Trump Goes for Section 230

You may have never heard of it, but Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is the legal backbone of the internet. The law was created almost 30 years ago to protect internet platforms from liability for many of the things third parties say or do on them. And now it’s under threat by one of its biggest beneficiaries: President Trump, who hopes to use it to fight back against the social media platforms he believes are unfairly censoring him and other conservative voices.

Section 230 says that internet platforms that host third-party content — think of tweets on Twitter, posts on Facebook, photos on Instagram, reviews on Yelp, or a news outlet’s reader comments — are not liable for what those third parties post (with a few exceptions). For instance, if a Yelp reviewer were to post something defamatory about a business, the business could sue the reviewer for libel, but it couldn’t sue Yelp. Without Section 230’s protections, the internet as we know it today would not exist. If the law were taken away, many websites driven by user-generated content would likely go dark.

The gravity of the situation might be lost on the president. Trump is using this threat to bully social media platforms like Twitter into letting him post whatever he wants after Twitter put a warning label that links to a fact-checking siteon two of his recent tweets. To illustrate why there’s much more at stake than Trump’s tweets, here’s a look at how Section 230 went from an amendment to a law about internet porn to the pillar of internet free speech to Trump’s latest weapon against perceived anti-conservative bias in the media.

Section 230, the internet free speech law Trump wants to change, explained

 

Brilliant of you

 

This is a simplistic argument. Section 230 is not absolute..it has limitations. Does free speech include sponsoring terrorism or child porn?

Since the vilest cesspits tend towards the right, I can see where the angst is coming from.

Remember attacking 230 will come to bite everyone and not just Twitter. BaptistBoard could be sued into oblivion

 

who said they did?

I shared those two examples to educate you on the scope of section 230

 

Trump lost the black vote in this single tweet.

Not that he had a lot to start with

 

Law professors reckon the executive order is much ado about nothing
Legal experts said it was unclear if the Federal Communications Commission would embrace Trump’s view of Section 230 laid out in the order. Even if it does, the agency’s regulations will have no binding legal effect on judges who actually have say over the law.

The order “is 95% political theater – rhetoric without legal foundation, and without legal impact,” said Daphne Keller, an expert on internet law at Stanford University.

Marc Randazza, a First Amendment lawyer, said he agreed with Trump’s censorship concerns but acknowledged that much of the executive order would not lead to actual reforms.



Trump's order taking aim at Twitter is 'bluster': legal experts

 

Most of the violence is instigated by police