U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

Re:U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate o... by pclmulqdq on Saturday September 17, 2022 @01:02PM (#32879080)

By some readings of section 230, they may not be able to unless they want to be treated as a publisher of speech. However, almost nobody is going to actually argue that this is the case.

Also, IIRC moderation rules are allowed, and if your rule is "no politics on the forum" and someone talks politics, they can be banned. Same with "no racism" or "no antisemitic comments."

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate o... by magicalist on Saturday September 17, 2022 @02:31PM (#32879977)

> By some readings of section 230

No, only by a reading of a made up text that some people wish was in section 230. If you're bringing it up I'm sure you've had pointed out before that there is no publisher/platform distinction in it.

> Also, IIRC moderation rules are allowed, and if your rule is "no politics on the forum" and someone talks politics, they can be banned.

The first person you ban is going to argue with you about the definition of "politics". So many people have been through this idea before, and it always leads right back to "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone".

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate o... by pclmulqdq on Saturday September 17, 2022 @03:01PM (#32880334)

It turns out that there actually are several subjects that are pretty well defined to be "politics," and there are lots of subjects of conversation that are definitely not "politics." There is a gray area, and as a forum moderator you can choose where the line is as long as you apply the rule consistently. Most of the discussion about this right now is about the consistent application of those rules: people point out one side getting moderated more heavily on certain forums than the other side.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate o... by mijoharas on Saturday September 17, 2022 @03:14PM (#32880468)

Section 230 (c) 3. Seems pretty clear that they can moderate for anything the provider finds objectionable.

Do you think this is unclear?

> No provider or user of an interactive com- puter service shall be held liable on account of—

> (A) 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, exces- sively violent, harassing, or otherwise objec- tionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected;

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate o... by pclmulqdq on Saturday September 17, 2022 @09:41PM (#32883534)

I think the argument is that "good faith" necessarily doesn't hold when you allow one group of people to post threats, harassing content, and misinformation while you ban another group from doing the same thing. In other words, selective enforcement to favor your friends doesn't seem to be particularly good faith. I'll leave you to decide which platforms to investigate and to find selective enforcement: all of them do it.

To be clear, I don't agree with those interpretations of section 230 - and neither do many judges.

[ Parent | on HN ]