[hansvm]

Print magazines aren't attempting to moderate 2-10 novels per second either. Isn't it much more commonplace for print magazines to exercise editorial control over every piece of content, conferring on themselves in some sense (at least as far as these laws are concerned) a degree of accountability?

[juniper_strong]

It is not just much more commonplace but obligatory for print magazines to exercise that control. A print magazine can't say, send me slander, send me libel, send me copyright violations, send me terrorist threats, if they agree with my personal political slant, I will print them all no questions asked.

Why can't a print magazine do that, but a website can? Did 230 say anything about why those are treated differently?

[dragonwriter]

> Why can't a print magazine do that, but a website can? Did 230 say anything about why those are treated differently?

The law itself doesn't, because laws generally don't. The discussions around the law offered a number of reasons; one basic deontological idea, as I recall, was that a website moderating user content was functionally more like a choosing which third-party publications to offer than actually publishing. But probably the more significant argument was consequentialist, that if companies were liable for everything if they tried to moderate at all, the into viable large scale sites would be completely unmoderated, with no attempt to preemptively identify illegal and offensive content. And that's why it was included as part of the Communications Decency Act.

[root_axis]

It's because the user on a website is understood to be representing themselves, not the organization that created the website. The intent of section 230 was to codify this distinction in representation into the law.

On the other hand, a print magazine hires employees to produce a bespoke product sold to the public, so whatever they publish in the magazine is understood to be a representation of the magazine company. In fact, the owner of a website would indeed be liable for posting infringing content if it were understood that the site owner was representing themselves (e.g. if I posted stolen photos from your laptop onto my self-hosted blog).