Oh, as to this, CNN wrote and posted it's own stories. If it was dumb enough to present opinion as fact then they would have had a problem. However, if a heap of people made libelous comments on their website, they wouldn't be CNN product and CNN would be shielded by 230 (the individual users would still be liable)

Section 230, it's not even ambigious

Nobody, with regard to user posts, is the publisher of those posts.

There's nothing in there about "unless you're a newspaper" or "unless you're a publisher" it's just "If you have a website and you don't provide the information you're not treated as the publisher or speaker".

If you disagree, fine, but it's no longer any fun to argue about, so consider this my capitulation :)

The public service? Governments are elected to set policy/make laws.

There's existing coverage for publishers, and they're not responsible for what people post in their comment section. They can still moderate it if they choose. Acting like a publisher, even if you want to accept that premise, changes nothing.

We all know you're a c*nt, Bill, but in this case it's about defamation which has an extremely high burden of proof so I'm not sure what you're on about there.

Oh, and we literally have obscenity laws and state based censorship here, so you might wanna check that out before you come over here being all c*nty.

Let's say "yes", because by your definition the guy that fills the pot holes in the roads is "the government" which makes absolutely no sense against "a humorless joyless hyper-conformist police state" which sounds like people that get to make policy.

Oh and yes, given this is 'straya, your high school civics class is fuck all use here.

Yeah, but the guy that I was responding to was mostly doing mad ranting, and just because part of that was about AT&T doesn't mean I accept it as part of the argument I'm making or prepared to engage in... so whatever.

My point is that Section 230 is not "breached" by anything Twitter have done, all the rest of this thread is incoherent waffle that assumes it does because they magically become the "publisher" of everything on their site.

Hell, it literally allows them to remove Trumps posts entirely if they want, they're being rather measured in their approach.

I never made any AT&T analogies, and I think it's a poor one. There's a lot more regulation over telcos than websites built on top of them.

A better analogy would be if Trump wanted to make a press release for broadcast on TV and they chose to run a chyron underneath that suggested he was full of it. Pretty sure that's been done too.

You're confusing the venue; Facebook, with the party being held accountable; Fairfax (the publisher).

Facebook's not being blamed for anything.

a) It's hardly "letting live" if I claim you're screwing your dog in the papers.

b) Yeah, nah.

Nah, "live and let live" does not give you carte blanche to be a c*nt, it's rather the antithesis. Also, the government has 3/4 of stuff all to do with the courts.

Ah well, I can respect that as a position, though I disagree with it, and I'm not sure it's even internally consistent given politicians "earn" votes with money too.

Just don't use Twitter /is/ however an option for Trump, he has plenty of other platforms he can use to make his voice heard just as loudly.

This is Australia, mate. There's no First Amendment or Section 230 of the CDA.

Newspapers are effectively required to moderate their comment sections online, they can't just side step that by suggesting people go comment on their Facebook page instead.

NB; the only real difference here is the ability to sue someone for defamation with deeper pockets, the stuff that was posted could have led to law suits for defamation against individuals, but it's not really worth it.

FYI, 230 is about safe harbor against shit "other people" say on your site. If you also post on your own site you aren't all of a sudden responsible for everything else on the site.

Why do you think Trump was trying to change the way it works with an EO? Because he likes signing things and holding them up to a camera?

If you need an example a child can understand: Newspapers have safe harbor under 230 for comments on their web site. They define publishing.

I think you also mean "liable", but still, liable for what?