Do you think phone service providers should be sued for conversations their subscribers have? Similar thing.
Also without it you could sue companies like cloud flare, aws or anyone providing hosting infrastructure.
I think if they were just going to be ISPs then 230 should apply, but it seems odd that a company can select a piece of content and show it to a million people and then not be responsible. And then alternately, they can choose to remove content due to automated and manual rules, not required by law. It seems like they should either be regulated or not.
It seems off that if I solicit articles from random and print them out and mail them, I’m liable for libel. But if I review them all and publish them on a server then I’m no longer liable.
To be more precise, phone companies only block based on regulators and consistent (at least theoretically) rules based on legal authorities given to regulators.
New media isn't paid for by its consumers. Their computer, their rules. Nobody is wringing their hands over the decades of censorship by broadcast radio and television for "community standards".
I don’t think the need for regulation depends much on how much I pay to use the service or whether the publisher is responsible for content.
Another example is that even publishers of free newspapers get sued for libel.
It isn't their job --at least not what I think the job the US Constitution should protect-- to create their own version of what he said, embellish it or modify it in any way, in support or opposition.
I don't want news anchors to creatively interpret reality for me. I want facts. The interpretation is mine, not theirs. Most of them are politically biased liars.
It doesn't appear that they even have a duty to the buyer for it to be a good and useful work.
The duty you want to imagine is real would seem to be impossible to reasonably provide because the cost of paying out every time they were wrong would mean books would all cost $500 and in turn the book stores would all shut down. The only viable way to sell books would be to run a website overseas in a less insane jurisdiction selling epubs.
If you wanted to take it to the next level and enforce liability for anything that goes over the wire you could just give up 99.9% of content in the universe?
In other words: they aren't expected to have actually read every word of every book they sell. Publishers, newspapers, etc, are. But if a book defames me on page 154, the law doesn't hold the bookstore responsible unless it knew. Once it does know, you could probably sue. But that's not the same as treating it like a publisher- it's a different standard.
profit motive for recommendation/amplification is probably what damages humans at scale
If they have even an incidental financial benefit from this behavior and take human or algorithmic steps to encourage it on their platform, then yes.
> Also without it you could sue companies like cloud flare, aws or anyone providing hosting infrastructure.
And yet, telephone companies were explicitly not liable under previous doctrine without 230 even existing. The idea of a "common carrier" far predates section 230.
I think it's fair to ask if companies like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube should honestly deserve that common carrier status.
If a TV station had a call in show where the callers were pre-screened to be slanderous, would that be an example of a publisher or a common carrier?
I don't know the answers but it's not so obviously clear cut as running the pipes.
That presumes the account can be traced to a real person.
I'm all for having solid end to end identity verification, but that opens a lot of doors governments and companies dont want us to have. For one it makes end to end encryption easy, as its equivalent to ensuring you aren't being MITMed.
Not only that I think anonymity is important. Without you could also just as easily be threatened or harassed by people online. It cut both ways.
If someone threatens or harasses you online, and they are not anonymous you can take action. Like you say, both ways.
You can always have sites that drop your identity. It's technically easier to drop information than to verify it.
Section 230 also protects those providing infrastructure for the internet as they do not have common carrier status. Also where do you draw the line between hosting and not? I can use twitter and many other sites to host images. Alot these sites grew out of an easier to use means to host content.
Like what about sites like word-press and medium that also provide easy to use platforms for blogging. Should only the technically inclined be allowed to get hosting?
Section 230 extends that regime to websites that host other people's content.
Specialty bookstores are even less like an ISP, they might restrict themselves to one or a handful of genres. Leftist bookstores have an ideological filter. And so on. None of them are like ISPs at all.
It would be weird to make Medium treated like a publisher for hosting a defamatory blog post while a bookstore selling a bound copy of the same content would not be. That's why section 230 is a thing!
Is that necessarily true though? If someone spews libelous content on Twitter, are they not individually susceptible to being sued for libel?
Even then he still was sued, the case was not tossed for lack of standing or merit. The judge still thought there was a case worth arguing.
Almost all our tech media products default to treating things as "this is good enough to broadcast to the world until someone proves we should take it down" instead of defaulting to "this is probably low-value dreck that's not worth much distribution."
This is certainly easier from a product design perspective... but does it really make sense?
However, I do think it's a step in the right direction and makes sense. After all, if your platform is promoting specific content by your own actions/volition, then it's no longer just content posted by some user, but it's now being used or reposted/linked by the company that owns the platform for monetary gain (I would guess ToS would solidify this with some boilerplate statement saying they can use your content to make money and to promote the platform etc).
Knowing about history can be important when evaluating and thinking about some of these ideas. Most people I have seen posting comments to your comment are rehashing arguments that were at the core of the Cubby v. CompuServe some thirty years ago.
FB and Twitter MODERATE and control everything on their systems. This places them in a position of responsibility. While IANAL, I think I can say this is a case of legal precedent. Are there cases that reverse or modify Cubby v. CompuServe?
For all their AI prowess they sure as heck seem to just suck at it when it comes to moderating for quality. These platforms are oceans, no, galaxies, of lies, misinformation and manipulation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubby,_Inc._v._CompuServe_Inc.
Totally made sense at the time. A quarter of a century later, these are now the largest companies in the history of humanity. We should at least be able to discuss what kind of liability we should be able to put on them.
By your logic, the phone companies would be legally liable for everything that users say or plan on phone calls.
- Pre-internet, generally speaking the only entities capable of widely spreading facts about private individuals were things you could sue for defamation or libel: newpapers, tv stations etc.
- Now Twitter, Facebook and YouTube can spread defamatory information about anyone without paying a similar price.
- It's true that the services will eventually accede to taking the content down (although in one case, that of a woman murdered on camera, it seemed to have proved difficult/impossible to fully do so given all the reposts).
- But they let it be put it up there in the first place! Once its up, all the damage to someone's life can be done in a day.