Koby, my patience with you on this matter has run its course. So sit down, shut up, and read this entire comment — twice — before you even think to reply (well, if you have the guts to reply, anyway).

No moderation system will get it right 100% of the time. Systems are only as perfect as the people who make them, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed lately, but nobody is a perfect person. (The closest we’ve ever gotten to a perfect person is dead.)

Even a human moderation system will get it wrong. People will always bring their own biases and prejudices to the system. They may or may not ignore the context of a comment/image when deciding if it needs moderation. The “human moderation content systems” of which you speak — systems that, judging from the context of your comments, you believe are a cure to the ailment of “imperfect” automated systems — won’t get it right every time because people aren’t perfect.

Then you talk of “non-objectionable content” being removed from services like YouTube. Two questions, champ: How do you decide what is and isn’t objectionable content, and how did your definition become YouTube’s definition? Because from where I sit, YouTube moderators can legally decide that Markiplier’s speech is “objectionable” and get rid of it, and you can’t do a goddamned thing about that. (Markiplier can appeal the decision, of course. But that is a move he has to make; you can’t do it for him.)

And then we get to the one piece of your comment that makes no sense whatsoever: your claim about losing 230 protections. I don’t know why you continue to whine about 230 when both I and numerous other commenters here have explained to you, repeatedly and at great length, what 230 does. You’re so blinded by some sort of near-religious loyalty to either the idea of free speech absolutism or a twisted desire for “neutrality” on Twitter, Facebook, et cetera that you refuse to accept these fundamental truths:

1. Without 230, a vast swath of the Internet would either be non-existent or overrun with trolls, since no one would want to operate/moderate a service where they are (at least) partially liable for someone else’s speech.
2. 230 extends First Amendment protections to interactive web services, and neither 230 nor the First Amendment make any mention of “neutrality” as a prerequisite for those protections.
3. Nobody, including you, has the right to force their way onto someone else’s private property and use it as a platform for speech/expression.
4. Nobody, including you, has the right to force other people into being an audience for any given kind of speech/expression.
5. Nobody, including you, has the right to force another person — or a privately owned business — into an association they don’t want.
6. 230 makes sure 3, 4, and 5 applies to interactive web services so nobody — including you — will ever have the right to force speech onto those services that the operators of said services otherwise wouldn’t host.

Getting rid of 47 U.S.C. § 230 won’t make the Internet a “nicer” place. It won’t make people more willing to become your audience if they weren’t your audience before 230 went poof. And it won’t create the “neutrality” that you have implied, over and over again, Twitter and its ilk should be forced to accept. Your desires won’t make a better Internet — it will destroy the current Internet and leave it as a wasteland upon which trolls, agitators, and other horrible people can run rampant.

Whatever your issues with content moderation are — and it’s not exactly hard to have any, given how much systems like ContentID fuck things up — don’t justify trying to take away a website’s legally protected right to moderate how it sees fit. And if 230 does go away, who gets to make the calls about what speech is and isn’t acceptable? I doubt that even you want the federal government saying “you must host this speech or else” to you or anyone else, after all.

I’d have a much easier time with this comment if I called you an idiot and washed my hands of you, Koby. But “easy” won’t make you think. And that is what I want you to do now, Koby — I want you to think.

I want you to think about the ramifications of making website operators liable for speech they neither wrote or helped published. I want you to think about the consequences of forcing “neutrality” on platforms that were meant for, say, queer people who wanted to get away from anti-queer speech. I want you to think — really dig down into the ol’ grey matter and ruminate for a while — about how much user-generated content is on the Internet right now…and how much of that content would disappear near-overnight if the websites hosting that content didn’t want to be held liable for any of it.

I don’t think you could still justify wanting to get rid of Section 230 after you’ve read this entire comment (hopefully twice) and done all that thinking I asked you to do. If you believe you can, you’re either still blinded by your devotion to the ideals of free speech absolutism or too ignorant to figure out the consequences of getting what you want. You can keep wishing for the end of 230 on that monkey’s paw you’re holding. But don’t blame anyone else if that finger curls and getting what you wished for fucks up the world. After all, you’re the one who wants 230 gone.