From the article: As pointed out on Twitter, it's all connected.
From the article:
Enter Stratton Oakmont. In the mid-1990s, the brokerage house and its then-President Danny Porush (the basis for Jonah Hill’s Donnie Azoff), sued Prodigy Internet Services over a series of anonymous and allegedly libelous postings on Prodigy’s Money Talk “computer bulletin board.” Among other things, the anonymous comments stated that Porush was a “soon to be proven criminal” and Stratton Oakmont was a “cult of brokers who either lie for a living or get fired.” (Go figure.)
The New York Supreme Court decided that Prodigy should be treated as the publisher of the anonymous comments. The court was a little fuzzy on the reasoning but emphasized that Prodigy was a self-styled “family orient[ed] computer network” that had actively edited a portion of the voluminous content it received. The basic idea seemed to be that because Prodigy edited some of its user-generated content, it made itself responsible for all of that content. That meant Prodigy could have had to pay damages to Stratton Oakmont.
The Internet, circa 1995, freaked out. Before this ruling, it looked like the Prodigies of the world might not be responsible for reviewing content that their users generated. But the Stratton Oakmont decision raised the worrying prospect that a company’s good-faith attempt to filter some content would expose it to crushing liability—not exactly a great incentive to sort through potentially libelous posts.
Congress agreed that was a concern. In 1996, it responded with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which sought to undo the Stratton Oakmont decision by guaranteeing that “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” (A Senate conference report stated explicitly that the point of this provision was to “overrule Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy and any other similar decisions which have treated such providers and users as publishers or speakers of content.”) Section 230 is a strong provision, and it’s gotten a lot stronger in the hands of the courts: Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, for example, has ruled that Section 230 frees ISPs of both publisher and distributor liability—which means that they don’t even have an obligation to take defamatory content down.
From the article:
As pointed out on Twitter, it's all connected.