Hardly a day goes by without someone someone blaming s230 for something that is nothing to do with s230...
If you want to have an opinion on the easily read law, then please.ease do a small bit of research rather than re-quote incorrect interpretations. You only have to look at my previous posts to get number of resources.. he'll, I'm not even American and I understand it!
El Reg needs to do an s230 primer - it affects the comments here as much as Facebook or twitter. A bit of education may help
1) a service provider is not responsible for the speech of others on their service. This is does not provide cover for illegal speech! If the provider posts something then it is still liable for their own speech. What you write is still covered by the 1st Amendment but has to conform to the rules given by the service.
2) a service provider can moderate posts that do not meet their published standards
Basically you have the right to say what you want but [service provider] does not have to host it...
The intent of s230 was not to create an unbiased twitter, it was there to allow lots of twitter-like services to grow without being encumbered by lawsuits. Parler came about because of s230 protections, el reg is protected... you are protected when you forward an email!
Remove s230 and you have one of two scenarios - either sites stop moderating entirely (they are not liable if they do not know what is being said) and you get the worst form of 8chan, or they moderate everything and you get a very different experience where posts take weeks to appear due to the amount of traffic (it will get shorter as everyone leaves in droves).
Nothing will be perfect and moderating on this sort of scale is impossible but they largely get the valance right
Biting the hand that feeds IT
