These are the 4 realistic outcomes of getting rid of section 230 protections which say: no interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher.
Option 1: every post must be vetted and manually approved by mods. For a big site, not doable.
Option 2: everyone must register with real id and they are all responsible for what they posted. Doable, and goodbye anonymity. Dictators wet dream. Welcome thought police.
Option 3: Say fuck it and close shop, get rid of all user content.
Option 4: stop doing business in the us, host all servers, all infrastructure, register everything in foreign countries.
This is what they are all begging for. Complete fucking idiocy. 230 is the only reason we can have a forum like this. It's the only reason you are allowed to post on someone else's site. Unless of course if you want to just use foreign companies servers.
The goal is reform.
So tell me, how would you reform it? With big government deciding what should be censored?
Explain to me the reforms you would enact.
Forcing companies like YT to state definitively whether they are a platform or publisher.
Which currently had zero meaning online. How would this fix anything?
lol, what do you mean it has zero meaning online?
There is no distinction online in any laws between a platform and a publisher. So as current laws stand, the distinction between the two is worthless.
So, how would you change the laws? Just screaming platform and publisher into the clouds is worthless.
Eh, dafuq you talking about?
He has no idea what he’s talking about.
Oh god FFS.
Again... As the law currently stands there's no distinction. You can moderate out of the ass, you still do not lose the protection.
Are you advocating for the gouvernement too décidé how a website should moderate content?
I wouldn’t. I don’t work for the government. I didn’t say anything about my position on the issue. I’m telling you what I think the goal is. Please take the attitude somewhere the fuck else. I owe you nothing.
Attitude? Wtf man I asked you an honest question. You suggested reform, how do we reform this in any meaningful way? If you don't want to have a conversation maybe you should take the attitude somewhere else.
For companies wanting 230 protection
Ownership, board membership, powers of attorney and loans must be by citizens of solely the US or incorporated entities(States, Indian tribes, random island commonwealths, etc) or corporations wholly owned directly or indirectly by such.
Bans of US citizens are not allowed unless they are currently imprisoned or under indictment or if they have multiple accounts.
Allow moderation of images/video less than 30 days old.
Only allow moderation of text (other than users blocking users) with a court order(including military courts) or a statement of copyright ownership and lack of fair use provided under penalty of perjury and permanent disbarment.
Only allow moderation of text with a court order? Why should I, who is paying for servers and made the site, have to go to court to remove your bullshit post? You're going to force me to pay for you?
Section 230 is not a right.
Neither is posting bullshit on the internet.
The big guys eat up the little guys and pay off the politicians to let it happen.
Trump is just a speed bump unless the next guy comes in just as hard if not harder.
As far as I remember, the proposed change was to repel 230 from the services who heavily censor user content, and that is not about spam.
Whatever.
Really that could be a step forward for internet. There are a lot of interesting and perfectly working solutions. Distributed, federative, etc. The only drawback is that there are no many users of that solutions. Everybody use that proprietary centralised crap from big corporations - Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. When someone welcome friends to the alternative solution, everybody tell "we don't want to, we have whatsapp/facebook/etc.". If this 230 repeal will be real, it will force users to drop that corporate crap in favor of open and distributed solutions.
In Russia we got that censorship with 'real ID' registration a little earlier. Do you think that this changed something? No. But now everybody in Russia know what VPN is, how to bypass censorship and how to use advaced communication technologies. The result of government laws was completely opposite to what they mean. They finally lost a possibility to censor internet or track users. Yes, there will always be some poor bastards who forgot about security and encryption and was catched by police. But overall, things become less fortune for government.
While we have internet connectivity (possibility to establish a connection from one IP to any other), there is no way to set up full censorship and tracking.
The difference is that taking out the 230 protections would impact the websites and companies themselves and they would have to fundamentally change their business.
I'm sorry, but if my webpage is not doing anything illegal, fuck any government person, in fact, fuck any person that comes up and tells me how I should run out and what's fair.
Fuck that bullshit.
We have no 230 at all. Any website treated as a property of the owner. If you do nothing illegal or anti-government, there are no any consequences. Even if you have some kind of forum/board and if some user post something illegal or anti-government on it, that does not mean that you will be prosecuted. Authorities will ask you about a data on the user who posted sedition first. May be I am not very into specific US details of websites laws, but I can't understand the real difference for something that is not a huge thing like Google or Facebook who exclusevly use user content to push their narratives.
The law right now is that the website is not responsible for anything a user posts due to section 230. People want to get the law changed because they think twitter is unfairly removing content from Trump lovers and wasn't them to be liable for removing content, essentially making big day government the boss.
And that is bad because... ?
I still don't get what is the difference between website who push some agenda with its own articles and website who do exactly same thing to push the agenda using selected user content and deleting everything that is not aligned.
Why in first case website is liable, and in second case it should not?
It's like online shop deleting any negative comment or review in feedback section. There is no difference from the writing 'positive feedback' by shop stuff.
It's about liability. If the website is liable for what users post they will just choose all user content.
Imagine if the win owner could be sued for someone saying "Hillary eats baby faces". This is what could happen without the 230 protections.
Couldn't he just say "it is an opinion of user and the user IP is 1.2.3.4, find him and prosecute if you wish. I'm heplful and cooperative publisher"?
If not. its like sueing shop owner for selling a kitchen knife used in murder by customer.
The problem is they are now a publisher so they are liable for having published it, doesn't matter who wrote it.
If the NY Times publishes a story by Michael Parsons that says Donald Trump is a transsexual hooker, the NY Times gets sued as the distributed the story, and maybe Michael too.
The following stupid post has been left for documentation and context; insult deleted with apology.
Actually, publishers are responsible for content, because they have editorial powers like deletion, moderation, and so on. The model you and I want is that of a phone company, which is providing the infrastructure with absolutely no responsibility of what goes over the lines. The problem with reddit is that they are a phone-company when it comes to responsibility and a publisher when it comes to editorial privileges. Reddit does not censor Anti-Hillary or Biden-corruption posts because they are required to do so by law. They do that for money. Repealing section 230 is not about burdening them with responsibility, it is about them making a choice:
OR
You can't have user generated content without protection from litigation for the hosting service. How would something like twitter exist? They have something like 300 million tweets per day. Should they be liable for all of them, or none of them?
Should they be forced to host legal sex videos if they don't want a part of that?
I grant you that your concern is legit and my post is a shitstain.
Sorry for the insult, I did not think that through, but although perhaps you did, what about the youtube of the early 2000s? Rampant anti-semitism, 4chan-trolling, religious wars and god knows what else.
Twitter used to be something like the linkedin for the porn industry, with all sorts of really weird shit by people advertising themselves and their wares.
4chan is a more modern example of how to do it right.
Free speech on the internet is currently not a legal issue, because with current legislation, new companies are free to set up sites with libertine policies. The current problem is centralization and lazy consumers. If there is no or only a small market for sites with 2010 mores (TOS), there is not much law-makers can do about it, or should do about it.
Where do we go from here?
Personally think we're fine the way it is. If you want a site with no moderation, find one or make it.
The government should be involved only if the content is illegal.I don't think they should decide anything else. Now there could be a problem with the government deciding what's illegal, but that's another issue altogether and we could go around in circles.
As it exists now, I think there's a good balance. Child porn, death threats, straight up scams and harmful malware. That's about the only time the government gets involved right now and I don't think it should be any more than that.
Telling the owner of a site who pays the bills for a server that they can't delete a post they deem shitty because some asshole in Alaska wants to be asshole to some other asshole in Canada.... Well, to me that seems unfair. Why am I paying for content I don't want?
not my downdoots, fren
That's what I thought I was saying in my reply above, but didn't, apparently.
Yeah, that's what all these people clamoring for repeal don't understand. Goodbye user-generated content with any kind of anonymity. Period.
A website like this one, or shit, even TDW will not be able to operate in the same way now that it does after a repeal. THIS HURTS EVERYONE not just Democrats or Republicans.
I'm not US citizen, so I can't clamor for repel or opposite. I just want to understand.
You already can't generate user content with anonymity. Every popular to slightest degree platform already knew more about you than you yourself.
Even in a worst case scenario, when 'platforms' would be obliged to collect ID's of users with addresses and phones. for the forums like this it would not be a problem to move into ZeroNet or any other hidden network. More people in p2p, faster it works. It will even have some benefits.
Or I am missing some point? May be in US a 'publisher' have to pay some publisher taxes and 'platform' should not? And that taxes make the, say, conspiracy.win too expensive for the owner?