Lots of thinkpieces about Section 230 these days. More discussion of 230 is excellent, but many of the pieces contain misstatements about 230 and the First Amendment. Those takes are then repeated in an echo chamber. In this thread, I try to correct the most common inaccuracies.

1. 230 is not responsible for platforms deleting content or deactivating accounts. The First Amendment allows companies to make those decisions. 230 allows easier dismissal of lawsuits arising from these decisions, but those suits never would succeed even without 230.

2. Relatedly, nobody has a First Amendment right to force a private platform to carry their speech. The First Amendment restrict the actions of the government, not private companies. Courts have been crystal clear on this point.

3. Section 230 does not "protect hate speech." In the United States, the First Amendment protects hate speech. This is different from other parts of the world, but it's not a 230 issue.

4. Section 230 does not protect platforms from claims of copyright infringement. Section 230 always has had an exception for intellectual property law. DMCA - an entirely separate law - sets the rules for platform liability and notice-and-takedown.

5. Section 230 does not apply to enforcement of federal criminal law. It always has had an exception for this. There are not many fed. criminal laws that can be easily enforced against platforms, but this relates at least partly to First Amendment limits.

6. Section 230 does not protect platforms for liability from content they create. If a platform posts a notice about user content that it believes is false or harmful, and that notice is defamatory in itself, the platform has no 230 protection for that comment.

7. Platforms do not magically lose their 230 protections if they "do too much editing." Section 230 was intended to fix a flaw in the common law that suggested that platforms received less protection if they moderate. The goal of 230 was to *encourage* moderation.

8. Relatedly, it's not possible to be a "neutral" platform unless you stop moderation altogether. And the modern Internet would not be useable if there was absolutely no moderation (or even moderation of only the content that is outside of the scope of the First Amendment).

9. It is absolutely true that Section 230 has benefitted "Big Tech" like Facebook and Twitter, and these companies could not have grown what they are now without 230. But they are not the only companies that benefit from 230 - any site that hosts user content relies on 230.

10. "Treat social media like a regulated utility" is a great way to allow even more consolidation of power in a field that already has too much consolidation.

Those are just my notes from some of the recent takes on 230. I think it's important to have a wide-ranging debate about the law, but we also need to be far more precise about what the law actually does.