CDA 230 Then and Now: Does Intermediary Immunity Keep the Rest of Us Healthy? | The Recorder

Of course, if the challenged words are really defamatory that might be thought of as an improvement for both injured party and for the reader. But if done without notice to the reader, it smacks of propaganda, and to the extent lawsuits or threats of same can induce defendant publishers to cave—when caving doesn’t entail paying out damages but rather altering the content they’ve stewarded—it could come to happen all too frequently, and with the wrong incentives. Similarly, an AI trained to avoid controversial subjects—perhaps defined as subjects that could give rise to threats of litigation—might be very much against the public interest. This would mirror some of the damaging incentives of Europe’s “right to be forgotten” as developed against search engines. Any refinement of the CDA that could inspire AI-driven content shaping runs this risk, with the perverse solace that even with today’s CDA the major content platforms are already shaping content in ways that are not understandable or reviewable outside the companies.