No, eg, liberal capitalist Americans oppose Marxism — and the adoption of neo-Marxist ideas has collapsed movie and game sales because their ideology is widely unpopular.
That’s a trope by Marxists to attempt to normalize alt-left ideology by accusing anyone who objects of being Nazis; a trope that’s become tired in the US and minimizes the true radical nature of the Nazi regime.
Notice the motte and bailey here: using the uncontroversial "liberal capitalist Americans oppose Marxism" claim to advance the idea that whatever social views they call "neo-Marxism" are unpopular.
I think there's diminishing returns. A broad, liberal arts, undergraduate education develops critical thinking and reading skills in a zero-to-one kind of way. Once you've attained those skills (whether through a college degree or some other way), further enrichment via self-study is much more easily doable.
This is definitely true. I think pre-graduate college is pretty eye opening, at least when I went. In most high schools, they just cover the top layer of knowledge; in college they go quite a bit deeper. "They never taught us that in high school," is a saying that applies.
I don't get your strong objection. A 1.0 release that is fit for use by >80% of the addressable market, and gets high marks from those users is a "boondoggle"?
Perhaps you overestimate the fraction of taxpayers that itemize deductions, have gig/rental/business income?
Structuring (splitting up cash deposits to a bank so that they don't trigger the bank to file a CTR) comes to mind. It does have a mens rea component, but the money being entirely clean doesn't make the act not-structuring, IIUC.
That thinking strikes me as "clear, simple, and wrong". (I appreciate that 230's bright-line rule may also be clear, simple and wrong)
Consider defamation. Often, the difference between a defamatory and non-defamatory statement is truth. Expecting websites to distinguish true statements from false ones is a non-starter.
Let's say my family has a horrible experience with a youth pastor. I post about it on facebook to warn people in my community. If my claims are false, they're almost certainly actionable defamation. If my claims are true, disallowing them to mitigate Facebook's potential liability is also bad, but not in a way that affects Facebook.
The idea that there's an indistinct difference between "publisher" and "common carrier" doesn't seem right. Google or Facebook are not, and have never been, common carriers. The entities that most resemble "common carriers", as that term is historically used, are infrastructure-layer companies. I don't see how the distinction could be sharper.
Monopoly concerns are better addressed by going after monopolies for being anticompetitive. Intermediary liability seems pretty orthogonal to competition concerns. I would need a lot of convincing to start believing that categories like search or even social media (despite network effects) are natural monopolies akin to railroads or POTS-type phone companies of yore – where you can't have efficient competition, and don't have thorny 1A issues to deal with, so common-carrier approaches are defensible.
As an aside, one reason I think 230 pretty much correct is that authoritarians on both sides of the spectrum want to axe it, but for different reasons.
OK, but you ignored the "mergers and acquisitions" point: if they're big enough to have acquisitions scrutinized closely (but not big enough for antitrust actions, as your points address), then maybe they should lose some 230 protections.
Why though? Seems to me that while any website of any size that allows any kind of user generated content (without every post being pre-approved before it goes live) needs protections like what Section 230 is meant to provide, the more users posting, the harder your problems are and the more important those protections are…
I mean, you can make the argument “I don’t like big tech so I want to make it impossible for them to legally function while allowing any user-generated content” but I’m not sure most would agree.
The "idea that these providers are simply neutral carriers of content" is a false premise, isn't it?
The piece you link is ... weird. First, it doesn't really describe the problem it's trying to solve. Then it presents some very vague policy prescriptions like "site[s] should be regulated by sector-specific rules that apply to that particular line of business".
There’s probably better writing on this by Matt Stoller that’s just the first thing I found.
A core premise of this argument is that 230 is bizzare exception to pretty clear core rules that we typically have on things like libel and product liability.
There’s just absolutely no argument at this point that these platforms are fundamentally consequential commercial enterprises. The create products, and profit from them, and those products and and do hurt people and cause horrible effects, but this law designed to preserve free speech utterly insulates them from any consequences of their profit making enterprise.
It’s just bizarre. Like the Washington Post can be sued for publishing content that’s harming people and wrong, but Google can’t?
If my kids are exposed to pedophiles every time they go to Chuck E Cheese, and they know about it and don’t do anything I can sure as hell can sue them. But not if it happens on Instagram? Why?
Any article published by the Washington Post is written by agents of their company, and that's why they are the responsible entity. Should you be able to sue every newsstand in your local city if they are selling a newspaper that defames you? After all, those newsstands are profiting from the sale of libelous content...
Is this person a lawful agent of a legitimate government? Is the ice cream policy reasonably connected to some compelling government interest, like public health?
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