YouSaid · the spoken record

Carrie Goldberg

lines on the record

68

first

2019-08-23

most recent

2019-08-23

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1

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podcast

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1. “Well, so when we're, I mean, my issue is that we don't have a clear definition of what information content is. And so I think a lot of conduct. And a lot of the issues and handling of the products is the problem here. I'm not really worried about content moderation when it comes to my clients. They're all people who have been really viciously harmed. But the problem is if these companies aren't even liable for how their product works And the defects in the design. Then this goes way beyond just a moderation issue. So if I can tell you the story of one of my clients, Matthew Herrick, he was impersonated by his stalker ex-boyfriend on Grindr. And more than twelve hundred men came in person to his job and to his home.”

   2019-08-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: CDA 230 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

2. “Right, absolutely. So, Carrie, that's the concept, let's stick on the Nancy Pelosi side, which I think you're more on, is that they haven't done enough. They're abrogating their, and I think this too. They're abrogating their responsibility. They'd rather not do anything. And they're not doing anything because they have these, first of all, these sort of loosey-goosey free speech principles, which they do. I don't think they're very thoughtful about it. And some of them are, some of them aren't. But they talk about the Pelosi side that they haven't done enough.”

   2019-08-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: CDA 230 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

3. “Yeah, and I mean, almost every day, either in my email or on Twitter or something, someone will start yelling at me about how is Facebook a platform or a publisher? And that's not the distinction that Section 230 makes. In fact, they don't want the intent of it is not to have that distinction, to allow Facebook and all the social media sites to take responsible efforts to take down harmful content. That's the point of Section 230, or one of the points at least.”

   2019-08-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: CDA 230 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

4. “Section 230, and they, for different reasons, criticized the tech companies for various things. But when you sort of drill down into what they're criticizing the tech companies for and what they would like to see, there's not much common ground there. So, I mean, I'm not sure what solution would satisfy all of the critics. So for Speaker Pelosian, there are a lot of critics believe that there's not enough moderation, that basically Section 230 is not living up to its initial purpose, which is to give them permission to do so. Good faith moderation. Yeah. And so they're saying, you know, if it's not working, we need to rethink this. But then...”

   2019-08-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: CDA 230 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

5. “I think, in one word, it would just be dizzy. That's how I feel, at least, because. The two criticisms that you talked about with Speaker Pelosian, Senator Hawley, are very different. They both don't like”

   2019-08-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: CDA 230 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

6. “Exception created in the law. Since that happened, almost all of the language around passing that law, which generally now is referred to as Fosta, everyone was talking about backpage, which was sort of started out as a Craigslist alike, but a lot of escorts and Certainly, some sex trafficking ads were on backpage. And so Backpage had really been a target for a long time, and there was a lot of different efforts to take it down. Now, one thing that is important is that Section 230 has never created immunity for federal criminal law. And so, in fact, Backpage got taken down on the executives got arrested just days before Foster was signed based on those old laws.”

   2019-08-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: CDA 230 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

7. “There have been a number of attempts over the years to break 230 in different ways, and there have been attempts in all different ways, and usually people sort of zero in on something that is big and scary. So things like opioid addiction or sex trafficking, the kinds of things that people will say, well, no one will ever be on the other side of that. Nobody obviously is in favor of sex trafficking. And so there was this law that was passed. It went by various names, Fausta and Sesta, and eventually passed in sort of this hybrid version pieces of both Fosta and Sesta sort of squished together. And the idea was that sex trafficking or facilitating or I forget all of the different, but basically anything that helps enhance sex trafficking in some form or another is exempted from Section 230 and therefore it was an example.”

   2019-08-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: CDA 230 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

8. “That distinction. If it's content that is created by the site, then obviously they should be liable for it. If it's actions done by the site, then that's what they should be liable for, what they should not be liable for, and what 230 protects is cases where it's third-party content that is the issue.”

   2019-08-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: CDA 230 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

9. “For discrimination. And the issue was that if you were using roommates.com to find roommates, you could designate race as a basis for what kind of roommate you were looking for. And that was something that you can't discriminate over. It's a protected class. And the question was, was roommates protected by 230 or not? And the court, it's a fairly nuanced decision, I think, in which they said, you know, the content that is specifically created by the users is still roommates is protected from that. But what roommates is not protected from is the content that it itself as a company creates. And in this case, it had created a pull down menu with race as a choice. And therefore, it was liable for that particular content, which I think makes sense. When that ruling first came out, I was a little bit nervous about it and what it would lead to in terms of other cases, but I think in the end, it was actually a pretty well thought out decision and showed.”

   2019-08-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: CDA 230 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

10. “230 has been litigated so many times at this point and there have been a number of different ways it's been chipped away there have been a number of different court cases that have you know around the edges sort of chipped away at things most famously there's the roommates case roommates.com”

    2019-08-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: CDA 230 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

11. “They can't be sued that one person, let me tell you they can't be sued, they can't be sued. And that's crazy. I mean, tort law is centuries old, and the concept is that it's the great equalizer for the cost of an index number, the poorest person, somebody without a pot to piss in, can sue somebody that did harm to them and bring them to the table. And section 230 has created a massive immunity for companies that don't deserve it, that are the most omniscient, omnipotent, data-rich, wealthy companies in the history of the world, and they're doing real harm. And they're also using Section 230 as a justification not to control their products and to intervene when somebody's being brutally harmed like some of my clients have been.”

    2019-08-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: CDA 230 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

12. “So, Carrie, let's talk about you from your perception why it was important. Well, I mean, at this point, it's basically a government subsidy. You know, it originally made sense when it was created, it was kind of seen to be very restrictive. The internet was a completely different place back then. And most of the tort issues related to defamation and obscenity and traditional publishing torts. Which I think the lawsuits about Prodigy and Comps are about defamation and the stock things, I think. Exactly. And so over the years, our information computer services have expanded to do all sorts of much more complex things. They geolocate. We've got our social media companies. We've got Amazon that provide third parties. We've got our search engines.”

    2019-08-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: CDA 230 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

13. “It was also used to make these companies become bigger because they want to be sued out of existence by any actions they made. I think that was probably, I remember at the time talking to Ron about the idea that we needed to let this new industry, the internet had just been sort of become commercial, let it thrive, let it thrive, and let it not feel under the regulatory scrutiny or legal scrutiny.”

    2019-08-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: CDA 230 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

14. “Section 230 does. It has two main provisions. The first says that if you are an interactive computer service, so a website, an app, a social media service, you're not going to be held to be the publisher or speaker of any third-party content, any content created by another information content provider. And then it has another provision saying that you're also not liable if you make good faith efforts to moderate objectionable content. So that gets in the bill. No one really pays much attention to it. People are furious about the Senate bill, which gets struck down by the Supreme Court. And then you're left with Section 230, and it took a little while for the courts to really sort out what that even meant and what the courts held. They interpreted it very broadly, and they found that with some exceptions, it provides fairly broad protection from claims against these sites for third-party content.”

    2019-08-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: CDA 230 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

15. “Yeah, absolutely. So you had the Senate basically pushing through this legislation, which you've written extensively about, a great book about, the Communications Decency Act, which imposed all of these penalties on transmission of indecent content. But the House, you had Ron Wyden and Chris Cox, who were younger, and they understood the internet a bit more. And they said, we want to do something different. We want to empower the services to do moderation. So we basically, their idea was there would be this market-based demand for moderation. So if a service wasn't moderating, then the users would walk away, and that's a better solution than having the FCC or DOJ regulated. In this weird political situation that I spend a long chapter about, I won't go into here. Both the CDA and the Cox-Wyden bill, which is Section 230, get into this telecom act of 1996. And the core, you already said basically what said.”

    2019-08-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: CDA 230 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

16. “I know none of my students know what they are, but there were two cases involving Prodigy and CompuServe, and CompuServe and Prodigy had very different business models. So for CompuServe, they basically didn't do any moderation. They didn't have user policies. They let all sorts of third-party content onto their service. Prodigy wanted to be family-friendly. So what Prodigy did was it had moderators, user policies, all that sort of stuff. They both get sued within the space of a few years in the early 90s for defamation that third parties put on their sites. CompuServe gets the case dismissed because it's held to be like a bookstore. It had no reason to know. Prodigy is held to be more like a newspaper publisher because it exercised editorial control. So that got the attention of Congress, which at the time was really all up in arms about pornography that was available.”

    2019-08-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: CDA 230 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

17. “So I wrote more than 100,000 words on these 26 words, but I will try to keep it shorter than that. So Section 230 is really was a solution to a problem that had emerged through basically common law and First Amendment court rulings that dated back to bookstore owner prosecutions in the 1950s. Which basically said if you're the distributor of someone else's content, the First Amendment prohibits you from being held liable either civilly or criminally unless you either know or have reason to know of the illegal content or the defamatory content. And that worked well for bookstores. So it basically said bookstores don't have to review books before they sell them. But if they know that they have obscenity, then they have to not sell them. Didn't work so well when you got to CompuServe and Prodigy and all these other services that my students.”

    2019-08-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: CDA 230 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

18. “Hi, I'm Kara Swisher, the editor-at-large of Recode. You may know me as someone who has said Section 230 on this podcast more times than I can count. It's also the name of my new band. But in my spare time, I talk tech and you're listening to Recode Decode from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today we've convened a coast-to-coast panel of experts to talk about the most important policy in the history of U.S. regulation of the Internet, which there isn't very much of it. So it's pretty much the big dog in this. Of course, referring to the 1996 Communications Decency Act and specifically Section 230, which says, and people can dispute what it says, that Internet companies are not publishers and therefore can't be held legally responsible for what their users say. That's the simple version. It's much more complex than that. It's a very short part of that act, which I actually covered when I was at the Washington Post. But today we have three people on today's show first here with me in our New York studio is Carrie Goldberg, the owner of the law firm, CA Goldberg.”

    2019-08-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: CDA 230 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT