The American Diabetes Association is not a state actor here. If the conference runners could be sued, the lawsuit would be over a contract violation (if there is one) by the ADA regarding the conditions for attending the conference, not about freedom of speech. If the ADA did violate its contract in removing the researchers, then the police would have violated the researchers' 1st Amendment rights, but qualified immunity likely applies.
> “While unintentional, this should never have happened.
It was unintentional on the part of Starbucks at large. The CEO of Starbucks Korea intentionally chose to integrate anti-democratic references into the marketing [1]:
> Did a dumb American exec misunderstand what Tank meant? Nope! Starbucks Korea is owned by a Korean billionaire who supports the old regime.
> Every new tumbler is 503 ml. Random size, eh?
> A right wing talking point is that "activists" are exaggerating and "only 503 people" were killed on 5/18.
> The slogan for the Starbucks campaign is "Slam it on your desk!" Random, eh?
> On 5/18 a young man was tortured to death in police custody. The cop said "I just slammed my hand on the desk and he died."
[...]
> Every Western article about this is like "is it too unwoke to make a pun on a day of remembrance?" but that's not what this is, this is a billionaire announcing to the entire country "We should not be a democracy, and I'm glad for every person who died trying to make it one. Suck it."
> The core sticking point is, I think, is that Section 230 was envisioned as a 'common carrier' exception. Common carriers do not apply editorial control to the content they transmit.
No, the writers of Section 230 (Ron Wyden and Chris Cox) envisioned the opposite, that websites hosting user-generated content would not be common carriers, would be free to develop new ways to moderate and curate content as they wished, and could not be punished for applying their own viewpoints to their moderation.
From Wyden's and Cox's amicus brief in Gonzalez v. Google confirming that targeted recommendations are protected by Section 230 [1] (related summary at [2]):
> Section 230 does not permit the Court to treat YouTube’s recommendation of a video as a distinct piece of information that YouTube is “responsible” for “creat[ing],” 47 U.S.C. § 230(f)(3).
[...]
> Section 230 protects targeted recommendations to the same extent that it protects other forms of content curation and presentation. Any other interpretation would subvert Section 230’s purpose of encouraging innovation in content moderation and presentation.
From Wyden's and Cox's reply comments to an FCC rulemaking process regarding whether the FCC has authority to interpret Section 230 (it does not) [3]:
> The first is that Section 230 does not require political neutrality. Claiming to “interpret” Section 230 to require political neutrality, or to condition its Good Samaritan protections on political neutrality, would erase the law we wrote and substitute a completely different one, with opposite effect. The second is that any governmental attempt to enforce political neutrality on websites would be hopelessly subjective, complicated, burdensome, and unworkable. The third is that any such legislation or regulation intended to override a website’s moderation decisions would amount to compelling speech, in violation of the First Amendment (regarding which, see section VIII below).
[...]
> The reason that Section 230 does not require political neutrality, and was never intended to do so, is that it would enforce homogeneity: every website would have the same “neutral” point of view. This is the opposite of true diversity.
The above quoted statements denying a requirement of political neutrality apply equally if you replace "political neutrality" with the more general "viewpoint neutrality".
> and part of that responsibility is remediating bad content as soon as possible?
No. Section 230 protects websites from the liability that they might otherwise bear upon removing objectionable content. You may ask, why would removing objectionable content give someone liability? Because for legal "simplicity" some people want to treat the act of removing harmful content as legal knowledge that the harmful content existed, and if the website was "too slow" to remove harmful content then surely the website should bear responsibility for the harm caused by being "too slow" or possibly complicit.
Section 230 itself already does not apply to federal criminal investigations, including investigations of child sexual abuse. A social media company should not bear legal responsiblity to detect crimes before law enforcement does.
Counterpoint - Businesses are generally liable in the physical world for harms caused on their premises by a foreseeable hazard. Whether as simple as a pothole in a parking lot that causes injury or an unstable shelf that collapses, …
The major social media sites know absolutely that their products expose customers and users to predictable harm and cause real damages. They should bear an analogous liability burden as a business operating a physical location.
In the case of Meta, X, et. al., the conversation is an integral part of the product. It isn't incidental "around their premises".
You're also wrong though - a corporation is absolutely liable for threats and various types of verbal harassment that occurs within their walls. Thus the endless liability-offsetting mandatory training videos... Duty of care is well established.
> ...a corporation is absolutely liable for threats and various types of verbal harassment that occurs within their walls.
From its employees or contractors, possibly. From customers or visitors? Absolutely not.
> ...the conversation is an integral part of the product.
For telephone, text messaging, and mail [0] the conversation is an integral part of the product. And yet, somehow they don't have this "liability burden" you're asserting is borne by everyone who provides a service or a space where people could plausibly speak with each other.
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