Posted on 11/02/2020 3:59:53 PM PST by Red in Blue PA
Yes Sir! I have a backup link ready if that one goes down LOL.
What would the 230 exemption do to stop this? It will only encourage more of it.
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With all due respect, redrafting 230 to permit the unleashing of potentially millions of plaintiffs and their lawyers on FB, Twitter and Utube WILL STOP this usurpation of free speech overnight.
I don’t think that’s accurate but I’m open to correction. I think Section 230 protects them from liability from what 3rd parties post on the platforms. I don’t know how repealing that would stop the activities of censoring speech, limiting distribution, or worse pushing forward the content they want people to see.
They are publicly traded companies but they are private enterprises in the general sense, meaning, they are not subject to the 1st Amendment. They can pretty much do what they want with content, user data, data feeds, search resutls, advertising, and so much more. I’ll say it again it is a MK-Ultra head screw on a massive scale when you can control what people see and hear, and take punitive action for what they say or write that is otherwise perfectly legal.
......well, we’re talking apples and oranges. Your right on Section 230 protecting them from liability of third parties on their platforms for saying bad things.
But, that’s not the point. The point is that Dorsey, Zuckerberg and the other guy “selectively” enforce what in effect is censorship of political thought and they think 230 protects them from being sued when they block you. Trump and others want to STOP that and modify (not repeal) the law to allow people to SUE for being censored and violating their free speech rights. Thousands of lawsuits will bring em all to their knee’s (meaning Zuckerberg, Dorsey and the other guy whose name i can’t remember).
Well I agree of course that Jack, Mark and the rest selectively enforce their rules to suit their whims and agendas. There was a story I saw that the PA Health Authority sent out thousands of letters that arrived the last few days to rural residents stating something to the effect of “you have been identified as being exposed to Covid-19 and must quarantine for 14 days” but did not give any explanation. It was a clear attempt at voter suppression on election day in rural PA counties. Facebook’s “independent fact checkers” said the story was fake, but they did not deny the letters went out they only said it was “fake” because the CDC issued a statement saying covid-infected people can go vote. The letter did not say they could not go vote, only said “you must quarantine” which is effectively the same thing. It’s a head-screw in 2 directions.
Anyway that is why I added my reply to the other poster. These are private corporations (publicly traded, but private - not subject to Constitutional limits on behavior as government or public utilities are). So I don’t see how repealing 230 would allow lawsuits against them. Don’t like the site policies, don’t use them.
Which is why I said, forget about section 230. It’s not going to change anything. The only way to change them is to force them to be regulated like utilities when they reach some number of users; e.g. if you have more than 3 or 5 or 10 million users, you cannot do anything but let the users control what they see, what they like, what they dislike, what they want to discuss, whom to friend or follow etc. And if the users break the law (conspiracies to commit crimes, evidence of crimes, incitement etc) then send the info to the authorities.
Google is a bigger problem to tackle, because they are even more opaque than FB/TW. They do take down content as well, and also do shadow banning and limiting of distribution, but they don’t flag things with warning labels and “fact checking” they just keep the content from showing up, and feed different users different types of information based on what their computers think will sway the user’s mind. It’s really insidious and much harder to regulate.
So I don’t see how repealing 230 would allow lawsuits against them. Don’t like the site policies, don’t use them
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I once was engaged in a lawsuit with a multi billionaire. The lawsuit went from Dec 1984 to settlement in Feb. 1999. The key argument was “whether or not there could be a verbal “contract” in a forty million dollar real estate deal. Long story short, I won.
What’s my point in this discussion with you? It is that even billionaires like Dorsey and Zuckerberg can lose to a guy with small firm lawyers and a never give up attitude.
When tens of thousands of lawyers and tens of thousands of plaintiffs file suit against these billionaires THAT and only THAT will get their attention. Dorsey’s stockholders know this. Young, punkish Dorsey doesn’t.
Again, I’m not calling for appeal. Neither is anybody else that I’m award of. We want to do micro surgery on 230 that says “you can’t turn me off just because you have a million word contract that nobody but nobody including the judge and jury will ever read”.
In my case, existing law was you HAVE TO have a contract in a real estate deal. LOL, when it comes to LAW in the US................nothing is unbreakable and the public outcry against Dorsey and Zuck will eventually swamp these guys if their own boards don’t first.
Well, afaik, the repeal of 230 is exactly what people are talking about, particularly Senator Hawley and others. But that seems rather punitive instead of problem solving. I do empathize with the concept that when you have millions or billions of users, it is burdensome to try to police the content of everyone. The Zuck supposedly says he has 100,000 employees pouring through content to weed out so-called ‘bad actors’. That’s nutso and as much as I dislike his ways and means it’s just bad business. If I slander you, you can sue me but not the platform on which I slandered you. That seems fair to me.
But only in exchange for a fairly libertarian approach to content. If they start to police what people say, what they see and hear etc, selectively and not uniformly according to a broad and comprehensible policy, that is the problem. Not liability.
If people want to say “if you are censored by facebook/twitter etc for content that is protected speech then you can sue them” maybe it will work. But I am not sure it is Constitutional. They are private enterprises not public utilities, they can pretty much do what they want (within some obvious limits) with their platforms. That is the problem and that is what has to change. Force them to be like the phone company or the electric company - can’t regulate the service at all based on speech, content, beliefs, creed, color, religion, sex etc.
And yes, I sort of knew you can’t have an oral contract for $40 million. But billionaires can spend a few million on lawyers hoping to wear you down. You can’t fight city hall they say and the problem is, these companies are more powerful than the government and the government wants to kowtow to them... not quite realizing that one way or another, eventually, they too will ultimately be victimized.
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