Thank you mmascari for decoding my tired writing last night.
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Interesting point about how the small venue moderator would not necessarily know they just approved a post with liber or slander. I hadn’t considered that angle.
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Honestly I think that this is the sort of thing that will end up killing Mastadon - each instance trying to keep up with global content and legal restrictions. Regardless of whether Section 230 exists they have to potentially deal with every jurisdiction in the world, which is…a lot
I haven’t had time to actually look into it but I believe that mastadon dot lol’s admin has said they are done and closing it for this kind of reason
And I apologize for my own tired (and angry from other unrelated things on the Internet and in the news) confrontational style yesterday, I was trying to be calm and considered but I had just…run out
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I don’t know about mastodon.lol in particular, but if there is talk about shutting down it’s more about what they might do if these cases end up seriously damaging the safe harbour.
There’s no 100% protection, so it’s all about reducing the probability of your instance getting attacked by legal tr0lls. The usual approach for U.S.-based servers (that aren’t fascist or free speech absolutist) that enjoy Section 230 protections is to also ban user content that’s illegal in the UK and Germany and to have a clear moderation policy that’s enforced effectively in good faith and in a timely manner. Those things combined will eliminate a lot of risk for instances operating in a U.S. or most Western jurisdictions.
Where I do see problems in that scenario are with instances with 10s of thousands or more of active users. Moderating at that scale costs time and money that most Fediverse admins just don’t have. I hope that this discussion over the SCOTUS cases convinces admins that they’re better off keeping their instance memberships small.
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I looked it up and it is not strictly related - it’s just a complete shit show of other stuff, mostly centered around Hogwart’s Legacy, but since the Florida thing is not a law yet I am not counting it. It seems to be more “running a community is hard and not many people should ever try it, much less have it blow up in size overnight”
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Honestly, I do not work for The Verge - It just keeps being very timely and very good. They start off with a discussion of the current Section 230 stuff.
While they seem to think that during arguments the Supreme Court began realizing that they’d bitten off more than they could chew by accepting the cases, they make the good point that this isn’t even necessarily about what your users post - could be about who your users are depending on how it goes. And they do talk about this being a wedge to get rid of 230 completely
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