A repeal of Section 230 likely would lead to more content moderation and fewer opportunities for user-generated content. To understand why, it's helpful to look at a dispute that Eddie Haskell had with an adult bookstore 40 years ago.

After Leave it to Beaver went off the air, Ken Osmond, the actor who played Eddie Haskell, became an LAPD officer who had a small family and led a pretty quiet life. Until the early 80s, when he found out that a chain of LA porn stores was selling a film starring John Holmes.
The cover of the film's carton said that it starred "John Holmes, who played 'Little Eddie Haskell on the Leave it to Beaver show.'" Ken Osmond was the only one who played Eddie Haskell, and he never was in porn.
The chain of porn stores sold more than 10,000 different films, and the men who ran the stores said they had not reviewed the movie's cover, nor did they know who played Eddie Haskell.
Haskell sold the bookstore chain for libel, and the key issue for the court was whether the company could be held liable for the cover of a film that it distributed, even though it was unaware of that cover and that it might be defamatory.
The case made its way to the California Court of Appeal, which held that the bookstore could not be liable. Looking to the common law and the First Amendment, the court held that the plaintiff must show that a distributor knew the content may be defamatory.
This "distributor" category receives more protection than the author who merely repeats a defamatory statement.
But "distributors" receive protection unless they know or have reason to know of the defamatory nature of the statements.
Applying this standard, the court concluded that Osmond's claim failed because there was no evidence that the bookstore chain knew or had reason to know of the defamatory nature of the film carton.
OK, you're wondering - this is a case from 1984, involving a film carton how does it apply to the Section 230 debate? It helps us understand the potential liability of platforms in a world without 230, where the common law and First Amendment set the standard of liability.
We don't know for sure how courts would categorize platforms. Some suggested that platforms would receive the sweeping common-law protections of phone companies, but I don't think that quite gets the caselaw right. We won't know without a test case, but that is too optimistic.
As I have written, the most likely *best* case scenario for them is that they receive common-law distributor protections like bookstores. And in that case, there is substantially more risk.
Take Haskell's case. Imagine if Haskell had complained to the store about the film carton, the store continued to sell it, and Haskell sued for those continued sales. It would be hard for the store to continue to claim it did not "know" of the statement.
So the bookstore would suddenly be in the position of defending a defamation case on the merits (i.e., litigating Osmond's public figure status, falsity, and other issues).
Now imagine a social media platform in a 230-free world. Does it want to defend defamation cases on the merits for billions of user posts? Of course not. So let's assume that it receives distributor protections.
There is a strong argument (though not absolute) that if the social media platform receives a complaint about user content, it will no longer be able to claim those distributor protections. So the platform either has to take it down or defend a defamation suit.
And what does it mean to have "reason to know?" We also don't know because there are so few distributor liability cases. But there's at least a reasonable chance that a platform could be liable even without receiving a complaint.
So this is why we could expect to see platforms remove more content without Section 230. Individuals who are the subject of objectionable content would have a greater chance of being able to pressure a platform to take down the content.
You might think that is a good result, in light of the harmful content online. Or you might think that it results in suppression of speech. Regardless of whether it is your desired outcome, it would indeed be the outcome of 230 repeal.
I also should add: RIP Ken Osmond, who lived a good life. https://t.co/gr2mb3xMNi

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A Call for Help!
1. we have a petition/open letter for the WHO
https://t.co/Bie8pUy7WJ
2. 372 people signed it but we want to boost it
3. I post link ascomment on related YT videos
Tks @KevinMcH3 for the tip
4. You can help by liking the comments
5. That will increase visibility!


6. Links for YT videos with comments are here
1. China curtails hunt for virus origins
https://t.co/NhcYdtsd2Y
2. China: nearly 500,000 may have been infected in Wuhan
https://t.co/KRUQ5hFrii
3. WHO becomes US-China battleground | DW Documentary
https://t.co/8ah8M8bpiB


4. Gravitas: The 'hidden hunt' for COVID-19 origins
https://t.co/hHhhUqgPYt
5. Seeking the invisible: hunt for origins of deadly Covid-19 coronavirus will take scientists to Wuhan
https://t.co/tCPQqjUZF3
6. WHO team to probe COVID-19 origins in

7. How forensic researchers track down origins of SARS-CoV2
https://t.co/r7A1lkr5li
8. Bats, roadblocks & the origins of coronavirus - BBC
https://t.co/Kh9jacC54t
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18.
I was right. "Lawyer" starts out with name-calling and an insistence that trial is "unconstitutional". He's saying Trump's 1/6 speech was rather bland, and pretending that was the only thing the House managers talked about, and the managers were "slanderous."

Bilious bullshit.


"Lawyer" is arguing that since there were objections raised by Democrats to some of the vote counts in 2016, that means Trump didn't engage in sedition.

I'm not sure how that logic works.

Now they're running a Trump campaign commercial.

A bunch of whataboutism, contrasting patriotic music behind Trump's racist dogwhistles about "law and order" against Democrats making firey speeches with dark music.

He went to the moronic Gym Jordan argument that Trump couldn't have instigated insurrection if the violence was gonna happen anyway (without acknowledging Trump had been encouraging and building up to that violence for close to a year).

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So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.