Kind of amusing how I keep reading and hearing about “the end of the Internet” because of the possible weakening of #Section230. Newsflash: that only exists in the US. Other countries have vastly different laws regarding platform responsibilities, and guess what - these US companies still operate in those countries, even though they *can* be legally responsible for their users content there.
@rene FWIW, most websites people are thinking about when they decry "The end of the Internet" are based in the US. They respect German law, French law, &c, but a change to *American* law will impact how those sites operate worldwide in a way that changes to the laws of nations the company isn't headquartered in won't.
Significant abridgment of s230 protections will make it impractical for a lot of sites to operate at scale because most of their traffic is Americans and the risk of the owner being thrown in jail / sued out of all their fortune is much higher if it's American law that gets broken.
@mtomczak The funny thing is that the post that triggered me posting about it was someone claiming weakening Section 230 would be “the end of Mastodon”. Mastodon is a prime example why platform responsibility is not a blocker as such for things like social media. Requires more and better moderation, yes, but that makes it an inherently better platform.
@rene I doubt weakening s230 will kill Mastodon, but only because most Mastodon nodes are functionally judgment-proof or outside jurisdiction.
... it would certainly make it harder to operate a federated mastodon node "legitimately." How much the community would care I can't predict; wouldn't be the first time a federation of protocol users just ignored the law.
