'Section 230 says that "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" (47 U.S.C. § 230). In other words, online intermediaries that host or republish speech are protected against a range of laws that might otherwise be used to hold them legally responsible for what others say and do. The protected intermediaries include not only regular Internet Service Providers (ISPs), but also a range of "interactive computer service providers," including basically any online service that publishes third-party content. Though there are important exceptions for certain criminal and intellectual property-based claims, CDA 230 creates a broad protection that has allowed innovation and free speech online to flourish'.
Well... if you really want to get into it. Twitter can’t “fact check” the original statement. Because it was a prediction.
It hasn’t happened yet. It’s unlikely to be mass scale fraud, of course, but it’s a future event.
It’s his opinion / prediction. As wrong as it is, that isn’t something they should “fact check”.
Twitter picked a really bad tweet to make a stand on. Like it or not, they chose to editorialize someone else’s content, that’s a publisher.
They didn’t have to “break a law” to now be liable for other content they “publish”. That’s all the EO is, that Section 230 doesn’t apply to publishers.
"I believe that if we allow people to leave their homes, everyone will die of Covid-19". Narrator: "There is no evidence that everyone will die of Covid-19, in fact there is plenty of evidence that everyone will not die of Covid-19".
At which point you claim that the original statement, because it included opinion, could not be fact checked, even though presenting sources that counter the priors required for the claims to make sense is a completely reasonable thing to do.
They are a private company and can do as they like... but if they’re going to “take ownership” of information on their service they are breaking the spirit of neutral carriers and Section 230.
This seems like an odd hill to die on. Surely they could have fact checked 100 different Trump tweets with actual misinformation and not just his concerns/prediction.
I am of the opinion they wanted to do this for awhile, planned it out poorly, and pulled the trigger at the wrong tweet.
Section 230 has nothing to do with neutral carriers. Section 230 does not mention, imply, or otherwise suggest that there is such thing as a "carrier", much less that one need be "neutral".
Here's what it 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
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
There's a bunch more, but it's all fluff or irrelevant. There are no relevant obligations (there is one obligation that the law has, it relates to kid-friendly modes in websites).
Note that there is no categorization as "publisher" or "platform". You are protected from certain kinds of content. The New York Times, who clearly publishes their own content, still has Section 230 protections for comments made in the comment box on their articles, because that content is not made by the NYT, but by another individual.
Under section 230, you can only lose protection on a specific piece of content if you are deemed to be the publisher of that specific piece of content. So the worst thing that can happen to twitter here is that they are determined to be the publisher of Trump's tweet for the purposes of things like libel and copyright lawsuits.
Given that, can you explain what spirit of the law is violated, and what spirit of "neutral carriers" (do you mean common carriers?) is related or to this?