Launch a small website and commit a felony in 7 states and 13 countries.
I wouldn't have known about the Mississippi bill unless I'd read this. How are we have to know?
But yeah, this definitely sounds like a business opportunity for services or hosts.
Websites don't have to be a business or be related to one.
I suppose this is what confused me then, as it seemed obvious that e.g. the Facebook reccomendation algorithm isn't speech, so if a social media site would be considered speech it would be due to the user content. Section 230 doesn't in any way supercede the constitution, but it does clarify which party is doing the speech and thus where the first ammendment would apply.
No, it immunizes certain parties from being held automatically liable (without separate proof that they knew of the content, as applies to mere distributors [0]), the "publisher or speaker" standard being the standard for such liability (known as publisher liability.)
It doesn't "clarify" (or have any bearing on) where the First Amendment would apply. (In fact, its only relevant when the First Amendment protection doesn't apply, since otherwise there would be no liability to address.)
[0] subsequent case law has also held that Section 230 has the effect of also insulating the parties it covers against distributor liability where that would otherwise apply, as well, but the language of the law was deliberately targeted at the basis for publisher liability.
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* See UDHR articles 12, 18, 19, and 20. This is not an issue limited to the provincial laws of one small country.
† Unless the site operators also use of the site, in which case they too do suffer it; this is in my experience virtually always the case with the noncommercial sites that it is most important to protect.
* The First Amendment generally prohibits the government from enacting any laws or regulations that limit speech based on its content (anything you might reasonably call "moderation" would definitely fall into this category!).
* Private companies are not the government. Social media networks are therefore not obligated to follow the First Amendment. (Although there is a decent argument that Trump's social media network is a state actor here and is therefore constitutionally unable to, say, ban anybody from the network.)
* Recommendation algorithms of social media networks are protected speech of those companies. The government cannot generally enact a law that regulate these algorithms, and several courts have already struck down laws that attempted to do so.
* §230 means that user-generated speech is not treated as speech of these companies. This prevents you from winning a suit against them for hosting speech you think injures you (think things like defamation).
* §230 also eliminates the liability of these companies for their moderation or lack thereof.
There remains the interesting question as to whether or not companies can be held liable via their own speech that occurs as a result of the recommendation algorithms of user-generated content. This is somewhat difficult to see litigated because it seems everybody who tries to do a challenge case here instead tries to argue that §230 in its entirety is somehow wrong, and the court rather bluntly telling them that they're only interested in the narrow question doesn't seem to be able to get them to change tactics. (See e.g. the recent SCOTUS case which was thrown out essentially for this reason rather than deciding the question).
People who are not “the speaker or publisher” for liability purposes have Constitutional first amendment free speech rights in their decision to interact with content, this includes distributors, consumers, people who otherwise have all the characteristics of a “speaker of publisher” but are statutorily relieved of liability as one so as to enable them to make certain editorial decisions over use generated content without instantly becoming fully liable for every bit of that content, etc., yeah.
And arguing the alternative is you making the exact inversion of statute and Constitution I predicted and which you denied, that is, thinking Section 230 could remove First Amendment coverage from something it would have covered without that enactment.
You don’t need to know all the laws of Mississippi to serve such customer, or any laws from anywhere else other than Italy.
Capitalism at its best. We have a definite problem with over-regulation and a judicial system that isn't coping nor keeping up. Capitalism, instead of fixing the problem, makes a business model out of it.
Capitalism: Why fix it when you can make money of it.
And if you don't do business in the US there is only so much the US can do. Most importantly it can ask ISPs in the US to block your site. As they do for copyright infringement routinely.
We have all accepted that our countries block copyright violations originating from outside their jurisdiction.
But of course this is a disaster for the free internet. While copyright laws are relatively uniform world wide, so if you respect it locally you're probably mostly fine everywhere, incoming regulation like age verification and limits on social media use, or harassment stuff, is anything but uniform.
To some degree this is also maybe more shocking to people in the US, as the US norms have de facto been the internets norms so far. It is, in any case, not entirely new:
"When Germany came after BME for "endangering the youth" and demanded that I make changes to the site to comply with German law, my response was to simply not visit Germany again (and I'm a German citizen). When the US started to pressure us, we moved all of our servers and presence out of the country and backed off on plans to live in the US. No changes were ever made to the site, and no images were ever removed — if anything, the pressure made me push those areas even more."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMEzine
How do we deal with the fact that we don't have a global mechanism for agreeing (socially and legally) on necessary regulations, whilemaintaining the social good that is a truly global internet?
And if the police has reason to suspect that there is illegal gambling happening at your dinner party they can obtain a warrant to bust your party.
Hell even if your party is to loud and annoys the neighbours the police can and will shut it down.
If social media sites are shut down but I am free to post my opinions on my personal blog site, how is my freedom of speech affected?
Did I not have freedom of speech before social media existed?
Is there an implication in freedom of speech that any speech facilitating service that can be offered must be allowed to operate? That's at least not obvious to me.
I echo what others said: There are good reasons to oppose all this, but blanket cries of "free speech" without any substance don't exactly help.
With the internet it's a lot less clear cut. The user is requesting data from Italy, maybe, but is located in another jurisdiction. Add Cloudflare and the data might even be served from the US by a US company you asked to serve your illegal data.
It's becoming a shit show and is breaking up the global internet.
In some cases this arises in US Constitutional law as the freedom of other people to seek and encounter the speech, though I'm not sure if there's a formal name for the idea. (e.g. "Freedom of Hearing".)
They can order overflights to land to arrest you, if they so desire. They can also block you from the more-or-less all legitimate commerce globally with sanctions. And if they really don't like you, they can kill you without due process.
All of which the US has done to undesirables over the years, and can do again without any controls or checks or balances, to anyone globally.
I am not sure that I have ever encountered anyone confused in the way you describe either...
The current legal reality is a shitshow but I don't think that's inherent to the situation itself. gTLDs and foreign hosting services certainly complicate things, but then so does choosing to (physically) import supplies from abroad. I'm not convinced there's a real issue there at least in theory.
I think that a single "common carrier" type treaty unambiguously placing all burden on the speaker and absolving any liability arising from jurisdictional differences would likely fix 90% of the current issues. If I visit a foreign run site and lie about my country of residence in order to access material that isn't legal where I reside the only liable party in that scenario should be me.
Shutting down a notebook factory for dodging sales tax is not a violation of the rights of would-be purchasers.
Except that in this case it's more like applying state sales taxes to online purchases. That has been a thing for years at this point.