[cirno]

> It allows the NYT to hide behind pawns they would love to sacrifice in the name of spreading convenient lies.

And when it comes to Twitter or other sites, how do you sue one of its users who posts libel and defamation about your character, when said user is hiding behind a VPN anyway?

Twitter is hosting the content, and chooses not to take it down, so if that content breaks actual laws (libel, cyberstalking, etc), they should be held responsible for it.

Whereas if it falls within the purview of free speech, then they should have nothing to worry about.

I realize it's not a popular sentiment here because we want to build platforms and not worry about the legality, but giving websites blanket immunity to host law-breaking content because "it was posted by someone else" means that all of our laws become unenforcable on the internet.

[nradov]

Twitter does take down content that breaks actual laws when ordered to so by a court. So the state you're asking for already exists.

[cirno]

I can't say I've even heard of a court order for Twitter to remove a tweet before.

Is that really practical, though? To spend thousands of dollars on legal fees to take down a single tweet from an anonymous account that will just repost it again and again? Meanwhile every time Twitter is completely immune to any consequences for hosting and distributing said content?

It's a sucky situation. A service like Twitter can't really function if they're responsible for the content on the site, but all our existing laws are effectively unenforceable on the web otherwise.

I think the hope people have for the removal of section 230 shielding is that Twitter and other content hosting providers will take existing laws more seriously. For instance, Cloudflare today says "there should be laws to handle this stuff, we don't want to enforce anything", and to date the CEO has only ever made two exceptions to that.

The contrarian side to that is going too far and Twitter et al becoming too censorious and taking down legitimate free speech content. None of these service providers can afford to have a legal team on standby to determine what constitutes fair use and free speech or not.

I don't have an answer, I'm just saying this isn't a one-sided issue. Right now the internet has a real problem with libel and cyberstalking. It's one of those things that one tends to not realize or think/care about until it happens to them.

[nradov]

Twitter already does take down legitimate free speech content. Their terms of service are far more restrictive than the US Constitution. And sometimes Twitter management takes down content or bans users on a purely arbitrary basis just because they don't like it (or they think their major advertising customers won't like it).

There's nothing special about Twitter or any other Internet site. If someone libels you then you have recourse through the civil courts. And if you file pro se then it's very cheap.