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Greene offers bill to abolish Section 230
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Thursday is introducing a bill to abolish Section 230 — the law the protects online platforms from liability — on the heels of Twitter accepting Elon Musk's offer to buy the company and take it private.
Greene's bill would eliminate the law making online platforms not liable for content posted by third parties and replace it with a provision to require "reasonable, non-discriminatory access to online communications platforms" through a "common carrier" framework that Greene compared to airlines or package delivery services.
Republicans have long claimed that social media platforms have an anti-conservative bias, pointing to tweets that have been taken down and the removal of entire feeds from networks.
[....] Titled the 21st Century FREE Speech Act, Greene's measure will serve as the House version of a Senate bill sponsored by Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.).
To combat the alleged bias against conservatives, it would prevent online communications platforms from exerting "undue or unreasonable preference or advantage to any particular person, class of persons, political or religious group or affiliation, or locality" and would provide consumers a mechanism to sue for violations.
Should any platform be liable for someone else's speech? Even if they engage in moderation?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30 2022, @02:29PM (2 children)
Common carrier works fine for ISPs and hosting services, but it falls far short for community sites like SN. A community site that can't self moderate can't survive because it will be overrun by trolls and spammers, but the existing law is based around newspaper letters to the editor where every post is moderated before publishing. That's why Section 230 was created, to make live posting legally compatible with moderation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30 2022, @03:20PM (1 child)
You're pinning it down to one form of moderation, which just isn't true. Just off the top of my head, when you have a pseudonymous community supporting ad hoc pseudonymity for the otherwise accountless, self-moderation works very quickly and effectively. Go on, show up, rant about how the lizard people are sucking your precious vital fluids and you'll find that nobody cares and you can scream into a void to your heart's content but you won't have much effect on the virtual air quality. Similarly, community moderation afforded to users, along similar lines to the reddit strategy, is just fine under this model.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 01 2022, @10:15AM
Spoken like someone who wasn't around when /guro/ raided 4chan. Section 230 is what lets message boards defend themselves from those types of attacks.