[ocdtrekkie]

Yep, Section 230 is built to protect big tech platforms. Unsurprisingly, everyone who writes articles claiming otherwise has a financial influence from a large tech firm.

A lot of the extremism, radical political shifts, and domestic terrorism can be placed squarely on 230 and it's defenders. Big tech platforms aren't worth this much damage.

[amanaplanacanal]

But without it, you can't even safely run your own local server, if you allow others to post there. It protects HN just as much as it protects Twitter and Facebook.

[ocdtrekkie]

This isn't meaningfully true, it's just a rhetoric used by big tech companies to protect their willfully harmful behavior.

Section 230 provides blanket immunity, but it's important to consider what actually happens without it: People doing their actual best to operate a site aren't going to be arbitrarily lined up and shot, judges and juries will side with them and establish clear precedent. But bad actors like Google and Facebook truly depend on 230, because if taken to court, they would be found guilty of willful actions based on profitability.

Good case law literally doesn't exist for Internet content in the US because 230 broke it in 1996, but the law isn't software, it's a human process with core concepts like intent and reasonableness which are circumvented by corporate immunity laws like 230.

[amadeuspagel]

> People doing their actual best to operate a site aren't going to be arbitrarily lined up and shot, judges and juries will side with them and establish clear precedent.

That's not what happened before Section 230[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prod....

[ocdtrekkie]

Yeah, there's one poor piece of case law from 1995, well before the modern Internet.

I understand people's fear of actually having to defend behavior on merits, but the literal death toll of Section 230 is a cost too high to avoid a couple court cases that will inevitably side with people doing the right thing.