Post-election "Trumpist" protest |
David Greene has a major article at Electronic Frontier Foundation explaining how the distinction of “publisher of platform” has been incorrectly cited, often on Twitter, even by me, when criticizing YouTube’s of Facebook’s removal or editing of content (placing of disclaimers) most recently with respect to the elections and Trump’s outrageous battle in the courts (even post “safe harbor day”). There has also been a lot of “censorship” of COVID-related content, sometimes discussions of other medications that should really not be shut down just because of uncertainty or lack of establishment support. Greene’s article is “Publisher or Platform? It Doesn’t Matter”.
The 26 words, remember, were “No provider or user of
an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of
information provided by another information content provider.”
The wording doesn’t say “platform”.
Two important concepts explained in Greene’s article
are “republisher” and “distributor”.
Generally, a republisher is still a publisher and a distributor is like
a bookstore. A service that does not alter
content might be somewhere in between (like a webhost), more like a distributor
if it does not know of actual libelous content.
No comments:
Post a Comment