Thread by @doctorow

There's a bipartisan movement to abolish #CDA230, the Clinton-era law that makes people liable for their own speech, while simultaneously immunizing tech providers who carry that speech and incentivizing them to moderate it.

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On the right, you have trumpy calls for a social media fairness doctrine that would require a platform that removed false claims that masks don't prevent covid transmission to also remove true claims that masks DO work (seriously, wear a fucking mask).

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On the left, you have people who claim that CDA230 is corporate welfare, absolving Big Tech companies of the need to hire an (impossibly large) army of moderators to approve everything their users say before it goes live.

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The truth is that CDA230 is one of the very few internet regulations that is a serious force for good. Its primary beneficiaries are you and me - members of the public who get to speak without having to host our own webservers, DNS, and CDNs.

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To really understand the issue, read @JGKelley's "Section 230 is Good, Actually," for @EFF: a comprehensive guide to CDA230 and the myths around it.

eff.org/deeplinks/2020…

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Have you read 230? You should! It's 26 words long!

"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."

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Kelley: "the law means that although you are legally responsible for what you say online, if you host or republish other peoples' speech, only those people are legally responsible for what they say."

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It really isn't that complicated. It's arguably the most important 26 words in internet history. Without it, there would be no Wikipedia, no Internet Archive, no Patreon, no Github. Security researchers couldn't compare notes on forums.

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Parents couldn't organize afterschool activities on public systems. Kickstarter couldn't host project updates with backer Q&A. Kiss Wordpress goodbye. Kiss goodbye your favorite geneology forum and the place where you show off your Warhammer and Blythe doll paints.

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All of these forums for speech need CDA230. You know who doesn't? Big platforms. To understand how this works, cast your mind back to the fight over #SESTA, a bill that made online forums liable for blocking acts of sex trafficking, a horrific crime.

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Sex workers opposed this bill. They said that because platforms couldn't know whether conversations among sex workers or between sex workers and their customers were voluntary or coerced, this would lead to a total shutdown of all forums.

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Initially, Big Tech fought SESTA. Then Facebook endorsed it - they, after all, have lots of moderators who could seek-and-destroy sex work conversations, and they have lots of other ways to make money.

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Two years later, sex trafficking is untouched, voluntary sex work is more dangerous than ever (which means that pimps finally have a reason to exist again - offering physical security for sex workers who can't use online forums to identify abusive customers).

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Many of Facebook's smaller competitors have, of course, disappeared.

SESTA was the first real change to 230 in decades. It's a preview of the likely consequences of the proposed 230 reforms: more power to monopolists whose bad moderation practices will be harder to punish.

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Despite this, there is a wealth of disinformation about 230. Kelley tackles the most common shibboleths.

* Moderation violates the First Amendment

As a matter of law, this is completely wrong. Private actors are not bound by the First Amendment.

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That's not to say that there aren't serious speech problems with Big Tech's moderation policies, but these are problems of Big Tech's bigness, not of a lack of fairness.

locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-d…

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A fairness doctrine for online speech wouldn't just limit when Facebook or Twitter remove or put warnings on speech - it would mean that a BLM safe-space would have to tolerate white nationalism; and that Parler couldn't kick off people who think Ayn Rand was a sociopath.

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* 230 does not draw a distinction between "publishers" and "platforms." No such distinction exists.

Rather, 230 distinguishes between "offline" and "online" platforms. That's because the public - you and I - can contribute to online publication but not offline ones.

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No matter how loudly you shout at your newspaper, it will not be audible to the other subscribers. But newspapers' online editions can be discussed, corrected and disputed by their readers. CDA 230 protects newspapers online editions, too.

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* CDA 230 encourages online publishers to moderate bad speech

Before 230, a US court found that if you moderate at all, you have to moderate EVERYTHING. The result was that no one wanted to remove even the worst speech because this created unlimited liability for them.

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230 changed that, creating a "Good Samaritan" rule that allows moderators to pick off the bad stuff they catch, without holding them liable for the stuff they miss.

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230's detractors have a point. Big Tech's moderation SUCKS. They hold all our friends and content hostage and they do a terrible job of moderating content. But making them double down on stuff they're bad at will only make things worse.

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We should fix these real, harmful moderation problems by creating alternatives, not wiping them out by making it impossible to co-exist alongside of Big Tech. If you hate having 90% of your online life inside of Big Tech silos, your REALLY gonna hate when it's 100%.

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Antimonopoly work, in other words: break 'em up, block their mergers, mandate interoperability, strip them of the legal power to block interoperators.

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And if we DO want to mandate good moderation, then use the The Santa Clara Principles On Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation, which are a good, multistakeholder starting place:

santaclaraprinciples.org

eof/