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What Is Section 230—And Why Does Trump Want To Change It?

Abram BrownMay 28, 2020

Section 230 is a part of federal legislation passed more than 20 years ago. It runs only 26-words long—short and to the point. But it has had an outsize affect on life as we know it. 

They are the “26 words that created the Internet,” says Jeff Kossett, a cybersecurity law professor at the U.S Naval Academy and one of the foremost experts on Section 230. 

Most fundamentally, Section 230 provides immunity to social media companies like Facebook and Twitter TWTR -1.8% against being sued over the content on their site. This allows them to operate and flourish without needing to moderate content.

“Section 230 set the legal framework for the internet that we know today that relies heavily on user content rather than content that companies create. Without Section 230, companies would not be willing to take so many risks,” Kosset says. 

President Trump now wants to change Section 230. He signed a new executive order on Thursday that will try to curb how social media sites use the legislation to prevent legal action. “We’re here today to defend free speech from one of the greatest dangers it has faced in American history,” he said in the Oval Office.

Here’s what Section 230 is and why Trump’s proposal matters to anyone like you—someone reading these words online. 

What does Section 230 say exactly?

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

What does this mean in practice? 

It offers a broad shield to tech companies, protecting them from lawsuits over content generated by users on their sites. It gives Twitter and Facebook the right to moderate content but does not give them the responsibility to do so. “Because content is posted on their platforms so rapidly there’s just no way they can possibly police everything,” says Sen. Ron Wyden, who helped create Section 230. 

Tech companies are not absolved from everything. They’re still required to police some types of unlawful content, such as child pornography or bootleg movies. 

Why was it created? 

In the 1990s, Stratton Oakmont, the brokerage founded by Jordan Belfort—yes, the guy who Leonardo DiCaprio portrayed in Wolf of Wall Street—sued an internet service provider, Prodigy Services, for defamation. Someone on a Prodigy-run message board had accused Stratton Oakmont of fraud. The New York State Supreme Court ruled that Prodigy had acted as a publisher and thus was liable for defamation. 

This case caught the attention of Wyden, then a Congressman for Oregon, who worked with California Rep. Chris Cox to include Section 230 as a protection for other internet businesses from lawsuits like Stratton Oakmont’s in their Communications Decency Act of 1996. Section 230 was only a small portion of that broader legislation. The Communications Decency Act’s broader purpose was to slow the spread of child pornography on the web. 

The U.S. Supreme Court in a 7-2 decision struck down most of the act the following year, ruling it that too greatly restricted free speech. But the court kept Section 230. 

“A lot of people will say…that without Section 230, you wouldn’t have had the rise of social media because they would have been sued to oblivion,” says tech ethicist David Ryan Polgar, a Forbes.com contributor. 

In essence, the act treats internet businesses “very similar to how we treat the Post Office,” Polgar explains. “There’s misinformation all the time that people are sending through letters, but you don’t blame the Post Office. They’re merely the conduit.”

Is Section 230 only relevant for social media sites? 

No. It’s almost impossible to overstate how wide the legislation’s reach is. Twitter and Facebook rely on it. So does Google GOOGL -1.3%, for instance. Without it, the search engine company might be sued for what it displays in search results. Yelp and Amazon AMZN -3.5% see it as a fundamental underpinning to allowing reviews.  

Why does Trump want to change Section 230? 

Trump and other Republican politicians, including Senators Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley, believe social media sites like Twitter are unfairly biased against conservative speech. Twitter earlier this week appended fact-check warnings to several of the president’s tweets that sought to discredit mail-in ballots. This angered Trump, and he quickly vowed to apply greater regulation to social media sites. 

While Trump and conservatives are the law’s loudest critics, it has some liberal detractors too. Its very creator, Wyden, a Democrat who is now a senator, has had some harsh words for tech companies. He envisioned Section 230 as not only a shield but also a sword, empowering them to actively curtail bad content on their sites. He has been disappointed with tech’s lack of interest in moderating itself, warning that if “you don’t use the sword, there are going to be people coming for your shield.”

How does Trump want to change Section 230? 

Like many Trump Administration proposals, his idea for altering Section 230 is somewhat unclear. His executive order asks the FTC to step up regulation of social media sites and reconsider whether they should be allowed to broadly protect themselves under Section 230. These are tasks that the FTC seems uneager to do. 

Any changes to Section 230 that force sites like Twitter to more actively moderate content could lead them to be more forceful in taking down content and labeling it as inaccurate. 

Ironically, this could hurt Trump, who has come to rely on social media to spread his ideas, many of which are either partially or wholly untrue or inaccurate. 

In the end, Trump forcing Twitter to change and get tougher on content could lead the platform to impose greater restrictions on the president’s tweets than the ones he complained about in the first place. 

“Donald Trump is a big beneficiary of Section 230. If platforms were not immune under the law, then they would not risk the legal liability that could come with hosting Donald Trump’s lies, defamation and threats,” says Kate Ruane, the ACLU’s senior legislative counsel. 

What’s been Twitter’s and Facebook’s response to the president’s actions? 

Twitter has declined to comment, though it continued to apply fact check warnings to tweets on Wednesday (none of those messages were from Trump). Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg have taken a different tack, continuing to argue that social media shouldn’t offer to fact check at all, an effort to avoid the conservative criticism that could lead to changes to Section 230. Companies like Facebook shouldn’t be expected to act as “arbiter of truth” Zuckerberg told CNBC.

What happens next?

Any Trump executive order will almost certainly face a legal challenge. Regulators, meanwhile, seem unenthused about taking on greater regulation. FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel sent this tweet Wednesday morning:

BASEMENT STRATEGY ... FOCUS WAS ALWAYS ON VOTER FRAUD

"It Defies Logic": Scientist Finds Telltale Signs Of Election Fraud After Analyzing Mail-In Ballot Data ... Basement strategy was focused on voter fraud ... keep him sequestered to minimize damage.

A most interesting thread popped up on Twitter Sunday from a data scientist who wishes to remain anonymous, regarding mail-in ballot data which strongly suggests fraud occurred in the wee hours of election night, when several swing states inexplicably stopped reporting vote counts while President Trump maintained a healthy lead over Joe Biden.

Using time series data 'scraped' from the New York Times website, the data - comparing several states (swing and non-swing) - clearly illustrates what fraud does and does not look like, and how several anomalies in swing states left 'fingerprints of fraud' as Biden pulled ahead of President Trump.

Presented below via @APhilosophae:

The following information is provided via an anonymous data scientist and another anonymous individual who wrote a script to scrape the national ballot counting time series data of off the @nytimes website.

— CulturalHusbandry (@APhilosophae) November 9, 2020

Continued...

This is based on their proprietary "Edison" data source which would ordinarily be impossible to access for people outside the press. The CSV is available here. And the script to generate it is here. I suggest that everyone back up both of these files, because this is an extremely important data source, and we can't risk anyone taking it down.

What we are looking at will be time series analysis and you will see that it is extremely difficult to create convincing synthetic times series data. By looking at the times series logs of the ballot counting process for the entire country, we can very easily spot fraud.

One of the first things noticed while exploring the dataset is that there seems to be an obvious pattern in the ratio of new #Biden ballots to new #Trump ballots.

As we can see on this log-log plot, for many of the counting progress updates, we see an almost constant ratio of #Biden to #Trump. It's such a regular pattern that we can actually fit a linear regression model to it with near-perfect accuracy, barring some outliers. How could this be possible? Is this a telltale sign of fraud? Surprisingly, as it will be shown, the answer is no! This is actually expected behavior. Also, we can use this weird pattern in the ballot counting to spot fraud!

Here is the same pattern for Florida. We see this linear pattern again.

And again (Texas)

And again (South Dakota)

And again all over the country. What appears to be happening is that points on the straight line are actually mail-in votes. The reason they're so homogeneous across with respect to the ratio of #Biden vs #Trump votes is that they get randomly shuffled in the mail like a deck of cards. Since the ballots are randomly mixed together during transport, spanning areas occupied by multiple voting demographics, we can expect the ratio of mail-in #Biden ballots to mail-in #Trump ballots will remain relatively constant over time and across different reporting updates.

Let's dig a little deeper into this:

Here is a plot of the same Florida voting data, but this time it's the ratio of #Biden to #Trump ballots, versus time. What we see is that the initial ballot reportings are very noisy and "random".

The initial reporting represents in-person voting. These vote reports have such large variation bc in-person voting happens across different geographic areas that have different political alignments. We can see this same pattern of noisy in-person voting, followed by homogeneous mail-in reporting in almost all cases. What we see in almost all examples across the country is that the ratio of mail-in Dem to Rep ballots is very consistent across time, but with the notable drift from Dem to slightly more Rep.

This slight drift from D to R mail-ins occurs again and again, and is likely due to outlying rural areas having more R votes. These outlying areas take longer to ship their ballots to the polling centers.

Now we're getting into the really good stuff. When we see mail-in ballot counting where there isn't relatively stable ratios of D and R ballots that slightly drift R, we have an anomaly! Anomalies themselves are not necessarily fraud, but they can help us spot fraud more easily.

Now let's look at some anomalies:

This is the Wisconsin vote counting history log. Again, on the Y axis we have the ratio of D to R ballots in reporting batch, and on the X axis we have reporting time. Around 4am there, there is a marked shift in the ratio of D to R mail-in ballots. Based on other posts in this thread, this should not happen. This is an anomaly, and while anomalies are not always fraud, often they may point to fraud.

Around 3am Wisconsin time, a fresh batch of 169k new absentee ballots arrived. They were supposed to stop accepting new ballots, but eh, whatever I guess.

— CulturalHusbandry (@APhilosophae) November 9, 2020

By 4am the D to R ratio was all thrown out of whack. That is because these ballots were not sampled from the real Wisconsin voter population, and they were not randomized in the mail sorting system with the other ballots. They inherently have a different D to R signature than the rest of the ballots quite possibly bc additional ballots were added to the batch, either through backdating or ballot manufacturing or software tampering. This of this being kind of analogous to carbon-14 dating, but for ballot batch authenticity.

Lets look at another anomaly (Pennsylvania):

Here is Pennsylvania's vote counting history. For the first part of the vote counting process, we see the same pattern for mail-in ballots that we've seen in every other state in the country, which is relatively stable D to R ratio that gradually drifts R as more ballots. But then as counting continues, the D to R ratio in mail-in ballots inexplicably begin "increasing". Again, this should not happen, and it is observed almost nowhere else in the country, because all of the ballots are randomly shuffled in the mail system and should be homogeneous during counting. The only exceptions to this are other suspect states that also have anomalies.

Again, this is evidence of ballot backdating, manufacturing of software tampering.

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Lets look at another anomaly:

In Georgia we see pretty much the same story as Pennsylvania: increasing fractions of mail-in D ballots over time even though it defies logic and we see this pattern no where else in the country.

In Michigan, we see a combination of Wisconsin strangeness, together with the GA/PA weirdness. We see both signs of contaminated ballot dumping, and ballot ratios drifting toward dems when they should not be.

Virginia:

Now in fairness, VA is the only state out of the 50 that has anomalies but has not had accusations of voter fraud, yet. I think this is the exception that proves the rule. Yet to figure out what causes this anomalous shift, but here it is so no one accuses me of holding it back.

Lets wrap this up: It appears Dems shot themselves in the foot bc making everyone do mail-in ballots actually makes it easier to catch mail-in ballot fraud. Bc all of the ballots go through the postal system, they get shuffled like a deck of cards, so we expect reported ballot return to be extremely UNIFORM in terms of D vs R ratio, but to drift slightly towards R over time bc some of those ballots travel farther.This pattern proves fraud and is a verifiable timestamp of when each fraudulent action occurred.

SOCIALISM IN AMERICA ... ITS BEEN HERE FOR A LONG TIME ... WHAT TO EXPECT!

 IF ANYONE IN AMERICA WANTS A PEEK ON SOCIALISM IN AMERICA WATCH THIS VIDEO ... DO NOT THINK FOR ONE MOMENT THAT THIS ISN'T POSSIBLE IT ALREADY EXISTS! THESE "AMERICANS" NOT INDIAN AMERICANS THEY ARE THE TRUE OWNERS OF THIS COUNTRY ... OH BUT WAIT IF THEY ARE NOT AMERICANS THEN WHAT REPREARTIONS DO THEY DESERVE?

WHEN THE FAT LADY SINGS

 

TRUMP DOESN'T ROLL OVER

 

WHEEL OF FORTUNE, JEOPARDY OR A DAY OF INFAMY

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.” 

                                                                                     ― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty  

At the risk of sounding like I’m saying, “I told you so,” I told you so.

 

If you’ve been reading tea leaves from the news lately, you may have already figured out what’s coming at us in the next few months. If so, the following may simply affirm your observations. But I wanted to put this out there so everyone knows what to expect and therefore won’t be surprised.

 

Seven predictions for how 2020 comes to an end:

 

Prediction 1: Trump will win the election in a landslide. I know the media is telling you the polls are tight, but just look around. Trump rallies are packed to the gills while Biden can’t fill the bleachers at a high school football field. Trump supporters hold huge boat parades while we see NONE for Biden. Trump supporters hold freeway caravans around that country that take up all lanes of a freeway, while an attempted caravan for Biden in Las Vegas drew only 30 people. Just like in 2016, pollsters today are making it look like it’s a close race. This is gaslighting – they’re telling you something that runs directly opposite of what your own eyes are telling you, but they’re expecting you to believe what they say.

 

Prediction 2: On the evening of November 3, Joe Biden will not concede the election, even though the vote will clearly be for Trump. Hillary Clinton has publicly stated that Joe should not concede, so the seed has been planted in our minds to expect this. And, because we’re expecting it, we won’t be shocked by it.

 

Prediction 3: Massive mail voter fraud will create confusion and Marxists (e.g. Democrats) will insist that “every vote counts.” They know Americans want to be fair so Marxists will play on that. They will cry and wail and plead that every vote needs to get counted, so they’ll ask for sympathy for voters who didn’t follow confusing new election rules about how to cast their mail-in ballots. That will be their story, but many votes will be fraudulent. As they’ve demonstrated on America’s streets, Marxists don’t care about following laws; they care about power.

 

Prediction 4: Because of massive mail fraud ballots showing up late, election results WILL be delayed. The deceptive Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and the clearly biased Jack Dorsey at Twitter have already announced they will flag any posts or tweets that claim a victory for Trump. They KNOW Trump will have more than enough votes to win, but as Zuckerberg already told us, we should expect results to take “DAYS OR EVEN WEEKS.” In other words, Facebook and Twitter are well-aware of the planned mail-in voter fraud, and they’re already providing cover for it. The planned vote count confusion will be dragged out as long as possible. The Marxists’ intention is to keep confusion swirling at least until December 14 in hopes that the electoral college won’t be able to identify a winner. Expect ballots to keep showing up out of nowhere.

 

Prediction 5: If Marxists cannot keep up the façade until December 14, some states will obfuscate the electoral process by choosing not to follow the rules laid out in the 12^thAmendment. In fact, both may happen. Either way, by attempting to throw the electoral college into confusion, Marxists (again, the Democrats) will make a push for the electoral college to be eliminated. Believe me when I say you don’t want this. Students of the Constitution know that if the electoral college is eliminated, the Republic will be gone.

 

Prediction 6: Expect Nancy Pelosi to be acting all patriotic and concerned about the Constitution during the chaos, but rest assured, it’s a passive-aggressive act. She is among the Marxist vanguard in both houses of Congress orchestrating the whole mess. You will also see some Marxist-friendly governors making a lot of noise.

 

Prediction 7: While Marxists in Congress are messing with the electoral process, Marxists on the streets (Antifa and BLM) will intensify their violence by burning, looting, and murdering even more than what we’ve seen to this point. There’s already a movement that seeks to lay siege to the White House. Not only do the puppet masters want all the street chaos to distract our attention from what’s going on in the electoral process, the street Marxists see this election as their only chance to either grab power or put up with Trump for four more years. The protestors have been trained to instigate violence, and copy-cat wannabes will want to join in. Street Marxists will view these riots as the fight of their lives: it will get intense.

 

To perpetuate the riots, puppet masters like George Soros will continue pouring money into organizations that fund them. Also remember that Antifa and BLM have threatened to go into the suburbs. Their purpose for doing so is to trigger the Soccer Moms who want peace at all costs. Marxists will hope that these suburban moms will apply pressure on their elected representatives to give in to the Marxists so the violence will end. Life on American streets will be unpredictable and dangerous.

 

How does it end?  The Marxists are desperate, so the fighting will be like nothing the country has ever seen before. I predict we’ll see horrific things happening in our cities and on our streets, and traditional media (read: Marxist-friendly media) will be spewing twisted truths and lies about everything listed above. And we can’t forget that social media giants favor the Marxists in this revolution, so they will be squelching debate in whatever ways they can.

 

The final months of 2020 will be an emotional roller coaster, but in the end, I predict Trump prevails. It’s not going to be pretty, and many who are now thinking life will return to normal after November 3 will be sadly mistaken. They will be wondering what happened to the country they once knew.

 

Whether the Democrats implode or not after all this happens remains to be seen, but it is my prayer that when the dust settles, all the Marxists plotters and schemers be exposed and the truth will be recognized as truth. And then … maybe then … Trump can get on with his promise to drain the entire swamp.

THIS ELECTION ISN'T OVER ...

For decades, the world has been dominated by a process known as globalization, a secularizing economic and political system that hollows out and erodes a culture’s traditions, customs, and religions, all the while conditioning populations to rely on the expertise of a tiny class of technocrats for every aspect of their social and economic lives.

https://www.turleytalks.com/en/podcast-launch

A DIFFERENT VIEW OF THE WATERMARK AND PIECZENIK

 

WHEN THE SHIT ...HITS THE FAN ... DUCK!

 

THIS IS PART OF AMERICA I REMEMBER ... UNFORTUNATELY ITS GONE!

WHAT AMERICA HAS LOST IS THE CAPACITY TO LAUGH AT OURSELVES WITHOUT TAKING OFFENSE ... LIFE IS TOO SHORT TO MISS THE OPPORTUNITY TO LAUGH AT 

 

THE ROADMAP FOR THE AGENDA!

 "In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility--I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation." - JFK

" When the people fear the government , there is tyranny . When the government fears the people , there is liberty ." - Thomas Jefferson .

THE BORG ... RESISTANCE IS FUTILE

The Borg are an alien group that appear as recurring antagonists in the Star Trek franchise. The Borg are cybernetic organisms linked in a hive mind called "the Collective". The Borg co-opt the technology and knowledge of other alien species to the Collective through the process of "assimilation": forcibly transforming individual beings into "drones" by injecting nanoprobes into their bodies ... SOUNDS LIKE THE DEMOCRATS!!!

PARIS AGREEMENT IN FULL SWING ...

An effective climate agreement should foster broad participation, high ambition, and sufficient compliance. While the Paris Agreement has been acclaimed for spurring universal participation, its main mitigation mechanism—an unenforced bottom-up framework of voluntary pledges—has been criticized for lacking ambition and incentivizing free riding. This article examines whether the broad, bottom-up structure of the Paris Agreement comes with effectiveness trade-offs. It asks: How ambitious is the Agreement, and how likely is it that countries will comply with it? After presenting two theoretical perspectives on regime effectiveness, the article discusses the broad participation and bottom-up structure of the Paris Agreement. Thereafter, it presents a framework for measuring the ambition level of climate agreements numerically, and uses it to evaluate the ambition level of the Agreement. Subsequently the article turns to implementation, and draws on in-depth interviews, public statements by states and non-state actors, and theory on ideational change, to assess how the Agreement is intended to spur compliance. The article concludes with an integrative assessment of the Paris Agreement, and argues that its effectiveness prospects are currently largely positive.

No respite for New Delhi residents as pollution spikes again

By Reuters

Increasing pollution in the Indian capital is raising concerns among residents, especially when the city of more than 20 million is struggling in the face of coronavirus pandemic.

New Delhi residents complained of breathing difficulties as they stepped outside for cycling and exercising in the hazy morning of Monday, October 26.

“The pollution is becoming hazardous,” said New Delhi resident Mukul Diwan.

As winds drop after the monsoon and cooler weather sets in, a host of pollutants hang in the air over New Delhi. The problem is exacerbated by the burning of stubble in fields across northern India’s farm belt.

Men ride their bicycles in front of the India Gate shrouded in smog, in New Delhi, India.Reuters

Dust and smoke fill Delhi’s air every winter, making breathing difficult for adults and children alike. Government data reviewed by Reuters shows that air quality this October has been worse than in the same month in 2019 and 2018.

SCIENCE OVER FACTS ...