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I think a better take is:

> Do you use personal / behavioral data / usage to shape the user experience and recommendations? You do not get covered by Section 230.

If they get to exercise editorial powers, then it doesn't make sense for them to be protected from liability for choosing what to publish. If they just give you a giant firehose, then they're not doing anything editorially and they should not have any liability as clearly that's not _their_ speech.



That's not at all how Section 230 works. There's a popular myth that it distinguishes between "publishers" (who make editorial decisions about what content is shown and how it is shown) and "platforms" that just host it with minimal interference, but that is in fact just a myth.

However, I don't really see how Section 230 is even relevant here. What Section 230 protects them from is for being liable for what is in the individual user posts posted to Facebook. It essentially just makes it so that if you have a beef with what someone posts on Facebook and want to sue you sue the poster rather than Facebook.

What is being alleged is that Facebook's decisions in how to arrange and present and show or not show that user content has harmed people. Those are things that are not in scope for 230.


Yet it remains relevant that "being liable for one's editorial decisions" is a good idea, and that differentiating between platforms which do and which do not exercise autonomy over how information gets prioritized and sorted may very well be relevant to this discussion.


This - one hundred times this.

No matter what the “algorithm” is, at some point it’s a choice of what to put in front of the user - a publishing choice.

Unless the rules are solely determined by myself and deterministic (no selection or choice on the platform end) then they are publishers.

And liable.




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