The problem with all of the repeal proposals is that none of them actually address the problem.
Suppose you're a search engine. One of the search hits is making a factual claim. The search engine naturally has no way to validate the claim. That would require an investigation, giving the accused an opportunity to defend their claim and then having a neutral arbiter make a decision. This essentially describes a trial in court.
We already have civil litigation. If you prove a defamation claim, you can have the court order it to be removed by the host or search engine.
Anything Congress could do about this would be an attempt to end run around the First Amendment, i.e. de facto require private companies to operate a shadow court system and then pretend the First Amendment doesn't apply even though it's being instituted through legislation.
It should be obvious why we don't want this -- if the government is imposing penalties only for not censoring things then you're going to get one-sided suppression of dissent, but if you punish them for over-censoring too then you're just cloning the actual court system and might as well use the real one.
The root of the problem here isn't Section 230. It's that these platforms are too large, so that any mistake they make gets amplified across a billion people instead of a million. Break them up.
Twitter banned accounts for challenging the effectiveness of wear masks because they are "anti-science", yet it didn't do a thing when people were challenging CNN/WHO/CDC's messages that wearing masks was unnecessary and would cause public panic in March 2020.
I'd support repealing of section 230 jsut for this level of double standards.
Maybe you just want 230 repealed so the networks can be burned to the ground through a mass of frivolous lawsuits. If so ... no?
> So when you see Trump or other conservatives calling for a Section 230 repeal, sometimes it is just an effort to inflict pain to try and get the platforms to do what they want.
IE: Violent posts from SJWs attacking white people and supporting violence in BLM/AntiFA "protests"? Many MANY still standing and complete silence from the platforms during YEARS of violence, hate and instigation...
"violent posts" from conservatives supporting thousands of examples of voter fraud and calling for peaceful marches - just like Trump called for - while questioning the "truth" about mask mandates that have changed on political whims (Fauci: for masks, against masks, for masks, against masks, etc)? THOSE have to be taken down with extreme prejudice...
The double standards the platforms are pushing is so extreme that "peaceful scholars" are honored... while American Presidents are banned...
You can, for four years, say "russia hacked our elections" with the evidence being a single foreigner paid by the DNC for spy information. But you can't say "democrats hacked our elections" with thousands of Americans presenting evidence.
The article is true that no one is going to be happy... but that won't change while the platforms are the massive hypocrites that everyone in the world can see on full display as they push 1984's "Truth".
True or not, we mustn't let a potentially minority-held opinion overtake the public sphere because the next generation will most certainly believe it because that's all they'll know. That is why absolute free debate is crucial and feelings should have no part in it.
I'm against both... you defend one.
This is not true.
> with the evidence being a single foreigner paid by the DNC for spy information.
This is not true
https://www.newsweek.com/rnc-chair-says-11000-people-have-co...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8936201/Kayleigh-Mc...
> this is not true
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/clint...
https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/24/politics/fusion-gps-clinton-c...
https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/409817-russia-collusion-bo...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/clinton-campaign-dnc-helped-fun...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dnc-clinton-campaign-paid-for-r...
Example: My campaign was spied upon.
Even to this day, the left is caught up in lies... "find the fraud" for example was just proven an out right lie.
Honestly, how can you believe the left as they scream LIAR! when they support Biden/Harris? Biden can't speak without lying and Harris couldn't even win her own state because she's laughable?
Trumps got problems galore... but he's still 100x better than anything on the left - which is why he won in 2016... and why they had to cheat in 2020.
Instagram just shows me all the stuff my friends post. That's it, as far as I can tell. It's great. Facebook amplifies some things and doesn't show me others. If it wants to be in that game, of distorting informational impact, it needs to take responsibility for what it's amplifying.
Unfortunately, Instagram is not just "showing you everything your friends post".
> make them responsible for promoting or curating the content, if they choose to do so
And internet should be back to BBS days where public content are moderated by volunteers in each community separately?
Now I think section 230 is not a necessity for an open internet. It just changed how internet works by making centralized business easier.
BBS operators would be equally responsible, and won't run BBSes. Same with chat rooms and IRC channels — their operators could be sued, so they won't run anything like that for public service.
Of course, a web forum could still be run over Tor, hiding the webmaster and the participants. There would be no one to sue, so whatever inflammatory content were on such a forum, it would stay unless the moderators cared.
If the point is to stifle the public discussion and push it underground, then removing the protection of operators from liability for UGC is the way to go.
I don't remember BBSs constantly got sued in the old days.
[0] https://www.eff.org/cases/steve-jackson-games-v-secret-servi...
Services doing that laborious work for no cost has let OSS authors more easily collaborate and just get work done on projects. They've also enabled small projects to just exist since the author doesn't need to even know about the infrastructure needed to host their code.
You can, and many do, self host Github equivalents. It's not like Github used all the oxygen in the room and monopolized source control.
The same is true for web fora. You can go host your own forum/fediverse site right now pretty cheaply. Domain names are cheap and TLS certs are free. There's nothing stopping you or anyone else from doing that. Plenty of people already are doing so.
Centralized platforms come into being because of network effects. You can host your own forum (or whatever) but that doesn't mean people will come join it. Lots of groups formerly served by on-topic forums moved to Facebook groups because all the participants were already there. It's no-cost vs low-cost and all of the infrastructure is managed by Someone Else. Infrastructure maintenance is a pretty thankless task.
Starting a new group on Facebook (or wherever) is pretty frictionless if all the participants are already on Facebook. There's a lot more friction starting a new little island of discussion with a forum.
By wanting to go back to the "BBS days" you're wanting network effects to not be a thing that exist. You're also somehow expecting people to have the technical chops to run a site. In the "BBS days" only a minority of a minority of people even had the modems to host or call a BBS. Just by the nature of the home computer market those people would be more technically adept than the average person.
My mom, a non-technical user, can join a Facebook group very easily. She's not going to seek out let alone join some forum even if it's dedicated to the same subject as the Facebook group. She's also not going to run her own forum to talk about some topic where she can simply and easily start a Facebook group.
People seem to forget that in the "good old days" of the early web it was mostly the technically adept building and browsing sites. In terms of conversations had or bytes transferred the vast majority was on closed platforms like AOL and CompuServe. Even in the "BBS days" (the latter era) Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL were far more popular than BBSes. Even with a BBS being "free" online services had a national reach and just far more resources available. Unless you had a big multi-line BBS in your area dialing into a board could be a crap shoot.
The olden days were not necessarily better than today despite nostalgia and fetishization. Some stuff today is not better than things in the olden days. I'm not saying I like or support Facebook or Twitter or that centralization is unalloyed good. Centralization doesn't just happen in a vacuum and for no reason. Usability is very important as well.
Of course there's more possible alternatives.
If I sue you and lose, you're out the cost of your defense. You'd have to sue me for your expenses. While an attorney might take the suit on contingency you're guaranteed to win and unlikely to recoup all of your original expenses even if you do.
Frivolous lawsuits are not in any was a boogeyman. One need look no further than bullshit DMCA takedowns and bullshit patent suits filed in East Texas to see the model for frivolous lawsuits with a Section 230 repeal.
They certainly were in the 90's and 2000's. This lawsuit[1] became a talking point against "frivolous lawsuits", and ammo in a PR war for tort reform[2] in the US.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tort_reform#Frivolous_lawsuits
No small company would, but some multi-billion dollar companies might. They sure would censor the hell out of any user content, though, or else they'd run the risk of being raided in the middle of the night by the FBI if a user found it funny to upload something illegal to their servers.
Which brings us to the OP's argument, that repealing Section 230 wouldn't do what the repeal proponents want. The end result of repealing Section 230 of the CDA is that total online censorship becomes the norm, and only giant companies would be able to benefit from the limited user-generated content that's allowed to exist after the repeal.
Websites/forums exist in countries without an s230 equivalent.
That has nothing to do with section 230. Websites weren't responsible for user-generated content before section 230 and they still wouldn't be if it went away.
What section 230 does is extend the same immunity that content-blind hosts have always had to hosts that modify the content they get from users.
This comment upthread:
> If a user writes some content that stays as a comment somewhere and it is defamatory, then the user is responsible. So far, so good. This is what 230 used to address.
is wrong. Section 230 didn't address that case; the user was always the responsible party. To see section 230 at work, you need a more complicated setup:
1. User A posts defamatory content to a web forum.
2. User B posts defamatory content to the same forum.
3. The forum operators see User B's post, are outraged, and take it down.
This is where section 230 makes a difference. It says that, even though the forum takes control of user-generated content for the purpose of expressing its own views, it still isn't liable for content that it hasn't directly touched. In the absence of section 230, the forum would bear liability for user A's defamatory post as soon as they took down user B's post.
There's no problem hosting user-generated content without section 230. You only have a problem if you editorialize on top of that content.
230 was written for a pre-algorithmic feed age where user content was displayed in a fixed context setup by the provider. The provider chose the frame, the user the painting.
Now users send content to a machine that is constantly making new frames to better match the pictures it is given. The picture is still the picture - still made by the user, but the site bears more responsibility for its presentation because its 'framing' is based on the contents / reaction to the picture. However, I do not think a total transformation has occurred. Choosing how to display the picture doesn't change its contents.
Writing a law that sensibly engages with the huge diversity of algorithmic strategies would be difficult even for skilled legislators (if only we had some!). Maybe the answer is in formalizing shadowbanning in some way?
If the algorithm simply prioritizes say the most upvoted comment, is that the same? Or how about prioritizes the most watched/liked video?
I ask this because it’s basically impossible to not prioritize content unless a website is a mere directory of user information with no search box. Where do you think the distinction lies between being responsible for user engagement and not?
People can search for things they want to follow if they want too. It is crazy, logging back into Facebook, how far it has gone away from the chronological feed of your friends that it started off as.
This used to be handled by the user clicking a button that said "sort by most votes" or the top of a column called "votes." Now it's a mystery how to handle that no one could possibly know how to do.
There's more depth to the subject.
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;
That's section 230.
Yes if it's defamatory or libel. Then section 230 is explicitly allowing the platforms to censor.
The 2 sides of the problem come when it's speech that isnt listed right there. It can be offensive, unpopular, or controversial but section 230 does not allow the platforms to censor those subjects. Section 230 outright says constitutionally protected.
So the main problem is that platforms have illegally broken good Samaritan protections and have effectively removed their section 230 protection on their own.
However, that's problem #2. Section 230 never made allowances for punishment or lawsuits. If Twitter lost their section 230 protection, they stop existing the next day. That's the only punishment but that would be tremendous wealth destruction.
But the real issue at play is that an algorithm decides that this content will increase engagement within the platform. And it actually does. Now, I think the company behind this algorithm is responsible for the defamation. For example Facebook uses the current law to hide and so all its fight with disinformation is subject to keeping the same engagement levels, which is obviously a very hard task. (We tried hard, but the problem is too difficult).
While the first case is good to address, the second one has severally outgrown it. Thus, so many people are even willing to give up something in order to address it.