4 ms·

The CDA was about making it clearly criminal to send obscene content to minors via the internet. Section 230 was intended to clarify the common carrier role of

The CDA was about making it clearly criminal to send obscene content to minors via the internet. Section 230 was intended to clarify the common carrier role of ISPs and similar providers of third party content. It does have a subsection to clarify that attempting to remove objectionable content doesn't remove your common carrier protections, but I don't believe that was a response to pre-CDA status quo.

dragonwriter 2y ago
> The CDA was about making it clearly criminal to send obscene content to minors via the internet. Basically true. > Section 230 was intended to clarify the common carrier role of ISPs and similar providers of third party content. No, it wasn't, and you can tell that because there is literally not a single word to that effect in Section 230. It was to enable information service providers to exercise editorial control over user-submitted content without acquiring publisher-style liability, because the alternative, giving liability decisions occurring at the time and the way providers were reacting to them, was that any site using user-sourced content at scale would, to mitigate legal risk, be completely unmoderated, which was the opposite of the vision the authors of Section 230 and the broader CDA had for the internet. There are no "common carrier" obligations or protections in Section 230. The terms of the protection are the opposite of common carrier, and while there are limitations on the protections, there are no common carrier like obligations attached to them. >
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> The CDA was about making it clearly criminal to send obscene content to minors via the internet. That part of the law was unconstitutional and pretty quickly got struck down, but it still goes to the same point that the intent of Congress was for sites to remove stuff and not be "common carriers" that leave everything up. > Section 230 was intended to clarify the common carrier role of ISPs and similar providers of third party content. It does have a subsection to clarify that attempting to remove objectionable content doesn't remove your common carrier protections, but I don't believe that was a response to pre-CDA status quo. If you can forgive Masnick's chronic irateness he does a decent job of explaining the situation: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/08/29/third-circuits-section-230-tiktok-ruling-deliberately-ignores-precedent-defies-logic/ https://www.techdirt.com/2024/08/29/third-circuits-section-2...

dragonwriter 2y ago

> The CDA was about making it clearly criminal to send obscene content to minors via the internet. Basically true. > Section 230 was intended to clarify the common carrier role of ISPs and similar providers of third party content. No, it wasn't, and you can tell that because there is literally not a single word to that effect in Section 230. It was to enable information service providers to exercise editorial control over user-submitted content without acquiring publisher-style liability, because the alternative, giving liability decisions occurring at the time and the way providers were reacting to them, was that any site using user-sourced content at scale would, to mitigate legal risk, be completely unmoderated, which was the opposite of the vision the authors of Section 230 and the broader CDA had for the internet. There are no "common carrier" obligations or protections in Section 230. The terms of the protection are the opposite of common carrier, and while there are limitations on the protections, there are no common carrier like obligations attached to them. >

AnthonyMouse 2y ago

> The CDA was about making it clearly criminal to send obscene content to minors via the internet. That part of the law was unconstitutional and pretty quickly got struck down, but it still goes to the same point that the intent of Congress was for sites to remove stuff and not be "common carriers" that leave everything up. > Section 230 was intended to clarify the common carrier role of ISPs and similar providers of third party content. It does have a subsection to clarify that attempting to remove objectionable content doesn't remove your common carrier protections, but I don't believe that was a response to pre-CDA status quo. If you can forgive Masnick's chronic irateness he does a decent job of explaining the situation: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/08/29/third-circuits-section-230-tiktok-ruling-deliberately-ignores-precedent-defies-logic/ https://www.techdirt.com/2024/08/29/third-circuits-section-2...