| 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. |