High court grapples with definition of publisher

Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act is a great unifier. Congressmembers from both sides of the aisle agree that it should be struck down or highly modified. And, based on their responses to 2½ hours of testimony on Tuesday, Supreme Court justices nominated by presidents from both parties seemed to be united in their confusion over the arguments and their reluctance to strike it down.

The court heard arguments in Gonzalez vs. Google which focused mostly on whether tech companies should be held civilly liable for content promoted by their algorithms.

Section 230 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,” which sets them apart from newspapers, broadcasters and other media companies whose content is mostly created and vetted by writers, producers and editors who work for the company. So, if a newspaper accuses you of a crime you didn't commit, or publishes something demonstrably harmful, you can sue that publisher because they made the decision to publish it. You might not win, but you have a clear target to sue. But if someone posts something on Facebook or YouTube

that harms you, your beef is with the person who posted it, not the company that allowed it to be posted.

Section 230 was written years before Facebook or even MySpace entered our world when people went online using services like Compuserve and Prodigy. Both of these companies had forums. At that time, I was a columnist at Compuserve and also a columnist and forum host at Prodigy. Prodigy's forums were moderated — a human decided whether a post was appropriate. Compuserve's forums were more of a free-for-all.

In a 1991 suit against Compuserve, a court found that Compuserve could not be held responsible for content because it didn't review the content and