Biden says Section 230 tech liability shield should end for Facebook, Zuckerberg should be subject to civil liability

Seems pretty easy to fix if you say that any paid placement (like a Facebook ad) needs to be vetted by the company making money off the ad, whereas unpaid bulletin-board content (like this here) is not the responsibility of the hosting entity. Don’t you get the best of both worlds with a law like that?

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Holy shit that escalated quickly. (Emphasis mine)

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Which is why, when they aren’t in power, the opposition needs to remove the mechanisms that the government uses to to excel use powers like this, rather than keeping them to use them against their own enemies. The Dems has the opportunity to undo the AUMF and the patriot act, bit they were too hungry for power themselves to take that opportunity when they had the chance, so they handed those powers to Trump.

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They changed our regime and installed a puppet.

If they understood that we considered interventions in our elections process as much an act of war as dropping a bomb on our soil, they would probably not do it as much. As is, they got away with it and will thus do it as they wish in the future.

Seems fair.

(And to be honest: we need to really take a look at our actions and understand that bombing countries, assassinating leaders, and interfering in elections are acts of war that we shouldn’t do, either. Our might should not make right.)

Oh yeah, I was disappointed in Obama. There was virtually no effort to walk back the Bush years or to hold people account for torture or murder.

I bet I’ve told this story before on BBS, but I saw an interview with Michael Moore after Farenheit 11/9 came out. And they mentioned the name was a play on Moore’s previous Farenheit 9/11 which itself was a play on Farenheit 451, obviously. So - the interviewer suggested - it’s all well and good to make a movie suggesting the Trump administration is fascist, but are people going to believe Moore when they already said this in the past about another administration?

I thought Moore answered the question fine, but what I wanted Moore to say was, “But I was right. I was right that America was becoming fascist under Bush. How do you think we ended up here?”

America desperately needs a leader who is willing to admit that America has done wrong. Unfortunately too small a minority of Americans share that view to make it happen.

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They tried to do that, but it is far from clear whether they actually affected the outcome of the Election.

Why don’t we try spending 10-15 years not doing that first, before we try to claim that it’s a legitimate cassus belli.

If those interventions are done entirely through propaganda, rather than bombs, that is ludicrously disproportionate.

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Using euphemisms to glibly describe starting World War Three with the country with the largest nuclear arsenal and third largest conventional army doesn’t make it any better.

Angels and ministers of grace defend us!

It doesn’t instill a lot of confidence when otherwise reasonable people seriously moot emulating Cheetolini’s moronic war crimes. It’s no wonder most of the world distrusts the US.

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Can someone clarify what section 230 actually does? Is it around all content, or just advertising or what? Are TV stations responsible for their content on live feeds? Would they be responsible for opinion from a member of the public?

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You know, back about 2000, 2005, the internet was pretty fucking awesome. Oodles of content, plenty of commerce, very little “social”, and bugger all suviellance.

If revoking 230 got us back to that, wouldn,t that be a good thing™?

I mean … The Salad Days were not so green nor so fresh. We cannot go back through the looking glass is the point.

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Sure. But compared to now? Bugger all, as I said.

For example, entire business models weren,t built around surveilling ‘customers’. The four largest companies in the world dudn t utterly depend on the profirs generated by surveilling everyone, all the time.

Of course he does - he wrote the patriot act

Section 230 is the reason sites like Boing Boing can safely allow comments.

Truth being an absolute defense against libel, combined with the ability to widely disseminate information since site owners are confident they aren’t liable for bad posts means reports of bad behavior can be spread widely.

In my opinion, it’s no coincidence that as the public is alerted to things like Epstein’s misdeeds and Ronan Farrow publishing “Catch and Kill” that we’re seeing a concerted effort to walk back free speech under the guise of protecting children.

Elites will never have to worry about the panopticon since they simply aren’t subject to the same laws we are, and if they do end up arrested they will either commit suicide to protect their coconspirators or flee the country

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Among other things, Section 230 classifies most social media as platforms for rather than publishers of users’ content. So, for example, neither Happy Mutants LLC (Boing Boing’s incorporation) nor the volunteers who work on and support the Discourse software used by this forum are legally liable for what you post here in the comments. If you post copyrighted content, the content’s intellectual property owner doesn’t have standing to sue Boing Boing or Discourse. If you were an employee of or paid contractor for Boing Boing then they could be liable.

Without this distinction, every single post on any internet site would have to be individually checked for legal liability or the owner of that site and potentially their internet service provider would face liability and could be sued out of existence. In practical terms it would eliminate open user participation and hand all communications to media outlets and their employees, just like radio, television and newspapers. This forum would cease to exist. Wikipedia would cease to exist. YouTube would be reduced to corporate channels.

Revoking Section 230 is a non-solution to the actual problem: that Fecesbook takes money from political campaigns and special interest groups (including adversarial foreign powers) to publish misinformation. It’s analogous to burning down a building to get the cockroaches; the cockroaches will be the only survivors. Biden is carelessly suggesting it because the real solution, holding Fecesbook and other platforms responsible for the ads for which they take money, is antithetical to the corporate and other investor class interests that fund his campaign.

I for one don’t want a future consolidated under the rubric of communications monopolies such as Comcast.

Hope that helps.

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While I’m sure Mr. Biden is a very nice old man in his own way, he’s senile, not very bright to begin with, and regardless of what he calls himself, more Republican than Democrat. A vote for “Status Quo” Joe is essentially a vote for Traitor Trump.

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The text is simple, perthaps deceptively so.

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.

Here’s the context:

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Maybe he needs to push going after the parties on Facebook that post false & lying posts.

I’m not against CDA230 reform. The problem is, the reform would have to be very specifically tailored to ensure that those larger orgs who have the means to enforce online discourse can have concrete steps to follow to maintain their safe harbour. But figuring that out would be incredibly difficult because there’s no definitive way to determine “truth”, so the likelihood of such reform succeeding is very, very small.

Instead, we probably need some sort of notice-and-takedown system, but again, these have all been universally abused by bad actors.

So, we’re stuck in this catch-22. I think this is probably a case where instead, imagine if large providers were forced to allow a filtering API you could subscribe to. Third parties can create filters based on disclosed sources of “truth” (Wikipedia, Snopes, Wikitribune, etc) that users can subscribe to. This lets users decide who they want to use as sources of truth without trying to legislate one, but more importantly. lets these services grow and lets us test the waters towards some sort of universal fact-checking service organically.

Because in the end, a resilient fact-checking infrastructure makes a lot of this go away, and the only way that gets traction is to make them directly useful so that 1) users use them, 2) they get traffic and possibly funding/donations and most importantly 3) public and private versions are allowed to exist and grow organically.

Will it happen? I don’t know. But I’d support such a project, including linking it here to the BBS.

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It’s like the bill of rights and the constitution; maybe there are tweaks that could improve them but opening it up will not go the way you think and will just as likely end up worse as better.

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I’m not sure why you chopped out the rest of my paragraph, but I explicitly said:

So no, as I already said, I think the chance of that happening is very very small.

I think you misunderstand. I specifically said:

This is an API, not a service (though I’m sure they could create their own). The point would be ANYONE could create a filter for ANY use case, including me. Including you.

If you don’t like how the filter is being used, subscribe to another, or create your own. That’s the point. @doctorow has spoken multiple times on the idea of adversarial interoperability, and I think it could very much apply here - allow everyone to create arbitrary filters - free, paid, proprietary, open - and by doing so create a technical framework to sove the section 230 “problem”, instead of trying to legislate one.

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Sorry - I wasn’t intentionally chopping I just misunderstood (+ am battling a flu so was a bit out of it).

I misunderstood your position and apologize- this is a topic that I’m passionate about and TBH I was so surprised at what I thought I was reading I dashed off a reply wo properly forming it.

(Ex: not noticing you meant user created filters)

I apologize- today it was I who was wrong on the Internet.

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