Why? This is seems like a total non-sequitur. It's pretty obvious that the individual posting illegal content is the person responsible for it and not the platform it's posted to, unless the platform is soliciting or refusing to remove said content. The anti-230 reasoning seems purely motivated by punitive thinking rather than what actually makes sense in reality.
> Those things are great, but are ultimately out of alignment with a commercial revenue model.
I would say it's out of alignment with the ad model specifically. Currently, there exists a financial incentive to curate content in a manner that pleases advertisers and the internet mobs that patronize their businesses. However, if social media companies were somehow forced into a subscription model, they would have a financial incentive to avoid banning users because it would hurt the bottom line, it would also eliminate the incentive to curate content to the prerogative of advertisers, and it would make the user experience much better due to lack of ads and the need to create better user experiences to maintain retention.
It is a non-sequitur only from the perspective of a social media company protecting its media business, but not from any other perspective. If I, as not even a user of the given social media service, were to receive numerous death threats as a result of content published and republished on that social media service I should have the ability to sue them for libel. This, of course, also ignores the numerous criminal liabilities faced by that social media company had they not been shielded by something like section 203, such as depraved indifference harm. There are numerous examples of this scenario both large and small, for example pizza-gate conspiracy theory and various online conspiracy theories attributed to Alex Jones.
At the moment harmed individuals get neither the ability to sue to recoup their harms nor a vote to censor content that is clearly illegal and/or harmful in the immediate to their person. This immunity does not exist for any other communication venue in the US irrespective of first amendment concerns, for example if a radio show or newspaper allowed such conspiracy theories you could sue them into bankruptcy as did Hulk Hogan versus Gawker.
I think everyone intuitively understands you can't assert 4A rights on contraband held by the police while also denying owning that contraband to dodge criminal responsibility. This thing with social media is the same thing but with 1A instead of 4A.
I would consider myself a first amendment absolutist; and yet I don't have a 1A problem with the concept of this law [0] insofar as social media companies choose the position that user speech isn't their speech. The problem is that they won't come out and state that position, they intentionally flipflop on whose speech their websites host exactly depending on what is most convenient. So of course it looks like this is a massively overreaching law when the position flops to "company speech". And if a company came out and said okay we accept responsibility for what's posted on our platform, then I'd be the first in line to say that the government can't force them to publish certain content.
Contrast traditional publishers who definitely have first amendment rights to publish or not to publish things. Well, yes, they do, but they also have legal responsibility for what they publish. The rights follow the responsibility.
[0] Saying nothing of the wording; because I'm sure it was drafted by censorious assholes, like every other law.
Now, would an alternate universe in which freedom of association was actually a robust right on its own be a better one overall? Would I happily trade that for this social media thing? Quite possibly, quite possibly.
At the time, websites were mostly just hosts of content. The individual is posting on the website but otherwise the website is a tool.
This changes with recommendation algorithms. Nearly all social media is based on some kind of recommendation algorithm. Should that be covered by 230? It could be argued that it starts to get closer to an endorsement of certain content (and indeed, some of that recommended stuff is ads.)
But we know that isn't actually the case. The algorithms are designed to drive engagement, what they show you is a function of your behavior on the site, it's not an "endorsement" by the site creators, they're finely tuned machine learning systems optimized for ad dollars - that's it.
Once again, this is just another example of how the ad model incentivizes pernicious behavior. If these sites were under a subscription model they'd be happy to offer you the option to sort your feed with a purely chronological algorithm because they'd still be getting paid regardless of your engagement behavior.
There are also active efforts to remove “bad” content from such recommendations, which is effectively un-endorsing it.
You can take HN as an example of a recommendation service - while they remove things that are off topic, you'd have to argue that YC endorses whatever is in the #1 spot on HN.
HN has more active, hands on moderation than most social media sites, and there's a stronger argument that dang "endorses" the front page of HN than that Steve Huffman "endorses" the front page of reddit.
Edit: Why is that objectionable?
Downvote trolls responding to a comment in less than a minute on a thread buried in other comments nearly 24 hours old. Feels like a bot.
It's a bit more insidious than that, as they can still go and say "we don't censor it, see, it is not removed", all while the content is blacklisted from recommendations.
Still works essentially as censorship as nobody can see it until they look at channel directly but it is not technically censoring.
> I understand why people hate that opinion, because they want civil discourse and nearly free access to media online. Uncensored content pushes normal people out.
Nope. It pushes ad revenue out. Youtube, aside from not allowing porn and other 18+ stuff was for long time basically uncensored, you could post anything and algorithms wouldn't punish you.
Got to be biggest video platform regardless of that.
They started with demonetizing or lowering monetization for "controversial" stuff because of ad money, and companies not wanting to see their ads on the more controversial stuff for fear of being associated with it. But it wasn't for people, it was to please other corporations that gave them money.
Recommendation system makes sure that generally if you don't search for something and don't watch it, you won't get it, so the fact some content that might offend them is on the platform is irrelevant.
And after Trump won, the companies just used same systems to push the topics they don't want on the margins of search results
Same thing. Ad revenue is a result of eyeballs looking at it.
I understand why people hate that opinion, because they want civil discourse and nearly free access to media online. Uncensored content pushes normal people out.
Those things are great, but are ultimately out of alignment with a commercial revenue model. The result is social media imposing an algorithmic bias to increase engagement, the results of which are often toxic, and that toxicity ultimately pushes normal people out anyways. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.