For 24 years we’ve taken for granted our ability to post our thoughts and arguments about movies, music, restaurants, religions, and politicians. It’s difficult to overstate how important this law is for the free speech of ordinary Americans. This allows websites to take down racial slurs – all without suddenly also becoming liable for all the rest of their users’ speech. This is what allows virtually all mainstream social media companies to remove obscene or pornographic content. First, it declared that “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” In plain English, this means that my comments on Twitter or Google or Yelp or the comments section of my favorite website are my comments, and my comments only.īut Section 230 went farther, it also declared that an internet provider can “restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable” without being held liable for user content. Internet companies were on the verge of being forced to make a stark choice – dive into the sewer or dive into censorship. But if you imposed even modest controls on user content, then you’d be liable for their words. Let everything in and your service would be quickly swamped with the worst, most vile forms of expression. Taken together, the two rulings put online providers in a difficult dilemma. Even that small level of control rendered Prodigy liable for its users’ speech. Then, in 1995, a New York state court ruled that Prodigy – a competing internet service provider– could be held liable for a user comment because it moderated the message board, removing comments that violated Prodigy’s posting guidelines. In 1991, a federal court in New York dismissed a lawsuit against an early internet service provider named CompuServe on the grounds that CompuServe couldn’t be held liable for users’ speech because they didn’t exercise any control at all over posted content. In two early cases, the courts started to provide an extremely unsatisfactory answer to the questions above. If the comment is Google’s or Snapchat’s also, then an aggrieved restaurant owner or angry spouse could sue the richest companies in the world to obtain redress. To take an example from our present era, if I write a Google review of a restaurant and claim they served me spoiled food, is that claim deemed to come from me alone – as a private individual – or also from Google, as a corporate actor? If an angry spouse posts on his Snapchat story that his wife cheated on him, is he saying she cheated, or is Snapchat also saying it? If the comment is mine alone, I’m the only one that can be held responsible if I’m lying. If I write a comment and post it on an online chat room or a comment board, is it my speech, the internet service’s speech, or did we both speak? Were the principles of law developed for physical space also applicable to virtual space? And one of the first points of contention was over user-generated content. What is Section 230? One of the early challenges of the internet was how to import the well-developed law of free speech to the online world. I’m talking about the poorly-thought-out, poorly-understood idea of attempting to deal with widespread discontent with the effects of social media on political and cultural discourse and with the use of social media in bullying and harassment by revoking or fundamentally rewriting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
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