> I am an unabashed supporter of the US’s approach with Section 230, as it was initially interpreted, which said that any liability should land on the party who contributed the actual violative behavior—in nearly all cases the speaker, not the host of the content.
I never really understood how that system is supposed to work.
So on the one hand, Section 230 absolves the hoster of liability and tells an affected party to go after the author directly.
But on the other hand, we all rally for the importance of anonymity on the internet, so it's very likely that there will be no way to find the author.
Anonymous authors have very little reach without external promotion or a long lasting reputation.
If someone builds up a reputation anonymously then that reputation itself is something that can be destroyed when a platform destroys their account etc.
Your premise goes precisely against the base of the lawsuit itself:
> (...) an unidentified third party published on that website an untrue and harmful advertisement presenting her as offering sexual services. That advertisement contained photographs of that applicant, which had been used without her consent, along with her telephone number.(...) The same advertisement nevertheless remains available on other websites which have reproduced it.
Anonymous author, great reach, enough damage for the victim to take a lawsuit all the way to the CJEU.
> What exactly provided great reach here? Is it the creator or something else.
Irrelevant, in the initial understanding of Section 230 that this thread was advocating for returning to. Only the author is responsible for the content in that framework, not the platforms distributing and/or promoting it.
In Section 230 platforms only maintain protection as a neutral party, anything getting promoted by them puts them at risk.
“letters to the editor” are a very old form of user generated content, but the act of selecting a letter and placing it in a prominent position isn’t a neutral act.
For clarity, they do maintain limited editorial discretion. Section 230(c)(2) states that service providers and users may not be held liable for voluntarily acting in good faith to restrict access to "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable" material.
Further, Section 230 contains statutory exceptions. This federal immunity generally will not apply to suits brought under federal criminal law, intellectual property law, any state law "consistent" with Section 230, certain privacy laws applicable to electronic communications, or certain federal and state laws relating to sex trafficking.
Forget the Internet and Section 230 for a second. Anonymous publications, particularly on contentious matters like politics and religion, are a long-standing tradition. If someone anonymously posts a leaflet in public square, how do you find the author?
>But on the other hand, we all rally for the importance of anonymity on the internet, so it's very likely that there will be no way to find the author.
So:
1) We all rally for the importance of anonymity (wrt general speech) EVERYWHERE, before even (and critical to) the founding of America. Writing like the Federalist Papers were absolutely central to arguments for the US Constitution, and they were anonymous. "The Internet" is not anything special or novel here per se when it comes to the philosophy and politics of anonymous speech. There has always been a tension with anonymous speech risks vs value, and America has come down quite firmly on the value side of that.
2) That said, "anonymous" on the internet very rarely actually is to the level of "no way to find the author with the aid of US court ordered process". Like, I assume that just as my real name is not "xoa" your real name is not "xg15", and to the extent we have made some effort at maintaining our pseudonymity it'd be somewhat difficult for any random member of the general public to connect our HN speech to our meatspace bodies. But the legal process isn't limited to public information. If you have a colorable lawsuit against someone, you can sue their placeholder and then attempt to discover their identity via private data. HN has our IP addresses if nothing else, as does intermediaries between the system we're posting from and HN, as well as possibly a valid email address. Which can potentially by themselves be enough breadcrumbs to follow back to a person and have enough cause to engage in specific discovery against them. And this is without any money getting involved, if there are any payments of any kind that leaves an enormous number of ripples. And that's assuming nobody left any other clues, that you can't make any inferences about who would be doing defamatory speech against you and narrow it down further that.
Yes, it's possible someone at random is using a massive number of proxies from a camera-less logless public access point with virgin monero or whatever and perfect opsec, but that really is not the norm.
3) Hosters not being directly liable doesn't make them immune to court orders. If something is defamatory you can secure an order to have it removed even without finding the person in question. And in practice most hosters are probably going to remove something upon notification as fast as possible, as in this case, and ban the poster in question on top.
So no, I don't think it's a "a massive vacuum of responsibility" anymore than it ever was, and the contrast is that eliminating anonymous speech is a long proven massive risk to basic freedoms.
The combo effectively enshittified swaths of the Internet, which now is full of robo-pamphleteers acting with anonymous impunity, in ways they never would if sitting face-to-face.
I love the Internet but it normalizes bad behavior and to the extent the CJEU was tracking toward a new and more stringent standard, well earned by the Internet and its trolls.
I never really understood how that system is supposed to work.
So on the one hand, Section 230 absolves the hoster of liability and tells an affected party to go after the author directly.
But on the other hand, we all rally for the importance of anonymity on the internet, so it's very likely that there will be no way to find the author.
Isn't this a massive vacuum of responsibility?