[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.