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The whole point of Section 230 was that we wanted to simultaneously incentivize user-content platforms (so, services that just allowed people to freely express

The whole point of Section 230 was that we wanted to simultaneously incentivize user-content platforms (so, services that just allowed people to freely express themselves without concerning itself too much about the content) while simultaneously encouraging those services to take down illegal content. That was it. The whole reason it was needed was because these platforms were worried that if they took down content, it might be seen as implicitly endorsing the content that remained. If that was the case, then they'd be liable for the content that remained. Including things like libel laws... it would be the same as a newspaper printing that content. They didn't want that, so this was the compromise. You can do light moderation and we'll grant you exemption. Fast-forward to today. Facebook and Twitter do not do "light moderation". They decide what you see and what you don't... they direct your attention from smaller stories to bigger ones, they spend countless thousands of employee hours catering to the whole experience. If that doesn't count as a modern digital scaled form of editorialization, I don't know what would. I think a law designed to encourage very light moderation in no way applies to full-fledged algorithmic determination, and that distinction needs to be made and clarified.

LatteLazy 4y ago
Services could always take down illegal content (in fact they were legally required to). Section 230 is specifically for taking down legal content that the site controller wants gone (without then having endorsed what remains as you say). Section 230 was specifically to allow MORE than what you call "light moderation". That was always the point.
asah 4y ago
serious q: what exactly is "light moderation" and how is this not itself an algorithm, just being executed by wetware neural nets with all sorts of biases, inconsistent judgments, etc ? if "light moderation" means an escalation path for exceptions, then the major platforms all have this.
- mjevans 4y ago
  When content is offered, not based on a factual request from the user but as a 'recommendation' that is a decision (even if it's an algorithm) and NOT a simple fact of serving whatever matched the end user requested (not the provider with 230 immunity) filter / sorting order on other end user published (not the provider with 230 immunity) content.
lliamander 4y ago
You precisely describe the nature of section 230. > I think a law designed to encourage very light moderation in no way applies to full-fledged algorithmic determination, and that distinction needs to be made and clarified. I think this is where the definition of "good faith" in section 230 comes into play. If the platforms are simply removing illegal content and protecting the users from content they don't want to see, that would be good faith in the sense it is putting the interests of the users first. Now, optimizing feeds to benefit advertisers, or trying to socially engineer democratic elections? That is not good faith. And yet, some of these actions are done at the request of politicians and government agencies - often with the implicit threat of regulation and anti-trust action. As much as we need to expect good faith moderation from social media platforms, we also a stronger protections for private entities being strong-armed by state actors.
- qball 4y ago
  >we also a stronger protections for private entities being strong-armed by state actors. It's important to note that this also needs (though I suspect that it already does) to apply to hosting providers and ISPs. (We need one for banks and payment processors, too, but one step at a time.) The whole "just make your own Internet" will ultimately be the death of free thought; in some respects, this has already happened. Cloudflare in particular makes a bundle on flat out illegal content; forcing them to moderate everything or just accept everyone's business (and ensuring ISPs can't blackhole routing requests) would likely be an improvement, and not one the enemy can as easily influence (as there's no viable "our payment processors said so" excuse). Of course, then the enemy will just amp up their efforts through the banks or the app stores, but one less avenue of attack they have is always better.
- danShumway 4y ago
  > You precisely describe the nature of section 230 In the original authors' own words (https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/sen-wyden-and-former-rep-cox-urge-supreme-court-to-uphold-precedent-on-section-230 https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/sen-wyden-a...): > Section 230 protects targeted recommendations to the same extent that it protects other forms of content presentation. [...] That interpretation enables Section 230 to fulfill Congress’s purpose of encouraging innovation in content presentation and moderation. The real-time transmission of user-generated content that Section 230 fosters has become a backbone of online activity, relied upon by innumerable Internet users and platforms alike. Section 230’s protection remains as essential today as it was when the provision was enacted. The original authors believe that algorithms are protected. The original authors of Section 230 also don't believe that Section 230 prohibits biased platforms or prohibits platforms from having an agenda. Ron Wyden's take on the "platforms are biased" argument (https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/16/18626779/ron-wyden-section-230-facebook-regulations-neutrality https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/16/18626779/ron-wyden-sect...): > Section 230 is not about neutrality. Period. Full stop. ---- That being said, should we have better protections for platforms being strong-armed by state actors? Yes, absolutely. The government has many levers it can pull to influence private speech, and those levers need careful safeguards and we need checks in place to prevent state actors from threatening platforms and using political power to bully them into making specific moderation decisions. But while that is an admirable goal, it has nothing to do with Section 230, a law that is itself a check on government power to punish companies over moderation decisions. If you're worried about private entities being influenced by state actors -- as you say "often with the implicit threat of regulation and anti-trust action" -- then giving the government more power to determine what is and isn't "good faith" moderation is heading in the wrong direction and would make the problem even worse. The solution to the government strong-arming platforms into removing content is not to give the government more power over moderation decisions.
danShumway 4y ago
> You can do light moderation and we'll grant you exemption. Another article about Section 230, another top-rated post on HN that's wrong about its origin. Section 230 was always designed from the start to allow companies to moderate legal content. "Light" moderation was never part of the equation. Look, the people who literally wrote and sponsored Section 230 are still alive today and they are open about what their motivations were, and yet still every single time this subject comes up the top-rated comment on HN is some completely fictional notion about how Section 230 was based on an assumption that feeds wouldn't be algorithmic or wouldn't censor anybody. And it's just factually wrong, and I don't understand why it's impossible to correct. It's difficult to have a conversation about the political/social merits of a law when people don't even understand the basic factual information about why the law exists. Imagine if every time an article about Linux came up the top-rated HN post was someone saying that Linux was never really designed to be a desktop OS, it was always intended to just be used on servers and only on servers -- and it didn't matter if Linus Torvalds himself was out making the rounds correcting people on that, we still had to have this conversation every time Linux was mentioned. That's how HN discusses Section 230. Section 230 was never about preventing algorithms. It was not designed to prevent "heavy" moderation. Again, the people who wrote the law are alive today and have explained their motivations. ---- Edit: it's been pointed out (correctly) that I should probably throw some sources on this. Techdirt's article is a little snarkier than I like, but is generally good (https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/ https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...), and even the Wikipedia article on Section 230 is a decent place to start looking at 230 motivations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230). There's also a fairly decent book, "The 26 words that made the modern Internet." In regards to the parent comment, from Wikipedia: > Service providers made their Congresspersons aware of these cases, believing that if followed by other courts across the nation, the cases would stifle the growth of the Internet. United States Representative Christopher Cox (R-CA) had read an article about the two cases and felt the decisions were backwards. "It struck me that if that rule was going to take hold then the internet would become the Wild West and nobody would have any incentive to keep the internet civil," Cox stated. Cox's concern was not that platforms should only do "light" moderation, he wanted a way for platforms to be able to also moderate completely legal but "uncivil" content that would make it hard for platforms to be professional or organized; a "Wild West" Ron Wyden goes a step further in his recent interviews (https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/8/5/21339766/zuckerberg-privacy-law-facebook-congress-wyden https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/8/5/21339766/zuckerberg-priv...): > "There is not a single word — not a word, not a comma, not a parenthesis, nothing — that suggests that 230 was about neutrality. In fact, what we designed it to be is if you had a conservative website, good for you! Do what you want with it! If you had a progressive website, same thing." And if that's not convincing to you, consider that both Ron Wyden and Christopher Cox have filed an amicus brief on this very case, saying that they believe Section 230 should protect Google (https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/sen-wyden-and-former-rep-cox-urge-supreme-court-to-uphold-precedent-on-section-230 https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/sen-wyden-a...): > The co-authors reminded the court that internet companies were already recommending content to users when the law went into effect in 1996, and that algorithms are just as important for removing undesirable posts as suggesting content users might want to see. Really not much that can make it more clear than that, the assertion that Section 230 wasn't designed to protect algorithmic recommendations is factually wrong, this is not something that's a matter of opinion.
matthewdgreen 4y ago
Let me make a counterargument: If you’re a government that wants to have substantial control over what sorts of content is available to users, then Section 230 is a problem for you. What you don’t want is a hundred million people responsible for their own posts. What you do want is a few dozen services that run the Internet and who you can say are “editorializing” and who thus face all kind of liability unless they obey specific speech codes that politicians then set. You might think that government control over platforms’ speech is prevented by the First Amendment, but that’s the insidious nature of Section 230: if you passed laws controlling how newspapers editorialize, the laws would be struck as violating the First Amendment. If instead you pass laws modifying platforms’ civil liability for users’ speech, it might have the same overall effect as the explicit laws would have on newspapers. Yet some will argue that it’s constitutional to do so. But surely, you argue, you’re not opposed to letting firms do light moderation. They just can’t do heavy moderation, like kick off users for “political” reasons or use any algorithms to help users discover content. But nobody has a clue what “political” means here and how it differs from spam, and coming up with a definition is not the job of the US government or the courts. Similarly, does anyone seriously think that firms are going to stop using content discovery algorithms and become a pure “common carrier” of all content? Of course they won’t. They’ll just accept whatever speech codes the government develops and they’ll obey them so that they can continue to make money. It’s depressing to see people on HN walk willingly into a speech-regulation regime for private companies, while claiming that the reason they want this is to ban algorithmic discovery. If you want to ban algorithms, just pass a law doing so and see if it’s constitutional. Instead we get this end-run where the result of these reforms is very likely to be much worse than the current situation and more critically we will still have most of the algorithms and moderation used to justify it.
- belorn 4y ago
  Lets flip the discussion and rather than asking when section 230 should apply, lets ask when publisher ever should be held liable for published content. Platforms don't need immunity to laws regulating publisher if those laws did not exist. If publishing laws only required that publisher prevented copyright infringement and sex trafficking, both being a requirement of existing 230, then everything could continue as before and the immunity provided by 230 would be unnecessary. The question is who if any would be harmed.

LatteLazy 4y ago

Services could always take down illegal content (in fact they were legally required to). Section 230 is specifically for taking down legal content that the site controller wants gone (without then having endorsed what remains as you say). Section 230 was specifically to allow MORE than what you call "light moderation". That was always the point.

asah 4y ago

serious q: what exactly is "light moderation" and how is this not itself an algorithm, just being executed by wetware neural nets with all sorts of biases, inconsistent judgments, etc ? if "light moderation" means an escalation path for exceptions, then the major platforms all have this.

mjevans 4y ago
When content is offered, not based on a factual request from the user but as a 'recommendation' that is a decision (even if it's an algorithm) and NOT a simple fact of serving whatever matched the end user requested (not the provider with 230 immunity) filter / sorting order on other end user published (not the provider with 230 immunity) content.

lliamander 4y ago

You precisely describe the nature of section 230. > I think a law designed to encourage very light moderation in no way applies to full-fledged algorithmic determination, and that distinction needs to be made and clarified. I think this is where the definition of "good faith" in section 230 comes into play. If the platforms are simply removing illegal content and protecting the users from content they don't want to see, that would be good faith in the sense it is putting the interests of the users first. Now, optimizing feeds to benefit advertisers, or trying to socially engineer democratic elections? That is not good faith. And yet, some of these actions are done at the request of politicians and government agencies - often with the implicit threat of regulation and anti-trust action. As much as we need to expect good faith moderation from social media platforms, we also a stronger protections for private entities being strong-armed by state actors.

qball 4y ago
>we also a stronger protections for private entities being strong-armed by state actors. It's important to note that this also needs (though I suspect that it already does) to apply to hosting providers and ISPs. (We need one for banks and payment processors, too, but one step at a time.) The whole "just make your own Internet" will ultimately be the death of free thought; in some respects, this has already happened. Cloudflare in particular makes a bundle on flat out illegal content; forcing them to moderate everything or just accept everyone's business (and ensuring ISPs can't blackhole routing requests) would likely be an improvement, and not one the enemy can as easily influence (as there's no viable "our payment processors said so" excuse). Of course, then the enemy will just amp up their efforts through the banks or the app stores, but one less avenue of attack they have is always better.
danShumway 4y ago
> You precisely describe the nature of section 230 In the original authors' own words (https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/sen-wyden-and-former-rep-cox-urge-supreme-court-to-uphold-precedent-on-section-230 https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/sen-wyden-a...): > Section 230 protects targeted recommendations to the same extent that it protects other forms of content presentation. [...] That interpretation enables Section 230 to fulfill Congress’s purpose of encouraging innovation in content presentation and moderation. The real-time transmission of user-generated content that Section 230 fosters has become a backbone of online activity, relied upon by innumerable Internet users and platforms alike. Section 230’s protection remains as essential today as it was when the provision was enacted. The original authors believe that algorithms are protected. The original authors of Section 230 also don't believe that Section 230 prohibits biased platforms or prohibits platforms from having an agenda. Ron Wyden's take on the "platforms are biased" argument (https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/16/18626779/ron-wyden-section-230-facebook-regulations-neutrality https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/16/18626779/ron-wyden-sect...): > Section 230 is not about neutrality. Period. Full stop. ---- That being said, should we have better protections for platforms being strong-armed by state actors? Yes, absolutely. The government has many levers it can pull to influence private speech, and those levers need careful safeguards and we need checks in place to prevent state actors from threatening platforms and using political power to bully them into making specific moderation decisions. But while that is an admirable goal, it has nothing to do with Section 230, a law that is itself a check on government power to punish companies over moderation decisions. If you're worried about private entities being influenced by state actors -- as you say "often with the implicit threat of regulation and anti-trust action" -- then giving the government more power to determine what is and isn't "good faith" moderation is heading in the wrong direction and would make the problem even worse. The solution to the government strong-arming platforms into removing content is not to give the government more power over moderation decisions.

danShumway 4y ago

> You can do light moderation and we'll grant you exemption. Another article about Section 230, another top-rated post on HN that's wrong about its origin. Section 230 was always designed from the start to allow companies to moderate legal content. "Light" moderation was never part of the equation. Look, the people who literally wrote and sponsored Section 230 are still alive today and they are open about what their motivations were, and yet still every single time this subject comes up the top-rated comment on HN is some completely fictional notion about how Section 230 was based on an assumption that feeds wouldn't be algorithmic or wouldn't censor anybody. And it's just factually wrong, and I don't understand why it's impossible to correct. It's difficult to have a conversation about the political/social merits of a law when people don't even understand the basic factual information about why the law exists. Imagine if every time an article about Linux came up the top-rated HN post was someone saying that Linux was never really designed to be a desktop OS, it was always intended to just be used on servers and only on servers -- and it didn't matter if Linus Torvalds himself was out making the rounds correcting people on that, we still had to have this conversation every time Linux was mentioned. That's how HN discusses Section 230. Section 230 was never about preventing algorithms. It was not designed to prevent "heavy" moderation. Again, the people who wrote the law are alive today and have explained their motivations. ---- Edit: it's been pointed out (correctly) that I should probably throw some sources on this. Techdirt's article is a little snarkier than I like, but is generally good (https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/ https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...), and even the Wikipedia article on Section 230 is a decent place to start looking at 230 motivations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230). There's also a fairly decent book, "The 26 words that made the modern Internet." In regards to the parent comment, from Wikipedia: > Service providers made their Congresspersons aware of these cases, believing that if followed by other courts across the nation, the cases would stifle the growth of the Internet. United States Representative Christopher Cox (R-CA) had read an article about the two cases and felt the decisions were backwards. "It struck me that if that rule was going to take hold then the internet would become the Wild West and nobody would have any incentive to keep the internet civil," Cox stated. Cox's concern was not that platforms should only do "light" moderation, he wanted a way for platforms to be able to also moderate completely legal but "uncivil" content that would make it hard for platforms to be professional or organized; a "Wild West" Ron Wyden goes a step further in his recent interviews (https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/8/5/21339766/zuckerberg-privacy-law-facebook-congress-wyden https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/8/5/21339766/zuckerberg-priv...): > "There is not a single word — not a word, not a comma, not a parenthesis, nothing — that suggests that 230 was about neutrality. In fact, what we designed it to be is if you had a conservative website, good for you! Do what you want with it! If you had a progressive website, same thing." And if that's not convincing to you, consider that both Ron Wyden and Christopher Cox have filed an amicus brief on this very case, saying that they believe Section 230 should protect Google (https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/sen-wyden-and-former-rep-cox-urge-supreme-court-to-uphold-precedent-on-section-230 https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/sen-wyden-a...): > The co-authors reminded the court that internet companies were already recommending content to users when the law went into effect in 1996, and that algorithms are just as important for removing undesirable posts as suggesting content users might want to see. Really not much that can make it more clear than that, the assertion that Section 230 wasn't designed to protect algorithmic recommendations is factually wrong, this is not something that's a matter of opinion.

matthewdgreen 4y ago

Let me make a counterargument: If you’re a government that wants to have substantial control over what sorts of content is available to users, then Section 230 is a problem for you. What you don’t want is a hundred million people responsible for their own posts. What you do want is a few dozen services that run the Internet and who you can say are “editorializing” and who thus face all kind of liability unless they obey specific speech codes that politicians then set. You might think that government control over platforms’ speech is prevented by the First Amendment, but that’s the insidious nature of Section 230: if you passed laws controlling how newspapers editorialize, the laws would be struck as violating the First Amendment. If instead you pass laws modifying platforms’ civil liability for users’ speech, it might have the same overall effect as the explicit laws would have on newspapers. Yet some will argue that it’s constitutional to do so. But surely, you argue, you’re not opposed to letting firms do light moderation. They just can’t do heavy moderation, like kick off users for “political” reasons or use any algorithms to help users discover content. But nobody has a clue what “political” means here and how it differs from spam, and coming up with a definition is not the job of the US government or the courts. Similarly, does anyone seriously think that firms are going to stop using content discovery algorithms and become a pure “common carrier” of all content? Of course they won’t. They’ll just accept whatever speech codes the government develops and they’ll obey them so that they can continue to make money. It’s depressing to see people on HN walk willingly into a speech-regulation regime for private companies, while claiming that the reason they want this is to ban algorithmic discovery. If you want to ban algorithms, just pass a law doing so and see if it’s constitutional. Instead we get this end-run where the result of these reforms is very likely to be much worse than the current situation and more critically we will still have most of the algorithms and moderation used to justify it.

belorn 4y ago
Lets flip the discussion and rather than asking when section 230 should apply, lets ask when publisher ever should be held liable for published content. Platforms don't need immunity to laws regulating publisher if those laws did not exist. If publishing laws only required that publisher prevented copyright infringement and sex trafficking, both being a requirement of existing 230, then everything could continue as before and the immunity provided by 230 would be unnecessary. The question is who if any would be harmed.