[TimPC]

There is good reason to reform section 230. Right now courts are applying the liability so broadly that companies aren’t liable even after they are notified about illegal behaviours on their site. In a court case involving Grindr refusing to take down a profile created by someone’s ex-bf that was being used to harass him, their refusing to so even after contact by lawyers was protected under section 230 and the case was thrown out. I’d be all for a modified version of section 230 that required sites to have a contact email and made them liable if they don’t address certain issues in an appropriate time period.

It’s also worth mentioning that before section 230 if you didn’t moderate you weren’t liable so in certain senses it’s a censorship bill rather than a free speech one since it protects removing speech. That being said I do understand the need to moderate sites and remove some content, hence my proposal of the modified version rather than a call for its elimination entirely.

[eli]

> a modified version of section 230 that required sites to have a contact email and made them liable if they don’t address certain issues in an appropriate time period.

So recreate the DMCA Takedown process but for speech? Do you think the DMCA is working well for copyright holders and users?

The abuse of this would be massive. Let's say I don't like the comments you wrote so I email the host of the forum they're on and say they're defamatory. Now the host has to decide if they are defamatory (which is often a tough call even for lawyers) and also weigh the risk that I might file a costly lawsuit anyway. Or they just delete the comment.

[hajile]

They always have the option of allowing everything and ignoring emails -- something the dcma doesn't offer.

[s__s]

To me that problem can be dealt with between the user, their ex-bf and local law enforcement. Grindr need not be involved, and no special internet laws need apply.

That’s a case of harassment and possibly some form of identity theft.

I don’t find your proposal tenable and it would obviously be prone to abuse.

[gowld]

That's only true of Grinder is obligated to positively ID a US resident who provided the content.

[odessacubbage]

there are a lot of reasons why grindr would not want to do that. grindr is not tinder and it's not okcupid a BIG part of the service is providing psuedonymity to it's users. attitudes about homosexuality in the us and especially internationally make it a pretty significant liability for a service to start 'outing' people. if you can be ID'ed in the US you can be ID'ed in singapore or chechnya. and even besides that there's a great degree of cultural complexity at play and even in 'tolerant' places many men are discreet because they don't want to be branded as a fag. if i ran grindr i would've made the same call

[dragonwriter]

> Right now courts are applying the liability so broadly that companies aren’t liable even after they are notified about illegal behaviours on their site.

Right. While the text of the bill doesn't remove distributor liability (only publisher/speaker), its applied as doing that to, and giving even actively-moderating sites only neutral platform liability. There may be justification for this in legislative history and legal construction, so it may not be a pure judicial mistake, but from a policy perspective its at least arguably an overcompensation that Congress should correct, a correction which would be much more modest than many of the reform/repeal Section 230 proposals but probably hit a better point in terms of dealing with the worst problems without creating more than it solves.

> It’s also worth mentioning that before section 230 if you didn’t moderate you weren’t liable

That's not entirely true. If you did actively moderate, you were liable as publisher, but if you didn't actively moderate you would still likely be held liable as a distributor.

> in certain senses it’s a censorship bill

The entire Communications Decency Act was a censorship bill and the express purpose of 230 as part of the CDA was to encourage sites to do moderate content instead of taking a hands-off position.

OTOH, so long as there is liability for knowing-unlewful content (distributor liability) and antitrust enforcement, I think that's a good thing and reduces the social pressure for government to push the maximum line the courts will let it get away with in terms of government content restrictions.

[curryst]

Grindr didn't refuse to take them down; the ex-bf kept creating new ones. That's a whole different problem. Grindr claims they were monitoring for new profiles, but that some slipped through their checks.

In that scenario, I don't know what a reasonable level of effort for Grindr to exert is. It seems infinitely unreasonable to make them liable for any failure; there is a determined person on the other end that will probably eventually find some way of adding spaces or using symbols instead of letters, or using weird UTF-8 symbols or something.

I don't see Grindr as failing there; while they probably could have done more, they seem to have made a best faith effort to stop it. The police should have intervened and filed charges against the boyfriend for stalking and harassment. Even failing that, I would have filed a civil case so I could subpoena the logs from Grindr and used them as evidence in a restraining order.

Grindr is not the appropriate party to resolve this. I don't call Ford when people drive their trucks like assholes. I don't call Glock when somebody shoots someone. If you're going to call Grindr, you might as well call their ISP and Google too, see if you can get the ISP to block Grindr or get Google to route Grinder to localhost. They're complicit in enabling this too.

> Right now courts are applying the liability so broadly that companies aren’t liable even after they are notified about illegal behaviours on their site

This, to a degree, makes sense. They haven't been notified about illegal behavior on their site, they have been notified of allegedly illegal behavior on their site. Grindr is well within their rights to say that they don't believe that the profile violates any laws. For example, it says that he attempted to file for a restraining order and was denied. So that court either found that what the ex-bf was doing wasn't illegal, or that he failed to meet the requirement of a preponderance of evidence. So he failed to convince a judge that his ex was more likely than not stalking him. Should Grindr be required to take action on a claim that is more likely false than true?

> I’d be all for a modified version of section 230 that required sites to have a contact email and made them liable if they don’t address certain issues in an appropriate time period.

That's fraught with issues. What counts as addressing the issue? Is it banning the profiles as people identify them? Is it banning the personal info from appearing in profiles? Do they have to hire a group of people to memorize all the bits of bad data, and check new profiles and profile updates for those snippets, as well as any clever encodings that a computer wouldn't recognize?

What is an appropriate time period? Is it some flat period, like a week, regardless of what changes are required? Does it vary, and if so, who decides what's a reasonable amount of time?

This is not to mention that literally none of this goes through a court, which is terrifying and exceptionally prone to abuse. Of course, it could go through a court, but we already have laws and remedies for this situation in court.

Cases like that make it seem really cut and dry, like there would never be a grey area. Even ignoring cases of outright fraud, what do you do in situations where one side feels victimized but it doesn't actually meet any legal standards? Like if person A always replies and argues with person Bs tweets. When person B blocks person A, they make a new account. Person B says they feel harassed and wants to force Twitter to do something about it. Person A says that Twitter is a public forum, and that if people don't want other people to disagree, they should use a more private forum. It never goes further than that. No threats, no doxxing, no real life interactions. Person A is probably an asshole, sure, but I don't think section 230 grants you immunity from assholes. I don't think it counts as stalking or harassment either (though I could certainly be wrong, not a lawyer). Should we really allow Person B to force Twitter to do something without having a judge involved? I would really rather not give the Twitter lynchmobs yet another way to dispense their own vigilante justice.

[odessacubbage]

not only that, plenty of people just use blank accounts with zero info and only exchange pics and identifying information in dms. the malicious ex could just do that with the same effect. if i'm a psycho bitch who scrawls your name/number and compromising information in hundreds of truckstop bathrooms across the tristate, are shell and conoco liable? that would be absurd and it's equally as absurd in this case.