I think the person you're responding to is talking about an asymmetry of rules - current politicians can say anything, everyone else has to follow rules. In that situation, current politicians can lie about their opponents, but opponents cannot lie back.
Actually it seems like social media companies are choosing who can't lie and who can. Normal users and even most politicians lie on social media everyday, who cares. The problem I see is social media companies targeting specific leaders and what they see as "lies" while ignoring others.
And most importantly, who decides what is a lie?
Either take 230 away from the company and no-one can lie on the platform, or stop censoring/altering users and allow everyone to say what's in their legal right to say.
There's a meme about nothing being true on the internet, why do we need a Ministry of Truth now?
Because it will allow for some form of competition because they will be forced to make decisions leaving space for other players to make different decisions.
IMO revoking Section 230 would benefit incumbents like FB and Twitter who have already made billion-dollar investments into content moderation, and hurt the small guys who suddenly become liable for every user comment they publish.
Can’t you imagine Mark and Jack telling Republican senators: “We wanted to enable free speech, we told you so, but you took away the protections around that so we had no choice but to turn the moderation dial to 11.”
You seem to work at FB so you might have some more insight than I do, if so please share. On the other side, I see new players arriving and proving to be competitive because FB will be forced to take a position, if people don't like that position they won't interact with the platform. Suddenly there's a market for a different platform.
I’m just a video rendering code monkey, I have no particular insight into this issue. (FWIW I believe Zuckerberg is genuine in his position, but I also think he’d change it rapidly if the legal environment tilted the other way and it became a genuine business threat.)
I wonder about those different platforms. They already exist — Gab simply isn’t that popular. Revoking Section 230 would expose Gab to a “Thiel vs Gawker” situation: a billionaire could sue them into extinction. That doesn’t seem desirable at all.
I'm not a fan of Gab, but it could easily be not popular because it's offering a worse version of the current form of FB.
If FB's status changed, Gab could theoretically become more popular. Not all new platform/publishers would be the equivalent of a Gawker and thus raise the ire of a billionaire. There are plenty of independent journals, magazines, blogging platforms, etc that don't get sued out of existence.
> You seem to work at FB so you might have some more insight than I do, if so please share.
Please don’t make accusations of astroturfing. It’s rude and against the HN guidelines. Why? Because the majority of the time, it’s not true. I don’t work at or have any connection to Microsoft, but a week ago, I was accused of astroturfing for them because I did not agree that them open sourcing stuff is EEE.
