Section 230: Regulating the Cute Little Bear Cubs Which Came of Age to Eat Us

The Stream ^ | July 28, 2021 | Nolan Lewallen

[Heartlander]

President Bill Clinton signed the Communications Decency Act (CDA) into law in 1996. A full decade would pass before Jack Dorsey sent the very first tweet on newly created Twitter at 9:50 p.m. on March 21, 2006. The tweet simply read, “just setting up my twttr.”

When the CDA became law of the land, Mark Zuckerberg was a 12 year-old kid — one year before his Star Wars-themed bar mitzvah. It would be seven years later (2003) that he would create FaceMash, a website where Harvard students could vote on which woman was more attractive from random photos. The site was shut down by Harvard’s administration. However, it morphed into Facebook in 2004.

The law passed two years before Google was officially launched by two college students — Larry Page and Sergey Brin — in 1998 in a garage in Menlo Park, CA. It evolved from a search algorithm they had developed, first known as “BackRub.”

The Communications Decency Act’s history puts into context its most contentious section, the now infamous 230. We must read it in light of the era when it was written. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time to give online companies protection from civil liability as “distributors of content,” rather than as “publishers.” This allowed freedom of speech to flow freely in the new, on-line community that had only become operational in a meaningful way about six years earlier. And the internet probably wouldn’t be what it is today had it not been for those protections. (For better and worse.)

The Good Samaritan Clause

Congress wanted to allow freedom of speech, and at the same time keep some level of decency on the internet. So it...

[Brian Griffin]

“and fellow Representative Ron Wyden (D-OR) wrote the House bill’s section 509...so that service providers could moderate content as necessary and did not have to act as a wholly neutral conduit....Cox/Wyden’s section became Section 509 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and became law as a new Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230

[freedumb2003]

Excellent summary of Rule 230 and how it is being abused.

The moment a platform or forum removes a post or user it violates the raison d’etre for 230. Editing or removal should ONLY be for direct treats to someone’s life.

The fig leaf must come off and 230 dropped. Once that happens EVERYONE will have to be kicked off G/F/T and that will be that.

I am perfectly OK picking and choosing my places to communicate.

[Yo-Yo]

Section 230 was originally designed to protect platforms from liability for child porn hosted on their servers. If a user posted child porn, and those images were stored on a platform’s server, the platform wasn’t liable for the porn, but had to remove it once they were informed it existed.

Trump used Social Media to tremendous effect to blindside the Dems in the 2016 election. Section 230 was weaponized against Trump as an excuse to limit his communications with supporters leading up to the 2020 elections.

[Brian Griffin]

Section 230 could have been based on user-controllable viewing based on provider-set flags.

Imagine:
<$lie>....</$lie>
<$violence>....</$violence>
<$porn>....</$porn>
<$badlanguage>....</$badlanguage>
<$hatred>....</$hatred>

[Brian Griffin]

I should have wrote: distributor-set flags

[cmj328]

Our enemies are always three steps ahead of us. They will fight to maintain Section 230, while at the same time it is already irrelevant. If there’s a big battle on Section 230, our attention will be diverted from where it should be: nationalization.

[Deplorable American1776]

And in 1996: Joe Biden was in the swamp... So was: Rosa DeLauro (Ugly Bitch CT3), James (to the left of the other) McGovern (MA2), Maxine and Nan (Braindead Morons CA) and many more...