Comment by dcow

That is not the argument. The argument is that, with appropriate court order, a site operator must take down the illegal material (if it hasn’t already been moderated out). However, the site owner should not be liable for that content appearing on their site since it was not put there by them and since there is value in uncensored/unmoderated online communities. The person who posted the content should be liable, not the site owner. In neither case is the content just freely siting there harming the public and unable to be removed because nobody is liable for punishment.

I think an interesting alternate angle here would be to require unmoderated community admins to keep record of real identity info for participants, so if something bad shows up the person who posted it is trivially identifiable and can easily be reprimanded. This has other problems, of course, but is interesting to consider.