DOJ unveils proposed Section 230 legislation

There's other areas that discuss a ban of E2E encryption.

Specifically this:

>>One important way to confront the grave and worsening problem of illicit and unlawful material on the internet is to ensure that providers do not design or operate their systems in any manner that results in an inability to identify or access most (if not all) unlawful content. Such designs and operation put our society at risk by: (1) severely eroding a company’s ability to detect and respond to illegal content and activity; (2) preventing or seriously inhibiting the timely identification of offenders, as well as the identification and rescue of victims; (3) impeding law enforcement’s ability to investigate and prosecute serious crimes; (4) and depriving victims of the evidence necessary to bring private civil cases directly against perpetrators.

And the problem here is that it is inseparable from the political issue.

The core is 4a, replace vague terminology. The point is to end 230 unless social media is compelled to reproduce right wing content. Nothing else. The other stuff about illegal material doesn't really matter.

Why this? Because this is all right wing media talks about with respect to 230. They want social media punished for removing their material. They publish their vicious lies which are removed by the website. Then they loudly proclaim the constitution is the reason.

So we can see through the politics. The rest of the proposed bill is fluff. The part that matters is the compelled speech.

So we have this: "Publish our lies or you are liable for all other user content that might be illegal."

This law would make it illegal to host discussion forums such as Hacker News.

Subparagraph (c)1(B) says that the only safe harbor for removing content is (c)(2). (c)(2)(A) restricts the criteria that can be used to remove content to the following: "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, promoting terrorism or violent extremism, harassing, promoting self-harm, or unlawful".

The current Hacker News Guidelines contain stuff like "Be kind. Don't be snarky". These are broader than the text in (c)(2)(A). Therefore the safe harbor may not apply.

Worse, section (c)(1)(C) implies that removing ANY content by a user could make the forum liable for ALL OTHER content posted by that user, unless there is "good faith", but "good faith" is defined in section (g)(5)(A) to require all moderation criteria to be defined with "particularity". "Be kind. Don't be snarky" could be construed to lack "particularity".

The only alternative provided by this law would be to only remove content according to extremely legalistic moderation criteria. In my personal experience, all high-quality open forums require moderation with a degree of subjectivity with open-ended criteria similar to our Hacker News Guidelines. Given the legal risks of having to go to trial to argue about whether you are a "publisher" of other people's forum comments, it would be foolish for anyone to continue to employ open-ended moderation under this law.

Section (d)(2)(B) makes it illegal NOT to "expeditiously" remove illegal content once a provider has "actual notice" of illegality. If someone has a blog that they don't really maintain, someone else posts an illegal comment, a third person flags the illegal comment, and the blog owner doesn't get around to moderating their blog for a few months, do they go to jail?

That same section would make it difficult for web hosting providers and DNS providers not to take down other people's websites immediately if they receive any complaint about any illegal comment on those websites (they already do this sometimes, but this would make the problem worse). This would make it easy for trolls to take down small forums or blogs without the means to employ a 24/7 moderation team; just post something illegal then immediately complain about your own comment to the DNS provider before a moderator even has a chance to see it. The only solution allowed by this law would be for small forums to pre-moderate all content.

https://www.justice.gov/file/1319331/download

Section (g)(3) says that "Being responsible in whole or in part for the creation or development of information includes, but is not limited to, instances in which a person or entity... comments upon ... or affirmatively and substantively contributes to, modifies, or alters information provided by another person". This implies that one editor of a wiki could be held responsible for not noticing and removing illegal content posted by another user while they edit a page.

https://www.justice.gov/file/1319331/download