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

[anon50609448]

@GulliverFoyle

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.

I think part of the problem here is the people in the US think that if someone might be able to make a weird, unconvincing argument about for suing someone out of existence then the lawsuit will happen and will be successful. Many other countries don’t have laws nearly as absolute or definitive as section 230 appears to be (to my reading). Yet we get along okay.

The EU law (according to wikipedia, not to an EU lawyer) says that:

Article 14 establishes that hosting providers are not responsible for the content they host as long as (1) the acts in question are neutral intermediary acts of a mere technical, automatic and passive capacity; (2) they are not informed of its illegal character, and (3) they act promptly to remove or disable access to the material when informed of it.

So it sets out some conditions around the immunity. So my comment here would not need to be checked in advance, but they do have some obligation to respond to complaints and the immunity doesn’t extent to content they specifically promote or to advertising (neither of which they are neutral or passive about).

I doubt Biden understands the problem very well. What Biden does know is that Facebook’s business model is to promote dangerous lies about Biden’s son’s credibility to profit, feeding those lies directly to people who are most likely to believe them, and most likely to think it is their responsibility to take the law into their own hands. Biden wouldn’t even know about this issue if it wasn’t personally affecting Biden, I don’t think. But I really feel like in Facebook’s case the law might as well say:

No provider or user of a poison dumping service shall be treated as the person who dumped any poison provided by another poisoner.

@orenwolf

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.

I agree reform would be hard. It bothers me (and I don’t think you are saying this) that so often it feels like, “It would be hard” is the end of the discussion in politics - in Canada where I am but I think even moreso in America. It feels a bit like Reagan/Thatcher/Mulroney was it, and our politicians will never try anything hard again. I think of big political achievements during my lifetime (abortion rights, gay marriage) and they were handed to us by the courts and kept there by politicians too scared to make new laws (at least in Canada).

Sometimes I just feel like English-speaking people aren’t fit to government ourselves.

@anon2148050

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

There but for the grace of FSM go us all.

[Entity447B]

@anon50609448

Sometimes I just feel like English-speaking people aren’t fit to government ourselves.

Don’t worry, non-Anglophones are unfit to govern themselves too!

Wait, am I doing being comforting properly?

[GulliverFoyle]

@anon50609448

I think part of the problem here is the people in the US think that if someone might be able to make a weird, unconvincing argument about for suing someone out of existence then the lawsuit will happen and will be successful.

Sadly, in the US the potential cost of a lawsuit can act as an effective deterrent, whether or not it can succeed, and policy is often shaped around that fact.

@anon50609448

Many other countries don’t have laws nearly as absolute or definitive as section 230 appears to be (to my reading). Yet we get along okay.

Do they suffer from the US’s special brand of ass-backward legal regime?