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upstart writes:

If You Don't Want EU Style Censorship To Take Over The Internet, Support Section 230:

Last summer, I mocked the EU a bit for setting up a new office in Silicon Valley, and sending an official here to "liaise with Silicon Valley companies affected by EU tech regulation," noting how it felt weird to have EU internet police setting up shop in Silicon Valley. Given that, I was a bit surprised that the new office invited me to "moderate" a panel discussion last month about the Digital Services Act (DSA), a bill I have regularly criticized and which I think is going to be dangerous for free speech on the internet.

There was no recording of the actual panel, but much of it involved me, as moderator, and Berkeley's Brandie Nonnecke (who was a panelist, but could have just as easily moderated the panel) quizzing the EU official sent to Silicon Valley, Gerard de Graaf, about how the DSA would actually work in practice, and specifically about our concerns regarding the potential censorial nature of the law. de Graaf insisted, repeatedly, that the DSA is "not a speech regulation," but then he basically kept going back to effectively admitting that it very much is a speech regulation. That is, he said it's not a speech regulation, it's just asking companies to have in place some practices to deal with "bad" speech. And, even as he kept insisting that it wasn't a speech regulation, he admitted that if it didn't lead to less misinformation online, EU officials would be disappointed.

Which... means it's a speech regulation.

[...] My takeaway is that the EU really wants to have it both ways. It wants to have speech regulation, but they know they can't call it speech regulation, so instead it's all just winks and nudges, telling companies they need to effectively disappear "unwanted" speech... or something bad might happen to them. [...]

[...] But all of this is why Americans — and American tech companies — really should strongly embrace Section 230. Section 230 is, in many ways, the anti-DSA. Even as a bunch of very ignorant, very foolish people insist that Section 230 was how the US government pressured internet companies to "censor," the opposite is true.

Section 230 gives companies the freedom to moderate how they want, without fear of facing liability or regulatory pressure for their decisions and non-decisions. Take that away, and suddenly lawmakers and bureaucrats — and anyone who can file a lawsuit — gain tremendous power to suppress speech. With 230, the companies get to decide, and if there are people who disagree with them, their options are to take their business elsewhere, not to create a legal punishment for the company.

[...] Over the past year or so, I've heard (somewhat tragically) that the big American internet companies (beyond Twitter and whatever it is that Musk thinks he's doing), recognizing that they're going to have to live with the DSA in the EU, are becoming more open to importing that model to the US.

They should not. That's not a model that the US should want, and it's a model that is dangerous for the American approach to free speech. Section 230 and the 1st Amendment, combined with normal business pressures, provides the exact right balance. Private companies moderate how they see best to do so, recognizing that allowing too much garbage will often drive away any business prospects. But without the extremely heavy hand of government (and its questionable motives) telling them what to take down and what to leave up.

Original Submission