Comment by joshuamorton
5 years ago
This is incorrect. Section 230 does protect certain entities. It removes liability from certain types of content.
A website that contains both first party and third party content has section 230 protection on the third party content, but none on the first party content. There is no legal basis for the idea of "publisher" as different from "platform". If a website makes a modification to a specific piece of content, they may lose section 230 protections over that particular piece of content, but they retain it on all other 3rd party content.
The FCC cannot change the requirements to gain "platform protection" because there are none, because section 230 applies to content (like a tweet), not entities (like "Twitter").
One thing I've always been curious about - if a site receives third party content, but also is assigned copyright to that submitted content as part of the T&C of submission, does that make it first party content? I would hope not, as I think the assignation of copyright does not imply the immediate ability for the site to review the content of that submission.
I'm not a lawyer, but no. Section 230 has nothing to do with copyright. It only asks if the content was created by a third party. Licensure doesn't change the creator.