|
|
|
|
|
|
by makomk
2067 days ago
|
|
|
What makes Section 230 a complicated and contentious issue isn't the actual details of the law - as you say, that's quite simple - it's the consequences of such a broad, powerful, simple, thing as protecting "interactive computer services" from almost all kinds of legal action for content created by others that they keep up, regardless of what they remove, with few caveats, across a vast swathe of causes for action, business models, moderation policies, etc. For example, suppose you're an online service Twitbook used by a vast swathe of the world to communicate, and you decide that you want to allow calls to murder politicians you dislike but not (obviously) ones you like. Section 230 gives you pretty good protection from liability over your decisions as to which political figures get threatened with murder. Probably even if one of your users gets inspired and puts a bullet in the head of someone you'd like to see dead. Or suppose you've got a nice legalized extortion racket seeking out negative claims about people or businesses, getting them to rank highly in Google, not allowing the original posters to remove them, and demanding money from the targets to take them down. Section 230 offers pretty much ironclad protection for your business model by making it nearly impossible to get a court order forcing you to take the content down, meaning you can ensure the only way to make it go away is to pay up, and you can even literally call the fee a charge to remove libellous or defamatory content and there's not a damn thing the court system will do about it. There's a long-running website Ripoff Report that has this as their business model, and they've won every case trying to get them to remove defamatory content without paying them money for the privilege thanks to Section 230. There's also plenty of imitators going after individuals, seeking out (say) claims they've cheated on their partners and charging money to remove them - again, solidly protected by Section 230. |
|
|
That's not true on 2 fronts. First, Section 230 requires good faith. That would almost certainly fail to pass the good faith muster, assuming they can demonstrate that it was done intentionally. So civilly, they would likely still be liable. In addition, Section 230 has no bearing on criminal law (it's specifically called out in subsection e). So in the event someone was killed, there would likely be a host of people from Twitter facing charges for being complicit in the death. They are effectively Charles Manson in this scenario, and I think they would have a hard time arguing that selectively filtering messages to expose users to messages encouraging them to kill someone does not count as speech.
I don't see why the second is a terrible issue. They're effectively a tabloid at that point, well known for spreading libelous content. I would be surprised if Queen Elizabeth is overly concerned that the tabloids say she's a lizard person. And also, RipoffReport is the wrong person to sue here, which is why that isn't working. If the content is libelous and you want it taken down, sue the person who wrote it, and have the judge issue a takedown order to Ripoff Report. Section 230 only protects them from civil liability, it doesn't make them immune to takedown requests.
In a funny idea, I wonder if you could upload a copyrighted image and then file a DMCA request against the page and have it delisted by Google. Their terms say you grant them a copyright, but if you upload a work that you don't own the copyright for you can't give them a copyright. Technically you're violating DMCA for the upload, and again by lying on the DMCA form you fill out (since you have to own the copyright) but as long as you pick something nobody is likely to sue you for, it should be fine (copy the credits from a book or something). Or if you want to get clever, you could have a friend make a painting of a stick figure in Paint and slap a copyright logo on it, then upload it and have your friend file the DMCA complaint. For bonus points, do it to every single page. They aren't liable because of section 230, but you could probably still force them to play a game of whack-a-mole with Google.