hello again today we're going to talk about section 230 of the communications decency act of 1996. now that's a big mouthful but really that section section 230 are the 26 words that made the internet what it is today for better and for worse of course it's still being debated it began with the question of whether the internet was a publisher or a platform the difference is if you're a publisher like time magazine where i used to work in the new york times or even a website being a publisher if you're the uh daily beast you're a publisher that means you're responsible for the words you're the one who curates the words on that page if you're a platform it means you're just neutral it's like being a bulletin board in some public post where people can just put up whatever they want and you're not necessarily responsible even if you put up that bulletin board you're not responsible for everything people post on it one example of that came in a case in 1959 called smith versus california and somebody was upset about a book ensued about a book but also sued the bookstore and the supreme court of the united states rules that a distributor such as a bookstore you can't hold them liable for everything that's in every book that happens to be on their shelves that would have the court said quote an effect of inhibiting the freedom of expression and so the notion of just being a distributor or a platform and to be able to sue them that's just as silly as saying you can sue the telephone company because somebody gets onto a conference call and says something libelous on that conference call so that was the great dichotomy and the question was whether online services in the old days were actually publishers or whether they were what we will call platforms meaning they just distributed things and this is even before the world wide web was a popular thing and it begins with compuserve one of the online services that predates the public being able to go on the web directly compuserve was an online service you dialed up and you got to a whole lot of places on it and they had newsletters and people posted things and one of the newsletters that one of the customers posted said something that seemed to be libelous it uh attacked uh uh some other uh online uh newsletter and uh and it got sued but the people who sued also sued compuserve the court found that compuserve couldn't be held liable it didn't moderate its content it never checked if somebody uploaded something onto a bulletin board compuserve didn't try to moderate it didn't try to curate it and thus the court said it couldn't really be held responsible for everything people just posted or put on just like whatever you put on 4chan or 8th channel for that matter whatever you may post on facebook which is how this story will eventually uh end as a discussion of facebook but there was a contrary case in 1995 a few years later against prodigy which was a very similar online service and an anonymous user posted something on prodigy accusing an investment firm named stratton oakmont of committing fraud uh stratton oakmont sued for libel prodigy unlike compuserve tried to moderate some of the content it you know it didn't let it wasn't quite like facebook it didn't let you put up just whatever you wanted it had moderators and editors of customer content to make sure the stuff that people posted wasn't horrible and so it loses the case by being responsible and trying to moderate and edit the content it loses the case because the court rules in this 1995 major decision that it was a publisher not just a passive carrier or not just a platform and so it was legally responsible for what was up there i at the time in 1995 was working at time magazine's online services we had created something called pathfinder we were also on americo online one of the other online services and we had bulletin boards and the bulletin boards had all sorts of content if we ran a piece about burning the flag or we ran this piece about legalizing marijuana there'd be bulletin boards and all sorts of our readers would post things and they'd post their opinions it was like letters to the editor uh and it was to some extent curated like editors to the edit letters to the editor were we had a wonderful guy named dick duncan who stayed up in the at night and kind of read as much as he could through all the comments and if he saw something really bad or something libelous he took it down after the stratton oakmont decision the lawyers at our company said quit moderating your content quit checking it quit trying to curate it to make sure that people aren't putting hateful or libelous things up because to the extent you do any moderation at all that makes you legally liable according to this case against prodigy but if you don't do anything you just wash your hands and you never look at what all the people post on your uh on your pages then you're like compuserve you're not going to be held liable well two congressmen i mean a congressman two congressmen uh a democrat and a republican on your right there's chris cox a california republican he looks at these cases and said that's exactly the wrong result that's exactly the opposite of what we want to have happen how are we going to have an internet that will blossom if companies get punished for trying to keep things clean and he said this struck me as a way to make the internet a cesspool by the way he was right i don't know if you've checked recently but a lot of the internet is a cesspool and part of it has to do with the fact that if you don't moderate if you're twitter if you're facebook if you're 8chan 4chan if you're something like that your instagram and you don't moderate in any way customer content that's being posted you're not liable you can't be sued so he teamed up with his close friend in congress a democrat named ron wyden that was way back when republicans and democrats could be friends and do things for the common good and they produced a section called section 230 that was designed to overrule the stratton oakmont decision and say that service providers could moderate content without making themselves liable for everything everybody get posed got every thing everybody anybody post it if you acted in good faith and you were just trying to take down the horrible stuff if something slipped through you weren't going to be held liable uh for that and what it was would just say small section that's why it's called section 230 buried in something called the communications decency act which was a big act that had sort of a different purpose which was to keep porn off the internet uh and hear the 26 words in section 230 that became as i said the 26 words that made the internet what it is today and those 26 words are no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of information provided by another information content provider so that gave you immunity if you're just posting other people's content and the reason it gave immunity was so that these service providers these platforms would feel comfortable moderating and taking down indecent things or hateful things or libelous things but they wouldn't by doing so expose themselves to a legal liability it passed by a near unanimous vote clinton signed it in law in 1996. the main part of the communications decency act the whole part about you can't post porn and other things was actually declared unconstitutional as a violation of free speech but section 230 remained intact so the only part of the bill that stays intact are these 26 words that basically make the distinction that says internet platforms such as twitter facebook instagram or any website or online service that allows people to post content they can make good faith efforts to keep hate speech off but in return they get immunity from being considered a publisher publishers can be held guilty of libel uh for things that they publish but an online service isn't a publisher it's just a platform we'll see how that turns out in our next lecture