3 ms·

>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 controver

>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.

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.