Freedom of speech is also freedom from compelled speech. This kind of law means the government can compel any private party to speak what they want and punish them for not doing so.
This is also demonstrably damaging to the effected party. It costs money to host content. Forcing a business to host content costs them - is poland going to fund this? No.
If the polish government has a problem with it then they should make their own government backed social media platform. Not violate people's rights.
Yes, exactly. It's a very restricted and strictly formatted form of compelled speech on specific products. Like other limitations on free speech, it exists because lawmakers have judged the benefits to be greater than the downsides of limiting manufacturers' free speech.
Now imagine a law that forces anyone with a website who ever had an unmoderated comment section to host and display those comments forever. That's the Polish law. Isn't that on a completely different level of compelled speech?
Consumer protection laws are written in blood. You can't leave arsenic out of your ingredients list any more than I can call myself a doctor and tell you to start eating roofing tar.
All warning or informational labels are forced speech.
But, it's worth remembering that people used to do things like add morphine to products without labeling it. Most countries limit free speech when it can harm others directly.
As all laws there are limits to its use. Nutritional labels are comprised of factual content to the product. The government can't force political or other government opinion onto it. Or at the least politically fueled labelling should not be allowed. For example forcing a company to host images on their cigarette packs. This should be unconstitutional.
General opinion especially political is protected, or at least is meant to be. People can make political products, but they have to be factual in their contents.
This isn't very related to the issue of social media - the posts are from other people including the government. You can't compel a company to host your opinions. You could compel them to list factual information about its content/origin though.
The freedom of individuals is more important than the freedom of corporations.
When the freedom of people to speak clashes with the freedom of corporations to not allow that speech, it's better to side with more speech (i.e. the side of the people).
There's a bizarre doublethink at work here, where people claim at the same time that social media companies should not be held responsible for speech on their platforms, hence section 230, but also that that speech is "their speech", hence forcing them to host speech is compelled speech. If it's their speech, they should be held responsible for it. If it's not, it's not compelled speech to force them to host it.
The entire rationale for section 230 was to allow online services to exercise editorial control over user-generated content — to not be a neutral host of all legal content — while also not holding them civilly liable as a publisher with certain narrow exceptions (but also leaving them criminally liable for anything that would carry criminal liability.)
So what you are suggesting is so e kind of doublethink blending support for 230 with something conflicting with 230 is, instead, exactly just support of 230.
But the choice to sell books (e.g., distributors) has, like the situation of online UGC service providers, always carried lesser liability than publication, but the choice to carry or not carry particular books is still a First Amendment activity. The idea that it's not your own free expression if it doesn't have exactly the set of legal liabilities traditionally associated with the publisher role is bizarre and indefensible.
> The entire rationale for section 230 was to allow online services to exercise editorial control over user-generated content — to not be a neutral host of all legal content — while also not holding them civilly liable as a publisher with certain narrow exceptions (but also leaving them criminally liable for anything that would carry criminal liability.)
I don't disagree with that and I don't see how it refutes my comment.
> But the choice to sell books (e.g., distributors) has, like the situation of online UGC service providers, always carried lesser liability than publication, but the choice to carry or not carry particular books is still a First Amendment activity.
Unlike online UGC service providers, bookstores can be forced to remove defamatory books[1] in the US. There's a reason there's a law specifically for UGC service providers, and you cannot defend this while at the same time demanding that they get treated like book stores when it comes to compelled speech.
> Unlike online UGC service providers, bookstores can be forced to remove defamatory books in the US. There's a reason there's a law specifically for UGC service providers, and you cannot defend this while at the same time demanding that they get treated like book stores when it comes to compelled speech.
Sure I can, since the plain text of the law in question only removes publisher (which are not notice-based), not the notice-based obligations and liability of a distributor. As the article you cite here argues, the extension of 230 beyond what it says on its face to also remove those distributor-style liabilities is a strained interpretation that some courts have adopted that lacks support in the text of the law and is explicitly at odds with it's legislative history and rationale.
So it's quite easy to support the law that exists for UGC service providers and demand they get treated like bookstores and other distributors as regards notice-based removal of defamatory content because that's exactly what application of the law as written does.
The debate over 230 is not, mainly, about this one area where some courts have applied it out of line with it's plain text.
Them not being legally responsible for other users content does not mean their speech isn't compelled when they want to remove content but cannot. You're telling a company they have to pay for someones speech on their own platform.
So they just don't have to operate in Poland if they don't like the laws. Block polish IPS, prohibit poles from using. If the removals are so important to them.
> It costs money to host content. Forcing a business to host content costs them
We force businesses to do a lot of things. The compliance costs here, for example, are a rounding error compared to GDPR compliance costs (especially around the ability to look up your own data), or right-to-be-forgotten compliance costs.
It's possible this is a bad law, but this is a sorta weak argument.
It would be compelled speech if I pretended my racist tweets are the official stance of Twitter. I don’t see how keeping them up is forcing Twitter to say something when they are just moving bytes around.
This is also demonstrably damaging to the effected party. It costs money to host content. Forcing a business to host content costs them - is poland going to fund this? No.
If the polish government has a problem with it then they should make their own government backed social media platform. Not violate people's rights.