[jerrya]

As absolutely not a lawyer, and acknowledging my huge ignorance I'd suggest that First Amendment processes are heard in court and protected by due process. Aren't they?

For good or ill, §230 bypasses court hearings and due process and so I wonder if it is

a) itself an unconstitutional denial of rights to the users, or

b) actually just fine legally, however an overturning of it would not necessarily be an assault on the First Amendment, only on this congressional shortcut

My "reform" of §230 would be to add on to this congressionally mandated shortcut with some form of due process to the users whose court rights have been bypassed -- if a site wants to use §230 protections, then they have to provide some form of due process to users, perhaps a timely takedown/suspension/banning appeals process, held in the open

If a site doesn't want to provide that, then they can avail themselves of the First Amendment and their §230 immunities are stripped and they are open to lawsuits.

[XorNot]

I'll post the same obligatory "actually read your Constitution" note:

The first amendment protects US citizens right to speak freely in public and private venues from being retaliated against by the government.

It specifically means you cannot be denied government services, support our rights because of any opinions you express publicly or privately.

It does not and never has obligated any private persons or business to listen, rebroadcast, or not *react" to what you say. You have never been protected from the consequences of your speech within your community, nor has anyone been required to enable it. It has never been a protection against the speech of anyone else, for example rallying their community to speak against you or for other private services to deny you patronage.

[Multicomp]

> It does not and never has obligated any private persons or business to listen, rebroadcast, or not *react" to what you say. You have never been protected from the consequences of your speech within your community, nor has anyone been required to enable it.

So there might be an example of the supreme court requiring just that: in a case called Marsh vs. Alabama, a private community (a company town) was forced to allow some mormons to keep door-knocking on private property because of First Amendment rights.

Something to the effect of 'if you have enough control over private space, you start to take on an increasing blend of public square obligations'. At least, that is the conclusion I drew from the below article. Unfamiliar domain name but I got it from memeorandum so it's not afaik some completely off the rails screed.

https://lpeproject.org/blog/after-the-great-deplatforming-re...

[klyrs]

Marsh v Alabama is a pretty narrow ruling, and hasn't been interpreted to apply to much more than company towns, which are now illegal.

Cyber Promotions v AOL is a subsequent case which is much closer to today's question: Cyber Promotions wanted to spam AOL, and AOL wanted to filter out spam because it threatened to ruin the internet. Thankfully, AOL won that case, and spam filtering is constitutional.

[jerrya]

Apologies, but it's not clear to me the relevance of what you are saying to what I have posted.

I don't think I'm asking for freedom from consequences for anyone, just the reverse of anything, I think sites should be granted 230 immunities but only if they provide some form of due process to users, and if they don't, users should be able to take sites to court just like they could if there was no 230.

[BostonFern]

The language you use seems to indicate that you either assume the First Amendment to be synonymous with freedom of speech, a common misconception, or that you believe the First Amendment would apply to tech companies currently protected by Section 230 were it repealed.

[jerrya]

> or that you believe the First Amendment would apply to tech companies currently protected by Section 230 were it repealed.

Is that not what Tim Wu is saying?

> But content moderation, as an exercise of editorial discretion, is protected by the First Amendment. And that Congress can’t repeal.

And so my understanding is that

1. Site content moderation actions are protected by the First Amendment.

2. Gov't can't tell a site what to moderate or not.

3. But without 230, a user can potentially sue a site for defamation or other reasons.

4. 230 provides a site a bypass to those suits, it gives sites publisher immunity.

My suggestion is that publisher immunity from user lawsuits should come with some guarantee of due process. Congress took away the ability of users to sue. My suggestion is that seemed reasonable in 1996, but today Congress should return to the user some ability to negotiate/talk/appeal to sites regarding their takedowns/suspensions/bans. I refer to that as a form of due process. But if you wish, call that a consumer protection law.

I've mentioned this twice now, and people tell me I need to read the Constitution or that I am confusing free speech and the First Amendment.

I definitely have no idea what you folks are seeing, and wish you could more clearly express your ideas and help with that.

[michaelmrose]

What sort of suits do you wish could proceed?

When you say due process regarding being banned what would that look like? Why should anyone have to justify to you why you can't use someone else's website?

Under what terms and situations would they have to reinstate you? Why?

[michaelmrose]

Saying I'm not a lawyer does not excuse you from doing the slightest bit of research.

You never had a due process right to be heard on facebook in the first place so 230 didn't abridge this completely fictional right.

It wouldn't abridge site owners rights to remove 230 it would just break the internet as we know it in the US. Your suggestion isn't a lot better. It would create pointless process that would likely be abused by vexatious litigants so you combine doing nothing for average joe's with giving special interests lisence to ruin the internet.

If you have not the slightest idea what the law us how can you hope to anmend it.

How about we leave everything as is and if you don't like how facebook runs their show you make your own site...with blackjack and hookers if desired.

[MrFlynn]

I'm not sure how section 230 bypasses due process. If a social media site removes something you posted, your first amendment rights have not been violated. The first amendment only protects you from being censored by the government. It says nothing about a private business enforcing whatever arbitrary rules it has against you.

[jerrya]

due process may not be the most appropriate or in any manner appropriate terminology.

but prior to 230, I could sue a site for distributing defamatory material.

Congress removes my right or my ability to do so. It gives my rights away to the site who it provides 230 immunity to.

Sites and society may have benefited from this trade, but individual have lost fundamental abilities to seek their day in court and have gained nothing.

I think Congress should temper 230 by saying that if a company accepts 230 immunity from lawsuits, it needs to provide basic due process rights to appeals processes to users.

If it doesn't want to provide reasonable appeals processes, it forfeits its 230 immunities and can seek redress in court.

[notahacker]

You still have the right to sue the originator of the content, Section 230 just recognises the reality that platform owners (from Facebook down to little guy with a comment section on his blog) are not the originator of the content just because they filter spam and/or [occasionally] delete something manually. Without that, they would of course have deleted a lot more users and a lot more content a lot earlier, because who wants to pay the legal bills for defending some random citizen's claim about a person or company?

How would a "due process" proposal even work? Do we have the US government step in and set global rules determining what is and isn't legitimate speech and who should have posting rights on your website? And if so, how is this making the Internet more free?

[PeterisP]

This proposal starts looking weird as soon as you go into detail because it ties one persons rights to redress in court with the due process accorded to their opponent - because any due process would start only if a takedown (a) happens and (b) is appealed.

I.e. if user A makes a post that defames you, you complain, it gets taken down, user A makes an appeal according to the new "230+ process" and gets it restored - then you'd have no redress in court because the provider followed the due process. (in any case, due process would be about the process of evaluating whether the post meets some editorial criteria, but the criteria themselves can be absolutely arbitrarily set by the platform; if they decide to ban the posts which contain the letter "a", that's compatible with due process, as long as they look in the appeal and point out that yup, there was an "a" in it so the ban was appropriate; and if they decide to ban only posts which they're absolutely required by other laws and leave everything else, that still fits due process).

In the opposite scenario, user A makes a post that might defame you but it gets immediately taken down by an automated algorithm; user A complains but gets auto-rejected without due process - so then you'd have a right to redress in court, but for what? The post got taken down.

And if you had in mind right to redress in court for the person making the post, they don't have any valid claim pre-230, during 230 and in your proposed scenario either way.

[michaelmrose]

You can ask the website to take it down and you can sue the person who posted it why isn't that sufficient?