it "fund social services" instead of "defund the police", instead? ("fund social services" is a bad name, but the spirit is right - focus on the positive outcome, not on how you'll "hurt" the police. If you want to focus on police, focus on how you'll improve their mission and help them do a better job at reducing violence in communities)
• waheoo 6y ago
  Defund the police does mean $0 for law enforcement though? The only people I've ever seen claim it doesn't are people that aren't claiming they want to defund police but do want to side with those who do. "They can't really mean that, you must have misunderstood." - nope. Just like when I say repeal 230, I'm seriously saying get rid of the thing or at least rework it so people aren't being censored by non non govt but still very real monopolies on speech.
• beowulfey 6y ago
  Sounds like lawsuits galore. The lawyers would love it.
• AmericanChopper 6y ago
  This is simply wrong. It would mean platforms that don’t moderate have no liability. The law was created because a website that didn’t moderate was found to be not liable for the comments it’s users posted, and a website that did was found to be liable. This is even on the Wikipedia page for section 230. I guess the conclusion that repealing it would result in more censorship is based on the idea that platforms would moderate more aggressively to try and avoid all liability. When really, that’s simple not possible, and they would have to abandon the practice all together. Well, the larger platforms would have to at least.
  • dd36 6y ago
    It creates an incentive to improve moderation automation and reduce moderation costs. One way to do that is to verify users, which will help with our sock puppet and deliberate misinformation problems.
    • csnover 6y ago
      If you are concerned about the chilling effect of sites arbitrarily moderating user-generated content they find objectionable, just think about how much worse identity verification would be. Here on HN, people regularly create throwaway accounts so they can provide valuable insider accounts of things happening at companies where they work; that would never happen if they had to prove their identities first. In fact, Twitter already does verify users for some accounts—that’s where the blue checks come from—and many of them are the most profligate misinformation peddlers. I think Twitter also requires new users to register with a phone number, and Google+ and Facebook both had/have real name policies, and none of that has done a thing to stem the flood of misinformation online.
      • dd36 6y ago
        Sure it could happen. The identity verification needn’t be public. Facebook et al have no real barrier to fake accounts.
    • AmericanChopper 6y ago
• recursive 6y ago
  > (much like "defund the police" doesn't mean $0 budgets for all law enforcement) off-topic, but I've never seen anyone admit this, or even suggest it, before now. It would probably strengthen the case if that was more obvious.
• temp8964 6y ago
  "repealing section 230 would result in more censorship, not less. " - No more centralized social media platform, everyone has to be responsible for ones own speech. Alternate technology will emerge to make it so easy to create ones own micro blog and everyone can subscribe.
• snowwrestler 6y ago
  You can’t limit the extent to which a company moderates content, as the right to moderate is based in the First Amendment. All you can do is adjust the shield from liability that 230 provides. If you decrease the size of that shield (as the DOJ proposal does), private companies will further restrict user activity (not expand it) until it fits under the shield again. That is true whether you are talking about a full repeal or only an incremental change.