| 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. |
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.