Therefore you could save all your other questions and statements.
Publisher, in the legal sense, has a long history, and content providers are not that any more the the word arm in the legal sense means human arms.
Legal definitions can should change in order to keep up with society and technology.
It’s nuts how many people simply don’t read or think.
Walmart can say, for example, they know they’ll lose 3B to theft. That doesn’t mean they are wanting it, or allowing it, or know exactly which item will be stolen when and where. It means, given their scale, and from evidence they gather after the fact, this is an estimate of what happens when they have so many locations.
Now go read carefully, and don’t make stuff up about what you read, and think about the facts presented.
I wish people would simply learn to read a little law instead of routinely not understanding simple concepts.
Your analogies don’t hold; no judge is going to consider those acts “publication” under the law. We’re talking about textual content here.
I’m guessing Meta and the public both have attorneys, and I suspect all those attorneys also know the answer.
It's an interesting question as to whether Meta's act of selective republication of others' content constitutes its own content. This matter hasn't been adjudicated; I expect it will be in the fullness of time.
Parties and their attorneys disagree on legal and factual questions all the time. Meta has a position; others may differ. These disagreements are why we have a dispute resolution system (i.e., the courts) in the first place.
If Section 230 were gone tomorrow, it would likely only be the Facebooks of the world who would survive, as only they could afford the lawyers necessary to fend off frivolous lawsuits. No sane person would run a free web forum where they agree to accept the liability of being a “publisher” for anything some rando posts.
Certainly I think there is a case that could be argued that when a web site says they explicitly screen and approve every piece of content, which as far as I know is what these ad tech companies claim to do, that does create a duty of care which is not present for automatically approved UGC. But I’m not aware of anyone in particular arguing this. Certainly that would be the thing to do first. Otherwise you are advocating for solving a cockroach infestation by dropping a nuclear bomb on the city.
The concerned is one of consistency in how media is regulated. E.g. Facebook, is the worlds largest media company, and it truly acts and behaves as a publisher now. It acquires its content from an army of paid and unpaid providers. They may be individuals, often they are influencers, often they may be nefarious agents and companies. It then decides how to place that content in it's "publication", which just happens to be an app and website. It goes out and tells the market, "I have this great publication in which you can place ads!". It then sells ads to those people, and makes a decision on how to place those advertisements inside its publication alongside that content that it acquired.
So how is it not a publisher? And why should it be regulated to any kind of different standard from other publishers?