3 ms·

Platform/publisher isn't a thing. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20201017/13051145526/section-230-basics-there-is-no-such-thing-as-publisher-or-platform-dist

Platform/publisher isn't a thing. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20201017/13051145526/section-230-basics-there-is-no-such-thing-as-publisher-or-platform-distinction.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20201017/13051145526/secti...

ajsnigrutin 5y ago
But it should be.
beerandt 5y ago
There's no legally spelled out condition, but one editorializes content and the other is content agnostic. The justification of 230's existence is that the host shouldn't be liable, because it's not their speech. That's no longer true if they're picking and choosing what gets heard, what gets buried, and what gets banned. They may not be typing the post, but they're determining what actually gets said. And that means they no longer deserve 230 protection.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  This is the way you think the law ought to work not how it is in fact written.
  - beerandt 5y ago
    >"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" That's how it's written. It provides protection for hosting controversial content posted by users, based on the fact that the host didn't write it, endorse it, or promote it. If the host has an active hand in doing those things, they are no longer merely hosting. Same goes for surpressing or censoring. The "another content provider" means the host is not involved in determining the content. But treating posts differently based on that content is not meaningfully different than an editor choosing what to publish.
    - michaelmrose 5y ago
      There is no clause matching your assertion in the rather short law passed 25 years ago and no case law asserting your erroneous interpretation. I'd ask you to provide such but we both know there is none. Neither editorial selection nor removal has anything to do with 230 immunity. The law is working as written and intended. It isn't merely a grey area. The law was deliberately intended to support editorial selection and even deletion of content offensive to the platform owners sensibilities while explicitly preserving their protection from liability for their users content. This is supported by a plain reading of the text and the words of the men who wrote it. First the law https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 > 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] Now the words of Ron Wyden >Republican Congressman Chris Cox and I wrote Section 230 in 1996 to give up-and-coming tech companies a sword and a shield, and to foster free speech and innovation online. Essentially, 230 says that users, not the website that hosts their content, are the ones responsible for what they post, whether on Facebook or in the comments section of a news article. That's what I call the shield. > But it also gave companies a sword so that they can take down offensive content, lies and slime — the stuff that may be protected by the First Amendment but that most people do not want to experience online. And so they are free to take down white supremacist content or flag tweets that glorify violence (as Twitter did with President Trump's recent tweet) without fear of being sued for bias or even of having their site shut down. Your positions isn't merely incorrect it is directly counterfactual. It's an example of replacing actual known reality with the counterfactual in order to obtain a rhetorical advantage. It is more advantageous to start from the lie that platform owners have somehow been violating or abusing the law outrageously and something must be done about it compared to the actual reality that the law is working as intended and you wish to change it because there is both a general feeling that existing laws and privileges ought to be enforced and that new laws need be examined before being enacted. The prevalence of people of a particular political stripe to literally just making up alternative facts in response to inconvenient reality is deeply challenging to productive dialogue because its impossible to start out with a reasonable basis for discussion one must instead rewind to figure out which part of your fellows assumptions are based on purely fabricated reality. I expect you have taken it as a given that the line you were fed was based on reality. You are mistaken. I strongly encourage you to read both the laws and the words of the man who cowrote it.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > The justification of 230's existence is that the host shouldn't be liable, because it's not their speech. > That's no longer true if they're picking and choosing what gets heard, what gets buried, and what gets banned. No, its not. That's approximately the traditional justification for distributors having more limited liability than publishers. Section 230 was expressly adopted to allow platforms to act like publishers in a limited way without publisher liability, specifically to pick and choose what gets heard, what gets buried, and what gets banned. The justification you invented is basically the opposite of the explicit purpose of 230.
  - beerandt 5y ago
    >specifically to pick and choose what gets heard, what gets buried, and what gets banned. BS. It covered liability for third party speech. It allowed controversial things to be said without the host being liable for hosting them. Private censorship of controversial speech is the complete opposite of it's purpose. >"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" If you only allow speakers to be heard that agree with you, you are the speaker. If you only publish things that you agree with you are a publisher. The law shields hosts in exchange for providing a place for free speech. If you no longer provide that space, you no longer deserve the protections it affords. The behavior we see now is exactly the behavior that 230 was meant to prevent: sites being overly protective and aggressively policing what gets posted. 230 was passed so they wouldn't have to do it. It's not an excuse for them to do it anyway. No one forsaw that the hosts would actually want an excuse to censor users.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > It allowed controversial things to be said without the host being liable for hosting them. That was already allowed, provided they didn't, to use the phrasing being used in this thread, “pick and choose what gets heard, what gets buried, and what gets banned.” Doing that even on a limited basis made them, under pre-230 law, a publisher, subject to liability for all content on the platform. Section 230 was adopted specifically to allow platforms to moderate user-generated content according the platform owners’ view of objectionable content without incurring publisher liability, because the pre-230 situation was viewed as encouraging a situation i which platforms who didn't feel they could completely moderate were forced to not moderate at all, making online communities persistently polluted with objectionable content. The Communications Decency Act, of which 230 was the only substantive part to survive, was not about promoting unmoderated internet fora, but the opposite.
- devwastaken 5y ago
  Choosing speech to be removed doesn't make it your speech. If at a city council meeting you're not allowed to yell and be inflammatory - is it now the cities speech when they tell you to get out? No. If they tell you, "you can't say that, change what you're saying" is it now the cities speech? No. 230 specifically is for the purpose of not being liable, and being able to choose what's on your platform. Specifically so you can moderate your own platform. No one has some magical right to use your social media business.
tick_tock_tick 5y ago
They want to have a discussion/debate on what rules should exist. Just because there aren't current rules doesn't preclude us from making some....

ajsnigrutin 5y ago

But it should be.

beerandt 5y ago

There's no legally spelled out condition, but one editorializes content and the other is content agnostic. The justification of 230's existence is that the host shouldn't be liable, because it's not their speech. That's no longer true if they're picking and choosing what gets heard, what gets buried, and what gets banned. They may not be typing the post, but they're determining what actually gets said. And that means they no longer deserve 230 protection.

michaelmrose 5y ago
This is the way you think the law ought to work not how it is in fact written.
- beerandt 5y ago
  >"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" That's how it's written. It provides protection for hosting controversial content posted by users, based on the fact that the host didn't write it, endorse it, or promote it. If the host has an active hand in doing those things, they are no longer merely hosting. Same goes for surpressing or censoring. The "another content provider" means the host is not involved in determining the content. But treating posts differently based on that content is not meaningfully different than an editor choosing what to publish.
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    There is no clause matching your assertion in the rather short law passed 25 years ago and no case law asserting your erroneous interpretation. I'd ask you to provide such but we both know there is none. Neither editorial selection nor removal has anything to do with 230 immunity. The law is working as written and intended. It isn't merely a grey area. The law was deliberately intended to support editorial selection and even deletion of content offensive to the platform owners sensibilities while explicitly preserving their protection from liability for their users content. This is supported by a plain reading of the text and the words of the men who wrote it. First the law https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 > 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] Now the words of Ron Wyden >Republican Congressman Chris Cox and I wrote Section 230 in 1996 to give up-and-coming tech companies a sword and a shield, and to foster free speech and innovation online. Essentially, 230 says that users, not the website that hosts their content, are the ones responsible for what they post, whether on Facebook or in the comments section of a news article. That's what I call the shield. > But it also gave companies a sword so that they can take down offensive content, lies and slime — the stuff that may be protected by the First Amendment but that most people do not want to experience online. And so they are free to take down white supremacist content or flag tweets that glorify violence (as Twitter did with President Trump's recent tweet) without fear of being sued for bias or even of having their site shut down. Your positions isn't merely incorrect it is directly counterfactual. It's an example of replacing actual known reality with the counterfactual in order to obtain a rhetorical advantage. It is more advantageous to start from the lie that platform owners have somehow been violating or abusing the law outrageously and something must be done about it compared to the actual reality that the law is working as intended and you wish to change it because there is both a general feeling that existing laws and privileges ought to be enforced and that new laws need be examined before being enacted. The prevalence of people of a particular political stripe to literally just making up alternative facts in response to inconvenient reality is deeply challenging to productive dialogue because its impossible to start out with a reasonable basis for discussion one must instead rewind to figure out which part of your fellows assumptions are based on purely fabricated reality. I expect you have taken it as a given that the line you were fed was based on reality. You are mistaken. I strongly encourage you to read both the laws and the words of the man who cowrote it.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> The justification of 230's existence is that the host shouldn't be liable, because it's not their speech. > That's no longer true if they're picking and choosing what gets heard, what gets buried, and what gets banned. No, its not. That's approximately the traditional justification for distributors having more limited liability than publishers. Section 230 was expressly adopted to allow platforms to act like publishers in a limited way without publisher liability, specifically to pick and choose what gets heard, what gets buried, and what gets banned. The justification you invented is basically the opposite of the explicit purpose of 230.
- beerandt 5y ago
  >specifically to pick and choose what gets heard, what gets buried, and what gets banned. BS. It covered liability for third party speech. It allowed controversial things to be said without the host being liable for hosting them. Private censorship of controversial speech is the complete opposite of it's purpose. >"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" If you only allow speakers to be heard that agree with you, you are the speaker. If you only publish things that you agree with you are a publisher. The law shields hosts in exchange for providing a place for free speech. If you no longer provide that space, you no longer deserve the protections it affords. The behavior we see now is exactly the behavior that 230 was meant to prevent: sites being overly protective and aggressively policing what gets posted. 230 was passed so they wouldn't have to do it. It's not an excuse for them to do it anyway. No one forsaw that the hosts would actually want an excuse to censor users.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > It allowed controversial things to be said without the host being liable for hosting them. That was already allowed, provided they didn't, to use the phrasing being used in this thread, “pick and choose what gets heard, what gets buried, and what gets banned.” Doing that even on a limited basis made them, under pre-230 law, a publisher, subject to liability for all content on the platform. Section 230 was adopted specifically to allow platforms to moderate user-generated content according the platform owners’ view of objectionable content without incurring publisher liability, because the pre-230 situation was viewed as encouraging a situation i which platforms who didn't feel they could completely moderate were forced to not moderate at all, making online communities persistently polluted with objectionable content. The Communications Decency Act, of which 230 was the only substantive part to survive, was not about promoting unmoderated internet fora, but the opposite.
devwastaken 5y ago
Choosing speech to be removed doesn't make it your speech. If at a city council meeting you're not allowed to yell and be inflammatory - is it now the cities speech when they tell you to get out? No. If they tell you, "you can't say that, change what you're saying" is it now the cities speech? No. 230 specifically is for the purpose of not being liable, and being able to choose what's on your platform. Specifically so you can moderate your own platform. No one has some magical right to use your social media business.

tick_tock_tick 5y ago

They want to have a discussion/debate on what rules should exist. Just because there aren't current rules doesn't preclude us from making some....