On 2026-03-14 at 10:28, Jeffrey Walton wrote: > On Sat, Mar 14, 2026 at 9:46 AM Jan Claeys <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On Wed, 2026-03-11 at 17:16 -0400, Jeffrey Walton wrote: >> >>> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be >>> treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided >>> by another information content provider. >>> >>> That lets companies like Meta and Google off the hook for what >>> their users say and do. >> >> It does not leave them off the hook for what they do themselves >> though (like the hyper-addictive algorithms, privacy-violations, >> etc.). >> >> And they already block many ridiculous things anyway; e.g. I just >> saw someone who had to pixelate her 5yo boy’s nipples on a beach >> photo from last summer because otherwise Instagram blocked it. > > Section 230 provides broad immunity for companies like Meta and > Facebook. It is completely opposite of the way things work in the > real world, where publishers are responsible for the material they > publish and distribute.
That's because, "in the real world", publishers receive submissions, review them at their leisure, decide which ones to publish, and in practice, publish only a small percentage of them; I'm given to understand that for e.g. book or magazine publishers, it's on the order of one or two percent. The time between submission and publication (or rejection) can also be lengthy; if I'm not mistaken, it is (and almost certainly at one point was) on the order of months. By contrast, the providers being referenced receive *millions* or even *billions* of submissions *per day*, and in order for online discussion spaces to be viable, need to "publish" a much, much higher percentage of them - probably over 90%, at least if you disregard spam. The typical submission is much shorter, so much less review time per item would be needed, but that would be *more* than offset by the *vastly larger number* of submissions that would need to be reviewed. Trying to hold the latter to the standards of the former would *completely shut down online discussion spaces*, including this one. Can you imagine how much less viable online public discussion would be if every post anyone tried to make had to wait (days or weeks or months or even years) for review before being published, and only one or two percent of them actually ever got published, rather than getting silently discarded? Providers of the sort that the quoted sentence is referring to *legitimately are not the same type of thing as* traditional publishers. > See for example, > <https://www.google.com/search?q=Section+230+defies+normal+legal+liability>. > > What you are seeing from Instagram and the 5 yo picture is the > "Good Samaritan" protections of Section 230. It looks to me more like one of the consequences that would result from Section 230's provisions about moderation *not* being available. My understanding is that those provisions are aimed at making sure that such providers can *choose* to moderate submissions if they wish to do so, without imposing the massive burden of being *required* to moderate all submissions. In this case, Instagram is choosing to apply automated "dumb" filters, which catch things that they should not cover - and is probably doing it because they think the PR hit (and potentially the legal fees to win in court if necessary) from under-censoring would be too much to accept, even if censoring less would be entirely legal. If the Section 230 provision that allows them to *not* moderate (or something like it) were not in effect, they would be *required* to at *least* put filters like that in place, and possibly do a whole lot more. Some of the largest players may well be able to meet that burden, although the impact of doing so might be undesirable in practice. Smaller players, however, would certainly not have the resources to do so - and so requiring that all submissions be reviewed and moderated before publication, even if only with automated "dumb" filters that produce results like the above, would in fact only serve to ensure that massive companies like Alphabet (behind Google) and Meta (behind Facebook and Instagram) would be the *only* ones who could afford to offer discussion forums. The people who criticize Section 230 for shielding such companies from liability never seem to realize that taking that liability shield away would leave those companies *the only ones able to compete in the market*. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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