8 ms·

US Supreme Court leaves protections for internet companies unscathed

142 points by LinuxBender 3y ago

laristine 3y ago
https://archive.is/yhf7y https://archive.is/yhf7y
adventured 3y ago
Wonderful news. If how the US Internet is regulated - how it functions at its core as a result of liability - is going to change, it should be done through actions by Congress. If social media companies were guilty, then so is every newspaper that spreads news of terrorist events, supposedly providing a platform for terrorism (which would also be the argument in cases of eg mass shooters that seek attention, copying prior mass shootings that are heavily publicized by the press/media/news). It's an excellent outcome that they're not guilty in this case. I'm glad to see the justices so relatively united.
- User23 3y ago
  Newspapers are publishers and are liable for what they print. That's the point of section 230, Twitter is not legally a publisher.
  - InitialLastName 3y ago
    Where is the line between choosing what people see and exerting editorial control over what to print? If a newspaper puts up a dark corner of their website that gives people labyrinthine access to all of the submissions that they decided not to publish, are they no longer liable for the content they post and promote on their main site?
    - favorited 3y ago
      > access to all of the submissions that they decided not to publish You mean a comments section?
    - nradov 3y ago
      Your question doesn't make any sense. If a newspaper creates an interactive computer service then they receive the same Section 230 protections as anyone else. The law doesn't define any line of editorial control. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > Where is the line between choosing what people see and exerting editorial control over what to print The line is different online vs in print, because of Section 230, whose scope is pretty explicit... > If a newspaper puts up a dark corner of their website that gives people labyrinthine access to all of the submissions that they decided not to publish, are they no longer liable for the content they post and promote on their main site? Are you under the impression that the main content of newspapers (either in print or on the web) is third-party submissions that the newspaper chooses to print or not but does not actively assign and pay people to write, and/or actively purchase for publication?
      - ianburrell 3y ago
        Online newspapers do mix editorial and community content in the articles and comments. The difference between them is pretty clear as is the moderation. Also, there are sites like Forbes that have editorial articles but also have blogs posted by users. These do get confused on Forbes.
    - djbusby 3y ago
      Isn't 230 to protect UGC? Newspaper publish content they create.
- laratied 3y ago
  Or imagine claiming that pay phone companies were liable in 1980 for facilitating mafia crime activity. It is so stupid that no one at the time even considered it.
tptacek 3y ago
This isn't all that surprising; for all the tsuris regarding 230, the statute and the intent behind it seem quite clear; the drama is that opponents of big tech companies don't like the statute, not that there's a real claim that it's been misinterpreted. It's not the court's job to fix that; that job belongs to Congress.
- woodruffw 3y ago
  I for one appreciate the Yiddish, but for those unfamiliar with tsuris[1]. [1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tsuris https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tsuris
- jcranmer 3y ago
  Reinterpreting a statute to reach a result they'd prefer, even if no one is pushing them to do so, is absolutely on-brand for SCOTUS (indeed, they did just that yesterday with Warhol v Goldsmith, reinterpreting the first factor to be about the use of the allegedly infringing work rather than the use of the allegedly infringed work within with infringing work). But the Gonzalez v Google case taking direct aim at section 230 was just such a horrible vehicle that there was no point in even tackling the question it was supposedly raising (and which everyone was ignoring in favor of attacking or defending 230 outright). Even counsel for plaintiff there admitted that there was no point deciding anything if they didn't also win in Twitter v Taamneh, and Twitter v Taamneh was a real stretch for plaintiffs.
  - legitster 3y ago
    > indeed, they did just that yesterday with Warhol v Goldsmith I would not argue at all that is what they did. There are remarkably few statutes about fair use specifically and as a doctrine it is a loose patchwork of precedence and principles. If legislatures were to pass actual legislation for them to interpret that would be a different thing.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > I would not argue at all that is what they did. There are remarkably few statutes about fair use specifically and as a doctrine it is a loose patchwork of precedence and principles. Its worth noting that the reason the fair use statutory language is the way it is is that it was largely a codification of the thn-existing case law on Fair Use as a Constitutional (stemming from the First Amendment) limit on the copyright power. > If legislatures were to pass actual legislation for them to interpret that would be a different thing. Congress isn’t really interested in expanding Fair Use beyond the Constitutional minimum, though.
deathanatos 3y ago
The opinion: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-1333_6j7a.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-1333_6j7a.pdf The referenced Twitter opinion: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-1496_d18f.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-1496_d18f.pdf
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  These are worth reading because the Court's decision here was very specific and narrow. The plaintiffs sued because ISIS killed their family members and they were specifically trying to prove collusion between Twiiter and ISIS (and YouTube and ISIS). The facts they declared they would present did not, SCOTUS ruled, meet the definition of collusion as per the law. In short, even if Twitter (and YouTube) did make money off of ads run next to ISIS recruitment information, that's not material support of terrorism. It'd be a bit like someone trying to sue CNN for supporting the invasion of Ukraine because they screwed up and ran that Applebee's ad against footage of Kyiv under siege. So the case doesn't particularly test 230 very thoroughly because the underlying civil claim ("Twitter is liable for my loved one's death because at some point they made money off an ad run next to ISIS recruitment material") has no legal merit.
  - lesuorac 3y ago
    It would be irrelevant if they proved collusion since collusion is not a crime. But yes, they failed to show that YouTube/Twitter "aided and abetted and conspired with ISIS".
  - MithrilTuxedo 3y ago
    Collusion?
    - shadowgovt 3y ago
      I used the wrong word. lesuorac was correct (and the words matter here because part of SCOTUS's ruling was on "Congress didn't define any of these terms in the statute so we have to go into the common law definitions of them.")
dragonwriter 3y ago
This headline is misleading, the Supreme Court did not address Section 230 at all. What it did was address the scope of a law relating to material support for international terrorism, and found that since the claims at issue didn’t, even if taken as true, meet that standard, it wasn’t relevant whether Section 230 would have protected the internet firms involved if it did.
- justrealist 3y ago
  Technically true, but if the SC had wanted an opportunity to revisit Section 230, they could have used this as an opportunity to do so. By declining on procedural grounds, it signals they are not especially interested in evaluating Section 230 in a broader scope.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > By declining on procedural grounds This wasn’t decided on procedural grounds, but on substantive grounds. The fact that it was decided on a different substantive question than some people wanted it to be doesn’t make it procedural.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      The procedural issue is which substantive question to tackle first. If they address the merits of the underlying liability and conclude that there was none, then they get to skip the question of Section 230 because it's irrelevant. Now suppose they want to avoid tackling the question of the underlying liability. Well, if the defendants would be immune under Section 230 anyway then that question would be irrelevant and they could avoid answering it. But that's not what they did.
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    Possibly, but I don't think I'd read the tea leaves that way. As much as people complain about activist judges on the bench, SCOTUS does a pretty good job, most of the time, of following the evolved purpose of their Court to rule as narrowly as possible to resolve the open question of law. This case specifically was ill-designed to probe 230 because the underlying claim of culpability was cobweb-thin. And the Court is guided by the arguments made in front of them; while plaintiffs certainly wanted this to hinge on 230, the defense made a very reasonable case based on "In what parallel universe are networks considered to have culpability because they made money indirectly by being the middlemen for someone else's recruitment video?" Might as well sue Goodyear for making the tires that went on the van used in the attack. There are other cases in the pipeline that will test 230 more directly than this one. This one doesn't even get to the point where questions of S230 law are under scrutiny because the civil tort law used didn't apply.
phkahler 3y ago
>> Twitter alone cannot screen every single piece of user-generated content with 100% accuracy. Imposing liability on such services for harmful content that unintentionally falls through the crack would have disincentivized them from hosting any user-generated content," So what? People can host their own content. I'm not arguing either way, but to suggest the viability of a particular business model should influence the decision isn't right. Either treat them like common carriers and make them host everything without moderation, or hold them liable for it. Or is my thinking obsolete somehow?
- Georgelemental 3y ago
  That would be disastrous for small community forums, that want to moderate but don't have the resources to do it perfectly. It's hard to find a police that works well for all of Twitter-scale, HN-scale, and small-PHP-forum scale.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  Literally the point of the CDA was to avoid that dichotomy, because that was more or less what the law was before that and Congress wanted websites to remove pornography etc., which they wouldn't be willing to do if it came with liability for hosting anything they didn't remove.
- wvenable 3y ago
  > So what? People can host their own content. How do they do that? It's services all the way down.
  - yamtaddle 3y ago
    Providing hosting, or an Internet pipe, is pretty different from accepting user submissions and adding them to your own systems to be presented to others as you see fit, often with broad claims of ownership over submitted content.
- Analemma_ 3y ago
  Your thinking isn't obsolete, it's more just... incorrect about what Section 230 says and why it exists. You should probably read the TechDirt "You Are Wrong About Section 230" article[0] and get some misconceptions cleared up. [0]: 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...
jmyeet 3y ago
This is unsurprising. A fairly reliable determinant for how the Court will rule is found using a materialist analysis. That is, the Court will generally side with corporations and capital owners when given the choice. This isn't new to this particular Supreme Court. There's a long history here. The interesting part isn't how the Court decided but how it decided. It didn't address Section 230 at all and only made a very narrow ruling that isn't really applicable beyon dthis case. The Court is, and always has been, political. Skepticism remains about the safe harbor provisions of Section 230 in the conservative wing of the court so it's no surprise that this ruling is narrow so as to not set precedent.
- alex_sf 3y ago
  > A fairly reliable determinant for how the Court will rule is found using a materialist analysis. That is, the Court will generally side with corporations and capital owners when given the choice. This is a big claim. Do you have any evidence to support it? In the wake of someone trying to prove the same for Congress, it was conclusively shown that the opposite was true: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-study https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-... I see several opinion pieces making the same claim, but no actual studies of their decisions. More importantly: the concern can't and shouldn't be the income of the parties involved in a suit, but who is right and who isn't.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
>The justices in a 9-0 decision reversed a lower court's ruling that had revived a lawsuit against Twitter by the American relatives of Nawras Alassaf, a Jordanian man killed in a 2017 attack during New Year's celebration in a Istanbul nightclub claimed by the Islamic State militant group. > After a judge dismissed the lawsuit, the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals allowed it to proceed, concluding that Twitter had refused to take "meaningful steps" to prevent Islamic State's use of the platform. The 9th Circuit was way off. The judge dismissed the case, they revived it, and then got overturned by a unanimous Supreme Court decision.
1lint 3y ago
I think this ruling is overall a good outcome, but one loophole I see emerging around Section 230 protections is that social media sites are free to censor/shadowban content according to their ambiguous and arbitrarily enforced TOS. This allows them to favor user content they find agreeable, thus implicitly promoting their own viewpoints while still hiding behind Section 230 protections. For example if a hypothetical billionaire acquirer of a social media site wanted to (implicitly) promote a cryptocurrency project, he could shadowban negative comments against the project, leaving comments in favor of the project to dominate on the site. At the same time, Section 230 would still shield his company from liability for those comments in favor of the project. This creates a situation in which the social media is in essence promoting the project, but in a roundabout way that shields them from liability. I can see this being especially problematic as it is applied to influencing elections. In my opinion, Section 230 protections should come with some obligation to respect the principles of free speech.
- jaredklewis 3y ago
  I don't think that's a loophole. On the contrary, if 230 were reinterpreted to mean that online content providers were legally required to have no editorial control over user provided content, that would be a pretty significant departure from current case law. Section 230 is quite short and (to my mind) somewhat vague, which I think lends itself to different understandings. But I don't think it could be reasonably interpreted to mean that online publishers cannot moderate user content as they see fit.
  - 1lint 3y ago
    I did not advocate for any reinterpretation of Section 230. Loopholes in the law should be fixed by the legislature, not by misinterpreting the law as it is written.

142 points by LinuxBender 3y ago

https://archive.is/yhf7y https://archive.is/yhf7y

Wonderful news. If how the US Internet is regulated - how it functions at its core as a result of liability - is going to change, it should be done through actions by Congress. If social media companies were guilty, then so is every newspaper that spreads news of terrorist events, supposedly providing a platform for terrorism (which would also be the argument in cases of eg mass shooters that seek attention, copying prior mass shootings that are heavily publicized by the press/media/news). It's an excellent outcome that they're not guilty in this case. I'm glad to see the justices so relatively united.

User23 3y ago
Newspapers are publishers and are liable for what they print. That's the point of section 230, Twitter is not legally a publisher.
- InitialLastName 3y ago
  Where is the line between choosing what people see and exerting editorial control over what to print? If a newspaper puts up a dark corner of their website that gives people labyrinthine access to all of the submissions that they decided not to publish, are they no longer liable for the content they post and promote on their main site?
  - favorited 3y ago
    > access to all of the submissions that they decided not to publish You mean a comments section?
  - nradov 3y ago
    Your question doesn't make any sense. If a newspaper creates an interactive computer service then they receive the same Section 230 protections as anyone else. The law doesn't define any line of editorial control. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > Where is the line between choosing what people see and exerting editorial control over what to print The line is different online vs in print, because of Section 230, whose scope is pretty explicit... > If a newspaper puts up a dark corner of their website that gives people labyrinthine access to all of the submissions that they decided not to publish, are they no longer liable for the content they post and promote on their main site? Are you under the impression that the main content of newspapers (either in print or on the web) is third-party submissions that the newspaper chooses to print or not but does not actively assign and pay people to write, and/or actively purchase for publication?
    - ianburrell 3y ago
      Online newspapers do mix editorial and community content in the articles and comments. The difference between them is pretty clear as is the moderation. Also, there are sites like Forbes that have editorial articles but also have blogs posted by users. These do get confused on Forbes.
  - djbusby 3y ago
    Isn't 230 to protect UGC? Newspaper publish content they create.
laratied 3y ago
Or imagine claiming that pay phone companies were liable in 1980 for facilitating mafia crime activity. It is so stupid that no one at the time even considered it.

tptacek 3y ago

This isn't all that surprising; for all the tsuris regarding 230, the statute and the intent behind it seem quite clear; the drama is that opponents of big tech companies don't like the statute, not that there's a real claim that it's been misinterpreted. It's not the court's job to fix that; that job belongs to Congress.

woodruffw 3y ago
I for one appreciate the Yiddish, but for those unfamiliar with tsuris[1]. [1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tsuris https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tsuris
jcranmer 3y ago
Reinterpreting a statute to reach a result they'd prefer, even if no one is pushing them to do so, is absolutely on-brand for SCOTUS (indeed, they did just that yesterday with Warhol v Goldsmith, reinterpreting the first factor to be about the use of the allegedly infringing work rather than the use of the allegedly infringed work within with infringing work). But the Gonzalez v Google case taking direct aim at section 230 was just such a horrible vehicle that there was no point in even tackling the question it was supposedly raising (and which everyone was ignoring in favor of attacking or defending 230 outright). Even counsel for plaintiff there admitted that there was no point deciding anything if they didn't also win in Twitter v Taamneh, and Twitter v Taamneh was a real stretch for plaintiffs.
- legitster 3y ago
  > indeed, they did just that yesterday with Warhol v Goldsmith I would not argue at all that is what they did. There are remarkably few statutes about fair use specifically and as a doctrine it is a loose patchwork of precedence and principles. If legislatures were to pass actual legislation for them to interpret that would be a different thing.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > I would not argue at all that is what they did. There are remarkably few statutes about fair use specifically and as a doctrine it is a loose patchwork of precedence and principles. Its worth noting that the reason the fair use statutory language is the way it is is that it was largely a codification of the thn-existing case law on Fair Use as a Constitutional (stemming from the First Amendment) limit on the copyright power. > If legislatures were to pass actual legislation for them to interpret that would be a different thing. Congress isn’t really interested in expanding Fair Use beyond the Constitutional minimum, though.

deathanatos 3y ago

The opinion: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-1333_6j7a.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-1333_6j7a.pdf The referenced Twitter opinion: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-1496_d18f.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-1496_d18f.pdf

shadowgovt 3y ago
These are worth reading because the Court's decision here was very specific and narrow. The plaintiffs sued because ISIS killed their family members and they were specifically trying to prove collusion between Twiiter and ISIS (and YouTube and ISIS). The facts they declared they would present did not, SCOTUS ruled, meet the definition of collusion as per the law. In short, even if Twitter (and YouTube) did make money off of ads run next to ISIS recruitment information, that's not material support of terrorism. It'd be a bit like someone trying to sue CNN for supporting the invasion of Ukraine because they screwed up and ran that Applebee's ad against footage of Kyiv under siege. So the case doesn't particularly test 230 very thoroughly because the underlying civil claim ("Twitter is liable for my loved one's death because at some point they made money off an ad run next to ISIS recruitment material") has no legal merit.
- lesuorac 3y ago
  It would be irrelevant if they proved collusion since collusion is not a crime. But yes, they failed to show that YouTube/Twitter "aided and abetted and conspired with ISIS".
- MithrilTuxedo 3y ago
  Collusion?
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    I used the wrong word. lesuorac was correct (and the words matter here because part of SCOTUS's ruling was on "Congress didn't define any of these terms in the statute so we have to go into the common law definitions of them.")

dragonwriter 3y ago

This headline is misleading, the Supreme Court did not address Section 230 at all. What it did was address the scope of a law relating to material support for international terrorism, and found that since the claims at issue didn’t, even if taken as true, meet that standard, it wasn’t relevant whether Section 230 would have protected the internet firms involved if it did.

justrealist 3y ago
Technically true, but if the SC had wanted an opportunity to revisit Section 230, they could have used this as an opportunity to do so. By declining on procedural grounds, it signals they are not especially interested in evaluating Section 230 in a broader scope.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > By declining on procedural grounds This wasn’t decided on procedural grounds, but on substantive grounds. The fact that it was decided on a different substantive question than some people wanted it to be doesn’t make it procedural.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    The procedural issue is which substantive question to tackle first. If they address the merits of the underlying liability and conclude that there was none, then they get to skip the question of Section 230 because it's irrelevant. Now suppose they want to avoid tackling the question of the underlying liability. Well, if the defendants would be immune under Section 230 anyway then that question would be irrelevant and they could avoid answering it. But that's not what they did.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  Possibly, but I don't think I'd read the tea leaves that way. As much as people complain about activist judges on the bench, SCOTUS does a pretty good job, most of the time, of following the evolved purpose of their Court to rule as narrowly as possible to resolve the open question of law. This case specifically was ill-designed to probe 230 because the underlying claim of culpability was cobweb-thin. And the Court is guided by the arguments made in front of them; while plaintiffs certainly wanted this to hinge on 230, the defense made a very reasonable case based on "In what parallel universe are networks considered to have culpability because they made money indirectly by being the middlemen for someone else's recruitment video?" Might as well sue Goodyear for making the tires that went on the van used in the attack. There are other cases in the pipeline that will test 230 more directly than this one. This one doesn't even get to the point where questions of S230 law are under scrutiny because the civil tort law used didn't apply.

phkahler 3y ago

>> Twitter alone cannot screen every single piece of user-generated content with 100% accuracy. Imposing liability on such services for harmful content that unintentionally falls through the crack would have disincentivized them from hosting any user-generated content," So what? People can host their own content. I'm not arguing either way, but to suggest the viability of a particular business model should influence the decision isn't right. Either treat them like common carriers and make them host everything without moderation, or hold them liable for it. Or is my thinking obsolete somehow?

Georgelemental 3y ago
That would be disastrous for small community forums, that want to moderate but don't have the resources to do it perfectly. It's hard to find a police that works well for all of Twitter-scale, HN-scale, and small-PHP-forum scale.
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
Literally the point of the CDA was to avoid that dichotomy, because that was more or less what the law was before that and Congress wanted websites to remove pornography etc., which they wouldn't be willing to do if it came with liability for hosting anything they didn't remove.
wvenable 3y ago
> So what? People can host their own content. How do they do that? It's services all the way down.
- yamtaddle 3y ago
  Providing hosting, or an Internet pipe, is pretty different from accepting user submissions and adding them to your own systems to be presented to others as you see fit, often with broad claims of ownership over submitted content.
Analemma_ 3y ago
Your thinking isn't obsolete, it's more just... incorrect about what Section 230 says and why it exists. You should probably read the TechDirt "You Are Wrong About Section 230" article[0] and get some misconceptions cleared up. [0]: 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...

jmyeet 3y ago

This is unsurprising. A fairly reliable determinant for how the Court will rule is found using a materialist analysis. That is, the Court will generally side with corporations and capital owners when given the choice. This isn't new to this particular Supreme Court. There's a long history here. The interesting part isn't how the Court decided but how it decided. It didn't address Section 230 at all and only made a very narrow ruling that isn't really applicable beyon dthis case. The Court is, and always has been, political. Skepticism remains about the safe harbor provisions of Section 230 in the conservative wing of the court so it's no surprise that this ruling is narrow so as to not set precedent.

alex_sf 3y ago
> A fairly reliable determinant for how the Court will rule is found using a materialist analysis. That is, the Court will generally side with corporations and capital owners when given the choice. This is a big claim. Do you have any evidence to support it? In the wake of someone trying to prove the same for Congress, it was conclusively shown that the opposite was true: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-study https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-... I see several opinion pieces making the same claim, but no actual studies of their decisions. More importantly: the concern can't and shouldn't be the income of the parties involved in a suit, but who is right and who isn't.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

>The justices in a 9-0 decision reversed a lower court's ruling that had revived a lawsuit against Twitter by the American relatives of Nawras Alassaf, a Jordanian man killed in a 2017 attack during New Year's celebration in a Istanbul nightclub claimed by the Islamic State militant group. > After a judge dismissed the lawsuit, the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals allowed it to proceed, concluding that Twitter had refused to take "meaningful steps" to prevent Islamic State's use of the platform. The 9th Circuit was way off. The judge dismissed the case, they revived it, and then got overturned by a unanimous Supreme Court decision.

1lint 3y ago

I think this ruling is overall a good outcome, but one loophole I see emerging around Section 230 protections is that social media sites are free to censor/shadowban content according to their ambiguous and arbitrarily enforced TOS. This allows them to favor user content they find agreeable, thus implicitly promoting their own viewpoints while still hiding behind Section 230 protections. For example if a hypothetical billionaire acquirer of a social media site wanted to (implicitly) promote a cryptocurrency project, he could shadowban negative comments against the project, leaving comments in favor of the project to dominate on the site. At the same time, Section 230 would still shield his company from liability for those comments in favor of the project. This creates a situation in which the social media is in essence promoting the project, but in a roundabout way that shields them from liability. I can see this being especially problematic as it is applied to influencing elections. In my opinion, Section 230 protections should come with some obligation to respect the principles of free speech.

jaredklewis 3y ago
I don't think that's a loophole. On the contrary, if 230 were reinterpreted to mean that online content providers were legally required to have no editorial control over user provided content, that would be a pretty significant departure from current case law. Section 230 is quite short and (to my mind) somewhat vague, which I think lends itself to different understandings. But I don't think it could be reasonably interpreted to mean that online publishers cannot moderate user content as they see fit.
- 1lint 3y ago
  I did not advocate for any reinterpretation of Section 230. Loopholes in the law should be fixed by the legislature, not by misinterpreting the law as it is written.