For example, see the DoJ's proposal to amend and clarify section 230 [1] [2]. Among other changes, they suggest limiting the extent to which a platform can moderate content while retaining the protection. Under this rule, if Twitter chooses to moderate aggressively then they lose the 230 protection, while a competitor that limits its moderation to illegal content and viagra spam could still receive the 230 protection.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-unveils-pr... [2] https://www.justice.gov/ag/department-justice-s-review-secti...
Also, your comment is confusing because "limiting moderation to illegal content and viagra spam" was the legal limit before section 230, if I understood correctly, so it's not making it clear what the difference is between "clarifying" and "repealing".
I won't worry about technicalities, because I have no idea what they are. But it is becoming abundantly clear that the social media companies have political power and are willing to wield it if they think that it is appropriate, similar to newspapers and television. It is reasonable that the regulations for social and non-social media converge.
This will leave an internet for those who can (i.e the big players).
Sorry, I think you actually do want a new law, not to modify this one. I have no idea how to define the websites that you want this to even apply to -- size? revenue? number of users? does twitter count? mastodon server instances? gab? reddit? texas instruments support forums? IRC servers?
This feels super arbitrary when almost every website to some extent republishes third party content.
(1) Someone has a long-established relationship with an internet service.
(2) That service makes an arbitrary and unexpected change to the nature of that relationship.
(3) That change causes material damage.
Then the site can be sued.
I don't think that would cover the current Trump business, they've been telegraphing for years that he would be banned eventually. But it might close the door to more damaging abuses of power where they strategic on timing and opens up some review of how clearly they are giving notice. Might help with the app store complaints.
That specific idea isn't going to be good - I've probably missed a bunch of relevant stuff - but maybe the idea can be salvaged and implemented with only mild damage to the internet ecosystem.
> Sorry, I think you actually do want a new law, not to modify this one.
There isn't really a difference, but sure. I don't care if changes are implemented as an amendment or a new bill.
That's not a good reason to DDoS them, though.
The DoJ proposal removes the catch-all and add "unlawful" and "promotes terrorism" to the list.
So if you moderate for a reason on that list, you keep the protection. If you moderate for other reasons, you lose it. And yes, I'm sure we'd see plenty of litigation on what constitutes harassment, terrorism, etc.
edit:
I personally think that the answer is to standardize terms-of-service documents and to make them into real legal statements that both the website visitor and owner can make claims regarding, and that those statements be registered with a federal agency. The standardization should be so tight that filing it should be a matter of picking from drop down menus on a form, and the implications of each choice should be common knowledge and taught in school. The form should be able to be filled out anonymously (as "owner of [X] site.")
If you run a site without having filed one, though, you would lose legal protections as a publisher based on modding behavior. If somebody filing suit can point out any decisions that have been defined by law as constituting a specific degree of editorial control (examples: spam-control, abuse-control, subject-control, position-on-a-subject-control, arbitrary-control, etc.) then they will be responsible for libel/tort claims as a site for individual posts. A site that has filed a terms-of-service will get the benefit of the doubt, and the ability to push liability onto completely onto posters or maybe even individual mods.
Those requirements would either be too onerous to run the walled gardens of Web 2.0 at scale and small players will have a profitable business opening again, or the big dogs would be forced to really bureaucratize or democratize, and small players will have a profitable business opening by providing them modding services at the forum level.
And sure enough, we only banned one person ever. We banned him because he made a series of scary threats against the release manager, including "I know where you live", but these threats were made off-list, it was a campaign of personal harassment because no one wanted this idiot's patches. Suppose we had forgotten to include threats of violence off-list in our expected set of rules? And remember, we were talking about our mailing lists, which are forums according to section 230. So, would we lose our section 230 protections under your proposal?
In other words, you want to create more regulations that websites have to abide by. All that does is favor the big players even more than they're favored now.
> Those requirements would either be too onerous to run the walled gardens of Web 2.0 at scale
No, they would be too onerous for any websites other than the huge walled gardens to meet. All you're doing is setting up another form of regulatory capture.
> or the big dogs would be forced to really bureaucratize or democratize
Or they'll just buy the regulations that favor them, the same way they do now.
Bluntly, "would need to be litigated to find out" isn't an acceptable answer given that the people giving this answer are the same people proposing the legislation.
Courts don't decide what the law is, they interpret it. You have to have an idea of what you want the law to be, you can't kick that off to the courts. They're trying to interpret your intention and the letter of the law you propose, not the other way around.
Let me predict how terror will end up being defined:
Promote storming the Capitol - No
Promote a free Palestine - Yes
Any fight against US oppression - No
Donald Trump's administration openly considered declaring BLM a terrorist group. I don't want someone like that deciding what does and doesn't count as neutral speech. That is a thousand times more dangerous to me than Facebook making the same decision.
It is startlingly naive for people not to understand that terrorism laws and 'neutral-speech' laws will be used against causes they agree with. Republicans in particular are kind of jumping the gun by encouraging the government to get involved with speech literally during a period where they no longer control the presidency, or the house, or the senate.
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A) It's wildly abusable by corrupt governments, and both parties in the US believe that their opponents are corrupt. You don't even need to outright censor -- you can just classify one political group's speech as harassment and make your own speech un-moderatable.
And importantly, when you do that, it doesn't just apply to one platform like Facebook, it applies to everyone. It applies to independent forums that are owned by the other party. Do you really want to give either Republicans or Democrats the ability to basically at-will strip 230 protections from opposition-run forums whenever they control all three houses?
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B) It places a burden on the courts that courts are not designed for. Courts interpret laws, they don't create them. The implication behind that is that the people making the laws have a general understanding of their own intent, and the Courts try to figure out what that intent is and what the implication of the letter of the law is. It is unreasonable for people to propose legislation that they themselves don't understand, and then ask the courts to retroactively come up with an interpretation and a set of guidelines that make the laws work. It's backwards design that will lead to a lot of unintended consequences and dumb, harmful rulings.
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C) Many of these exceptions being proposed even in this comment section are themselves contentious. It is not clear to me, at all, why pornography should have fewer 1st Amendment protections than hate speech. Both are harmful to children, both can gross people out, both cause discussions to degrade, both are things that people don't want on their platforms. Yet, there is a general assumption that of course platforms will be able to filter lewd content, they just won't be able to filter low-key racists and nazis.
This is exactly the kind of content-favoritism that the 1st Amendment was designed to prevent. It is inherently problematic for the government to privilege certain categories of speech over others. The distinction between pornography and hate speech is one of the more blatant examples of hypocrisy, but the problem also comes up in more subtle ways when people talk about banning spam, as if comment spam, self-promotion, and off-topic discussion are some kind of clear categories that everyone agrees with -- they're not.
Reddit, Hackernews, and Facebook all have very different definitions of what self-promotion and spam are. Which definition is correct? Which one should be baked into law? And why? Why is it more reasonable for us to come up with an ad-hoc definition of spam than it is for us to come up with an ad-hoc definition of hate speech? Why should spam deserve less protection under the 1st Amendment?
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D) Finally, baking these exceptions and moderating decisions into law creates an environment where we're constantly chipping away at the 1st Amendment. The way that the US works right now is that we have extremely broad legal protections, but that the systems built on top of those laws provide additional subjective moderation controlled by the free market, by individual choices, and by communities themselves. This is a good system because universal moderation decisions are practically impossible. In short, it gives us breathing room and allows us to acknowledge that moderation is both important and subjective.
When people tear away independent, private moderation decisions, the only thing that's left to protect people from harassment online is now the law. You lose that subjectivity and that acknowledgement that different forums need to be moderated differently.
People who advocate that private platforms shouldn't be able to make their own moderation decisions should not be surprised to see increased calls for the government to get involved in making certain speech illegal. Even if you could force Twitter or HN to turn into 4Chan, people aren't going to tolerate that. They are going to go to the government and ask the government and the courts to make more speech illegal -- because that's the only avenue they'll have left to protect themselves.
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I have not seen any proposal, from anyone, not just in general in comments, but from political activists, from bloggers, from lawyers -- I have not seen one single proposal for Section 230 reform that addresses those problems. They all propose an incredibly ambiguous set of restrictions on moderation and then fall back on, "we'll work the details out later." But when you're talking about restricting someone's fundamental Right to Filter[0], the details really matter.
They're far from perfect, but is it better to give the power to control digital communications to a few corporations?
Newspaper publishing is opt in; that is, anything published they chose to publish.
Websites that allow third parties to post content on them is opt out; that is, anything published did so without initial moderation.
If a website operator posts their own statements, they can theoretically be found to be libelous. They can't be held accountable for posts by other people. Newspapers potentially can (though I've never seen a court case where a newspaper was sued for something in the Opinion section), but they -chose- to publish that item.
Realistically websites should be thought of as a public bulletin board. Should you be able to sue the person who put up the bulletin board, for content that was posted to the bulletin board by other people?
> When a US Army reservist found herself at the center of a conspiracy about the coronavirus earlier this year, her life was upended.
> Hoax peddlers on the internet falsely claimed that Maatje Benassi was somehow the world's COVID-19 patient zero. Over time, conspiracy theorists posted at least 70 videos across multiple YouTube channels claiming that Benassi had brought the virus into the world. Along with those videos came death threats, which Benassi and her husband, Matt, took seriously.
> But at first, the couple did not know how to respond. Trolls hiding behind aliases on the internet were almost impossible to find, and the Benassis could not sue YouTube for allowing the content to be posted because of a now-controversial law known as Section 230.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/section-230-60-minutes-2021-01-...
https://revisionlegal.com/internet-law/defamation-attorney/i...
A) post video to YouTube for $0
b) contact lawyer to subpoena YT and then sue a jerk? $50,000
Worse, what if the defamer is able to hide their identity or from a jursdiction that doesn't care about an order from US courts? In that case, even paying for a lawyer won't help.
If you add black to a white background, you get black. If you remove white of a white background, you get black.
If the intention behind the action is the same, and the outcome is the same, should the legality of it hinge on the action?
Likewise, the New York Times is liable for the articles published by its own writers, but it bears no liability for the comments section.
The CDA draws a bright line between content "authored" by a firm and content "made available." In practice, that line is fuzzy.
As a hypothetical example, Twitter probably should face liability if it took a random tweet (say) accusing Bezos of pedophilia and made an editorial decision to promote that tweet to all its users, but it could still plausibly claim that it was just making the content available.
It's a complicated topic, and I don't know where the best balance lies.
That's what I meant, but you're right, I wasn't entirely clear. Thanks.
That's a protection that neither social media nor the NYT (for comments) would have without Section 230 if they do any moderation (at least according to Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co.)
Yes, the First Amendment does protect speech that gives false information. We had a recent HN thread on just this topic:
There already exists laws that act very similarly to what people are proposing.
Specifically these laws are called common carrier laws, as they apply to phone systems, for example.
Do you believe that the existing laws, that apply to phone networks, are tyrannical or worse or bad?
I don't think it is unreasonable to consider how our existing laws, that most people find reasonable, such as the ones that already apply to phone companies, could be updated to the modern era, so as to apply to newer communication networks.
I'm happy to let people I don't like have their own websites. I don't want to be forced to let them use mine to post about how I should die.
One company moderated their content, they were found liable for libel in user content in court. The other company did not moderate their content, they were not found liable for their user content. Anecdotally one of these services was seen as the good one and the other as the crappy one because of their moderation policies.
While social media didn't exist at the time in its current form, I'd argue this is still very relevant today. Without section 230 websites would only be able to moderate for illegal content, and there's a mountain of stuff you wouldn't want to see online that isn't technically illegal, and a lot of people who will try to put it in front of you if given the oppurtunity.
The concern is that absent Section 230, a provider needs to either be (almost) totally hands-off or they have to strictly moderate (which isn't really viable for the modern web and social media).
We hope that the justice department would act in good faith, without political influence, but we're fresh out of an intensive course on how naive it is to rely on that.
The reality is what this article outlines towards the end; this is already covered by the 1st Amendment in large part, Section 230 does the bulk of its work in simplifying court proceedings. If section 230 were changed, it'd likely be unconstitutional anyway.
I think the relevant part is that one definition of "defund" is (from Google answer box/featured snippet, only provided definition):
>prevent from continuing to receive funds.
So some people upon first hearing the phrase "defund the police" understand it to mean "prevent the police from continuing to receive funds". Without any qualification, this is naturally understood to mean "all funds", which is not the concrete policy proposal behind (what seems to be most uses of) the phrase.
I myself had this understanding of the phrase "defund the police" when I first heard it (which is not something that I would support) but I do support most of the concrete policy proposals behind the "defund the police" movement that involve reallocating funds from the police to social services and other programs. I would be hesitatant to use the phrase myself though, because this interpretation seems quite common among people not "extremely online".
https://www.vox.com/2016/7/14/12189446/mike-pence-planned-pa...
I often also frankly wish that 10% of it would fund a Sharia-style hangman, but perhaps that is my inner misanthrope.
The point of "defund the police" is that that funding would be better used in treating the underlying causes of said drugs problem.
As far as I can tell, there's no concrete replacement proposed for section 230, just a general wish for less protection for these platforms. Complete police and prison abolition is a much more thorough and considered philosophy.
That assumption of cohesiveness of argument is what I’m trying to get at with my question. The argument we should be having is in the terms of the academic work, rather than the one-line phrase.
My point overall is that no equivalent academic work has been presented that actually attempts to remove Section 230 protections (as the protections stem ultimately from the first amendment), so it’s not fair to compare the two.
I may have gotten separated a bit from that point along the way, so I apologize for my lack of clarity!
I have never been clear on whether they wanted to eliminate police entirely, or turn it volunteer- and donation-only.
Perhaps some people view it as “reduce police funding” but many mean it to mean “$0 to police” and that’s the definition of defund.
Words matter and language matters and trying to nuance a pretty simple statement like “defund” is hard for people to understand. Especially with people, friends of mine to be specific, literally mean to defund and remove police.
I know no one involved with the Seattle CHAZ [0] but, for example, this is a group that wants to defund police.
If the intent is to reevaluate police funding then a label like “police reform” makes more sense. Calling something “defund police” and meaning reform is dumb, it’s foolish when there are also people using the label who want to defund the police.
I had a conversation with someone using the phrase ACAB who then explained that not really all cops are bad. This is really confusing to me as to why make a statement that I don’t believe in.
I think we need serious improvement in how we fund and operate police. I want reform and work toward reform. But small, suburban, peaceful city has 100 police officers for 50k people and we have military vehicles and whatnot. I want to work on this and make it better but conversations seem current divided between people who want to increase and zero out the budget and people trying to improve are getting shouted down or ignored. So we’re sticking with the normal increase 1% a year.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Autonomous_Zone
I don’t think I need someone to clarify, but it does take me extra time to figure out if someone is taking about the literal or figurative “defund” idea.
All you can do is adjust the shield from liability that 230 provides. If you decrease the size of that shield (as the DOJ proposal does), private companies will further restrict user activity (not expand it) until it fits under the shield again. That is true whether you are talking about a full repeal or only an incremental change.
- No more centralized social media platform, everyone has to be responsible for ones own speech. Alternate technology will emerge to make it so easy to create ones own micro blog and everyone can subscribe.
off-topic, but I've never seen anyone admit this, or even suggest it, before now. It would probably strengthen the case if that was more obvious.
I guess the conclusion that repealing it would result in more censorship is based on the idea that platforms would moderate more aggressively to try and avoid all liability. When really, that’s simple not possible, and they would have to abandon the practice all together. Well, the larger platforms would have to at least.
Can't do that, it'll hurt the bottomline. Most users aren't keen on using platforms filled with spam, porn, trolls, and hate speech. And if you don't believe this, ask yourself why a lot of these sites don't allow porn, spam, trolls, or hate speech right now. It's partly moral, but mostly because it's bad for business.
Stricter moderation will be the more likely outcome, and we'll have even less free speech than we have now.
In fact, Twitter already does verify users for some accounts—that’s where the blue checks come from—and many of them are the most profligate misinformation peddlers. I think Twitter also requires new users to register with a phone number, and Google+ and Facebook both had/have real name policies, and none of that has done a thing to stem the flood of misinformation online.
Facebook et al have no real barrier to fake accounts.
Just like when I say repeal 230, I'm seriously saying get rid of the thing or at least rework it so people aren't being censored by non non govt but still very real monopolies on speech.
The problem is: in terms of legal risk, "just allow everything" is safer, since it's quite expensive or even infeasible to completely moderate the platform. But Congress wanted to encourage internet companies to do moderation for things like pornography and other "indecent" content (this is part of the Communications Decency Act, after all), which is why this "Good Samaritan" section exists: to remove the specter of liability that could arise from even light-touch moderation. (But note that despite that title, the language is broad and not conditional on the presence or absence of any moderation scheme.)
Repeal has a few possibilities, one of which is as you said, just eliminate user-controlled content completely from some spaces, or moderate it extremely heavily (like requiring manual review before something is posted). But, the other extreme is also possible, of totally removing moderation to escape liability the other way around.
No it's not a possibility. Social media is paid for by advertising and no large advertiser wants to have their ads show up next to child pornography. Just look at what happened with Youtube.
Yes, no one is going to run a service that hosts user created content if doing so means that they can be raided by the FBI in the middle of the night should a user find it funny to upload illegal content to a company's servers.
Only entities that can throw millions or billions of dollars at censoring illegal content would take on the risk of hosting user uploaded content on their own servers.
Which that ends up in regulatory capture areas that prevent new competition and innovation.
Taken beyond digital content, making the producer of a service or good liable for what a user/consumer may do is a horrible precedent. If any crime is committed or problematic content uploaded, the user is committing the crime and responsible for the content not the whole service.
Already there are massive moderation services that are here and more coming. Is this something we really want beyond just removing content that incites violence or is illegal and taken down when notified. Trying to pre-empt everyone's user generated content and take it down is problematic for many reasons including competition and allowing smaller/medium players in the game.
Most of the systems are sufficient that just have reporting that can be removed by users if the content does violate rights rules like inciting violence, illegal content or copyright infringement.
We all know how auto AI driven or and overzealous competition falsely reporting moderation can end up with systems like Youtube's copyright strike system, essentially a harshly tunes and easily exploited system by bad actors.
We have to be very careful and it is safer on the side of less moderation and blaming users not the service. If we don't, big players already established could easily use this as regulatory capture and even stifle competition by merely uploading content to competitive services that will then get them in trouble.
Wholesale shutting down services or making the barrier to entry too high and costly with massive moderation services that amount to regulatory capture will prevent competition and stifle freedoms, instead of blaming users that are creating the problems, that is the wrong way. If we blame the services we can end up with a chilling effect on sharing ideas, information and content besides just obliterating competition.
We are going to turn the internet and freedom into an authoritarian Vogon-tastic bureaucratic Borg if we aren't careful. A hands-off system, with reporting or blocking systems for content that is offensive/illegal which are already common, is the best way. We don't want any of that Vogon poetry.
Any system of sufficient size will have bad things, you deal with those bad things individually not shut the whole thing down.
Karl Popper's take on this:
> The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly paradoxical idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.
I personally feel like moderation has gone way too far with social media, even though I'm far from politically conservative and definitely not a supporter of Trump. I think sites should lose some protected status if they start moderating excessively, as an incentive to moderate even less. Conversely, I think they should be granted a degree of immunity if they do.
Whereas on a web forum such as this, moderation is necessary for conversations to not descend into chaos.
Frankly I don't understand why people think moderation has gone too far. Is it that e.g. Twitter shouldn't be allowed to silence unpopular opinions because silencing unpopular opinions is always bad? Or is it that it's bad because Twitter is huge and influential. Would you have a problem with someone silencing a gun control fanatic who has appeared unwelcome on their private little gun collectors' website?
I can't tell you what it means for US law, as I don't know what laws surround this. I can tell you that the lack of safe harbor laws has stopped me from making certain technology products in my country though, as the risk is too great.
Give people an upload mechanism and inevitably it will receive material that could land you in jail. Maybe it comes from users, maybe it comes from bots, it doesn't matter. If you're on the hook, it's a no brainer to not get involved if there are no laws protecting your platform from liability.
[1] https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/legislative-history
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prod....
Instead, platforms would be treated as though they had consciously decided to publish every publically-available comment/file upload/post/etc. That would probably mean manually moderating everything, and rejecting a lot of it for capricious reasons.
But honestly, I am not convinced that that would be a bad thing. It would certainly encourage more people to create their own publishing mediums, and it might help break up the titanic oligarchs that currently occupy the market.
Put it this way: I would happily give up sites like HN to remove the business model that makes mass-scale social media viable. Sites like Twitter and Facebook have inflicted unconscionable harm on our collective humanity, and they have demonstrated a complete inability to self-regulate.
It would also cost however much a lawyer charges for helping to moderate every submission. Because I doubt the average WordPress blogger is familiar with all possible laws the submissions could violate. Or can make correct judgements based on precedent for things like copyright works.
Honestly though, the blogger would probably only need to pay for one hour of a lawyer's time. That lawyer would say "Turning off the comments is your best bet" and then round up to an hour for billing.
This strikes me as a solution to the problem of censorship in the same way that "just buy your medical supplies from Mexico" is a solution to US healthcare costs.
That means that you aren't going to pay $100 for a WordPress site, because allowing you to upload content without the protection of Section 230 is too much of a risk to bear for only $100.
Absent Section 230, the hosting provider could potentially be liable for anything published. They already do have to take down illegal content if they're informed about it. Section 230 predates modern social media.
If I were responsible for comments, I would do either of two things:
a) just shut down the forum, b] use a paid commenting service that would come with moderation. This means that people who would want to comment would probably pay some fee for that privilege.
Accidentally, b) is unusual for us, but a quite sustainable model. Surely more sustainable than current "show ads for free stuff", which seems to be hitting its limits.
Note that a side effect of this is that you would no longer have moderation control yourself. And how many of those paid services would exist, given the legal costs of running them?
What makes you think there wouldn't in practice be the same centralization that we see today -- one or two paid services that handle moderation for the entire Internet because only they have the lawyers necessary to do so. The only difference would be that every independent forum that didn't use them would be opening themselves up to significant legal risk.
At least right now if I set up a forum with Open Source software on a Linode server, I don't need to worry that turning off Google Captcha or avoiding a 3rd-party centralized service for my comments will get me sued.
One important difference is that the networking effect is not as big as in case of FB et al.
But yes, the general trend in maturing markets is toward some kind of oligopoly. It is, I believe, time to reactivate antitrust laws, we are well beyond the point where they should have been used.
Intuitively I expected political dissidents would move off Twitter first, but I can see how the opposite happened instead.
> (c) Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material (1) Treatment of publisher or speaker > 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.
Wouldn't repealing Section 230 mean more censorship and restrictions as the liability would be too great to be on the hook for what some random account might decide to publish, no?