@louis @matthewstoller Section 230 is and has long been a very polarized issue! @mmasnick is very much on one side of it. A bit more ambivalently perhaps, but I’m on the other side. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/trump-fighting-section-230-wrong-reason/617497/ 1/

@louis @matthewstoller @mmasnick When Section 230 was passed and the early caselaw turned it broad and impenetrable, the issue was mostly what you might call “negative moderation”. Refraining from distributing things you think bad shouldn’t make you responsible, as happened perversely to Prodigy. 2/

@louis @matthewstoller @mmasnick But I think we as a society are coming to a decision that so broad an immunity is untenable for “positive moderation”, for what you choose to amplify. We all agree that moderation choices, positive or negative, are themselves 1st Amendment protected expressive speech. We all agree that refusing to carry something you think bad shouldn’t recruit new liability for what you allow relative to not moderating at all. 3/

@louis @matthewstoller @mmasnick But for content you choose to highlight or amplify in ways that go beyond some “neutral” presentation, and certainly for things you are paid to amplify, I think it now exceedingly likely that liability will be clipped, to some degree. 4/

@louis @matthewstoller @mmasnick Whether that’s good or bad, in my view, will depend upon details. There are obviously terrible devils in details of what “neutral” might mean, or “positive vs negative moderation”. 5/

@louis @matthewstoller @mmasnick I don’t think the fully expansive Section 230 status quo is politically sustainable, for the good reason that it’s bad policy. Publisher and distributor liability exist in other contexts for good reasons, and reasons that apply to algorithmic mass-audience publishers at least as much as they do traditionally. 6/

@louis @matthewstoller @mmasnick The very expansive interpretation of Section 230 that has obtained since the 1990s was based on a supposition that internet experiments could be utopian, and we wanted to err on the side of protecting rather than disciplining and potentially discouraging them. The results of that interpretation are in, no longer an experiment, and not utopian. We as a public are revisiting our courts’ earlier choices. /fin