Of course this is being handled ham-handedly, but it seems to me that section 230 is a ludicrous piece of legislative malfeasance that allows content publishers to duck the legal responsibilities of publishing while profiting from behavior that is obviously publishing.
I can't see how a Twitter/FB feed is substantively different from a curated "letters to the editor" section in a newspaper and I cannot for the life of me understand why it is treated different legally.
Would love to hear arguments that either 1) these social media sites are not actually publishing or 2) social media publishing is somehow different from publishing in other media.
Without S230, Twitter and Facebook would not curate or moderate any content - you'd be constantly bombarded by a torrent of spam, vitriol and disinformation.
With S230, companies can remove the worst, most obvious ofenses without fearing being held accountable by the things they didn't find.
> I can't see how a Twitter/FB feed is substantively different from a curated "letters to the editor" section in a newspaper and I cannot for the life of me understand why it is treated different legally.
Both companies offer non-algorithmic feeds where users are 100% in control of what they see. Even with an algorithmic feed, users are still doing far more curation than any "curation" that an algorithm does, which is random at best in terms of intention by these companies at a political level.
I don't see how we interpret that as publishing any more than posts on a forum. The only "editorial" stances these companies take is to moderate content - not delete or edit, only flag and delete. This case is only really interesting because it's a new type of flagging that has not been broadly applied yet against a president.
I'm not sure how we got the question reversed - how in the world is Twitter/Facebook considered a publisher? They have millions and millions of users that write whatever they want without any editorial help, only moderation like that of most all internet forums.
This begs the question - what is "publishing" defined as, and what are the relevant features? I'm hard pressed to think of a useful definition of publishing that includes Twitter/Facebook.
Feed structure and content aside, is writing and applying a custom TOS that covers content not editorializing/publishing?
This is the crux of the argument from the political right at the moment: Twitter is deciding what sort of content is and is not allowed on their platform according to some sort extrajudicial rationale. I don't understand how that isn't publishing.
I'd bet any definition of publishing includes exerting control over which content to display, when to display that content, and where. These companies do all of those things.
> is writing and applying a custom TOS that covers content not editorializing/publishing?
For the specific TOS in question I see no way this counts as that. It is simply banning things like pornography, hate speech, and cyberbullying among other things. How that becomes "editorializing" is crazy to me and doesn't seem like a good faith argument.
> I'd bet any definition of publishing includes exerting control over which content to display, when to display that content, and where. These companies do all of those things.
The exerting here is incredibly minimal at best though. There is also no literal editing of material, affiliated writers, or strong voice selection done by Twitter. At the end of the day, the users decide what they want to see so long as it applies to the TOS. This is wildly different from any publisher such as a news outlet.
If we stretch the definition of publisher to its ends, comically so, we can absolutely get Twitter and Facebook under it. We'd also eliminate any prior meaning of the word.
I can't see how a Twitter/FB feed is substantively different from a curated "letters to the editor" section in a newspaper and I cannot for the life of me understand why it is treated different legally.
Would love to hear arguments that either 1) these social media sites are not actually publishing or 2) social media publishing is somehow different from publishing in other media.