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Rather than making the change needed, which is to force social media companies to operate as neutral utilities, these Democratic legislators want to use regulatory consequence to increase censorship. It’s shameless, but also expected given how recent congressional hearings have gone: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-in-a-five-hour-hea...

The phrasing used in the proposal (https://energycommerce.house.gov/newsroom/press-releases/ec-...), around causing “emotional injury”, is so vague and could be used to violate people’s first amendment rights by proxy using regulation of private tech companies. I suppose this was the next step beyond vague classifications like “hate speech”.

JFC get your goddamn grubby hands off S230.

At some point someone is going to claim encryption algorithms are malicious since it can be used to encrypt child pornography and start suing anyone that hosts examples of encryption.

Is this not already the case? S230 protects a publisher for user generated content. It does not protect a publisher for whatever they choose to add to user generated content. If a website's only addition is HTML formatting and "here are all the posts by your friends/feeds/etc", then it's hard to see how that creates liability for them. Whereas if a website editorializes by promoting specific posts, they are adding substantive content in addition to what other users have generated.

I suspect that the real thing preventing such lawsuits is that generally in the US, the contents of speech rarely create liability. For example it seems perfectly fine to have advertising filled with blatantly fraudulent statements, as long as you add a few weasel words that destroy an expectation of objectivity.