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Senator Sheldon Whitehouse Has Really Bad Ideas About Section 230
from the that's-not-how-any-of-this-works dept
Over the summer I got a copy of the new book from Lee Bollinger and Geoffrey Stone, two formerly staunch 1st Amendment supporters who have apparently decided to go back on their earlier views, with a collection of essays by a variety of authors about “social media, freedom of speech, and the future of our democracy.” Much of the book is maddening, because there are many essays from very famous people who should know better, but seem more than willing to reject the 1st Amendment because people said bad stuff online.
There are some pieces that are interesting and thoughtful, but the vast majority of them are incredibly frustrating. I had kind of blocked the book out of my mind, not wanting to revisit the frustration, but last week, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse decided to post a thread on Twitter promoting his chapter in the book, and presenting some of his ideas from his chapter — which was one of the most frustrating, by far, in the book. Bollinger and Stone obviously had an agenda in what they chose to put in the book, but Whitehouse’s chapter, in particular, would have benefited from having literally anyone who understands how Section 230 and the 1st Amendment intersect do an editing pass to call out some of the bullshit claims in it.
Unfortunately, after Whitehouse posted his thread, a lot of people cheered on his tweet saying “we should repeal Section 230, as it does more harm than good.” I criticized that tweet, and some people argued that it was unfair, because I didn’t deal with the entire contents of the thread. So, now I’ll go one step further and breakdown Whitehouse’s chapter in the book, and just how confused and wrong it is.
We should also note that Whitehouse has a bit of a history of being massively, dangerously wrong about the internet. He’s long been an extreme copyright maximalist, and was one of the initial co-sponsors of the initial bill that eventually became the SOPA/PIPA package. He’s been cozy with the top copyright industry lobbyists. A few years later, during a Senate hearing, he started making up nonsense about how a Google search he did lead him to The Pirate Bay and how this “criminal activity” (searches to websites) had to be stopped. He’s also been terrible on encryption, where he made up a story of a kidnapped girl and the only way we could possibly find her was to break into her phone. He also once pushed a bill to make the terrible CFAA even worse, and when called out on how much damage it would do, he blamed the “pro-botnet, pro-foreign cyber criminal caucus.” And, more recently, he pushed an obviously unconstitutional bill that would have required search engines to block searches that lead to information about illegal drugs.
Are you sensing a pattern yet?
Anyway, let’s get to Whitehouse’s book chapter. The premise is that (1) social media is bad, and (2) it’s because of Section 230, so (3) we should get rid of Section 230, and (4) while it’s possible that there would be some negative impacts of that, he has a “narrower” version of Section 230 that can replace it. Basically all four prongs of the plan are bad, and confused about reality.
The article starts out with the expected “social media is bad because the people on it say bad things” line of reasoning, cherry-picking from the usual pile of “social media bad” tropes:
Social media platforms—companies that facilitate information sharing through virtual networks—have shielded themselves more than any other media from responsibility for destructive content they house and propagate.
First off… what? Again, multiple studies have shown that cable news spreading bogus reporting has been way more responsible for misinforming the public. Indeed, there’s a whole book detailing, with very thorough data, how the viral stories go viral because of cable news, and not the internet. But, Whitehouse isn’t concerned with being factual. He’s here to burn down social media with disinformation.
Second, his “evidence” to support this claim is a footnote… linking to a Newsweek article that doesn’t even make the claim Whitehouse pretends it does. I’m guessing he didn’t think anyone would bother to check his footnotes, but the article is just about an advertising boss, who is not exactly an unbiased player, saying some nonsense about whether tech companies are “platforms or publishers,” which is a nonsense distinction.
They claim that their algorithms simply promote whatever is selected by the collective wisdom of the public, and that they lack the resources or expertise to identify and remove unlawful or untruthful content. But the truth is they are not neutral or incapable observers. Social media companies spread disinformation, exacerbate preexisting biases, and disseminate unlawful content because of deliberate, profit-seeking choices. These platforms choose how to structure their services; what content to allow or disallow; what content to promote; what ads to sell, and to whom; and how they connect advertising to the content users consume or create.
Then what’s your excuse for pushing this disinformation, Senator? This whole paragraph is misleading disinfo. No one claims that the platforms are “neutral,” but it is accurate that when you have an open platform for billions of people to communicate, some of those users are going to push garbage. No one claims that they can’t deal with any of it. Every platform puts in place rules and enforcement to try to deal with as much of it as they can, but the impossible part is actually being able to deal with all of it. And it’s not just because of “profit-seeking choices,” though if it were that, then rather than go after Section 230, why not go after Wall Street and its demands for short-term profit maximization for public companies?
And, again, it’s people who spread disinformation. As noted above, cable news does it much more impactfully than social media does. But Whitehouse isn’t looking to regulate cable news, because he recognizes the 1st Amendment problems with that. Unfortunately, he ignores them when it comes to social media.
Also, many of the other complaints are exaggerated or misleading in their own way. For example, the claims about “exacerbating preexisting biases,” the evidence there… suggests otherwise. As we wrote about last year, the evidence suggests that the internet actually doesn’t push people into echo chambers, but rather the reverse. The only “truth” to the idea that it exacerbates preexisting biases is by introducing people to other views leading some people to react negatively, and leading them to dig into their preexisting biases. That’s not the fault of social media. That’s the fault of bad education and people who are scared of new and different ideas. Kinda like Senator Whitehouse who seems to keep exacerbating his preexisting biases against the usefulness of the internet.
So, we’re already off to a not great start, but it quickly gets much, much worse. Because, while lots of people insisted that Whitehouse had a serious plan to “repeal and replace” Section 230 with “something better,” in the chapter, he suggests a total repeal would be the best overall solution:
I should say at the beginning that I would support simply repealing Section 230 and letting courts sort it out. This has the advantage of legislative simplicity and speed. It also minimizes the hand of Congress in an area that relates to speech, where our own political motives—whether of incumbency or party—create their own hazards. Better to minimize Congress’s hand in this.
So, yeah, I agree with minimizing Congress’s hand in this, and he’s correct about the problems of Congress meddling in areas relating to speech, where political motives may take control, but it’s utter madness to suggest that repealing it and “letting courts sort it out” is any kind of reasonable solution.
First, to argue that it’s faster is similarly madness. If we simply removed Section 230 today, tomorrow the courts would be flooded with tons of ridiculous and frivolous cases, blaming social media for basically everything, and it would take years to sort out the mess, and it would be incredibly costly for everyone sued. And while totally out-of-touch Senators like Senator Whitehouse can dismiss this concern by saying that the big tech companies have plenty of money and lawyers to deal with this, it ignores the fact that Section 230 protects tons of smaller sites, that would also get caught up in this, and many would go out of business trying to defend these frivolous lawsuits.
It is the height of elitist nonsense to say “let’s just create massive turmoil” for every website on the internet, because I don’t like the internet. But that’s what Senator Whitehouse does here. It’s obnoxious. It’s based on fallacious assumptions, and it’s dangerous.
Senator Whitehouse suggests that this mess would be relatively short-lived:
Most of the questions that would come up in court post-repeal would find ready answers in existing legal doctrines, with familiar structures and duties. Repeal is not a ticket to an alien legal environment; it’s actually a return to established legal norms.
Tell me you’ve never been a small business sued by frivolous grifters without telling me you’ve never been a small business sued by frivolous grifters. As far as I can tell, Whitehouse, whose great great grandfather was a railroad magnate, and whose parents and grandparents were career diplomats, has never worked in the private sector at all. He got a law degree, became a law clerk, and then went straight to work in the government. It is the height of hubris to suggest that a ton of small, struggling businesses should have to go through years of expensive litigation because you’re mad that some people on the internet aren’t nice.
From there, Whitehouse insists that without Section 230, “disinformation” directed at individuals would be solved by lawsuits:
Where disinformation targets an injured individual, liability law will usually clean up the mess.
And here we begin to realize the root of the problem: Senator Sheldon Whitehouse does not understand the 1st Amendment. Most disinformation is protected speech under the 1st Amendment, Senator. There are some exceptions, but they are pretty limited, because we protect freedom of speech. What’s lacking from Whitehouse’s analysis (and this becomes a bigger deal later in the piece) is the lack of understanding that there is no underlying cause of action for most disinformation, because it’s protected under the 1st Amendment.
He goes on a weird, and somewhat misleading, history of Section 230, followed by a very, very, very misleading explanation claiming that social media sites have no interest in stopping the spread of disinformation on their platforms. This is simply untrue, and fails to reckon with the very real challenges and tradeoffs in trust and safety, and how these companies have tried to balance those different trade-offs.
Like most interlopers with zero experience in the field, Senator Whitehouse writes as if there’s some easy solution. Much of this part of his chapter reads as a Senator with no experience in healthcare saying “the solution is easy, we just need to ban health insurance, and everything will sort itself out.” That’s not how anything works, and your “solution” completely ignores all the work of tons of experts who have spent decades actually making the internet better.
And, again and again, Whitehouse seems to struggle with understanding what is protected speech under the 1st Amendment. In a section of his chapter about “illegal content,” he repeatedly presents examples of content that, while bad, is not illegal. He talks about disinformation and misinformation. He talks about anti-vax content. He talks about false COVID info. He talks about “climate denial.” We can all agree that this information is problematic, but it’s all very much protected.
And… removing Section 230 would actually make it that much more difficult to deal with. Section 230 is what allows different companies to experiment with different approaches and figure out what works. It’s why all of the major social media companies have implemented increasingly beneficial policies for handling this stuff, and that they can adapt rapidly. Without it, every single change would require a review by the legal team, who is risk averse, and would greatly limit the ability of companies to keep ahead of malicious actors on their sites.
This is obvious to anyone who has worked on these issues, which does not include Senator Whitehouse.
Whitehouse continues to insist that companies aren’t even trying to do anything about these issues, which is an insult to their trust and safety teams who actually do work incredibly hard to put in place and effectively implement policies and enforcement to improve the various websites. Whitehouse’s entire chapter is an insult to all the work those teams put in.
Finally, towards the end of the chapter, after he suggests a full on repeal, and after making a ton of false claims (disinformation?), Whitehouse does admit that just getting rid of Section 230 might have some negatives. It’s almost like halfway through the chapter, someone else took over writing it. He notes that repealing 230 would leave a lot of uncertainty. He notes that misinformation often isn’t legally actionable (something he then forgets later in the chapter). He even admits that Congress can’t just outlaw misinformation because of the 1st Amendment (though he sort of hides the ball by not directly mentioning the 1st Amendment, and instead just talking about “strict scrutiny”):
Congress can’t readily solve these problems by creating new causes of action. Causes of action based on the content of speech — for example, a new cause of cation for knowingly publishing misinformation online — will be subject to strict scrutiny in court. Many statutes seeking to criminalize cyberbullying or other online speech have been struck down on vagueness grounds.
Vagueness isn’t the problem here. The 1st Amendment is.
He also points out, correctly, that “unlimited liability could privilege wealthy special interests.” That, of course, is the point that some of us keep trying to highlight. If you want to lock in Facebook and Google, get rid of Section 230. They have the lawyers and the bank accounts to deal with the fallout. No one else does. Whitehouse actually is correct in saying this… but then seems to immediately forget about it and not care about it:
If Section 230 is repealed without additional guidelines, an already unbalanced information ecosystem could be unbalanced further as platforms yield to legal pressure from big, deliberate manipulators of information. Powerful special interests can bring lawsuits they are unlikely towin in order to scare off social media companies in terms of how they police certain content.
[…]
The ultimate success of a lawsuit, however, may not matter to well-funded interests with the means to threaten nuisance suits, and there are other doctrines of tort law that could be used to frame a dispute or a threatened dispute.
And, of course, the benefit to the biggest companies is mentioned as well:
Trillion-dollar social media companies could be beneficiaries as well as victims of nuisance litigation. With an abundance of resources at their disposal, Google and Facebook can easily afford to litigate. This gives them an incumbency advantage: New social media startups cannot afford to spend millions of dollars on litigation. Startups also can’t afford to spend millions of dollars developing automoderation mechanisms.
This is… all accurate. Yet most of the chapter, both before and after this part, completely ignores this. It’s almost as if he handed off his pen to someone more well informed, and they added this section which is then otherwise ignored.
You’d think that whoever wrote the parts above would then recognize why Section 230 is actually useful. But instead, it leads Whitehouse to finally laying out his “proposal.” Which is basically… a DMCA for misinformation, plus some additional transparency mandates.
The best solution would be for Congress to require a “notice-and-takedown” systems removing Section 230 protections when a company willfully refuses to remove unlawful content. As part of this system, major social media platforms should maintain an “acceptable use” policy, explain how the platform enforces its content moderation policies, and describe the methods of reporting content or speech that violates policies or other laws. They should notify users when their content is taken down, and give users a forum for appeal if they they’ve been wrongly removed or if the company has failed to act.
All of these ideas have been suggested elsewhere, and all of them have very, very serious challenges and tradeoffs Whitehouse does not grapple with. First, we already have a DMCA notice-and-takedown provision in copyright that is massively abused to try to silence speech. A big study of how well notice-and-takedown works in everyday practice… shows that it doesn’t. As that paper notes, they found “surprisingly high percentages of notices of questionable validity.” Expanding the notice-and-takedown system much more broadly without recognizing how the existing one already puts a burden on protected speech should be a non-starter.
Also, note the sleight-of-word trickery in this paragraph. He notes that the notice-and-takedown provision should cover both “speech that violates policies or other laws.” But… policies are not laws. There’s an important difference there. Speech that violates laws is an issue, and almost every website will actually remove it once it’s proven that the speech is violative. The problem is that people like Whitehouse assume that there’s some obvious marker of “illegal speech” as compared to speech that is legal, but there is not. There’s a reason why we have a court system that takes a lot of time and back and forth with hearings and trials and evidence and juries to determine if something breaks the law. This proposal ignores all that, and assumes that a website can just tell, based on a report, if some speech breaks a law. That’s not how any of this actually works.
And if we’re just talking about internal policies, well, companies already try to remove content that violates those policies once they’re informed of it, but the problem is that people with zero experience in this field (like Senator Whitehouse) don’t understand that it’s rarely as obvious as they think whether or not content actually violates policies. Sometimes it is, but the biggest issues and the biggest challenges are that so much content is in a gray area where it’s not really clear if they break the rules or not, and many judgment calls are made, often by understaffed, overworked teams with little time to judge the context or nuance of the issues at play.
Whitehouse doesn’t care. He assumes, incorrectly, that companies are deliberately ignoring this content, when the reality is that they’re trying to figure out ways to enforce policy across billions of people, in which every scenario is impossible to fully understand, and millions of judgment calls are made every day.
As for the demands for an appeals process, and clear explanations, again, that is massively burdensome for smaller players. Techdirt removes between 500 and 1000 spam comments per day. I should need to contact each spammer to let them know, and share with them our “appeals” process? Fuck that.
He has a few more suggestions that are just as confused, and just as untethered from reality. For example, he insists that Section 230 should not apply to algorithmic recommendations (which the Supreme Court might solve for him this term). But that basically would destroy search on any website, let alone many other important, and useful algorithms.
He keeps forgetting that most misinformation is constitutionally protected. For example, he says:
The threat of legal liability, for example, could make Facebook and other companies more likely to adopt measure that stop the spread of misinformation even if they also reduce user engagement, as failing to act would carry its own financial risks.
But, as even he admitted earlier in the chapter, misinformation is mostly protected under the 1st Amendment. So what possible cause of action could there be for failing to remove misinformation? Also, this sentence completely ignores the other statements in this very chapter highlighting how powerful interests will use the threat of litigation to pressure companies into hiding legitimate information they want hidden, as well as the vastly different scenarios for smaller competitors that don’t have Facebook’s legal team and bank account.
The whole chapter is weirdly disconnected from reality. There is that weird bit in the middle that accurately highlights many (but not all) of the problems with his own proposal, which he then completely ignores.
Senator Whitehouse, who has never worked for a private company and has no experience with the internet other than proposing and supporting ridiculously bad regulations for the internet, does not understand the problem at all (he misrepresents why content moderation is such a challenge, blaming it on profit-seeking, rather than the complexities of human beings and society). And his proposed solutions have so many negatives that he fails to grapple with. And, even when he does grapple with some of the downsides to his proposals… he then just ignores them as if he hadn’t even mentioned them.
It’s the worst of political nonsense. It’s grandstanding on an issue he doesn’t understand, with a solution that will not work and will make the actual issues that much worse. This is not good policymaking at all.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, content moderation, disinformation, free speech, misinformation, section 230, sheldon whitehouse
Comments on “Senator Sheldon Whitehouse Has Really Bad Ideas About Section 230”
Abolish the Senate!
Hyperbole to be sure but it is infuriating when a single individual representing a tiny portion of the country wants to push their insanity on the other 98% of the population. And we can’t do anything about it because that small group he/she represents thinks he/she is just peachy!
You can insert McConnell, Blackburn, McCarthy, Greene, Gaetz and many others into this same diatribe. I know somebody is going to say that I’m only talking about republicans here and I’m biased against conservatives. I’m know there are democrats that have a lot of wacked out opinions and can be lumped in with this list, I just can’t think of those names right now.
Besides the republicans just give us so much reason for wanting them to go away.
Re: Abolish the Senate!
Why stop there? Why not tear down the whole stupid 18th century mess that passes for government in the United States?
Go on, you know you want to.
Why stop at notice-and-takedown for illegal speech? The copyright industries are also saying it isn’t working. Everything, the DMCA, section 230, etc., should move to a notice-and-staydown regime! That way, social media companies can become more proactive in policing their platforms, and the internet becomes a better place for all standpoints! /s
Re:
Good thing you put that /s on the end. I was getting worried that someone was using your account name to troll us…
Section 230 doesn’t make it possible for web sites to moderate. That’s taken care of by the First Amendment. What Section 230 does is protect them from legal liability if, or more likely when, they make a mistake in their moderation. Unfortunately, many people seem to equate “A moderation decision I disagree with” with “A moderation mistake”, and don’t like the fact that section 230 protects the moderators from legal liability for those too.
Re:
Section 230 doesn’t make it possible for web sites to moderate. That’s taken care of by the First Amendment.
Ah yes, the First amendment the protects the freedom of speech, religion, the press…. content moderation. Because the Forefathers must’ve had such insane foresight about the coming of the internet that they created a law that would be enacted 220 years later.
In all seriousness, this is a half-truth. The short answer is no, it is only section 230 protects both the content and the moderation of content from liability. The First Amendment enables free speech, expression, press, and religion. It could be used to justify moderation, but that is an assumption. It is Section 230 that makes those two aspects of content and moderation de facto. Take away 230, you turn the Internet into a dysfunctional mess of extremes.
Re: Re: You're not wrong...
Take away 230, and the internet becomes a mess.
But no, I have to agree with the parent post, that 230 enshrines protection from liability, and that 1A (both association and speech) protects moderation (see: compelled speech).
230 both shuts stupid litigation down early, and provides incentives (pay defense’s legal costs) to not bring stupid suits. And that is huge.
Re: Re:
Content moderation is a form of speech/expression.
Re: Re: Re:
On further retrospect, I may have made a mistake responding the way I did.
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Re: Re: Re: Content Moderation by a Social Medium Platform is a Ninth Amendment Violation
Support for discrimination by a social medium platform constitutes depraved anti-American anti-Constitution white racism that must be buried just as “separate but equal” and Jim Crow were buried. It is hard to be more disgusting than a white racist TechDirt microbrain supporter of white racial discrimination by a social medium platform.
Re: Re: Re:2 O_O
tf did I just read?
No, Mr. Thumb. Moderation isn’t a form of “Anti-White” discrimination. It is simply that, moderation. In fact, moderation is protected by the constitution (I admit I was initially wrong about this, thank you, Mr. Stone for correcting me). You are speaking nonsensical word salads at this point.
Re: Re: Re:3 Good for you
I appreciate you admitting your mistakes. It takes a real honest person to admit that they can grow as one.
Re: Re: Re:3 Pulling a Shiva
Yeah just a tip but I wouldn’t waste too many brain cells trying to decode their comments, one of the ‘tactics’ they employ is to simply accuse anyone who doesn’t agree with them of being a bigot since there can’t be valid reasons not to agree with their insane attempt to destroy online platforms.
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Re: A Social Medium Platform Has No First Amendment Rights!
A social medium platform is not like a common carrier.
A social medium is a message common carrier.
A social medium platform has no First Amendment right to discriminate against a user or against his content, but a user has a Ninth Amendment right to non-discriminatory message common carriage.
Here is an originalist argument that will persuade Justice Brett Kavanaugh: Petition to SCOTUS for writ of certiorari to the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit (Martillo v. Twitter).
Please help the legal battle against white racist discrimination by a social medium platform: 9th Amendment Challenge to Social Medium Abuse.
Martillo v. Twitter is an excellent companion both
There is overlap among all four cases, which are complementary. The petitioner of Moody litigates from the standpoint of a state that wishes to regulate to prevent abuse of the public while the petitioner of Martillo litigates from the standpoint of an abused member of the public. Both the common carrier status of a social medium platform and also the scope of § 230 immunity are addressed by Martillo and relevant to Gonzalez and to Taamneh.[1] Martillo also briefly addresses issues of selective prosecution and of selective enforcement of US criminal anti-genocide and anti-terrorism law by the US DOJ.
Martillo makes an Originalist argument, which opposes:
The case will not stop at SCOTUS but will return to District Court in a class action that will seek penalties from the class of discriminatory social medium platforms.
Martillo lays out the case
Here is an example of an argument that is directed to the lay public and that is informed by knowledge of Internet technology.
Hosting is Bailment Not Speech
The following question and answer clarify why hosting is bailment and not speech.
Question: Does a notice board accessible to passing members of the public – by being in the entrance of a supermarket for example – offer a common carriage service? If not, how does Twitter differ from that in function, other than by being a service attached to a network that offers public access?
Answer: The described public notice board is a material board to which a member affixes a material message. The material board provides neither message switching nor message common carriage. Twitter provides store-and-forward message switching as well as message common carriage among users. Twitter temporarily stores a message in a backend database system (hosting or bailment) while the message is on the way to an end-user by means of message common carriage.
Discussion: The question confuses the frontend model (a pure concept or abstract idea[2]) with a material notice board. The frontend model makes it easier for an end user to interact with Twitter’s system.
In other words, Twitter’s system has no similarity whatsoever to the material notice board and the question shows a lack of comprehension of Internet technology.[2]
Hosting is not speech of a social medium platform. Hosting is bailment, and from the standpoint of common carriage law, storing digital personal literary property in a backend server of the social medium platform hardly differs from temporary storage of a paper letter in a satchel at a USPS sorting location or at a FedEx office until the paper letter can be sent on its way to its destination by common carriage. A message common carrier has no First Amendment right to discriminate against a user (customer) either with respect to carriage or with respect to bailment.
Notes
[1] If Twitter, Google, and Facebook (Meta) provide common carriage and have not been consistently violating common carriage law, they would have been able to defend themselves in Gonzalez v. Google LLC and in Twitter, Inc. v. Taamneh by asserting common carrier status.
[2] Abstract idea in this context has some similarity to the abstract idea exception to patent eligibility. A discussion of confusion of virtual reality with physical reality can be found in Appendix G – Reply to Twitter’s Appellee’s Brief (p. lxxv).
[3] The terminology of full-stack software engineering is somewhat confusing. A software engineer generally uses the Model-View-Controller design pattern to design a web or cloud service. The end user invokes a browser on his end host (a laptop or mobile computing device) to access the service. A single page application is frontend social medium platform software that runs in a web browser to access the service of the social medium platform – an older design might use Jakarta (or Java) Server Pages, but such a design does not affect the argument. A mobile device typically runs a mobile app (provided by the social medium platform) to complete the common carriage service, which the social medium platform’s backend provides.
Re: Re:
Apart from the fact that both the board and anything posted on Twitter exist on the premises of a privately owned company, which means they have a 1st Amendment right to not associate with whatever person or speech appears on those premises.
In other words, you don’t have a leg to stand on, and Twitter can discriminate however they choose.
Re: Re:
Still ain’t reading your shit manifesto bro.
The man in the ivory tower
He has a great view.
From atop of his ivory tower
Its never to hot nor to cold
The Food never rots and his cot is always made.
But he can never experience the Trees or the fields nor the people that play.
He has never seen those that make his food each day.
His bed is made, but he can not say, tis whom it was that did it in dismay.
The light inside is abit dark, as the tower is not lit up with Much spark.
Consider who he gets paid. Not you or I on any day. Consider the books he may read as few, and only the whispers in his head get thru. ‘How much can we get this day?’
Let’s be honest, is there a single Senator that actually has anything except bad ideas about everything? Regardless of what they try to do, it’s only for their personal glory and never for the benefit of the people, those they are supposed to represent!
Re:
Ron Wyden (D-OR)?
One day that streak might be broken, but it's not today
And the ‘The only way to attack 230 is to lie about it’ streak continues unbroken, why it’s almost as though in all this time no-one has been able to come up with an honest, fact-based criticism of the law despite countless people looking…
That said there is some irony in someone lambasting social media for ‘spreading misinformation’ who’s entire argument is nothing but that, I guess his real issue is that’s it’s not lies he personally supports being spread.
Re: Letitia James says, "Hold my beer!"...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/sharing-mass-shooter-content-online-should-be-illegal-ny-ag-says/
Methinks Oregon Senator Ron Wyden may want a word or two.
Now, here’s the problem with Letitia’s idea:
“Imma gonna kill me some asswipes” –> big problem
“He said “Imma gonna …” and he was serious!” –> Need that quote to convince people there is/was a problem
–> May also encourage the problem
–> How the snot was I supposed to know the guy was gonna murder (or just murdered) someone?
Example:
Trump’s recent “tweet” on jews, or his stochastic threat to Mitch McConnell –> yes, trump is morally liable.
Maggie Haberman repeats it in full, lots of people say that gives the threat its power. You gonna hold the NYT liable?
Beyond that, even if there was a good solution to how this kind of stuff should be moderated, the big social media operate at such a scale that there’s no human available to collar (or phone, or e-mail) to respond when mistakes are made. Techdirt is different in that respect; we see site management periodically chiming in, especially with our favorite idiots.
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Re: Depraved Delusion of a White Racist Supporter of Discrimination by a Social Medium Platform!
I explain exactly why a 2022 social medium platform is not a 1996 Interactive Computer Service on p. 30 et seq. of Petition II to SCOTUS for Writ of Certiorari to the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
It is hard to be a more despicable liar than a supporter of white racial discrimination by a social medium platform.
Re: Re:
“It is hard to be a more despicable liar”
but damn it, you’re trying
Re: Re: It's going to get laughed out anyway...
Also ain’t gonna read your shit court filing either.
Section 230 Must Go
No matter how much of a nutjob Senator Whitehouse might be (and I agree he is too clueless to be in government) it doesn’t change the fact that Section 230 is really, really bad and should be eliminated.
The problem is that most of the people who want to eliminate Section 230 are nutjob Republicans ranting about imaginary “censorship” and so facts get obscured and the whole debate gets badly derailed. This is extra ironic because Section 230 is entirely a Republican creation.
A brief history lesson for those who may not remember (or who might not be old enough):
In 1994, halfway through Bill Clinton’s first term as president, Republicans took control of both the House and Senate for the first time in 40 years.
Republicans were confident that they would defeat Clinton when he ran for re-election and so in preparation for that, in 1996 they created The Communications Decency Act, a law whose only real purpose is to allow greater government censorship of radio and television by greatly increasing the fines that could be levied by the FCC for broadcasting “indecent” content.
The now-infamous Section 230 was added as an afterthought and nobody even noticed it at the time. Remember, in 1996 things were VERY different. What we call “The Internet” barely existed back then. Google, Facebook, Twitter and all the other “social-media” companies DID NOT EXIST. (Mark Zuckerberg was only 10 years old.)
It would be more than 15 years before Section 230 would become relevant.
Throughout history many newspapers, magazines, radio and television programs have been successfully sued for libel, defamation and publishing blatantly false stories. But Section 230 pretends that Internet Websites are not publishers.
And so we are stuck with this absurd, ridiculous law that does nothing good and creates far more problems than it solves.
Re:
Wrong. It was authored by Chris Cox and Ron Wyden, a Republican and a Democrat, respectively.
Incorrect. Given that 230 was authored after, and essentially in response to, Cubby v. Compuserve and Stratton-Oakmont v. Prodigy and directly reverses the moderation disincentive those decisions created, it would seem that it was relevant pretty much since its inception.
Not so. 230 just says that websites generally aren’t liable for user-generated content posted on the site. They’re completely liable for their own statements.
What problems, specifically, does 230 create?
Re:
Before trying to lecture people on history you should actually know and understand said history because your “history lesson” has so very little to do with reality one have to wonder if you are intentionally lying or have no actual clue what you are talking about.
What’s absurd and ridiculous about it and what problems did it create? Be ´specific.
Re: Almost an all-square
While I turn in my 230 bingo card I’ve got some light reading you may be interested in if you want to understand the law a bit more accurately.
Hello! You’ve Been Referred Here Because You’re Wrong About Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act
Re:
For what reason should someone be able to sue Twitter for defamation if a Twitter employee didn’t post the defamatory content?
So what? Sites and services that accepted third-party content existed back then; chatrooms and forums/messageboards are two such broad examples. 230 made sure—and still makes sure—that the liability for content lies with the person who posted the content rather than the people who own/operate the interactive Web service. 230 shortcuts lawsuits that try to put the burden of, say, defamatory speech on the platform it appears on instead of the people who posted it.
And now I see why you think 230 is a bad thing: It doesn’t let greedy jackoffs aim for the deepest pockets and get away with it.
Newspapers, magazines, radio stations, and television programs all tend to vet their content before it goes live. If they’re found liable for defamation, it’s because they published that speech. Twitter doesn’t work in that way; neither do most interactive web services. 230 doesn’t make any sort of distinction about “publishers”—and I should note that 230 also protects websites for newspapers like the New York Times for any comments on NYT articles that NYT staff doesn’t post.
Thanks for once again proving that no one can present a cogent argument against Section 230 without lying about or misrepresenting Section 230. You win the same thing everyone else who does that shit wins: an instant loss of credibility!