Section 230 Opinion, Theory Crafting and Practical Reality
- Thread starter Abhishekm
- Start date
Doomsought
Well-known member
Nuking 230 is well, the nuclear option in this fight. Its an act of last resort because the legislature has been limp wristed with section 230 reform. They had four years of increasing warning sings, but they chose to obey the black mailer rather than fight back.
lordmcdeath
Well-known member
Ultimately there are two real ways to deal with it without nuking the internet until it glows under a pile of radioactive lawsuits.
1. You create a law that designates 5 basic categories of media. If you have more than a 30% market share of any of those categories, you are effectively a public forum. You must operate as such with an open infraction and appeals processes that includes publicly available and auditable records. So either competition or this new public forum regulation will force this out into the light.
2. Add political affiliation/view as a protected class to the civil rights bill. That will prevent any of this censorship under that umbrella and also prevent workplace discrimination based on political view. That is likely to have several good knock on effects.
1. You create a law that designates 5 basic categories of media. If you have more than a 30% market share of any of those categories, you are effectively a public forum. You must operate as such with an open infraction and appeals processes that includes publicly available and auditable records. So either competition or this new public forum regulation will force this out into the light.
2. Add political affiliation/view as a protected class to the civil rights bill. That will prevent any of this censorship under that umbrella and also prevent workplace discrimination based on political view. That is likely to have several good knock on effects.
Doomsought
Well-known member
Being a public square is a matter of fact that must be decided by jury.
That specific wording is would work much better.
Abhishekm
Well-known member
That still leaves the issue that is the double standard of section 230. Specifically where web based companies enjoy both the protection of a platform against serious legal consequences for content from its users and the privilege of a publisher in being able to selectively choose supported content and allowed users of their service.
And the public private argument doesn't really take into account the subscription or follow system. I mean platform wise you can make an argument for public visibility for content people have not explicitly chosen to see but what about people subscribing, following or explicitly opting to be notified of all content by someone and the other party accepting it?
At that point wouldn't a Facebook or Twitter post be as private a means of communication as a whatsapp group or a magazine subscription for that matter?
Heck even for publicly visible content, its not like unsolicited contact is new. Half the average individuals mail is junk they never asked for but look over anyway. Door to door salesmen are a click and so are advertisement phone calls or emails. As long as its not illegal why would that even matter law wise.
And that is not even getting into the ability of a company to view and store user data or even curating private messages, videos or images.
There is a lot more nuance to 230 I'll admit but the issue itself is both even more nuanced and also explicit. The nuance being the complexity of how the web functions as an indjstry and explicit in that it really is a politically accepted double standard to how rules and privacy is applied to the 'web' as opposed to how it is treated anywhere else.
Thirty years of people clicking yes to 'user agreements' they never read, companies writing and editing the same at will and without notice expecting rightly that no large portion of the population will really care and politicians who work 100 days out of a year not caring about the actual details of their policies under the correct expectation that their average voter will never look into it anyway.
This isn't an argument or anything, just me rambling my own very shallow opinion on this stuff. So read or ignore as you guys want. But I don't think the needs of the protection for specific portions of an industry to be viable should take precedent over constitutional rights or be a justification for legal doublestandards.
My opinion on article 230 is basically that when you strip away all the party or personal politics based motivations for or against it, the argument is whether the legislature allowing the bending and likely the ocassional breaching of constitutional or legal rights of random citizens at someone elses biased whims is worth more or less than the profitability and likely viability of a nebulous potion of the web based sector of the economy.
Not saying which is the right choice there because it really does depend on which one values more. There probabaly are plenty of ways to say that in a way slanting the view towards the industry and more slanting it even more towards the rights argument.
I don't even know what I would prefer myself if it came down to it. But thats as best as I can put my understanding of the topic in my limited writing skills and understanding of the topic.
And the public private argument doesn't really take into account the subscription or follow system. I mean platform wise you can make an argument for public visibility for content people have not explicitly chosen to see but what about people subscribing, following or explicitly opting to be notified of all content by someone and the other party accepting it?
At that point wouldn't a Facebook or Twitter post be as private a means of communication as a whatsapp group or a magazine subscription for that matter?
Heck even for publicly visible content, its not like unsolicited contact is new. Half the average individuals mail is junk they never asked for but look over anyway. Door to door salesmen are a click and so are advertisement phone calls or emails. As long as its not illegal why would that even matter law wise.
And that is not even getting into the ability of a company to view and store user data or even curating private messages, videos or images.
There is a lot more nuance to 230 I'll admit but the issue itself is both even more nuanced and also explicit. The nuance being the complexity of how the web functions as an indjstry and explicit in that it really is a politically accepted double standard to how rules and privacy is applied to the 'web' as opposed to how it is treated anywhere else.
Thirty years of people clicking yes to 'user agreements' they never read, companies writing and editing the same at will and without notice expecting rightly that no large portion of the population will really care and politicians who work 100 days out of a year not caring about the actual details of their policies under the correct expectation that their average voter will never look into it anyway.
This isn't an argument or anything, just me rambling my own very shallow opinion on this stuff. So read or ignore as you guys want. But I don't think the needs of the protection for specific portions of an industry to be viable should take precedent over constitutional rights or be a justification for legal doublestandards.
My opinion on article 230 is basically that when you strip away all the party or personal politics based motivations for or against it, the argument is whether the legislature allowing the bending and likely the ocassional breaching of constitutional or legal rights of random citizens at someone elses biased whims is worth more or less than the profitability and likely viability of a nebulous potion of the web based sector of the economy.
Not saying which is the right choice there because it really does depend on which one values more. There probabaly are plenty of ways to say that in a way slanting the view towards the industry and more slanting it even more towards the rights argument.
I don't even know what I would prefer myself if it came down to it. But thats as best as I can put my understanding of the topic in my limited writing skills and understanding of the topic.
Last edited: