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> 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 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. |