In article <469b70b8-b1f5-bef7-5c03-b1e5d8b2c0aa@meetinghouse.net> you write:
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That's my understanding as well, from years of hosting email lists. As soon as one starts moderating, the rules change, and immunity goes away.
Thanks for bringing it up, because that understanding is 100% completely WRONG. In 1995 a New York state court decided Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy. Stratton Oakmont was a stock broker, Prodigy was an early online service, and one of Prodigy's users posted a message that allegedly defamed Stratton Oakmont. The state court misinterpreted the earlier federal Cubby v. Compuserve and found that since Prodigy moderated its forums, it was a publisher and was responsible for the user's message. (Stratton Oakmont actually was a bunch of crooks, several of whom later went to jail, but by then this issue was long over.) In response the US Congress passed the widely misunderstood 47 USC 230, which has two significant sections. The first part 230(c)(1) says that "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." That means that if, for example, I sent a message here saying you'd just been fired for having unnatural relations with an underage sheep, you could sue me for libel, but you couldn't sue NANOG for carrying the message. The other section 230(c)(2) says "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of ... any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected;" That means that if NANOG decided to that this list is about network management, not livestock management, and deleted my message, that still doesn't make them liable, even if there were other messages they didn't delete. Courts have interpreted "good faith" and "otherwise objectionable" very broadly, to include all sorts of moderation and spam filtering. So you are specifically allowed to moderate all you want, even if you do not do it perfectly. For reasons I do not fully understand, this simple law is wildly misinterpreted, including by a lot of members of Congress who should really know better. You don't have to take my word for this. Lots of actual lawyers have explained it. Here's Mike Godwin on Slate: https://slate.com/technology/2020/12/legal-scholars-mary-anne-franks-mike-go... And here's Eric Goldman, a law professor who has been writing about technology law for a long time: https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2021/01/new-op-ed-people-who-understan... https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2020/07/want-to-learn-more-about-secti... R's, John PS: with respect to Parler, it means that while Amazon wasn't responsible for the sewage flowing through Parler, it was entirely allowed to turn it off at any time.