by PirateBear

A really good article about CDA 230 and how it protects websites, especially small websites, from being held liable for the actions of their users. If you don't know what CDA 230 is, it's explained in the article, but it essentially says that websites can't be held liable for the actions of their users. From the article:

Again, as someone who runs a small blog, the number of requests we get from people demanding content be taken down is fairly incredible. It's Tuesday of this week and we've already received requests to take down one story (entirely) and a dozen or so comments on other stories. If we had to follow through on those we'd shut down all comments, and it would take away this entire community. It's not about "making money." It's about not being burdened with constant legal threats and the risk of having to go court because someone is unhappy.

My thoughts on this:

Some people have recently put forward that stripping 230 protections as a way to combat online harassment, but this would come at a major cost to free speech and the ability of small sites to operate period, as well as giving websites a very good reason to delete something that is even slightly controversial or negative about powerful people. None of this would protect anyone except those who have the resources to throw legal weight around, but would take away platforms for everyone else to speak.