SCOTUS rules Google and Twitter didn't contribute to terrorist attacks The US Supreme Court has ruled that Google and Twitter did not break the nation's Anti-Terrorism Act by publishing and recommending content that supported the Islamic State terrorist organization, also known as ISIS. In a Thursday decision, the justices unanimously sided with Big Tech in cases Twitter Inc v. Taamneh and …
The ruling has no effect on content moderation at all. The platforms are free to do this however they please as guaranteed by the terms and conditions that all users have agreed to abide by.
What it does do is reaffirm the right to free expression in the US. Incitement remains a crime but it is notoriously difficult to prove. Other countries have other laws.
Well, what it does is close one avenue to further restrictions on free expression. To say that it "reaffirmed" anything is overrating the importance of the decision, I think. Siding with the plaintiffs would have been a disaster; tossing the case, which is what SCOTUS did here, basically just kicks the can down the road. It's a good outcome but not a great one.
That would probably depend on whether you platform anonymised the users. If one of your customers has a complaint against another, but is able to identify the other and sue them instead, I'd expect section 230 to get you off the hook no matter how small you are.
The hard issues here, which section 230 is intended to resolve -- legally at least, are firstly that they might have to sue "Anon42" rather than a real person (and the provider probably doesn't have much clue who that is) and secondly that Anon42 might turn out to be in a different country and so much harder for normal people to sue.
Section 230's attitude to these problems appears to be "not my problem" and "not my problem", which is probably why Big Tech likes it so much.
That's the irony. It doesn't protect the free speech of independent bloggers who publish calls to mayhem and murder, those guys will be arrested for criminal offenses and sued for civil offenses. It only protects the impunity - the freedom from liability - of large social network sites to profit from those independent bloggers who publish calls to mayhem and murder.
Section 230 has ravaged the local news and even the big newspapers, with intelligent curation of news items replaced by tasteless viral statistics.
“To me, returning online to Shades after months away, with friends in both camps, it seems that the players are behaving like members of a paranoid cult. A closed, self-referential culture, with shared experience of addiction, shared conventions of behaviour, thought, and expression, the use of purpose-made clichés to stop thought, a jargon incomprehensible to outsiders, a revered leader whose word cannot be questioned, the bitter hatred of renegades: these are hallmarks of religious cults.” (Cybergypsies, 1999)
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