Summary
Lawmakers are once again pushing to repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields online platforms from legal liability for user-generated content.
Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) are collaborating on a bipartisan bill to sunset the law in two years.
Repealing Section 230 aims to force Congress to renegotiate platform liability standards.
The proposal reflects growing frustration over tech giants’ power and content moderation practices, but past efforts have faced political gridlock despite bipartisan support.
Good. All the major centralized/corporate social networks are Nazi bars now anyway; nothing of value will be lost if they can no longer exist.
Remember that the Fediverse could survive instances having legal liability for user-posted content because each user could run his own instance.
The Nazi bars will survive. It’s the dissenters and minorities trying to speak in them that will be silenced as a self-protective move by tech corporations.
Uh… Bluesky? And in the first place it won’t be the big platforms losing here, but the small ones. What section 230 does is make it so you don’t need a first amendment argument to prevent the courts from controlling what you do with your internet platform, because a first amendment lawsuit is very expensive to run compared to a section 230 lawsuit.
They can, but that will push many people away.
I don’t buy the smaller platforms being hurt more argument.
It’s not hard to prevent undue burden on smaller platforms by adding in the bill that it only applies to platforms with more than $1B in revenue.
We need to get rid of 230 because it has given way too much immunity to the biggest internet companies and they have been simply shrugging away all their responsibilities. Let’s work out how to make this bill work for the people instead of shutting it out.
100% agreed. Not even that high. Platforms that generate more than $1 million in revenue. Wipe out these engines of disinformation.
And this would require each user to run their own instance. The Fediverse is already hard enough to get average folks to join, this would make it nigh impossible for most.
And what happens when you instance is found hosting opinions that the current administration, or some random company doesn’t like? They just send a cease and desists to your ISP or hosting company. And of that ever became too burdensome, they’ll go up the chain to DNS providers and sue them into censoring domains completely.
Once 230 is gone, responsiblility for content hosting can be shifted all the way upstream to largest companies that make up the backbone of the internet, and with liability on them, they will censor everything.
Well, yes. I am opposed to repealing section 230, it’s one of the few good parts of the CDA. I’m arguing with someone who’s in favour of repealing with section 230.
Sorry, I wasn’t trying to argue with you at all, just add more on to your point. I completely agree with what you wrote, but I could have phrased it better.
Ah, okay. Since you opened with a question I assumed you were engaging in debate with me, which was confusing since we seemed to be in agreement.
People outside the USA will still run instances. It might become harder for people in the USA to access them, depending on how these measures are enforced.
Sure, but wouldn’t it be nice if people inside the USA could still run instances too?
Of course. In the current climate this bill would be a huge problem.
They’d do it, because the alternative would be no social media at all.
X would somehow magically be exempt from legal problems, it’d still be around. Same with Truth Social.
But surely one user posting illegal content would get blasted to all connected instances making everyone guilty.
So… Worse. Much worse.
You are truly delusional if you think that the Fediverse is safe. This is just the first step towards using DNS to filter the internet of dissenting opinions, and lastly, this will be used to automate lawsuits against anything and anyone that hosts anything that those in power don’t like.
To spell it out, if they remove 230, and everyone just hosts their own platform, and those platforms are used to spread information and opinions that are counter to the administration, they will sue your ISP to cut off your service.
Damn, it’s sad people can be so clueless yet still have a voice.
Yeah, I’m struggling to see the downside of this personally, which means there is no way in gods green hell it will happen.