Re: Publishers or Not
The difference is that if the newspaper published your letter, it is an editorial decision. Note: The analogy is not quite correct - it is more like suing the post office for delivering a letter you do not like. If anyone posts on their own site they are liable for their posts - I can post any old crap here and El Reg cannot be sued in the US for it but diodesign could be if it was found to upset someone. The liability rests with the writer not the host delivering the message.
To be the same as a newspaper, every post on every site would ned to be read and moderated. This was seen as impossible at the scale that posts are created (even in the 1990's). FB and Twitter are always mentioned but the Reg is also covered as are you if you have a site with comments. Google could be sued over their search results, free speech would be lost as it would become whatever the moderators said it should be - a bit like all newspapers are biased along the lines of their editor ... Don't take my word for it - From Ron Wyden, co-author of S230
" Without Section 230, sites would have strong incentives to go one of two ways: either sharply limit what users can post, so as to avoid being sued, or to stop moderating entirely, something like 8chan — now operating under the name 8kun — where anonymous users can post just about anything and speech supporting racism and sexism is common.
I think we would be vastly worse off in either scenario. Just look at Black Lives Matter and the protests against police violence over the past week as an example. The cellphone video that captured the officer kneeling on George Floyd's neck spread across social media platforms — and it's the reason Americans learned about his unjust killing in the first place. So many of these cases of unconscionable use of force against black Americans have come to light as a result of videos posted to social media.
In a world without 230, I cannot imagine that Facebook or Twitter would allow posts about police violence that could possibly be defamatory. These horrible injustices would never get the public attention they deserve. And accountability would be even less likely. "
This brings us to moderation - a site does not have to host your speech if it violates the community rules. They are usually fairly relaxed about this, partly due to the moderation at scale issue above but if you post hateful, bigoted speech you should not be very surprised if the post gets removed. This is not censorship(!!) despite what Trumps followers may think - Twitter and Facebook are not saying you cannot post vile rhetoric, they are saying they will not host it. Feel free to put it somewhere else though.
It has been mentioned before but it obviously got missed - a great primer for s230
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act.shtml
I saw someting the other day that said S230 tries to remove most of the bad stuff while attempting to preserve as much of the good stuff as possible - this sums it up nicely. Nothing is 100%, especially with the scale of FB, Twitter etc. but you can certainly aim towards it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
