47 USC 230(c) and The Absolute State of The Internet

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has been the subject of recent controversy. Specifically the two paragraphs in subsection (c).

Paragraph one absolves digital publishers from liability as publishers.

> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

Paragraph two absolves them from liability for blocking any content or individuals they deem objectionable.

> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—

> (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or

> (B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).

While the latter absolution seems to me, as a layman, both overly broad (see overbreadth doctrine) and overly vague (see void-for-vagueness), this essay is concerned primarily with the former, with "the twenty-six words that created the Internet".

In the early nineties, as the Internet emerged, forums arose where users could contribute content, and with them came lawsuits regarding the policing of that content. A couple congressmen, seeking to incentivize content policing, wrote the above paragraphs, and in 1996 President Bill Clinton signed them into law. By the early aughts those spaces where users could contribute content had proliferated and became known as the web 2.0, or the social web.

So began an inexorable slide into centralization, into relinquishment of control and surrender of privacy.

Running an Internet space is time consuming and mentally taxing, even granting the rare necessary technical skills; few folks have the wherewithal. It was, and remains, easier to delegate the task to the conglomeration of social media corporations. Corporations who publish, and profit from, the content you provide while escaping all legal consequences and all responsibility for the societal detriment.

For social media, profit is driven by engagement, and engagement is best achieved through addiction. Worse, users feed their addiction by the increased engagement of others. This is a communicable addiction. We pull our family and friends into social media systems, and into addiction. We behave self-destructively in pursuit of the gratification of increased engagement, and, if lacking external constraints, we can degenerate catastrophically.

Our publishers, our enablers, are shielded from culpability by the law. We are shielded from culpability by anonymity or by obscurity, a few by fame. While we don't escapes the subtler repercussions, the damage we suffer from being caught in a system that demands engagement as the ultimate virtue, we have an illusion of impunity.

Society cannot abide even the appearance of evasions of consequences, and if the legal system won't dispense justice, the mob will. Thus we get cancel culture. Thus we get pressuring of social media corporations to censor or permit, to ban or allow. The law abdicated its power of judgement, and left anarchic chaos.

We are adrift in uncertainty, enraged by perceived injustices. We need sensible rules applied equitably, and until we have that, unrest will persist. So let's repeal Section 230 and make publishers liable again.