Thread by @AriCohn

1/ I usually hesitate to crap on student newspaper articles, but this piece was actually written by the paper's advisor, @mdgiusti, who is the journalism *chair* and clearly not doing students any favors in the "make sure what you're writing isn't totally wrong" department.

https://twitter.com/Loyola_Maroon/status/1454485658114871304

2/ Off to a bad start, completely mangling the history. First of all, "everyone saw they were different?" No.

Second, Cubby Inc. v. Compuserve (one of the cases leading to 230) was actually about distributor liability, which has nothing to do with the decision to publish.

3/ Instead, the court in Cubby found that Compuserve was a distributor, and thus would have had to have actual or constructive knowledge of content's defamatory nature (and plaintiffs hadn't produced any such evidence) before liability could be imposed for speech on its service.

4/ And then came Stratton Oakmont, where the court really mangled things and held that because of the editorial control that Prodigy exercised over its service, it was a publisher rather than a distributor.

5/ And thus was born the moderator's dilemma: You could be completely hands-off and try to make it really difficult to establish any actual/constructive knowledge, but if you did try to moderate content you would be socked with even more liability.

6/ Contrary to @mdgiusti's apparent belief, the entire point of Section 230 was to protect them where courts *would* find that they were making "publishing decisions," because otherwise content moderation would be heavily disincentivized.

7/ I really don't know where he got this from--people really just want to believe that "common carrier" means whatever they want it too--but no, Section 230 was not common carriage legislation. It was pretty much the opposite of that.

8/ If you want to know more about why platforms are very much *not* common carrier's, see our brief in NetChoice v. Moody: techfreedom.org/wp-content/upl…

9/ And now we get to this bizarre non-sequitur of a turn, that to the best of my understanding is actually @mdgiusti's real gripe: THE MACHINES (i.e., algorithms).

10/ No, really, they wouldn't.

11/ So he's mad that algorithms are being used to promote content because it "silences rational conversation and dialogue."

But he misses two things in his angry screed.

12/ (a) Algorithms are heavily used for content moderation as well. Without them, and without 230, you're going to have a lot *more* crap, not less of it.

13/ (b) There's no legal cause of action for "encouraging people to yell at each other," nor for most of the content he probably thinks shouldn't be promoted.

Changing Section 230 wouldn't have any impact on that, because "you promoted things I don't like" isn't actionable.

14/ This guy cannot even figure out what he's trying to argue! Is this about content moderation? Algorithms? What the hell are you even trying to say?

15/ @mdgiusti's conclusion is as bad as his open. The literal, actual, point of Section 230 was to remove disincentives for providers to determine what values they want their community to have, and set/enforce their rules accordingly.

16/ I hope the journalism students are better at (a) research and (b) stringing together comprehensible thoughts than their chair/advisor.

Because this?

This aint it.

Journalists can't be subject matter experts in everything. Nor do they need to be.

But the good ones do their homework and make sure what they're saying isn't a ragged mess.