Section 230 relieves internet service providers from statements published by others. In other words, if you wrote a defamatory comment on my blog, it would be *you* and not *me* who is held liable for that defamation. The theory — I didn’t write it, and I didn’t have control over it.

Now, of course, I do have the control to delete it. And, I could do so without losing my Section 230 protection because Congress wisely put a “good samaritan” clause in 230 — which allows me to do the right thing in some instances without automatically becoming a “publisher.”

In the case of this blog, it might not be overwhelming labor for me to police my comments. But, it is something that I don’t regularly do. I barely have time to write the blog, let alone censor comments.

Increase the scale now… imagine Craigslist or Yahoo! Groups, or Autoadmit. If they had to police every post, do you think they would continue to operate? Or do you think that they would just shut down? I think the latter.

Now lets think about newspapers… Newspapers that print classified ads have a person who takes the ad, a person who typesets the ad, and there may even be a proofreader. We have at least three sets of eyes that consider the content before printing. A newspaper sure wouldn’t let an ad go through that said “Fuck You,” and they can exercise the same control to eliminate ads that say “Whites Only.”

No matter how you slice it, newspapers are not a public forum. My “comments sections” and Craigslist’s ads, and AutoAdmit’s forums are public fora that can only exist if the actual liability goes to the author of the unlawful post. Putting liability on them would be like putting liability on the city for anything spoken in a public park.