Summary
Lawmakers are once again pushing to repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields online platforms from legal liability for user-generated content.
Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) are collaborating on a bipartisan bill to sunset the law in two years.
Repealing Section 230 aims to force Congress to renegotiate platform liability standards.
The proposal reflects growing frustration over tech giants’ power and content moderation practices, but past efforts have faced political gridlock despite bipartisan support.
For all the people cheering or indifferent to this:
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This would affect more than social media - this would affect ANYWHERE that has user accounts that can post content - blogs, wikis, website builders, hell, even email.
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The summary states this is so it can be “renegotiated”. Considering the current authoritarian direction of the United States, now would be absolutely the worst time to rewrite online content policing laws - it will absolutely be used to silence dissent.
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If it accidentally kills Facebook and X, that would be a silver lining. But then again they have the money and connections to be effectively immune, as does Truth Social. It’s smaller sites that would suffer, and it would be selectively enforced as another means of political persecution.
The Fediverse might still be OK, but it might become dangerous for US-based admins even if hosting outside the USA.
Might be dangerous for Fediverse hosters outside the US to visit the US as well.
So Durbin is basically a Republican now huh. Good to know.
Round two: Lindsey Graham vs Elon Musk
Good. All the major centralized/corporate social networks are Nazi bars now anyway; nothing of value will be lost if they can no longer exist.
Remember that the Fediverse could survive instances having legal liability for user-posted content because each user could run his own instance.
The Nazi bars will survive. It’s the dissenters and minorities trying to speak in them that will be silenced as a self-protective move by tech corporations.
But surely one user posting illegal content would get blasted to all connected instances making everyone guilty.
So… Worse. Much worse.
Yeah, I’m struggling to see the downside of this personally, which means there is no way in gods green hell it will happen.