For example, T-Mobile is a platform. They aren't responsible for anything you say when on the phone, using their network.
CNN is a publisher. They are responsible for anything that gets posted on their website, and can get sued accordingly.
Social media companies want to choose what is posted on their website, but also not be held responsible for anything that is posted on their website. They want the perks of being a publisher, and the perks of being a platform.
Obviously there are arguments made on both sides. But that is the general disagreement, if I understand correctly.
When you have billions of users wanting to post content you can hardly be a publisher in any traditional sense; nor will the gov./society/users let you be a platform.
The latter is a type of tacit endorsement that to me, falls under the guise of "publishing", even if it's done in an automated fashion.
This isn't true though. CNN/NYTimes/etc can't be sued for 3rd party comments on their site. CNN is also allowed to filter what comments make it on their site. These are not opposing ideas.
> For example, T-Mobile is a platform. They aren't responsible for anything you say when on the phone, using their network.
> CNN is a publisher. They are responsible for anything that gets posted on their website, and can get sued accordingly.
Also T-Mobile is a point-to-point communications platform, while CNN is a broadcaster.
Social media seems like a new thing that doesn't have directly analogous antecedents. It's a high-impact, wide-reach broadcaster that has little to no editorial control. Before it, broadcasters lacking editorial control were marginal and low-reach.
A website that contains both first party and third party content has section 230 protection on the third party content, but none on the first party content. There is no legal basis for the idea of "publisher" as different from "platform". If a website makes a modification to a specific piece of content, they may lose section 230 protections over that particular piece of content, but they retain it on all other 3rd party content.
The FCC cannot change the requirements to gain "platform protection" because there are none, because section 230 applies to content (like a tweet), not entities (like "Twitter").
I grew up reading the NYTimes online and thought that the discussion section offered great debate. I think it might have become a case of it is too expensive to moderate? Do people just post ads and spam? Because in my mind, active discussion is always good
CNN is a publisher.. they pay people to be on TV, they pay people to write articles. Of course CNN (the company) is liable for what it puts out, because they are literally creating 100% of the content and paying people to do it. So if they are slandering someone with no basis, it's logical to say "Uh CNN is literally paying people to write lies to mislead people".
Now let's take a site like HN. People post articles here, people comment on articles. HN isn't "creating" any of the content like CNN. So obviously some random person posting a story or commenting complete bullshit is not HN's goal.
Now what's the argument... that as soon as HN starts to flag something as misleading, remove "spam" (who determines what is a spam article?), then suddenly they are put into a publisher realm and can get sued for what is or is not on there?
I mean.. to me that is LAUGHABLE that someone wants to argue as soon as a site like reddit/twitter/hn starts to do anything to the content they treated like a publisher and are liable for the content. This already happens a billion times a day across all those platforms anyway.