Misrepresenting Section 230

If you are still unsure of Section 230, listen to Josh Barro and Ken White's "All the President's Lawyers" podcast for today.

Or read this article: Misrepresenting the Communications Decency Act

Bottom line:

By asserting that Facebook must be a neutral public forum to benefit from Section 230 immunity, [Senator Ted] Cruz suggested that Facebook’s practice of content moderation could put this immunity at risk. But Section 230 was adopted precisely to encourage this moderation. As the statute’s proponents explained at the time, the hope was to incentivize online service providers to “help ... control” what enters the home through the “portals of our computer.” Protecting “anyone ... who takes steps to screen indecency and offensive material for their customers” was an explicit goal. And the drafters did not look favorably on government review of these discretionary decisions: “We do not wish to have content regulation by the Federal Government of what is on the internet, ... a Federal Computer Commission with an army of bureaucrats regulating the Internet.” By moderating its website, Facebook doesn’t risk running afoul of Section 230; it lives up to it.

[...]

Sub-section 230(c)(2) explicitly contemplates such a thing: It protects Facebook from civil liability on the basis of any “good faith” restrictions the company places on access to “material that [it] or [the] user considers to be ... objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.” There is no neutrality provision and no review provision. The text explicitly says that the decision about whether material is objectionable is the service provider’s to make.

  Lawfare Blog