(Thread) @mattgaetz is making an inane argument about companies having to give up some First Amendment rights to avail themselves of Section 230 protections.
Section 230 was meant to fix a problem created by a 1995 court case, Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy, in which the court 1/
Section 230 was meant to fix a problem created by a 1995 court case, Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy, in which the court 1/
found that Prodigy was liable for third party content because it became a publisher by moderating posts according to terms of service and filtering obscene language. This conflicted with a 1991 case, Cuddy v. CompuServe, which found CompuServe NOT liable for user content. 2/
Section 230 was written into the 1996 Telecom Act to overrule the Stratton Oakmont case. It reads: “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.” Notice 3/
that it says NOTHING about private companies not having the right to have terms of service or run their services as they see fit. In fact, the entire point of 230 was to ensure companies like Facebook could exercise some ability to enforce TOS and NOT be held to be publishers. 4/
So when @mattgaetz or other conservatives suggest that Facebook or Twitter becomes a publisher and loses Section 230 protections by moderating other people’s content in some way, he is either entirely missing the point of 230 and ignoring its history, or he is just lying 5/
about it. The reason Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc can avail themselves of 230 is that they do not exercise any PRIOR RESTRAINT on user generated content. They do not pick and choose what anyone can post or review any content before it goes out. Doing THAT could make them a 6/
publisher and they’d probably lose liability protections under 230. But the idea that enforcing terms of service and community standards and choosing to refuse service to those who violate them (which IS their rights as private companies) makes them ineligible for Section 230 7/
is just absurd. What @mattgaetz envisions is a world where no private operator of an online service has any control over what appears on their service whatsoever and where users would face no consequences for violating any of those companies’ rules. You want to see what that 8/
looks like? Go spend some time on 8chan or Gab or places like that. I can guarantee you that if Facebook or Twitter embraced that sort of anything goes mentality, the vast majority of you would stop using them because they’d no longer be useful. 9/9
