what are the 26 words 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 and that means
what in the english language that means
that
if i were to post something about you on
facebook that was
awful and defamatory and you actually
had a viable defamation lawsuit
you could sue me but you can't sue
facebook
what it says is that facebook or any
platform whether it's a small community
bulletin board to a massive social media
site
has the ability to decide what to keep
on their platform that users post
and what to take down and how to set the
rules of the road
why was section 230 necessary so section
230 to understand why it's necessary you
really have to go back
to what the law was before section 230
and that is
what's the liability for distributors
of content that others create so before
the internet that was bookstores and
newsstands
and the general rule was if you're a
distributor of someone else's content
you're only liable
if you know or have reason to know that
it's illegal
so that worked pretty well for a
bookstore and bookstores usually were
able to avoid being prosecuted for
obscenity or sued for defamation
what does section 230 do so what section
230 does
is it says that if you're an online
service a website any online platform
you
are not treated as the publisher of
someone else's speech
so if i go onto twitter and i type
type a tweet and it might be defamatory
it
uh might violate someone's privacy and
they could have a claim
they could sue me but they can't sue
twitter
unless an exception applies there are a
few exceptions one for federal criminal
law one for intellectual property law
but in general
the platforms are not going to be held
responsible for user content and also
they won't be held responsible for their
decision to
restrict edit delete content
suspend users it's very much a
market-based approach
because what congress was thinking was
this is something the market could work
out
so if a service just did not do any
moderation
the idea at least was that people
wouldn't really want to go to it because
it would be filled with garbage
or if a site did too much moderation
people might consumers generally would
say well
i don't really want to use that site
because they're deleting everything
so let the market decide and that's very
much
what section 230 did but help me
understand the same is not true
for other forms of media if somebody
says something defamatory on
60 minutes or on fox or cnn or in the
new york times
those organizations can be sued
so why not google youtube facebook
the difference between a social media
site and
let's say the letters to that order page
of the new york times
is the vast amount of content that they
deliver so i mean you might have five or
ten letters to the editor on a page
uh you could have i think it's six
thousand tweets per second
and so section 230 really recognizes how
exceptional the internet is and says
we we want to encourage this marketplace
of ideas
now 25 years later that marketplace has
a lot of really great stuff but it also
has a lot of really terrible products in
that marketplace and that's really
what's driving this debate right now
was part of the reason for section 230
to protect
these fledgling internet companies so
that they could grow
back in 1996. part of the intent was
that this is a nascent industry and
there's so much potential there
uh in in this industry that that
congress
or at least the authors of section 230
didn't want to overburden it with
regulation and litigation so the idea
was
let's take a very hands-off approach
rather than saying you're going to be
sued to oblivion
we're going to let let you decide what
these rules are and let the market
decide
today who's covered by section 230.
anyone who operates
a website or an app that allows any user
content
is going to be covered so i mean
obviously when people talk about
platforms they
think of facebook twitter youtube
but it also could be and a small local
news site
that allows user comments so this
protects not just the
googles and the facebooks of the world
but also
very small operators absolutely if
you're operating online
230 is a shield yes