<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>thomaslord</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t see why they should be.&lt;p&gt;If someone uploads their library of child porn encoded to base64 split across tons of tweets, do you want Twitter to have a choice between removing that content and continuing to operate?&lt;p&gt;We have 3 options here:&lt;p&gt;1. No moderation allowed whatsoever on a site without a court order. That obviously leads to a terrible, toxic community with lots of reprehensible content that the average person wouldn&amp;#x27;t want to participate in.&lt;p&gt;2. A good faith effort at moderation. This allows the most reprehensible, highest-impact content to be removed and allows users to participate in the moderation process.&lt;p&gt;3. No content can be published without moderation, on any site anywhere. Want to post a Facebook status? Have fun paying $20 for the privilege of waiting 48 hours for a human to review it.&lt;p&gt;All of this is irrelevant though, because this executive order is not targeted at censorship. It&amp;#x27;s targeted at a private individual who voluntarily, &lt;i&gt;for free&lt;/i&gt;, passed on a message from one person to many other people and decided to tell them &amp;quot;this seems fishy, you might want to read up on it.&amp;quot;</text><parent_chain><item><author>jtbayly</author><text>Newspapers do that because they are liable for what they publish. Twitter is not liable for what it publishes. Why should it not be liable? The answer is because they are just providing a platform and others are publishing. But the moment they use their platform to modify and censor what people publish, then they should probably be liable, right?</text></item><item><author>threeseed</author><text>Newspapers have restricted what they publish for centuries.&lt;p&gt;They don&amp;#x27;t allow libellous, defamatory, salacious or inappropriate comments for example.&lt;p&gt;So it sounds &amp;#x27;new tech&amp;#x27; hasn&amp;#x27;t really changed anything.</text></item><item><author>MrJagil</author><text>I think that’s a simplistic view. No one is arguing Twitter is comparable to a store with a display window. The reality is that Tweets are broadcasted to billions of people. It’s a new reality. It’s a newspaper where anyone and everyone is authoring anything, including presidents, and with the roll of a die, the message is amplified to a multiple of the expected audience.&lt;p&gt;Twitter may technically be a private platform run by a private company, but the issue not one of semantics, it’s about ethics and morals and how we compose a society with mighty power imbalances, fortified by new tech.</text></item><item><author>krapp</author><text>&amp;gt;It really is a public web space that is operated by a private company&lt;p&gt;No, it isn&amp;#x27;t, any more than a store is a public space because it has windows the public can see into. You have to sign up for a Twitter account and accept their terms of service to post on the site. It&amp;#x27;s a private platform run by a private company for its own private business interests.</text></item><item><author>TheColorYellow</author><text>Its an interesting thought experiment to assess in what ways Twitter is a &amp;quot;private website&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;It really is a public web space that is operated by a private company, but I can&amp;#x27;t help but feel that the nuances and similarities of what Twitter really is and what responsibility they truly hold in society is above the courts comprehension.</text></item><item><author>cdolan</author><text>The biggest takeaway, looking past the headline:&lt;p&gt;“This week a federal appeals court, ruling in a case brought by conservative activists against social media companies, affirmed that private websites are not public spaces and social media companies don&amp;#x27;t have First Amendment obligations.&lt;p&gt;Any truly strong limits to Section 230 would almost certainly require action by Congress.”</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Trump signs executive order targeting protections for social media companies</title><url>https://www.axios.com/trump-executive-order-social-media-protections-8a53f1c6-3c05-4844-98a3-071373b497a8.html?stream=technology&amp;utm_source=alert&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=alerts_technology</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>triceratops</author><text>Why should they &amp;quot;probably be liable&amp;quot;?&lt;p&gt;Twitter isn&amp;#x27;t liable for illegal content posted by their users, as long as they take it down in time and make good faith efforts to keep it from being posted in the first place. If they weren&amp;#x27;t free from liability then a service like Twitter would need heavy human moderation and be extremely expensive to operate - perhaps it wouldn&amp;#x27;t exist at all.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s the only reason this non-liability exists. It has nothing to do with moderation or censorship. Twitter, as any other web property, have the right to curate their platform and make it pleasant for their other users. &lt;i&gt;It&amp;#x27;s their personal property.&lt;/i&gt;</text><parent_chain><item><author>jtbayly</author><text>Newspapers do that because they are liable for what they publish. Twitter is not liable for what it publishes. Why should it not be liable? The answer is because they are just providing a platform and others are publishing. But the moment they use their platform to modify and censor what people publish, then they should probably be liable, right?</text></item><item><author>threeseed</author><text>Newspapers have restricted what they publish for centuries.&lt;p&gt;They don&amp;#x27;t allow libellous, defamatory, salacious or inappropriate comments for example.&lt;p&gt;So it sounds &amp;#x27;new tech&amp;#x27; hasn&amp;#x27;t really changed anything.</text></item><item><author>MrJagil</author><text>I think that’s a simplistic view. No one is arguing Twitter is comparable to a store with a display window. The reality is that Tweets are broadcasted to billions of people. It’s a new reality. It’s a newspaper where anyone and everyone is authoring anything, including presidents, and with the roll of a die, the message is amplified to a multiple of the expected audience.&lt;p&gt;Twitter may technically be a private platform run by a private company, but the issue not one of semantics, it’s about ethics and morals and how we compose a society with mighty power imbalances, fortified by new tech.</text></item><item><author>krapp</author><text>&amp;gt;It really is a public web space that is operated by a private company&lt;p&gt;No, it isn&amp;#x27;t, any more than a store is a public space because it has windows the public can see into. You have to sign up for a Twitter account and accept their terms of service to post on the site. It&amp;#x27;s a private platform run by a private company for its own private business interests.</text></item><item><author>TheColorYellow</author><text>Its an interesting thought experiment to assess in what ways Twitter is a &amp;quot;private website&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;It really is a public web space that is operated by a private company, but I can&amp;#x27;t help but feel that the nuances and similarities of what Twitter really is and what responsibility they truly hold in society is above the courts comprehension.</text></item><item><author>cdolan</author><text>The biggest takeaway, looking past the headline:&lt;p&gt;“This week a federal appeals court, ruling in a case brought by conservative activists against social media companies, affirmed that private websites are not public spaces and social media companies don&amp;#x27;t have First Amendment obligations.&lt;p&gt;Any truly strong limits to Section 230 would almost certainly require action by Congress.”</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Trump signs executive order targeting protections for social media companies</title><url>https://www.axios.com/trump-executive-order-social-media-protections-8a53f1c6-3c05-4844-98a3-071373b497a8.html?stream=technology&amp;utm_source=alert&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=alerts_technology</url></story>