Comment by matt4077
9 years ago
That doesn't even begin to make sense... Or at least you're 20 years too late with that argument:
"The act was passed in part in reaction to the 1995 decision in Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co.,[3] which suggested that service providers who assumed an editorial role with regard to customer content, thus became publishers, and legally responsible for libel and other torts committed by customers. This act was passed to specifically enhance service providers' ability to delete or otherwise monitor content without themselves becoming publishers"
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
You should read more of the Wikipedia under limits.
That law does not change the fact that one could argue "well they did censor this so...". It is a risk. If you have a record that says "we censor nothing" then you are much safer. I would agree that under the law you site it should be clear cut, but that is not the way it has worked lately. It's a risk based on a moral belief and I applaud the CEO for doing it. That does not invalidated the risk.
The law doesn't change what anyone can argue. It only changes what a court will consider valid. The section on limitations says nothing about about the topic we're discussing, whereas the law was explicitly written to overturn this (since then invalid) belief that "any content moderation creates a burden to moderate all content". Quote:
"The important difference between CompuServe and Prodigy for the Stratton court was that Prodigy engaged in content screening and therefore exercised editorial control. The holding in Stratton was overruled in federal legislation when Congress passed Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in 1996. As a result, Internet service providers in the United States today are generally protected from liability for user-generated content."
Anything else would obviously be unworkable. Facebook, for example, exerts wide-ranging control over content (i.e. they delete quite a lot). If that were to create liability for all user-generated content on Facebook, they would have seized to exist long ago.