I understand it is has something to do with online platforms facing liability for criminal user content (especially with regards to child pornography). I’ve heard that it will cause major privacy issues though. Here are my questions:
How specifically does it affect platform liability? How does it affect online privacy? What is section 230?
Not looking for opinions on whether the act is good or bad, just want to understand it.
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Pre-internet, user-generated content on someone else’s platform wasn’t really a thing. You could self-publish (if you had the money), or you could try to convince some media company to share your stuff. Either way, whoever published it was responsible for the content…if you publish kiddie porn, you get busted. If you convince a media company to publish kiddie porn, they get busted. The idea was that the publisher has a responsibility to assess the legality of the content.
However, under the internet model of user-generated (and moderated) content, that’s just not practical…can you imagine if someone(s) at YouTube had to review each video and figure out if it was a copyright violation, or a porn violation, or a criminal act (all of which varies by country and age of participants) before it posted? The most popular social media sites all literally can’t fully review all their user-uploaded content, so who gets the liability? Section 230 sorted that out…the liability is on the content creator, *not* the publisher. This is a really unique carve-out for internet companies, traditional media like TV stations or newspapers can’t pull this off.
It has enabled explosive growth of user-generated/moderated content that is the backbone of the modern internet. It has also allowed the major hosting platforms to completely abrogate any responsibility, legal or otherwise, for the damage done on and by their platforms.
EARN IT is an attempt to specifically address that for child pornography…it lays out the framework to establish the guidelines that the platforms have to follow and, crucially, allows governments to sue the *platform* when they don’t (under Section 230, they couldn’t usually do this before).
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