The metro newspaper I joined in 2001 had nearly 400 newsroom employees. It is now well below 100, and the paper’s steady demise over two decades is heartbreaking. But it is not due to Section 230.

There are a lot of factors, most notably the decimation of papers’ monopoly on classified and local display ads. This surely is related to the Internet. But not in the way that editors now argue.

I saw firsthand throughout the aughts, a parent company that required papers to have lousy, almost unusable websites. Not sure why-my best guess is that papers saw the Internet as a threat rather than an opportunity.

Rather than embrace the Internet and create an experience that would be worth a subscription, my paper and so many others developed bloated and unmanageable online experiences. Maybe the hope is that people would have no other choice but to keep the print edition?

Newspapers continue to shrink, and in many cases shut down entirely. They have legitimate gripes with social media and Google about IP issues. But somehow 230 has been dragged into this debate.

This recent editorial summarizes the attitude that many newspapers have about 230. https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2020/dec/05/and-so-it-begins/

The implication is that online liability is a binary standard: either do absolutely no editing and get 230 protection, or make even the slightest change and you are just as liable as the writer. This is wrong wrong wrong.

It also is wrong advice that I have heard lawyers for newspaper companies repeat to their clients over the years. Perhaps it is why the comments on many newspaper sites have been cesspools. It is malpractice-level wrong.

From a normative perspective it also is wrong. If 230 *did* prohibit any moderation, social media would be even more unusable than the newspaper websites that are bloated with 1,428 pop-ups per page.

It’s also important to note that newspaper websites receive 230 protections just as much as social media. The problem is that social media took full advantage of the possibilities of the Internet, while newspapers generally pushed back for as long as possible.

It’s tragic because newspapers had an opportunity to use the flexibility provided by 230 create thriving online public squares, but so many of them failed early on and it is hard to catch up.