Read on Twitter
Here’s the problem with the “they can publish whatever they want” argument. Let’s talk about other contexts.
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Have you ever gone to an office supply store to purchase printer ink and paper only to hear the cashier ask you... 1/? https://twitter.com/walterolson/status/1357327690320252931
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Have you ever gone to an office supply store to purchase printer ink and paper only to hear the cashier ask you... 1/? https://twitter.com/walterolson/status/1357327690320252931
2/? ...”what do you intend to write on this paper?” Of course not. Have you ever heard of an office supply store saying “I won’t sell you ink and paper because I saw you handing out a flier I don’t agree with”? No.
3/? And most of the time if you ask those stores, they’ll say something like “We just sell you the tools to express yourselves. What you say with it is your business.”
And the courts have taken a similar attitude. If a person commits defamation, they don’t hold the company...
And the courts have taken a similar attitude. If a person commits defamation, they don’t hold the company...
4/? ...that sold them the ink and paper liable. For that matter, they don’t hold Microsoft responsible if you use Word to create a defamatory document and Microsoft doesn’t attempt to tell you what you can say in Word.
5/? What section 230 actually does, is primarily they say to the web “you won’t be responsible for what people say on your platforms any more than we hold office supply companies responsible for what ppl saying using ink and paper bought at their stores.”
7/? In other words, fundamentally section 230 treats Twitter, to pick an example, as being like the ink and paper you buy at the store. It’s not their fault if you use it to commit fraud, defamation or to threaten to kill a person.
8/? And that at first blush makes intuitive sense. I mean no one at Twitter helped me write any of these words. When I hit the “tweet” button I don’t expect Twitter to read what I wrote and decide if it can actually be published on their platform.
9/? But unlike the office supply store, Twitter will decide after the fact if you broke some kind of rules. They might take down what you wrote. They might stop you from publishing at all.
10/? And part of that has to do with the other part of section 230: it also says that even if Twitter engages in moderation, they still are allowed to say to the courts “we are not responsible for what this person said on our platform.”
11/? Now in a lot of ways section 230 helps people express themselves. Could Twitter even operate if every time somebody tweeted a defamatory statement, Twitter could be successfully sued? But it breaks the implied covenant we have with the office supply store:
12/? “You aren’t responsible for what I say with the ink and paper I buy at your store, but it also means it’s not your business what I say.” What I am getting at is the difference between ppl who sell the means of expression blindly verses those who attempt to exert editorial…
13/? …control. The office supply store doesn’t care what you say with its ink and paper. Microsoft doesn’t care what you type in Word. Hewlett-Packard doesn’t care what you publish using their home printer.
But Twitter cares about what you say.
But Twitter cares about what you say.
14/? Worse yet, Twitter is deeply unfair in how it censors people. Here are three tweets that didn’t get their users suspended. At last check only Griffin’s was forced to be taken down. @Kaepernick7 meanwhile was given about $3 million by @jack. But Trump is permanently suspended
15/? A friend of mine, @elisabethlehem, regularly gets very ugly attacks from the left. She recently posted screenshots of some of them. Twitter suspended her for posting them, but did nothing to the ppl who actually wrote the tweets.
16/? And almost every conservative I know has stories like these: bans and suspensions that are ridiculous, arbitrary, and almost always biased as hell. I once used the “Jane, you ignorant sl*t” joke from SNL in a conversation (only uncensored) and was suspended for days.
17/? But at the time, and even today, you can see the exact same uncensored word being said on Twitter all the time. It is even part of people’s handles. Again, every conservative on Twitter who engages has stories like this.
18/? One solution is to take away the moderation shield. That is, say to Twitter and other platforms that if you moderate you take responsibility for everything that is said. I tend to think that’s a bad idea, because I think there’s a lot of stuff Twitter filters out...
19/? ...that really would ruin the experience. I think if Twitter didn’t moderate, every third user would just be an ad for “male enhancement” or a Nigerian prince looking for your help. My compromise is simply to amend 230 to say that if a platform reaches a certain size...
20/? ...that then it has to provide “due process” for its moderation or they lose the liability shield. Literally say just that. Courts understand what due process is, and the arbitrary and incredibly biased moderation would go away very quickly.
21/ I want it only to kick in at a certain size so it’s only when the platform gets big enough to afford bureaucracy that it’s forced to make that choice. And they can still choose “no moderation.”
22/ but it restores something closer to the balance we normally see. If they are not responsible for what we say legally, they should doing a lot less to regulate what we say. /end
