Social Disease

The 1996 Law That Ruined the Internet;

In 1996, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act, a law meant to crack down on digital smut. From a decency perspective, the legal standard that had emerged from the CompuServe and Prodigy lawsuits seemed, well, perverse. Prodigy was liable because it had tried to do the right thing; CompuServe was immune because it had not. So Section 230 of the act stipulated that providers of internet forums would not be liable for user-posted speech, even if they selectively censored some material.
 
Much of the Communications Decency Act was quickly struck down by the Supreme Court, but Section 230 survived. It quietly reshaped our world. Courts interpreted the law as giving internet services a so-called safe harbor from liability for almost anything involving user-generated material. The Electronic Frontier Foundation describes Section 230 as “one of the most valuable tools for protecting freedom of expression and innovation on the Internet.” The internet predated the law. Yet the legal scholar Jeff Kosseff describes the core of Section 230 as “the twenty-six words that created the internet,” because without it, the firms that dominate the internet as we have come to know it could not exist. Maybe that would be a good thing.

25 Replies to “Social Disease”

  1. “because without it, the firms that dominate the internet as we have come to know it could not exist. “

    Right, it made a small number of people so rich they could buy and sell our democracy.

    1. Exactly. Proponents of section 230 want all that power in the hands of as few as possible. It’s so much easier to control viewpoints when their is only a few main sites that people gather at. Also from the article:
      Vigorous argument and provocative content would migrate to sites where people take responsibility for their own speech, or to forums whose operators devote attention and judgment to the conversations they host. The result would be a higher-quality, less consolidated, and ultimately freer public square.

      1. No it wouldn’t. You have no idea what you’re talking about. First, this isn’t the public square. Second, it just means moderators would have to be WAY more stringent. Stop talking.

        1. This is the public square. The media depend on Twitter for leads and information on what to cover. They also rely on social media to squash the information they want censored and boost the approved narrative. They simply censor whatever counters their approved narrative, and create a consensus. Then anyone who disagrees is a conspiracy nut. It’s Big Brother.

          They may be private companies, but they are very much the public square and their algorithms have a huge effect on the economy. Don’t think so? You are naive.

          1. “This is the public square. ”

            No it’s private property your victim complex aside.

            “They may be private companies, but they are very much the public square” = “I may eat my cake but I’m gonna have it too!”

  2. ” the firms that dominate the internet as we have come to know it could not exist. Maybe that would be a good thing.”

    Completely wrong. Indeed, without S230, those firms would have even more dominance. You don’t understand 230.

    “There is nothing in Section 230 that applies solely to big tech. Indeed, it applies to every website on the internet and every user of those websites. That means it applies to you, as well, and helps to protect your speech. It’s what allows you to repeat something someone else said on Facebook and not be liable for it. It’s what protects every website that has comments, or any other third-party content. It applies across the entire internet to every website and every user, and not just to big tech. ”

    https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act.shtml

    All that S230 does is hold those who post libelous stuff as solely accountable, not the owners of forums they are posted in. That’s it, and without it you have a radically less free internet.

    1. You’re right, the real answer here is the same answer that was made for Standard Oil, whose monopoly was also ‘perfectly legal’ and yet was deemed harmful to the country. When an outfit like Google, Facebook, or Twitter decides that their activist employees should have enormous power over what the electorate can know… well, as the Washington Post puts it “democracy dies in darkness.”

      What needs to be done is that these effective monopolies should be held to a higher standard.

      1. The rape of Standard Oil is one of the great evils of America’s history. A company that created enormous value created by a creative genius was laid low because of some conniving failed competitors who ginned up a bunch of peons and pandering politicos.

        An independent Alberta should become a refuge from antitrust. A safe space for monopolies.

        1. The world you want to live is not free. You think tyranny is great because you seem to admire the tyrants. Tyranny with a smile is still that, tyranny.

          No one can be trusted with that much power. It simply can’t be tolerated by a free society.

          You are like so many NeverTrumpers, an idealogue with no idea how things work in real life.

          1. You keep using words like ‘free’ and ‘tyranny’ the way progs use them. There is no such thing as ‘freedom to crush private enterprise’.

  3. Seems easy enough to fix. Allow Big Tech protection under section 230 if they only moderate content that they believe is in violation of existing laws NOT their terms of service.

    1. Like Blackface the pie-rat calling another MP a POS in parliament? (Immunity spell, no consequences)
      Amen

    2. Why should a private firm that wishes to cater to the needs of cat owners be required to allow dog related material to be posted?

      The example may seem silly but it should illustrate the point. Private firms go after an audience and they should be free to target that audience as they see fit.

      It only gets complicated when a firm tries to position itself as a site that is for everyone but finds that keeping one set of customers happy requires that they censor another set of customers. It is not an easy position for any business to be in.

      On top of that you have deliberate disinformation campaigns using platforms to spread known lies. A company that did not shut those lies down risks driving away customers disgusted by the garbage. It is lose lose.

      The only thing that is certain is eliminating liability protections will kill off smaller players first and result in even more onerous content control by the big players as they seek to protect themselves. No one wins.

      1. It becomes difficult when network effects create a de facto monopoly. Like I said above, Standard Oil could have made the same arguments you are making.

        1. A ‘de facto monopoly’ isn’t. If you want to displace a dominant company, make a better product.

          1. The point of “social media” is to be where all the people are. The first companies that gain a large amount of users will always dominate. It has more to do with being first than being “better.”

            The experimentation FB has done on it’s users without consent is reason enough to regulate them.

            You want to talk about these companies as if there is a historical parallel. The only one that comes close is the printing press. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google and Twitter are basically giant publishers who have become so powerful that anything anyone wants to publish must go through one of their services. Everyone gets their news from one of these sources now. You still don’t think it’s a problem when they decide to censor certain political views and news stories? You don’t think that has an impact on our elections?

  4. And thus has the Internet remained a Wild West for pornography and propaganda for every anti-American, anti-capitalist and anti-Semitic movement enjoying an expense account on the tab of Beijing and Wall Street—Islam, militant faggotry, black supremacy, eco-kookery, their name is Legion.

    Freedom of speech, defined as the right to speak the truth, remains as cruel a joke as in the days before the Internet.

    The key difference is that a crudely printed pamphlet could actually be distributed anonymously. Anybody daring to speak the truth online can be identified by IP address and be blacklisted from polite society and the formal economy in a matter of hours—saving the Deep State from having to force people to register typewriters or photocopiers.

    1. “Anybody daring to speak the truth online can be identified by IP address and be blacklisted from polite society and the formal economy in a matter of hours”

      The disappeared.

  5. Remember when Kate was forced to put a public apology on the masthead of her blog because of something Kathy Shaidle posted about Richard Warman? That’s what not having s.230 gets you. And that’s getting off lightly. If you numbnuts continue in your quixotic quest to destroy s.230, every conservative blog and forum will instantly go offline, because the left’s Mobys will simply sink them by flooding them with anonymous, scandalously libelous posts along with porn, spam, and Nazi propaganda. You can’t delete anything or else you’re liable for the libelous posts. And if you don’t delete anything, your comment section becomes a useless cesspool and all your readers and advertisers bail.

    The real problem is not s.230, you illiterate Luddites. It is and has always been the ideological groupthink in the tech industry that motivates them to band together and deny service to any competitor to Big Social. The problem is that that’s a really, really hard thing to prosecute without violating the First and Fifth Amendments.

    1. It’s not hard to bust a monopoly, if you aren’t a coward. Of course Big Social won’t be busted, they know how to get their friends elected.

      1. They better not be. They better do everything they can to scuttle any anti-trust actions. Google is one of the great hopes of our world. A counterbalance to large governments. The treatment of FB’s Libra project was completely evil.

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