[judge2020]

You can't forgo them voluntarily, the section makes it a fact that a service and the service's users cannot be treated as the 'publisher' of content if all they do is re-broadcast or propagate said content. The only way this dream scenario happens is if Google's lawyers put out a statement saying "we accept full responsibility for user-generated content and welcome anyone to sue us over such content, and we will not argue that we are protected under section 230 in court" - and even then, the judge of that court case could still rule that they're protected under 230 since it's law.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230

[someguydave]

That's why section 230 needs to be re-written. I'm fine with moderation, and I'm fine with sites that publish user-generated content defining their own content rules.

What I'm not fine with - and what the parent article is mainly focused on - are rules that are unevenly enforced in order to play favorites.

I would reform section 230 so say that you must post the site's user-generated content rules, and you must post a moderation log. The moderation log would consist of the list of moderation actions taken and the accounts affected, and the time. Any moderation action that appears to not align with the stated content policy should be reviewable by a third party accredited arbitrator, at the plantiff's expense.

The net effect of this scenario would be to cause the sites to write down detailed rules about content, and enforce them fairly on all sides.

Right now there are simply too many flagrantly biased or inaccurate moderation decisions on these sites, and many of them seem to be motivated by political or economic reasons.

It's one thing to ask that sites be the "public square" because of the huge gift of liability protection that section 230 grants. This argument has not held up in courts. It's a totally different thing to require sites play by their own rules, and hold them accountable for each hypocritical moderation action that genuinely hurts the "little guy"

[Const-me]

Paragraph b3 says this: “It is the policy of the United States to encourage the development of technologies which maximize user control over what information is received by individuals, families, and schools who use the Internet”

I think the technologies where a centralized commercial company controls which information is received by users violates at least the spirit of that law.

[edmundsauto]

Centralized spam filters are an interesting test case. We generally agree they are good, and necessary. How are they different than algorithmic ordering that we agree to in the TOS?

[Const-me]

> How are they different than algorithmic ordering that we agree to in the TOS?

People [would be] consuming the spam content being filtered agree with the filtering and are generally happy with it.

Failing that, when people are unhappy with their spam filter they can adjust or disable it.

As a last resort, they can migrate to another e-mail provider, there's no monopoly on e-mail. Moreover, e-mail is delivered almost equally between different providers.

Many people watching youtube or reading facebook are unhappy with their content policies. There's no way to control their filters or opt out of them. There's de-facto monopoly on these markets: the network effect is too strong, and antimonopoly laws don't seem to apply to their acquisitions of competitors.

[edmundsauto]

Interesting points. I don’t think I’m fully sold on it - something like Tinder would seem to be an interesting thought experiment, where people are unable to move due to network effects.

I definitely appreciate you taking the rime to respond. I’m just not sure that I agree that a network effect is monopolistic. It feels more akin to losing a feature by switching off gmail.

Definitely valid points about turning off the filter, although on gmail, I believe that is only for your personal filters. Google still filters huge amounts of malicious stuff before it gets to the spam folder, by silently dropping it.

[Const-me]

> I’m just not sure that I agree that a network effect is monopolistic.

A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which high infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors.

Source there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

A social network is very similar to railroad network, electricity distribution network, or landline phone network. Yet we allow Facebook or Youtube to do whatever they please with the servers they own, while regulating the hell out of the older ones.