[jeffdavis]

Common carriers (like a telephone company) are content-neutral (unbiased) and have no legal responsibility for what is said. If someone mails you a threatening letter, you can't sue USPS.

Publishers can publish (or decline to publish) whatever they want, but they do have some responsibility for what they say. Libel, copyright infringement, and threats all carry consequences even if the publisher is not the author. Publishers can be as biased as they want.

Is FB a publisher or a common carrier? What about Google? Youtube? Instagram? Twitter?

(The answer is that they are kind of either depending on the exact part of the organization. And they are having it both ways: control without responsibility.)

[koboll]

>Publishers can publish (or decline to publish) whatever they want, but they do have some responsibility for what they say.

It is abjectly insane to label a tweet as something Twitter, the company, is "saying". If we're retooling the law to orient it toward that definition, then the inevitable endgame, after the avalanche of litigation, will be that the concept of posting text on social media or blogging platforms is dead. It kills Web 2.0 in its entirety. It regresses the United States back to the dark ages of a completely one-directional media, where the best you can do as an outsider is to submit a letter to the editor.

[karatestomp]

> It is abjectly insane to label a tweet as something Twitter, the company, is "saying"

If there were a company printing and distributing, to any passing person on the street, fliers with content provided by the company's clients, would they have any legal liability for what their clients put in the fliers? That seems very similar to what Twitter does. Certainly closer than their being treated like a phone company or mail carrier, which they don't much resemble (email provider? Yeah, sure, they do). Perhaps in that situation the printing & distribution company would also have no liability, I don't know.

[koboll]

If I invent a machine that passes out six thousand flyers per second, and allow people to feed text into it at will, then yes, it is insane to describe these as my "speech". I may provide a mechanism for the words to get onto a page, but I have zero agency in the process of thinking them up, drafting them, and enacting their distribution. I am providing a mechanism for others to say things.

However, you would probably say I start to become liable if I erect a giant wall on which all of these flyers are posted, and allow illegal content to remain hanging there even when I'm informed of it and aware it's illegal. This gray area is exactly what Section 230 is designed around.

It's totally unreasonable to expect a platform operator to act as the speaker of a post the moment it is posted. But after becoming aware of a post and the reasons it may be objectionable, they start to gain a sort of post-hoc liability.

If someone prints out child porn, glues it to a yard sign, and plants it on your front lawn, you should probably not be liable for arrest starting that instant. But if, after coming and going and seeing it over and over for a week, you make no efforts to remove it or report it, then you should probably be liable for arrest. This is exactly the logic behind Section 230.

[karatestomp]

> If I invent a machine that passes out six thousand flyers per second, and allow people to feed text into it at will, then yes, it is insane to describe these as my "speech".

I'm not following how having a machine do the work absolves the owner of responsibility. It seems like the same kind of "normal thing, but with a computer!" that folks in tech circles usually mock when it shows up on patent applications or when someone decides we need a new law to cover something that's already covered by existing laws, simply because now it's with a computer.

If you manage to replace all the components of an ordinary publisher with robots, seems to me the owner of those robots ought to be treated just like an ordinary publisher. Accepting, storing, reproducing, and distributing as broadly as possible (oh and don't forget slapping your own ads on) others' work sure seems like publishing to me.

[ryukafalz]

>I'm not following how having a machine do the work absolves the owner of responsibility. It seems like the same kind of "normal thing, but with a computer!" that folks in tech circles usually mock when it shows up on patent applications or when someone decides we need a new law to cover something that's already covered by existing laws, simply because now it's with a computer.

The fact that it's happening on a computer isn't the important part, and indeed if that were the only difference it would be a ridiculous argument. The important part is that the operator of the machine has never seen the content.

It's unreasonable to be liable for content you aren't aware of, and thankfully the status quo is still that you are not (outside of a few unfortunate cases). Effectively most of the internet couldn't exist if this protection were eliminated. Hacker News might not be able to exist. If you were liable for everything any user might possibly say, regardless of whether or not you notice it, would you run a discussion forum like this? A web host? A messaging app?

Once you're aware of e.g. illegal content, of course you should be liable.

[leereeves]

If you designed a machine that passed out six thousand flyers per second, and only allowed certain people to distribute certain messages, you might reasonable be considered liable for the content you've approved.

[nradov]

There's nothing insane about it. Twitter used to be highly supportive of free speech. However they now actively ban users and censor tweets which don't conform to Twitter's ideology. The content they are banning isn't illegal (at least not in the USA), they just don't like it. And the criteria for banning is only vaguely defined and constantly shifting based on the whims of a few employees. Thus any tweets they leave up are implicitly endorsed by Twitter.

Twitter also acts as a publisher by exercising editorial control over if and where tweets actually appear to each user.

Twitter would have a stronger legal and moral argument against further regulation if they acted as a neutral intermediary. For example, they could establish a policy of only removing content if required to do so by law.

[esoterica]

Hacker news also bans people merely for being rude, even if they don’t post illegal content. If you have a principled objection to this act you should delete your HN account and leave.

[nradov]

You misunderstand. As a strong supporter of private property rights I have no objection to Y Combinator or Twitter banning users or removing content from their services. But if they're going to exercise that degree of control then for regulation and legal liability purposes they should expect to be treated more like publishers than like common carriers.

[strbean]

No parcel carrier will allow me to mail my cardboard box full of loose fish guts. They turn me away because the box is wet and falling apart and smells terrible. They find the content I want them to ship to be objectionable, and it would negatively affect their ability to provide service to their other customers.

I'm not sure if that is a great analogy for what Twitter et al. are doing in regards to content policing, but there is some kind of argument there.

[esoterica]

Should we be able to sue HN over any comment or post that gets made in this website? Do you not realize that HN would be forced to shut down overnight since the legal liability would be completely untenable? Your legal regime would effectively make internet moderation impossible. It would, without a single trace of exaggeration, instantly kill almost every single internet community in existence.

[nradov]

You're exaggerating. I don't know why you immediately jump to the assumption that any regulatory change would be all or nothing. A more likely political outcome will be some sort of compromise.

For example, Internet services which host user-generated content might be able to retain liability protection only if they also provide some reasonable degree of transparency and accountability. Clearly document their editorial policies and algorithms, and provide a formal appeals process for users who were censored.

[BadThink6655321]

Should the person whose content is blocked be able to face their accuser, know precisely what line they crossed over, and have recourse against arbitrary, malicious, incompetent ... moderation? As it now stands, one entity is judge, jury, and executioner, which is a recipe for abuse of power.

[ryandrake]

> It would, without a single trace of exaggeration, instantly kill almost every single internet community in existence.

Only the ones that act like publishers, curating the content they allow and disallow. The ones that behave more like the telephone or postal system would not have the liability, right?

[leetcrew]

ideally a platform with >n users or generating >m revenue would have to pick between publisher (editorial control and liability) or carrier (neither).

[gadders]

Well, by the fact they are allowing some voices and silencing others, largely in one political direction, it would seem they are expressing an opinion indirectly.

I don't think anyone wants Twitter to be responsible for every tweet. What most people want them to do is be more like they used to claim to be "We are the free speech wing of the free speech party"

[Fjolsvith]

Maybe not disabling accounts, but they do shadow ban:

https://metro.co.uk/2018/09/06/twitter-admits-shadowbanning-...

[woopwoop]

Here is section 230, the law protecting websites from liability for things published on them by third parties. [0] I do not see anything about a provider needing to be content neutral. In fact, part c2a seems to be explicitly saying the opposite. IANAL. Where does this legal concept of a distinction between a "carrier" and a "publisher" appear?

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230

[schoen]

It appears in the pre-230 litigation about intermediary liability, to which section 230 was a response.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...

[heavyset_go]

There is no distinction, it's a red herring.

[iudqnolq]

Completely wrong with regard to current US law. First Amendment rights apply to corporations without distinguishing based any attribute. There is no such legal concept as a publisher or a platform. No legal scholar has argued that publisher/platform exists in current law, the academic community speculated it might be nice to change the law to make the distinction and then it gets misreported.

[esoterica]

They should be allowed to have it both ways. If I run a video game forum, I should be allowed to ban trolls and remove off-topic posts without accepting legal responsibility for any illegal content that gets posted on my forum by third parties without my prior knowledge or consent. Forcing people to choose between being a publisher and being a utility would completely and instantly kill every single internet community dead in its tracks.

I don’t understand how people can post on a heavily moderated forum like HN while demanding that moderation be effectively made illegal. It’s like people hate Facebook and Google so much that they mindlessly get onboard with any form of retaliation against them regardless of the actual consequences.

[carapace]

FWIW, it doesn't sound insane to me that you should have "legal responsibility for any illegal content that gets posted on my forum by third parties without my prior knowledge or consent." You're the one who chose to set your forum up that way, eh? (We're not talking about hackers defacing your site, yeah?)

As much as I find the idea of "illegal content" galling (I love freedom) I'm not so idealistic that I fail to recognize that freedom of speech cannot be an absolute. ("Fire" in theaters; revealing national security secrets; doxxing; there are limits. I'm glad I'm not on the hot seat when it comes to nailing them down: I don't run open internet forums, for example.)

If you don't have a way to pass that responsibility onto the actual speakers then you must shoulder it yourself, no?

Whether or not current systems can survive that is less important to me than the establishment of formal responsibility for one's speech.

[ryandrake]

There should be a line somewhere between curbing abuse, curating content, and promoting ideology. But I personally don’t feel comfortable or qualified to decide where that line should be drawn. There must be some point between USENET and the NYT editorial section where the publisher becomes liable for the content they promote.

[Fjolsvith]

FB is a publisher because they don't allow everyone on their platform.

Edit:

We try to make Facebook broadly available to everyone, but you cannot use Facebook if:

    You are under 13 years old.
    You are a convicted sex offender.
    We've previously disabled your account for violations of our Terms or Policies.
    You are prohibited from receiving our products, services, or software under applicable laws.

From Facebook's Terms of Service:

https://www.facebook.com/terms.php