Moderation was legally punished, creating a perverse incentive not to police content

Evidence

Four years later, in 1995, an early provider of web services called Prodigy was sued for a defamatory anonymous posting on one of its message boards. This time a New York state court came to the opposite conclusion. The key problem as the court saw it was that Prodigy had exercised editorial control by moderating its message boards. The company established content guidelines and deleted posts that violated those standards. The court concluded that Prodigy was a publisher, not merely a distributor, because it had taken responsibility for the content on its site. Were the court’s ruling to stand, internet companies would face “a paradoxical no-win situation: the more an ISP tried to keep obscene or harmful material away from its users, the more it would be liable for that material.” Internet companies faced a binary choice: “free speech savior or shield for scoundrels?” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 357

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses the intuition that moderating = responsible; resonates with contemporary debates where platforms are attacked both for censoring and for hosting harmful content. — connects to: Discipline created a private penal system punishing what state law ignored — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 274; Penal policy ignores the criminal psyche and acts on market incentives — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at…, 1357; Prohibitions without enforcement can make severe abuse harder to detect — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 7800 (+2 more)
• SHARE: The paradox that moderation increased liability is a sharp counterintuitive nugget for anyone in internet law or platform policy.

Broader Connections

• Discipline created a private penal system punishing what state law ignored #expands (0.85) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 274
• Prohibition laws work as normative signals, not criminal sanctions #expands (0.75) — , The Rod and the Child, 10897
• Penal policy ignores the criminal psyche and acts on market incentives #complicates (0.72) — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 1357
• Prohibitions without enforcement can make severe abuse harder to detect #corroborates (0.72) — , The Rod and the Child, 7800
• Overbroad statutes are tainted when prohibiting both protected and criminal conduct #exemplifies (0.70) — Ruggero J. Aldisert, Agatha D. Aldisert, Logic for Lawyers- A Guide to Clear…, 844