Platforms claim a 1996 legal category never designed to anticipate them

Evidence

Although they were not included in or anticipated by the law, social media platforms have generally claimed that they enjoy its safe harbor. Section 230, designed to apply to online services and access providers, included a third category awkwardly called “access software providers” to capture these early sites that hosted content provided by users. Such a site is defined as “a provider of software (including client or server software), or enabling tools that do any one or more of the following: (a) filter, screen, allow, or disallow content; (b) pick, choose, analyze, or digest content; or (c) transmit, receive, display, forward, cache, search, subset, organize, reorganize, or translate content.” Contemporary social media platforms fit this category, but they also complicate it. This definition might capture YouTube’s ability to host, sort, and queue up user-submitted videos, but it is an ill fit for YouTube’s ContentID techniques for identifying and monetizing copyrighted material. It may approximate some of what Facebook offers, but it could hardly have anticipated Facebook’s NewsFeed algorithm. — Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet, 120

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the ‘content/conduit’ legal distinction also central to Milgrom’s law merchant work on private versus state classification of intermediary roles. — connects to: Free expression can be reframed as a product of, not a rival to, restriction — Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet: Platforms,…, 93; A minor safe-harbor amendment survived the CDA’s full repeal and reshaped platform law — Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet: Platforms,…, 108; Platform custodianship was not evident to companies at their start — Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet: Platforms,…, 626 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Platform custodianship was not evident to companies at their start #expands (0.85) — Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet, 626
• Assimile legal status was never defined because defining it would grant unintended rights #corroborates (0.82)