I don't think that section 230 is about First Amendment. I thought it was about whether a company can be shielded from law suit on the content published on the company's website. That is, how to classify a company as a platform or as a publisher.
First amendment is the issue as we're contemplating who should be liable for the consequences of bad speech. If FB is liable than FB is incentivized to censor risky people; if I'm liable then I might watch what I say on Yelp or Wikipedia.
Right now we have a situation where the platform owner can collect the fruits of popularity, while the platform users experience basically no-liability gossip, such as empirical claims about businesses.
Anyone who is hated broadly by the internet, whether just or unjust, would like FB to be liable no matter what is right or wrong, because holding hundreds of tiny individuals accountable for tiny wrongs over the web is a losing battle.
People have successfully pursued defamation cases for posts to Facebook and other social media platforms.
Section 230 shields Facebook from liability for these posts, not the users. And Facebook generally responds to subpoenas from a court for IP address data that can be used to identify a the user behind a libelous post...
So what if I say that your restaurant serves old chicken and gives food poisoning? What if too many users each take a tiny stab, repeating the false empirical claim they heard?
The restaurant can sue all of the other users for libel, and if it's a coordinated effort or the apparent facts behind each libelous act are sufficiently similar, they can get them joined into a class action imposing joint and several liability imposed on the named defendants (i.e. the few they are able to reasonably identify), meaning that it is now the named defendants' responsibility to find the other users if they want to avoid paying the full damages out of their own pockets.
Believe it or not, all of these hypothetical that techies keep bringing up on HN in this thread as if they were magical logical bullets have long been addressed by courts and/or legislators.
> Believe it or not, all of these hypothetical that techies keep bringing up on HN in this thread as if they were magical logical bullets have long been addressed by courts and/or legislators.
Are you sure you're not engaging in some magical thinking when you imagine Yelp users enjoined as a defendant class? When is the last high profile case where something like this happened?
I think the parent comment recognizes that but is saying there is "basically" no-liability because it is so impractical to sue a random internet commenters one by one.
For sure, if you are Elon Musk and you claim on your twitter account that a world renowned diver is a pedophile, you might suffer real consequences.
But if someone posts on my restaurant's yelp page a totally fabricated negative review, what are my options? Even let's say I have video or other evidence that disproves their assertion (unlikely), I will need to quantity the harm that this particular internet comment did to my business, which is in most cases nearly impossible. And all for what? A median wage worker isn't going to be able to cover my lawyers fee's (assuming I can prove malicious intent) before going into bankruptcy.
What businesses really want is to be able to sue Yelp itself for libel. They want to say: "Yelp, you didn't quality control your comments, these reviews are being fabricated. After my 5 star rating dropped to 1, my business’s income plummeted, now pay up."
I don't think it would be a good idea if our laws worked like that, but as the parent points out, the current situation is that the platforms are more or less immune to libel, and suing random internet commenters for libel makes no sense.
