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Which is wild, because it's 26 words long and fits in a tweet:
> 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.
Section 230 was passed because when companies were held liable for their users' speech, they "solved" this problem by just blocking every controversial thing a user said. Without Section 230, there would be no Black Lives Matter, no #metoo
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Cory Doctorow
In response to this postLong thread/51
There'd be no online spaces where the powerful were held to account. Meanwhile, rich and powerful people would continue to enjoy online platforms where they and their bootlickers could pump out the most grotesque nonsense imaginable, either because they owned those platforms (ahem, Twitter and Truth Social) or because rich and powerful people can afford the professional advice needed to navigate the content-moderation bureaucracies of large systems.
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Long thread/52
We know exactly what the internet looks like when platforms are civilly liable for their users' speech: it's an internet where marginalized and powerless people are silenced, and where the people who've got a boot on their throats are the only voices you can hear:
https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/
The evidence for this isn't limited to the era of AOL and Prodigy. In 2018, Trump signed SESTA/FOSTA, a law that held platforms liable for "sex trafficking."
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by Cory Doctorow ;
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