HACKER Q&A
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Are you still against repealing Section 230?


Are you still against repealing Section 230?


  👤 LinuxBender Accepted Answer ✓
Repealing or amending? Being for or against repealing Section 230 is tricky. It is much more than a double edged sword to repeal the entire thing. People know about the publishing/moderating facets of 230 and that aspect has been discussed ad-nausium.

There are also protections in section 230 for service providers that in effect are also for end consumers. If those are also removed or altered, all small websites could be purged from the internet. Anyone without a significant legal team and/or real time moderation system would not be able to allow user generated content without taking a massive legal risk. As an example, forums would not allow any posts to be visible until a moderator has approved it. That could have far reaching implications, including for sites like this one. People would not host their own chat servers. People would not host their own blogs. Hosting anything could end up requiring some certification or license.

In my opinion, the only entities that would benefit from 230 being entirely repealed would be large organizations that already take legal risks for publishing content and manually review all content. e.g. news agencies, government agencies, etc...