Reforming Section 230 of the 1998 Communications Decency Act has given companies on the Internet and content providers both a variety of very solid protections against content lawsuits.
But, in recent years, on both left and right, there's been fears that social media behemoths have been stretching these protections too far.
At Nieman Lab, two co-authors have an excellent piece on both WHY Section 230 needs some reforms and WHAT they should be.
The troll? This guy on Twitter. I'm not a Twitter expert to know if he has some way of hiding his post-2014 tweets or if he actually does only replies. The fact that he lists ZERO followers means that he's a pontificator type, IMO.
As for his trollery? It's the claim that social media are "disruptors." As in one of those Silicon Valley/New Media BSers.
He claimed that FB/Twitter were just distributors. He repeatedly refused to engage with the idea that between making editorial decisions (that's essentially what they are), whether between the use of algorithms on who gets to see what AND on the human tweakings of said algorithms, or the use of human content moderation panels, etc, especially when combined with monetarization decisions off this, MIGHT not just move them beyond distributors.
At one point, he cited an old federal civil case about bookstores. I said it was a crappy analogy, because the case didn't involve a bookstore either adding pages to, or deleting pages from, the books that had been sold to it, then still selling them. (I didn't think to add, re the algorithm issue, that the bookstore case also didn't involve a bookstore placing limits on certain parts of the store and who could visit.)
(Update: A Twitter account called "Section 230," whose best part about it is using a sign for NM Highway 230 as its icon, and which admits to "lots of canned responses," has refused to engage with my bookstore analogy, instead citing a variant of the troll's analogy. I eventually told him "where to go" and muted the conversation. Said account has also refused to engage with the monetization issue and whether that doesn't make them "publishers.")
He also repeatedly claimed that the authors of the Nieman Lab piece, a journalism prof and an adjunct law prof, didn't know what they were talking about. (Update: Multiple people on Twitter have made similar claims.)
I told him that I thought he was not only engaging in handwaving with his disruptor claims, but was engaging in "Section 230 originalism" that I found no more compelling than constitutional law originalism. As for analogies? I said that social media didn't exist in 1996. And, full-blown versions of algorithms and content moderation panels took years to develop after FB and Twitter launches.
I finally went Godwin's Law on him and told him Hitler was also a disruptor then muted the conversation.
As for the original claims? The HOW is probably not the final word. But the THAT, in some sense of building on FOSTA/SESTA ideas in 2018, is solid. The one argument against the authors might be the same that EFF raised against FOSTA/SESTA, that "Fair Housing Council" ruling meant that websites willingly abetting sex trafficking were already outside of Section 230.
Per the authors, though, the monetization factor of the issues they raise with social media could be seen as playing out the same — they're no longer Good Samaritans. However, what they're getting at is "triggers" for when they're outside that zone. Re FOSTA/SESTA, at least some groups in original opposition dropped their opposition after a number of its terms were better defined.
