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Because they're using 47 U.S. Code § 230 (c)(1) to avoid responsibility for what's said on their platforms. That section says: "No provider or user of an inter

Because they're using 47 U.S. Code § 230 (c)(1) to avoid responsibility for what's said on their platforms. That section says: "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." We're in this weird place where social media platforms want to claim that it's their speech in some cases, and not their speech in other cases, and that just seems unfair. This has been resolved in the past by phone companies and similar platforms being declared common carriers - and that's true even if there are a bunch of competitors available. Why shouldn't that be true of social media platforms?

TulliusCicero 3y ago
They're taking the only rational position available. * Absolutely censoring nothing is an insane position to take. Even just spammers would flood such a site, let alone super extreme people like outright Nazis or KKK members. The typical person would have no interest in sharing a website with people like that, and they would flee. Very few people want to be posting on 4chan (and IIRC even 4chan has some moderation these days, underscoring the point). * On the other hand, you can't realistically expect a company to take full responsibility for every piece of user generated content immediately. There's no way to do this well at scale, other than to use algorithms to get rid of what seems like the worst stuff, and deal with the grey areas when users submit reports of bad behavior. It's not feasible for a site that lets users upload random things, resulting in millions of pieces of new content daily, to manually approve every single one.