On 2026-03-14 at 13:29, Joe wrote: > On Sat, 14 Mar 2026 10:28:05 -0400 Jeffrey Walton > <[email protected]> wrote: > >> 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. > > But the telephone providers have never been held responsible for any > slander uttered though their connections.
This is part of the reasoning behind the difference, indeed. There's room to make a counterargument involving the messages spoken via telephone being transitory, and the ones hosted by online service providers being persistent. That's enough of a qualitative difference to make drawing a distinction between telephone service and online discussion fora reasonable, though IMO not enough of one to make erasing the difference between online discussion fora and traditional publishing reasonable. > But one way or another would be good. If they censor or apply > political bias to what they carry, then they are have responsibility > for what they allow through. At the moment they claim no > responsibility when they clearly are applying editorial control. That's the "allowed to moderate, but not obligated to moderate" thing. If there were a requirement to moderate, only the biggest players would be able to afford to do it, and everyone else would have to drop out, so the only legal online discussion forums would be those hosted by those big players; if there were a prohibition on moderation, not only would there be no way to have discussion spaces dedicated to particular topics that didn't get swamped with posts about unrelated topics, there'd also be no way to rein in the floods of spam that are out there even nowadays. There are definitely problems with the current situation, don't get me wrong. But I've never seen a suggestion of an alternative that would fix any of those problems without introducing enough others to be a cure worse than the disease. -- 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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