Common carriers (like a telephone company) are content-neutral (unbiased) and have no legal responsibility for what is said. If someone mails you a threatening letter, you can't sue USPS.
Publishers can publish (or decline to publish) whatever they want, but they do have some responsibility for what they say. Libel, copyright infringement, and threats all carry consequences even if the publisher is not the author. Publishers can be as biased as they want.
Is FB a publisher or a common carrier? What about Google? Youtube? Instagram? Twitter?
(The answer is that they are kind of either depending on the exact part of the organization. And they are having it both ways: control without responsibility.)
>Publishers can publish (or decline to publish) whatever they want, but they do have some responsibility for what they say.
It is abjectly insane to label a tweet as something Twitter, the company, is "saying". If we're retooling the law to orient it toward that definition, then the inevitable endgame, after the avalanche of litigation, will be that the concept of posting text on social media or blogging platforms is dead. It kills Web 2.0 in its entirety. It regresses the United States back to the dark ages of a completely one-directional media, where the best you can do as an outsider is to submit a letter to the editor.
Here is section 230, the law protecting websites from liability for things published on them by third parties. [0] I do not see anything about a provider needing to be content neutral. In fact, part c2a seems to be explicitly saying the opposite. IANAL. Where does this legal concept of a distinction between a "carrier" and a "publisher" appear?
Completely wrong with regard to current US law. First Amendment rights apply to corporations without distinguishing based any attribute. There is no such legal concept as a publisher or a platform. No legal scholar has argued that publisher/platform exists in current law, the academic community speculated it might be nice to change the law to make the distinction and then it gets misreported.
They should be allowed to have it both ways. If I run a video game forum, I should be allowed to ban trolls and remove off-topic posts without accepting legal responsibility for any illegal content that gets posted on my forum by third parties without my prior knowledge or consent. Forcing people to choose between being a publisher and being a utility would completely and instantly kill every single internet community dead in its tracks.
I don’t understand how people can post on a heavily moderated forum like HN while demanding that moderation be effectively made illegal. It’s like people hate Facebook and Google so much that they mindlessly get onboard with any form of retaliation against them regardless of the actual consequences.
FB is a publisher because they don't allow everyone on their platform.
Edit:
We try to make Facebook broadly available to everyone, but you cannot use Facebook if:
You are under 13 years old.
You are a convicted sex offender.
We've previously disabled your account for violations of our Terms or Policies.
You are prohibited from receiving our products, services, or software under applicable laws.
You are correct, publishers don't have a legal requirement to be unbiased, but publishers can be sued. Service Providers cannot be sued for what appears on their service[1]. The argument is that "biased" decisions on what to publish makes them publishers and not service providers.
1) ok, in the US anyone can get sued and there seem to be some specific things people can sue and win on, but that is outside the scope of 230.
This has been my understanding for many years. And so it's ironic how increased moderation to increase marketability brings immunity of service providers under 230 into question.
It's almost like 230 has been a bait and switch ploy. With 230, mega social media corps developed, with nothing else to protect them against liability.
But instead, we could have had decentralized systems that made liability impossible. And if stuff like this goes forward, maybe we can. Someday, anyway.
jeffdavis|6 years ago
Publishers can publish (or decline to publish) whatever they want, but they do have some responsibility for what they say. Libel, copyright infringement, and threats all carry consequences even if the publisher is not the author. Publishers can be as biased as they want.
Is FB a publisher or a common carrier? What about Google? Youtube? Instagram? Twitter?
(The answer is that they are kind of either depending on the exact part of the organization. And they are having it both ways: control without responsibility.)
koboll|6 years ago
It is abjectly insane to label a tweet as something Twitter, the company, is "saying". If we're retooling the law to orient it toward that definition, then the inevitable endgame, after the avalanche of litigation, will be that the concept of posting text on social media or blogging platforms is dead. It kills Web 2.0 in its entirety. It regresses the United States back to the dark ages of a completely one-directional media, where the best you can do as an outsider is to submit a letter to the editor.
woopwoop|6 years ago
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
iudqnolq|6 years ago
esoterica|6 years ago
I don’t understand how people can post on a heavily moderated forum like HN while demanding that moderation be effectively made illegal. It’s like people hate Facebook and Google so much that they mindlessly get onboard with any form of retaliation against them regardless of the actual consequences.
Fjolsvith|6 years ago
Edit:
We try to make Facebook broadly available to everyone, but you cannot use Facebook if:
From Facebook's Terms of Service:https://www.facebook.com/terms.php
jaywalk|6 years ago
LegitShady|6 years ago
protomyth|6 years ago
1) ok, in the US anyone can get sued and there seem to be some specific things people can sue and win on, but that is outside the scope of 230.
mirimir|6 years ago
It's almost like 230 has been a bait and switch ploy. With 230, mega social media corps developed, with nothing else to protect them against liability.
But instead, we could have had decentralized systems that made liability impossible. And if stuff like this goes forward, maybe we can. Someday, anyway.