There’s another shift that comes amid the whining about “tech censorship” and the “silencing of conservative voices online,” and it’s a purely transactional one: put up our content or lose the immunity that CDA 230 provides. Here’s a concise recent formulation of the bargain on offer:
This argument seems to at least implicitly acknowledge that the First Amendment protects the right of online forums to choose the content that appears on their sites. It just wants to do away with that expressive freedom as the price sites must pay in order to continue to enjoy CDA 230 immunity.
So: either moderate your site to allow all First Amendment-protected speech, or lose your immunity with respect to third party postings. Your choice.
Now, putting aside some obvious questions (Which sites are “market-dominant?” Could a scheme like this actually pass First Amendment scrutiny? How do we determine whether a site has lived up to this 1A standard in a given case?), it’s worth asking: would any market-dominant site actually agree to this bargain?
OK, that’s a rhetorical question.
Because the answer is that there is absolutely no chance that any such site would take this deal.
The First Amendment allows for a stunningly wide range of noisy, messy, irrelevant, dishonest, and offensive expression. And even if this deal allows sites to impose reasonable content-neutral restrictions (like post length, duplication, formatting, etc.), it would unleash a torrent of vitriol, abuse, pornography, and abject nonsense. Sites would be helpless to shape a desired user experience or serve a particular audience. They’d just be bulletin boards for unstructured, unfocused expression.
And what would these successful sites get for this deal? The right to be immune from liability for third party postings and their curatorial decisions?
Sure, that’s nice and all, but it’s not an existential risk to any site that’s reached market dominance. CDA 230 immunity is most important to sites that are just getting started, who can’t take the cost of fending off suits over user-generated content. Big, established sites? They’ve got the resources to take that cost. And faced with a no-win choice like this, it’s certainly a better alternative than turning one’s site into an unusable cesspool.
What the market-dominant firms WOULD do in response to this ultimatum is pretty much the polar opposite of what the conservatives claim to be advocating for: they’d become much, much more aggressive about policing the sort of content they allow to be posted.
Why? Because decisions to take content down, de-emphasize posts, or suspend posting privileges are protected by the First Amendment in a way that decisions to post content are not. CDA 230 provides a procedural benefit in the former case; in the latter it offers an important substantive right. Thus, while losing CDA 230 would marginally increase the risk of taking user postings down, it would greatly increase the risk of leaving postings up.
So, if conservatives get to force government to offer this bargain, no eligible site is going to take it. And if the hammer then comes down, and CDA 230 immunity is taken away, look for the likes of Google, Facebook, and Twitter to take a much, much heavier hand with the “delete content” switch.
Now, maybe “conservatives” calling for this bargain just really don’t like the interactive web, and would be happy to see it stifled in this way. But if they really believe that there’s a deal to be had here that will lead to a more useful, robust, or “politically neutral” internet, they’re sorely mistaken.