Would a repeal of 230 affect Wine Berserkers?

Very specific question. I assume not much as it is carefully moderated.But would Todd need to insure himself against lawsuits frivolous or otherwise in say wine fake thread?

Please can we try and confine our answers to the WB board and not get mired in political discussion.

You can expand that question and include CT. Will you be sued for a bad wine review?

It would depend on 1. what, if anything, it was replaced with (obviously), and 2. (less obviously) how the FCC chooses to interpret what’s left of the statute.

You won’t get in legal trouble for a bad wine review, at least not in the USA.

The writer has always been subject to suit for a bad wine review. The issue is whether Todd or Eric can be sued over a bad wine review posted by someone else to WB or CT.

Section 230 protects a platform from being bullied into censorship of user content by threats of litigation. Shutting down criticism of a brand by suing or threatening to sue individual reviewers is inefficient. A single suit against a platform that frightens it and other platforms into censoring bad reviews of the brand will stifle criticism far more efficiently and effectively.

think of s230 as adding a reasonable gray area. the paradigm prior to s230 was that if you were a platform and you engaged in any moderation, you were treated as a publisher and not a distributor. by being classified as the former, you were exposing yourself to liability for content posted on your platform by third parties. that would lead to the only reasonable stance of engaging in zero moderation, which is undesirable (by some/most/all?). s230 came along because at any scale, both options are not good.

in reality, s230 creates a lot of problems for everyone because the gray area is the largest area; what do you do in this case vs this case? etc. this is exacerbated by the reality that there exists very few options to run a tech company or content platform without using a handful of massively scaled products and services. further, for companies like facebook that use massive amounts of tech to take user-generated content, funnel it through a ton of algorithms for the sole purpose of monetizing it, should likely take them out of this gray area and put them firmly in the publisher arena where they would be liable for the content on their platforms.

net-net; prior to s230, it didn’t work because the net was changing rapidly. s230 came along as a reasonable bandaid but is not also antiquated because … the net changes rapidly.

Yes - I think repeal without any replacement (i.e., amendment) is very unlikely. But right now it’s very unclear what the amendment would look like. My best guess is that it would maintain a high degree of protection, but not absolute, and there might also be some viewpoint non-discrimination requirements to be entitled to the protection. I doubt that would be a problem on a wine board, though it might provide incentives not to have a politics board. (The viewpoint discrimination isn’t like to be with respect to whether the 2019 Bordeaux vintage is great or not)

I find it hard to imagine how a true review (i.e., someone’s opinion of wine) could subject the author or (in the absence of 230) the hosting site to a non-frivolous lawsuit. I mean, if the review falsely alleges that the winemaker is using Concord grapes, not cabernet, maybe–but a true opinion of a wine would likely be protected speech regardless of 230, right?

sorry, but none of this is true. criticism is protected speech (e.g., “I tasted your wine and it sucks”). defamation in the forms of libel and slander are not (e.g., “Your wine sucks because it contains lethal amounts of arsenic”). if you’re merely a distribution platform for such speech, then you’re not liable for someone on your platform making the second claim, though the author would be. if you’re publishing platform, you may also be liable in addition to the author of the claim. section 230 only opens up a wide berth for the real-world aspects of companies moderating what happens on their platforms. it has nothing to do with “censorship” (big quotes because none of what’s happening now in the news regarding 230 is actual censorship).

Ask NED as far as I know he’s the only one who’s ever threatened to sue Todd.

You can be sued for all sorts of things you aren’t liable for. Still costly and disruptive.

Doesn’t this thread belong in the asylum?

The First Amendment doesn’t protect you from being sued, it just protects you from having a judgment issued against you for protected speech and it can be expensive to get to that point. While courts can award legal fees to the winner of a dubious lawsuit, they tend not to, particularly if the state doesn’t have a robust anti-SLAPP statute that awards legal fees.

Censorship doesn’t just refer to government suppression of speech, it can refer to private action as well. For example, Mark Squires engaged in censorship when he deleted reasonable criticisms of Parker. He had the right to censor, but it was still censorship. Censorship isn’t necessarily bad, I think we are all glad that Todd would censor Holocaust denial here.

Section 230 actually facilitates censorship (in the form of moderation) by private owners of websites and online services. Going to your distribution vs. publishing platform distinction, historically to be a distribution platform you couldn’t exercise editorial control over content. Once you exercised editorial control, including typical acts of moderation such as editing or deleting offensive posts, you could be found to be a publisher subject to liability for defamatory material published by users on your site.

Section 230 provides that a provider of an interactive computer service is not the publisher or speaker of user content even if the provider moderates that content. It provides immunity to the provider against defamation claims based on user content. That’s huge and was essential to the rise of social media platforms.

And it’s not just wine reviews with content like “this wine smelled bad.” Imagine, for example -

A wine review that went on to say “this wine was so bad, clearly the winemaker has no idea what he or she is doing.”

A winery gets cited for an environmental or permitting violation and there is a big discussion with numerous assertions being made about what did or did not happen, what those things say about the character of the owner, whether decent people should buy their wines, etc.

A ring making counterfeit wines is busted and there’s a discussion about which distributors or retailers may have sold fake bottles, what they are and are not doing about investigating, giving refunds, whether they turned a blind eye or even were knowingly complicit, etc.

A claim that a particular retailer leaves wine deliveries out on the sidewalk directly in the hot summer sun for hours at a time before finally bringing them all in, or a claim that wines sold by a particular retailer or importer show signs of heat damage way too often, leading the poster to conclude that those wines aren’t properly handled or stored to protect the wines against excessive temperatures.

An infamous counterfeiter of auction-worthy bottles goes to jail and as his story is revealed there is robust discussion about who aided and abetted him, which auction houses or other market participants knowingly or with willful ignorance sold the counterfeit wines, which buyers of the fake bottles then nevertheless tried to resell the fakes they got stuck with, knowing they were likely fakes and taking steps to obscure their sources. Perhaps that discussion would even develop into spotting seemingly fake bottles still being offered at auctions today, and occasionally calling folks out for not spotting the fakes or even knowingly trying to pass them off as real.

Now, maybe all of those examples are wildly unrealistic, but in theory any or all could come up on a wine board like this. Without 230, anyone who wanted to sue alleging such posts are defamatory could sue Todd/WB in addition to or instead of the person who wrote the post in question. And all of these examples are at least potentially actionable enough to survive a motion to dismiss, as opposed to a lawsuit over a pure matter of opinion like a positive or negative wine review.

Having said that, typically people choosing defendants want to go after the money and so companies like Facebook or Twitter are much more likely to be targets of such suits than private citizens who run one website as a hobby and don’t make enough to quit their day job. So it’s unlikely that a website like this would be seen as an attractive target if the goal is to recover a significant amount of money. OTOH, all it takes is one person who’s just ticked off enough, and just vengeful enough to want to shut the site down even without recovering any money and it’s not that hard to run up the costs of defense to the point that running the website just isn’t worth the cost and potential liability.

So, yeah, I think it could affect this site.

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Strongly disagree. While it’s fine to discuss potential reforms of Section 230, I think it’s disingenuous to suggest that simply using “algorithms” to rank content is akin to an editorial decision that a publisher would make.

I think a lot of the current calls for reform around Section 230 are mostly just reactionary fears about “Big Tech” being too successful, and wanting to punish them by taking them down a peg. This crab mentality is not helpful, ultimately.

i think using the word “simply” here is ludicrous - it’s the whole thing. the amount of data facebook has on their users combined with how they use it makes so-called editorial decisions irrelevant, in comparison. the result is exponentially more powerful. they are making constant tiny changes on the platform to increase engagement in order to monetize that behavior. that this is done programmatically as opposed to by some editor in an office is irrelevant. it is the opposite of the underlying notion of passive distribution that a pre-s230 world contemplated.


for fun, go to facebook and download your info. it will be massive: www.facebook.com/help/1701730696756992

The fact that it’s done programmatically is irrelevant. A feed that simply sorts in reverse chronological order is also done “programmatically”, as sorting is itself an algorithm. I think you’re throwing around a lot of scary buzzwords like “algorithm”, “monetize” and “user data” without explaining why the use of such things should have platforms that host user-generated content be considered as content publishers.

Here’s a basic test: should Yelp be responsible for a defamatory negative review that a customer posts about a business? Does the fact that Yelp sorts by “helpful reviews” first instead of by “most recent” affect your decision on the previous question?

Every time there is a “retailer check” thread, the opportunity exists for the thread to invite posts that injure the subject retailer in his/her business or trade; indeed, that is the very point of the thread (or at least the inevitable and contemplated outcome of the thread). An erosion of the protection for those who essentially provide a blackboard on which others can scribble would be a very injurious outcome.

How about by a wine store if someone complains about dealings with the store? Or by a wine auction house where posters have said (in some cases in abundant detail) that they are auctioning off wine they should know or suspect is fraudulent?

Is it technically possible to be found liable for tortuous conduct when writing a wine or store etc. review? Yes (e.g., “I was more offended by this wine than I was when I witnessed [specific broker-dealer] steal his clients’ money!”). However, the overwhelming majority of wine (or store) reviews are largely mere opinion, perhaps with some truthful facts sprinkled in, and this kind speech is protected and/or not actionable. Even if someone says “The labels on these bottles were so poorly faked that the auction house should have known the bottles were not authentic,” this is protected as it is an opinion. A statement like “The auction house knowingly/intentionally sells fake wine!” could get someone in trouble if it’s not true, but I don’t think you’ll find statements of fact like this in many reviews. Finally, even if a statement is defamatory, there are a lot of reasons why the potential victim would not want to file suit (cost vs reward, negative attention, horrible discovery/investigation, etc.), and that’s before you even consider some state laws that make it even riskier to bring defamation suits.