But the PITA is that they’re right and Twitter did a massively stupid thing and just painted a huge target on the back of every site with user generated content and moderation.
Think about the leverage this gives the administration. Sure, Twitter pushes a lot of garbage content, but singling them out puts the administration in a position to demand compliance from others under threat of losing their 230 status.
This is an incredibly fascist move disguised as an egalitarian one.
Think about the leverage Twitter already has! If Twitter wanted to, and not saying they haven't, they could easily sway an election, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. Surely you can find a better reason than simply saying this is fascist.
Could Twitter sway an election? Maybe, but it’s speculative. This move is concrete and would give the president the power to go to any tech company and say “do as I wish or I will gut you” in no uncertain terms.
This is classic power consolidation and is a core strategy of fascist regimes. I’m in no way being hyperbolic here.
I’m not Twitter doesn’t deserve to be regulated, because they do. However, choosing to conditionally regulate companies this way is a great way to fuel corruption because the regulators get to pick and choose who to regulate instead of universally applicable law.
I'm afraid this is the same scenario no matter which regulator is in power. The previous administration became the arbiter of truth as to gender and race. What's stopping the next administration from doing the same?
> I'm afraid this is the same scenario no matter which regulator is in power.
Yes, we trust regulators to regulate effectively and not to single out companies when they do things the president doesn’t like.
> The previous administration became the arbiter of truth as to gender and race.
How is the prior administration’s policy to towards race and gender in any way relevant to this administration’s policy towards one tech company?
> What's stopping the next administration from doing the same?
Well, if this action results in a drop in public approval of the administration, the next administration is probably not going to be incentivized to do it. Further, this line of questioning provides zero substance as you could ask that question of any scenario. “It’s OK now because no one will be stopped from doing it in the future” is not a valid argument.
It's something that internet freedom advocates have wanted for a long time, and it's unfortunate that these are the people introducing it.
edit: people seem to be misunderstanding what I'm saying, or maybe misunderstanding what is being implied in the article.
Section 230 is GOOD, and it is something freedom-fighters have advocated for for a long time. What I'm saying is that freedom-advocates have been in favor of using the threat of losing 230 protection as a way of compelling platforms not to censor speech that they don't like.
You always have to look at the facts and not align with a party. Maybe one party does more stuff you like but if the other party does something you want, you should support it.
I'm curious: What internet freedom advocates? Because the EFF seems to believes in section 230 being a generally good thing.
And back during the Christchurch shootings when there were proposed limitations to section 230 to make companies liable for hate speech on their platform, there was an uproar from the internet freedom advocates that this would result in censorship and less free speech.
Internet freedom advocates (like the EFF) have been major advocates of section 230 protections specifically because they can compel sites not to censor content.
So basically: no you can't just remove that anti-government, anti-corporate, etc. stuff, because once you do that you are no longer protected, so you better let EVERYBODY speak (within reason) so or else.
Sites under section 230 are well-within their rights to curate content. They're just not responsible FOR content posted on their platform. It seems like you have an objective misunderstanding of how section 230 works.
For example, HN is a platform covered by section 230 as well. If HN removes political content, do you believe that HN should have its section 230 rights revoked?
That seems to be the exact opposite of their stated policy position on CDA 230[0]. I don't see anything about how they support private sites losing protections for removing speech hosted on the platform. Do you have a source for your claims?
What, how do internet freedom advocates want this?
Are we next going to say google is responsible for the search results it provides, when it's just indexing the internet and returning the best match algorithmically?
HN is going to start being responsible for every piece of garbage someone posts?
The question of publisher vs platform is a question of who should be sued for bad speech.
If Twitter / Wikipedia is legally vulnerable for bad claims, such as by Rush Limbaugh, then Twitter would feel incentivized to remove such risky individuals from the platform. If Rush Limbaugh were held responsible for his statements, he may feel poorly about freely disclosing his narratives.
I think I'd miss the President's tweets. But if S230 protections are significantly curtailed, his tendency to tweet off the cuff without having his facts lined up in a row would put him near the top of the chopping block to kick off the service for liability reasons.
I put together a Twitter Q-sona. I followed a bunch of prominent and not-so-prominent Qanons.
The way I understand it, they are not censoring people, the people claiming to be "shadow banned" and "twitter deleting my followers" and "I get no traction on my tweets", are misunderstanding Twitter, or technology, or both. There's a huge misunderstanding of how large twitter is, how many tweets flow through, and how many people are tweeting. My understanding is based on personal research. What's yours based on?
The most notable recent example is Aytu BioScience, an aultraviolet light blood treatment company banned, we all know the story.
I thought about going into one of the many particular individuals that have been banned, that is well know to most people except exceptional researchers like you, but I figured it would just be easy to start you with a video
Conservatives have accused all media of that for 40 years, most often without any reason at all. Tim Pool appears to be a conservative ideologue - why should I believe him?
why should I believe you? the events mentioned in the video are not under debate. no one debates those actions didnt happen. all you do is make statements and say that since you dont see it, it didnt happen.
If Section 230 protections were removed, Trump would have to be banned immediately, because lawsuits against Twitter would be filed within hours. Which is somewhat the point: if you remove Section 230, there will no longer be anything like Twitter or Facebook.
It seems to me that the threat is loud and clear. If you do anything to respond to the Trump administration, we will destroy and censor you.
The great irony is that if you strip a company of their section 230 protections, doesn't that just mean that they're going to censor more things on their platform since they're now liable? Why wouldn't they remove Trump from Twitter entirely if they could be held liable for his rants? Of course then you're said to be 'biased' against Trump, which then circles back to the first step.
Which seems to me might be the endgame here. Get Twitter to ban Trump and now you have a lot of red meat for his fervent fanbase.
I worry that what Trump wants is something far more "Godfather": for Jack Dorsey to sit down and be given an offer he can't refuse.
Dorsey gets told "We'll call this all off, say that we've decided not to interfere with free speech, but from now on you never contradict the president, you never contradict any Republican leader, and you start posting fact-checks more often on Democrats". That's the Trump strategy, typically. Deals. Always making deals.
And Dorsey knows he has to play the game, because his major shareholders will all be quietly informed that the deal was out there, and he didn't take it. He'd lose his job if he didn't agree. And if he goes public, Trump can say "I sat down with the man and tried to work out a fair deal, but he refused!", playing the victim.
Donald Trump is not a brilliant man, but he is very, very good at this game because he does not let ethics, norms, or laws get in his way.
We call someone who burn down everything around the person, a pyromaniac, not "good at this game".
Anybody expecting a human response, will continue to be devastated. This is a fine moment to learn quickly what maybe just 2-3% has experienced before.
He would spin up a White House version. In fact, I'm extremely surprised the White House, or conservatives in general, haven't spun up something like that. Don't even mention GAB, that's a platform that's become worse than 4Chan.
You're assuming they are competent enough to build that. Another assumption: his followers will leave Twitter, where they can harass/abuse everyone else at will, for an echo chamber where they'd basically just be reading Trump's bullshit 24/7.
Oh gosh no, they wouldn't build it, Lockheed would. Like every other government administrative technology function. Trump Derangement Syndrome may be clouding your understanding of federal contracting and technology. Hopefully it will NOT be the same people who built Healthcare.gov Did you like that website?
Conservatives have spun up conservative equivalents of a lot of things. You can find a "Conservapedia", there's a Reddit analog in Voat, a Twitter alternative in Parler, a Facebook alternative in RightBook, for a while I had "Red63", a Trump-friendly Yelp thing on my phone.
What Twitter did was a stupid move and goes well beyond “responding.” They used their privileged position on a platform to comment on Trumps tweets in a way that nobody else can.
Like I get that Twitter employees are mad and frustrated but they undermined themselves by throwing their weight around.
Do you believe HN deserves to be stripped of its 230 rights if they choose to ban people for violating the rules?
How far down the rabbit hole of moderation = abuse of power do we want to go? Should platforms have zero control? What's stopping HN from becoming filled with off-topic images of cats outside of HN abusing their power to censor low-quality posts?
They should fire his sleazebag social media corps. Isn't him sharing inappropriately an operational security concern anyway?
Apparently, there's no penalty for that person who shared classified satellite imagery on that platform.
That account is in clear violation of the Terms of Service. The government is prohibited from passing laws that infringe upon freedom of speech (one of our values).
No business should be forced to carry such misinformation.
Section 230 has very little to do with whether a corporation operating a media platform may exercise their free speech right to respond to such discourse.
It means those companies will need to do censoring better job rather than peddling a certain unstantiate views as truth and claimed it is universally fact checked like evans evans evans (yeah, who fact check the fact checker and so on?). Or else, they get sue by anyone. Expect many social media companies to be less meddling now as they can't afford to be the next gawker. Lawsuit is very stressful and tiring even if you can afford to lose. Just go ask Bill Gates his monumental IE court adventure decades ago.
Trump's motive is questionable, but the outcome of this is definitely better for the society. Many social media has not check and balance due to that 230. Now we the people able to check and balance while getting paid handsomely for doing so. Just see how CNN behave before and after Sandmann.
> The great irony is that if you strip a company of their section 230 protections, doesn't that just mean that they're going to censor more things on their platform since they're now liable? Why wouldn't they remove Trump from Twitter entirely if they could be held liable for his rants?
Please, oh please, don't throw me in the briar patch!
Or, worse, to prevent them from being sued for medical malpractice because one of their users tweeted medical advice without a degree, someone took it seriously, and now they're being held partially liable by the victim's estate because the drug they started taking in response to that advice exacerbated an undiagnosed heart condition.
This whole situation feels messy and gross but I think they’re absolutely right that Twitter has massively overstepped what would reasonably be considered moderation.
I’m reasonably mad at Twitter for this because they’ve punched a hornets nest and opened the door to making the lives of every site massively more painful and complicated because the pendulum feels like it’s about to swing the other way where any form of moderation is going to be rebranded as editorial and make the web worse overall.
By defining truth they overstepped. It's like when you go to Trader Joes looking for gluten free poptarts. If Trader Joe's has decided gluten free only applies to soft white wheat, then they are the arbiter of truth as to what Gluten Free means in their stores. Twitter takes this one step further by not only identifying what it believes is truth, but also by putting a scarlet letter on what it deems contrary to their truth.
Twitter has every right to say what the truth is. It has the right to free speech as much as anyone else. It also will be held to account for its speech under the law.
Dared to fact check? No. Step away from TDS for a moment and consider: Twitter interjected its corporate belief in what is truth. You love it now because Orange Man Bad, which is clouding the logical part of your brain that says that platforms should remain neutral unless they want to be treated like any other publication.
I now know Twitter, the company’s, stance on the issue because they posted their views on top of someone else’s tweet in a way that nobody bit Twitter can do. Twitter can take a stance and even use their official Twitter account to sing it loud and proud but they wielded their power in away that makes it very clear that Twitter is in control.
Its so weird that a company would make it clear that theyre in control of the platform they own and are responsible for.
You're really being duped here. Its not about "twitter posting their views". This isn't a question of who's opinion may or may not be right. Trump is continuously posting verifiably false information that could kill people. The idea that a single person on earth could object to fact checking these things, that again, will cause more deaths, is just stunning. Stop with the awkward 1984 act. You and I both know you're being completely disingenuous.
Wait for it. That's really the next step here. If this blows over, and Twitter is allowed to continue to get away with editorializing content, then the next step is to flat out start deleting tweets.
And...? It's their platform. They pay to run it. And it may be news to you, but they already are deleting tweets that violate their policies. They delete and shut down whole accounts for violating policies.
But then so is basically any form of moderation by this definition. It’s a grey area and I think YT made the right call and Twitter made the wrong one.
Saying we won’t host content about X that doesn’t come from $authority is very different than using their privileged position to put a banner next to any X video with their stance.
> This whole situation feels messy and gross but I think they’re absolutely right that Twitter has massively overstepped what would reasonably be considered moderation.
On the contrary, Twitter has repeatedly failed to enforce their own rules/TOS, primarily to benefit a single extremist political faction.
That doesn't explain the YEARS of absolutely false information coming out of most political candidates, oh and China. Can't forget China, or do they get a pass?
I mean, if this legislation were actually to go through (which seems doubtful) Twitter would pretty much have to immediately remove Trump's account, given the libel exposure.
Exactly! As much as HN likes to yell "orange man bad" the disconnect between reality and politics has made it so they don't see the benefit of eliminating sec 230.
On one hand side, provided rationale is right and I agree. If Twitter wants to play the policing game, they'd better bring out big guns and introduce a mechanism to police and fact-check entire platform.
On the other hand, and maybe its due to my lack of knowledge on the 230, how's report-and-remove of posts different? Twitter already has mechanisms to remove flagged content so how's this incident different (apart from being blatantly political).
Lastly, does anyone know if Facebook and YouTube are also protected under 230? I imagine that GOP wants to make an example of Twitter but for the sake of consistency Facebook and Youtube should get the same treatment.
> On one hand side, provided rationale is right and I agree. If Twitter wants to play the policing game, they'd better bring out big guns and introduce a mechanism to police and fact-check entire platform.
They're not required to, of course. They are exercising their right to free speech. They are also not required to publish, amplify or otherwise create a platform for any speech they don't want to.
Lastly, does anyone know if Facebook and YouTube are also protected under 230? I imagine that GOP wants to make an example of Twitter but for the sake of consistency Facebook and Youtube should get the same treatment.
My understanding that any website on the internet that allows users to post content is protected under 230. Including Hacker News, which then becomes potentially liable for any content posted if its removed.
Facebook and Twitter should face the same liability as the New York Times. How many companies do you know that have absolute immunity? That's how Facebook, Google, and others have grown so large. They don't have to worry about what goes out on their platforms.
Section 230 is not absolute immunity. It's immunity from what _users of your platform_ post.
The NY Times also enjoys 230 immunity if they host comments on their site. Literally every site on the internet that has comments (including HN) have this protection.
Let's call it for what it is: absolutely immunity from libel. Something the New York Times, Washington Post, etc. DO NOT have. Once Twitter stepped across the line and started policing speech is the time for them to lose their 230 immunity.
> Once Twitter stepped across the line and started policing speech
Can you post a link to the bit of CDA 230 that you think prohibits moderation? What court case makes you think that a site can't have CDA230 protection if it starts removing content?
AH! Thank you for pointing out that Sec. 230 DOES NOT contain anything about prohibiting moderation. It's simply IMMUNITY. Blanket immunity. Thank you for pointing that out. Another great reason why Section 230 needs to be changed.
Friendly reminder that any member of Congress can write and introduce whatever bill they want to.
My reading of the prospects for actual passage of this bill are approximately a butterfly fart in a tornado.
This is most likely what is sometimes called a "message bill": legislation that is not actually expected to pass but is introduced anyway in an attempt to score political points.
Your statement is an error in interpreting polls. Polls cannot tell you who will win the election, only the probability of each result. Trump has about a 30% chance of winning according to the polls.
The polls themselves were no less accurate as they have been historically, on average. They were not wrong, but have always had the limitation of only representing probabilities.
They were not wrong? I think FiveThirtyEight would disagree with you. Their polling showed Hillary would win. They were mostly confident in that poll, and yet only one (Los Angeles Times) was correct.
While the First Amendment generally does not apply to private companies, the Supreme Court has held it “does not disable the government from taking steps to ensure that private interests not restrict . . . the free flow of information and ideas.”
This needs to be applied universally to all companies or killed, because this puts companies like Facebook in a position to be coerced by the White House under threat of losing their protected status.
Applying this rule to single companies that act out seems so incredibly dangerous.
You can't just say "Twitter has to do X", as it would probably qualify as a bill of attainder. Consider the Sherman Antitrust Act, which was equally the law for both Standard Oil and Joe's Gas Station.
Have these people thought at all about what they're doing, as opposed to just reflexive spasms of anger? If this went through, it would accomplish the exact opposite of what they want: if section 230 was removed and Twitter became liable for the things right-wingers post there-- with their frequent libel and thinly-veiled incitements to violence-- it would have to increase the amount of censorship and banning it does, to save itself from constant lawsuits.
I see a lot of people asking "wouldn't stripping section 230 protections create more censorship on the platform?" That is the point. Shifting all liability to Twitter would effectively kill the platform as there is no way, even with the most sophisticated methods available, to police a platform of that size to the point where the liability is acceptable.
Yep. There's a million small forums that want to provide some levels of political moderation (e.g. we don't want the KKK or overt Nazis posting their rants).
Yet if you remove those posts, suddenly you become liable for anything posted on the rest of your forum. It's going to kill every small community on the internet.
I'm so mixed up about this whole Section 230 thing. It seems like it absolves Twitter from liability about things that its users post. But due to various pressure points or cultural factors or whatever, they act they're liable for things posted and have invested a lot of money in moderation, fact checking, trust & safety, "censorship" -- whatever you want to call it. None of this is illegal. Republicans seem to being missing the forest for the trees here, but I'm not sure what the forest looks like. Section 230 is the very same law that would prevent a conservative or right-wing site being liable for its users' content.
The tweet "corrections" seem unwise, because those seem to not be immune from cvil liability under section 230 being that they fail the 3rd prong of section 230 where "defendant (Twitter) must not be the 'information content provider' of the harmful information at issue". So if someone posts libel on Twitter, you can't sue Twitter, but if Twitter "corrects" someone's tweet with something that is actionable libel, couldn't you sue them then?
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] threadThis is an incredibly fascist move disguised as an egalitarian one.
This is classic power consolidation and is a core strategy of fascist regimes. I’m in no way being hyperbolic here.
I’m not Twitter doesn’t deserve to be regulated, because they do. However, choosing to conditionally regulate companies this way is a great way to fuel corruption because the regulators get to pick and choose who to regulate instead of universally applicable law.
Yes, we trust regulators to regulate effectively and not to single out companies when they do things the president doesn’t like.
> The previous administration became the arbiter of truth as to gender and race.
How is the prior administration’s policy to towards race and gender in any way relevant to this administration’s policy towards one tech company?
> What's stopping the next administration from doing the same?
Well, if this action results in a drop in public approval of the administration, the next administration is probably not going to be incentivized to do it. Further, this line of questioning provides zero substance as you could ask that question of any scenario. “It’s OK now because no one will be stopped from doing it in the future” is not a valid argument.
What do you mean when you say this?
edit: people seem to be misunderstanding what I'm saying, or maybe misunderstanding what is being implied in the article.
Section 230 is GOOD, and it is something freedom-fighters have advocated for for a long time. What I'm saying is that freedom-advocates have been in favor of using the threat of losing 230 protection as a way of compelling platforms not to censor speech that they don't like.
And back during the Christchurch shootings when there were proposed limitations to section 230 to make companies liable for hate speech on their platform, there was an uproar from the internet freedom advocates that this would result in censorship and less free speech.
Gosh what an ugly URL. It's the lobbying reports for Twitter. The biggest internet "freedom" advocates are the paid lobbyists of the tech industry.
Citation for claim?
https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230
So basically: no you can't just remove that anti-government, anti-corporate, etc. stuff, because once you do that you are no longer protected, so you better let EVERYBODY speak (within reason) so or else.
Sites under section 230 are well-within their rights to curate content. They're just not responsible FOR content posted on their platform. It seems like you have an objective misunderstanding of how section 230 works.
For example, HN is a platform covered by section 230 as well. If HN removes political content, do you believe that HN should have its section 230 rights revoked?
[0] https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230.
Are we next going to say google is responsible for the search results it provides, when it's just indexing the internet and returning the best match algorithmically?
HN is going to start being responsible for every piece of garbage someone posts?
If Twitter / Wikipedia is legally vulnerable for bad claims, such as by Rush Limbaugh, then Twitter would feel incentivized to remove such risky individuals from the platform. If Rush Limbaugh were held responsible for his statements, he may feel poorly about freely disclosing his narratives.
The way I understand it, they are not censoring people, the people claiming to be "shadow banned" and "twitter deleting my followers" and "I get no traction on my tweets", are misunderstanding Twitter, or technology, or both. There's a huge misunderstanding of how large twitter is, how many tweets flow through, and how many people are tweeting. My understanding is based on personal research. What's yours based on?
I thought about going into one of the many particular individuals that have been banned, that is well know to most people except exceptional researchers like you, but I figured it would just be easy to start you with a video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbTXqrS9l5E
People are objecting because they think it should only be used to censor ideas the objectors don't like, not things the platform operators don't like.
that's about the most generation take on his feed I could imagine
The great irony is that if you strip a company of their section 230 protections, doesn't that just mean that they're going to censor more things on their platform since they're now liable? Why wouldn't they remove Trump from Twitter entirely if they could be held liable for his rants? Of course then you're said to be 'biased' against Trump, which then circles back to the first step.
Which seems to me might be the endgame here. Get Twitter to ban Trump and now you have a lot of red meat for his fervent fanbase.
Dorsey gets told "We'll call this all off, say that we've decided not to interfere with free speech, but from now on you never contradict the president, you never contradict any Republican leader, and you start posting fact-checks more often on Democrats". That's the Trump strategy, typically. Deals. Always making deals.
And Dorsey knows he has to play the game, because his major shareholders will all be quietly informed that the deal was out there, and he didn't take it. He'd lose his job if he didn't agree. And if he goes public, Trump can say "I sat down with the man and tried to work out a fair deal, but he refused!", playing the victim.
Donald Trump is not a brilliant man, but he is very, very good at this game because he does not let ethics, norms, or laws get in his way.
Very well put.
I don't think Trump has completely thought this through. Twitter is how he communicates with his base. What would he use instead?
Like I get that Twitter employees are mad and frustrated but they undermined themselves by throwing their weight around.
How far down the rabbit hole of moderation = abuse of power do we want to go? Should platforms have zero control? What's stopping HN from becoming filled with off-topic images of cats outside of HN abusing their power to censor low-quality posts?
Apparently, there's no penalty for that person who shared classified satellite imagery on that platform.
That account is in clear violation of the Terms of Service. The government is prohibited from passing laws that infringe upon freedom of speech (one of our values).
No business should be forced to carry such misinformation.
No, this is America.
"The 598 People, Places and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter: A Complete List" (2016) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/01/28/upshot/donald...
"Trump Is on Track to Insult 650 People, Places and Things on Twitter by the End of His First Term" (2017) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/26/upshot/presid...
A disgrace. Learn some respect.
Section 230 has very little to do with whether a corporation operating a media platform may exercise their free speech right to respond to such discourse.
Again, this is America.
Trump's motive is questionable, but the outcome of this is definitely better for the society. Many social media has not check and balance due to that 230. Now we the people able to check and balance while getting paid handsomely for doing so. Just see how CNN behave before and after Sandmann.
Please, oh please, don't throw me in the briar patch!
I am curious if the courts will agree if annotating tweets with a fact check is editorializing.
I’m reasonably mad at Twitter for this because they’ve punched a hornets nest and opened the door to making the lives of every site massively more painful and complicated because the pendulum feels like it’s about to swing the other way where any form of moderation is going to be rebranded as editorial and make the web worse overall.
Do you reject the existence of an objective reality?
This is all because they DARED fact check lie number 2129317?LOL
I now know Twitter, the company’s, stance on the issue because they posted their views on top of someone else’s tweet in a way that nobody bit Twitter can do. Twitter can take a stance and even use their official Twitter account to sing it loud and proud but they wielded their power in away that makes it very clear that Twitter is in control.
You're really being duped here. Its not about "twitter posting their views". This isn't a question of who's opinion may or may not be right. Trump is continuously posting verifiably false information that could kill people. The idea that a single person on earth could object to fact checking these things, that again, will cause more deaths, is just stunning. Stop with the awkward 1984 act. You and I both know you're being completely disingenuous.
Wait for what? Twitter has been deleting tweets for years.
Saying we won’t host content about X that doesn’t come from $authority is very different than using their privileged position to put a banner next to any X video with their stance.
On the contrary, Twitter has repeatedly failed to enforce their own rules/TOS, primarily to benefit a single extremist political faction.
On the other hand, and maybe its due to my lack of knowledge on the 230, how's report-and-remove of posts different? Twitter already has mechanisms to remove flagged content so how's this incident different (apart from being blatantly political).
Lastly, does anyone know if Facebook and YouTube are also protected under 230? I imagine that GOP wants to make an example of Twitter but for the sake of consistency Facebook and Youtube should get the same treatment.
They're not required to, of course. They are exercising their right to free speech. They are also not required to publish, amplify or otherwise create a platform for any speech they don't want to.
My understanding that any website on the internet that allows users to post content is protected under 230. Including Hacker News, which then becomes potentially liable for any content posted if its removed.
...and every other site on the internet, including this one. Or IRC channels, or Discord, or search engines...
They already do? Comments on NYTimes articles are covered under Section 230 just as comments made on Facebook or Twitter.
The NY Times also enjoys 230 immunity if they host comments on their site. Literally every site on the internet that has comments (including HN) have this protection.
Can you post a link to the bit of CDA 230 that you think prohibits moderation? What court case makes you think that a site can't have CDA230 protection if it starts removing content?
This is flat out wrong. If Twitter posted something that was libelous, or a Twitter employee wrote something libelous they would be subject to libel.
This is so wrong, it verges on being misinformation.
Twitter does not have absolute immunity from liability.
Here is a breakdown: https://imgur.com/gallery/wPsPtd7
My reading of the prospects for actual passage of this bill are approximately a butterfly fart in a tornado.
This is most likely what is sometimes called a "message bill": legislation that is not actually expected to pass but is introduced anyway in an attempt to score political points.
The polls themselves were no less accurate as they have been historically, on average. They were not wrong, but have always had the limitation of only representing probabilities.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight-gav...
https://www.city-journal.org/html/platform-or-publisher-1588...
Applying this rule to single companies that act out seems so incredibly dangerous.
This legislation is a bit of a joke and aimed at a certain audience. It's obviously illegal.
Yet if you remove those posts, suddenly you become liable for anything posted on the rest of your forum. It's going to kill every small community on the internet.
I suspect HN would be included in that.
The tweet "corrections" seem unwise, because those seem to not be immune from cvil liability under section 230 being that they fail the 3rd prong of section 230 where "defendant (Twitter) must not be the 'information content provider' of the harmful information at issue". So if someone posts libel on Twitter, you can't sue Twitter, but if Twitter "corrects" someone's tweet with something that is actionable libel, couldn't you sue them then?