> Section 230 protects individual bloggers, anyone who forwards an email, and social media users who have ever reshared or retweeted another person’s content online.

If someone you have never heard of writes a letter -- on paper, with a pen, communicating some kind of message that is somehow restricted by law... whether it be libel, copyright infringement, offensive, or hate speech -- and I decide I like it so much that I want to send a copy of that letter in the mail to everyone in my town... I am sorry, is the intuition that the EFF is claiming here that I shouldn't be held liable, just because I in some way curated the message from someone else?

I mean, this person didn't even ask me to mail it... it isn't like I am running a newsletter for the town, having to filter out the best messages from the numerous I am sent, lest I run out of paper and my readers run out of time. No: the person who sent me that letter wanted some audience of theirs to read it, I was one of the people they sent it to, for all I know I was the only person they expected would ever read it, and now I am the reason a thousand people will.

In this scenario -- as with the examples from the EFF -- I plucked this message out of world and chose to send it to my audience... this isn't me merely deciding not to moderate it: this is more like a museum going out and hunting for pieces of art for an exhibit... is the exhibit itself somehow not an act of speech?

I dunno... I personally feel like, if anything, I should be held more liable than the person who wrote the original letter in this scenario, not less: I am the person who chose to give their message some immense audience, not them. If I try to now claim "I didn't say it... this other person did!", that's not only disingenuous, that borders on nonsensical, as if I want to say something false and bad about you, I bet I can find someone else who said something similar, and I shouldn't just to get to avoid accountability because I merely "forwarded it".

I think what the EFF is doing here is trying to claim that a law that has successfully defended a user is thereby a law that helps users; and... I do see the logic there? But--and I guess this is where the EFF and I really disagree--I'm going to say that, just because a law helps some user avoid accountability, that doesn't mean I want that user to avoid accountability! The law should make sense, not merely be a useful and powerful card to play during legal battles.

There is something else going on here, though, as I clicked on the links in this quoted section to see if I would agree with the scenarios being defended, and I feel like this phrasing was dubious and even downright misleading :/.

Take the "anyone who forwards an email" one that I am kind of poking at here... and that's not at all a good description of what happened, as the EFF website notes that the key issue at hand is whether the message has been intended to be forwarded: if not, Section 230 wouldn't apply... but like, that's the situation with most end-user email forwards, as end users aren't expected to run forwarding service!

More to the point, this was about a non-profit that runs a mailing list, a newsletter, and a mailing list, not a user. Sure: the court kind of leaned into the word "user" to make a newsletter and mailing list be an idea that could be managed under this law, but that technical definition of "user" clearly isn't what the EFF is trying to make us think of here.

But like, returning to the result: in this case, they actually did forward an email they received which clearly was not intended to be forwarded: if you read the email, that much is obvious. The actual user here, Smith, is the person I'd think we want to protect, not the non-profit that took their self-admittedly "crank" question and forwarded it to their serious mailing list and put it on their serious website as part of their serious newsletter.

Worse, nothing about this seemed to end up decided by Section 230: as I noted, the appeals court decided it would only apply if the email had been intended to be forwarded, but they don't establish fact, so they sent it back to the district court to decide that...

...and, while I would be shocked if they had decided the message had been intended to be forwarded, it doesn't matter, as they dismissed the case due to a procedural issue caused by the same lawsuit having been filed in two jurisdictions, and the other copy of the lawsuit was both slightly earlier and hasn't been forwarded correctly to this defendant, so we know nothing.

So, frankly, I just feel kind of lied to here? The EFF is telling me this law protected a user, but, as far as I can tell, the part of this case where this law came up was about a corporate interest running a service, not a user, and it didn't even manage to protect them either, for good reason, as the intuition I feel we should have here is that the service provider was in fact liable :/.

And, to make it all the more ridiculous, the court of course had to evaluate section 230 as it existed--it determines how the law is to be applied, not what the law should be--but it also clearly thought it was a stupid law and wanted to make that known ;P, and so thereby started its opinion thusly:

> There is no reason inherent in the technological features of cyberspace why First Amendment and defamation law should apply differently in cyberspace than in the brick and mortar world. Congress, however, has chosen for policy reasons to immunize from liability for defamatory or obscene speech “providers and users of interactive computer services” when the defamatory or obscene material is “provided” by someone else.

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-9th-circuit/1158381.htm...