As if last year’s debacle by Democratic politicians — piling onto the bandwagon to ban TikTok — wasn’t stupid enough, Dick Durbin says “Hold my beer.” Already having alienated a generation of young voters, in a mind-blowing act of political idiocy, our senators now are sponsoring a bill to repeal Section 230, a key piece of legislation for a free and open internet.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act gives a “safe harbor” to websites that have online participation by third parties, such as comments by readers and user-generated articles. It allows sites to moderate content without being held liable for that content.
For example, if I write a story and declare that [Person A] is a “pedo guy” (as one megalomaniac billionaire did and got away with it), DK can ask me to verify that fact or to restate my premise to make it clear that I am using parody or some other literary device. The staff could remove my story if I don’t comply with their requests.
By intervening in that one story, DK does not become liable for every single statement published on this site, due to Section 230’s grant of immunity. DK, and other sites, can attempt to moderate some content if they so chose without being held liable for all content created or shared by readers/members.
Without Section 230 protection, if sites choose to moderate any content, they become liable for all content, whether it was generated by their own staff or by members of the public. The safer course of action, naturally, would be to do no moderation whatsoever, thus keeping all content “at arms length” and severing their responsibility for it.
What does that mean for Daily Kos?
No more flagging and bojo-ing of rightwing disrupters. MAGA assholes can flood this site with fanboy/fangirl testimonials to the greatness of their god-king … and those stories will have to stay up. They can bully our members and write lie after lie and we wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.
Technically, DK staff could still moderate. But that would mean being inundated immediately with “lawfare” — hundreds or even thousands of lawsuits by trolls. DK wouldn’t last a month before it was bankrupted.
The only other viable option would be for DK to publish only stories by its own staff and disallow user comments.
Durbin, Klobuchar, and the other morons have proudly stated that they will strip the big social media companies (X, Facebook, etc) of immunity and end their tyranny over the American people.
No, they will cement their tyranny. Smaller companies and organizations — from Daily Kos down to tiny personal websites — will be cowed by rightwing keyboard armies. The social media giants? They have billions of dollars and armies of lawyers to fend off such attacks.
Plus, who are the people likely to initiate such charges? Conservatives, of course. We actually respect free speech and will seldom issue challenges to it; they hate any speech that isn’t their own and will do everything possible to squelch it.
Note that sites can already be held responsible for material that is illegal, such as kiddie porn, genuine threats to persons, etc. The immunity under Section 230 does not extend to illegal content.
Can someone please inform our politicians that joining forces with Republicans on anything will always result in very bad things?
Republicans’ wet dream will come true
They could at least glance through Project 2025 where they would see that conservatives have long been planning to repeal Section 230, giving themselves the power to poison every bit of the internet (Musk has made a good start but there’s much more still to ruin). Brendan Carr, Trump’s new chair of the FCC, has already begun weaponizing the FCC to censor any speech the right doesn’t like and to strip away any controls over the howler-monkey shrieking of conservative trolls.
Why are our Democrats wanting to throw gasoline on this dumpster fire? Maybe they could think ahead instead of climbing aboard every ship headed for an iceberg and failing to notice that the lifeboats say “GOP only; Dems f*ck off and die.”
They need to stop with the shortsighted, self-serving machinations that will muzzle voices of dissent online forever. Thanks for nothing, mofos (yeah, I am pissed off, sorry).
