[CookieMon]

> When in American history would all of the major book publishers refusing to print someone’s words mean the publishers should be made legally liable?

Major book publishers are legally liable, which is fine because they decide what they publish, e.g. they refuse to print some people’s words.

The tech industry was given immunity from that liability, with the idea they acted more like a common carrier than a publisher.

[triceratops]

> with the idea they acted more like a common carrier than a publisher.

This is pure invention.

Information services' closest publishing analogue is letters to the editor. In print, the publisher has a far lower inbound volume of letters, and has to satisfy a less stringent SLA (letters are published daily or weekly). Publishers are able to moderate submissions effectively. Thus they can be held liable for user submissions they publish, even though they didn't write them.

Information services cannot do this. If they adopt the moderation model of a traditional publisher, their usefulness is lost because:

a) you'll need way more manpower to moderate (or the service cannot handle a high volume of submissions)

b) you'll lose the low-latency of an information service (i.e. nobody wants to wait 10 hours for their tweet to be posted).

Given these facts, treating information services as publishers by making them liable for what their users posted would have killed an entire industry in the cradle. Which is why Congress wrote the safe harbor into law. It has nothing to do with them being a "common carrier". You can read the law and it explicitly allows them to perform as much moderation as they wish.

[CookieMon]

You're railing against claims I didn't make.

Section 230 explicitly allows the tech industry to perform moderation. It was needed because ISPs were being sued for user-generated content and if the service had not moderated content they were found not at fault (Cubby, Inc. v. CompuServe Inc), but if they had moderated their user content they were found to have editorial control and thus be a publisher and legally liable (Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co.), this is directly relevant to whimsicalism's analogy.

A Wikipedia summary: "The court held that although CompuServe did host defamatory content on its forums, CompuServe was merely a distributor, rather than a publisher, of the content. As a distributor, CompuServe could only be held liable for defamation if it knew, or had reason to know, of the defamatory nature of the content. As CompuServe had made no effort to review the large volume of content on its forums, it could not be held liable for the defamatory content."

Section 230 was Congress clarifying which of those ways internet services should be treated. My phrase "with the idea they acted more like" is descriptive of what ISPs are / how they are classified, not prescriptive or Congress demanding how they act. It does sound like I should have said the idea was they're "more like a distributor than a publisher", instead of "more like a common carrier than a publisher".

[triceratops]

Ah gotcha. We're on the same page.

[mattnewton]

Thank you for the clarification, I'd note this is a bad analogy but the edit window seems to have passed.