During the adoption of the 1996 WIPO treaties and the 1998 US DMCA, this safe harbor rule was characterized as a balance between the rights of the public to publish online and the interest of rightsholders whose material might be infringed upon. The idea was that things that were likely to be infringing would be immediately removed once the platform received a notification, but that platforms would ignore spurious or obviously fraudulent takedowns.

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That's not how it worked out. Whether it's Sony Music claiming to own your performance of "Fur Elise" or a war criminal claiming authorship over a newspaper story about his crimes, platforms nuke first and ask questions never. Why not? If they ignore a takedown and get it wrong, they suffer dire consequences ($150,000 per claim). But if they take action on a dodgy claim, there are *no* consequences. Of *course* they're just going to delete anything they're asked to delete.

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This is how platforms always handle liability, and that's a lesson we really should have internalized. After all, the DMCA is the second-most famous intermediary liability system for the internet - the most (in)famous is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

This is a 27-word law that says that platforms are not liable for civil damages arising from their users' speech. Now, this is a US law, and in the US, there aren't many civil damages from speech to begin with.

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The First Amendment makes it very hard to get a libel judgment, and even when these judgments are secured, damages are typically limited to "actual damages" - generally a low sum. Most of the worst online speech is actually *not* illegal: hate speech, misinformation and disinformation are all covered by the First Amendment.

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Notwithstanding the First Amendment, there *are* categories of speech that US law criminalizes: actual threats of violence, criminal harassment, and committing certain kinds of legal, medical, election or financial fraud. These are all exempted from Section 230, which only provides immunity for *civil* suits, not criminal ones.

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In other words, if you made a #MeToo accusation, or if you were a gig worker using an online forum to organize a union, or if you were blowing the whistle on your employer's toxic waste leaks, or if you were any other under-resourced person being bullied by a wealthy, powerful person or organization, that organization could shut you up by threatening to sue the platform that hosted your speech. The platform would immediately cave.

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But those same rich and powerful people would have access to the lawyers and back-channels that would prevent you from doing the same to them - that's why Sony can get your Brahms recital taken down, but you can't turn around and do the same to them.

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This is true of every intermediary liability system, and it's been true since the earliest days of the internet, and it keeps getting proven to be true. Six years ago, Trump signed SESTA/FOSTA, a law that allowed platforms to be held civilly liable by survivors of sex trafficking. At the time, advocates claimed that this would *only* affect "sexual slavery" and would not impact consensual sex-work.

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But from the start, and ever since, SESTA/FOSTA has *primarily* targeted consensual sex-work, to the immediate, lasting, and profound harm of sex workers:

https://hackinghustling.org/what-is-sesta-fosta/

SESTA/FOSTA killed "bad date" forums where sex workers circulated details of violent and unstable clients, killed online booking sites that allowed sex workers to screen clients, and killed the payment processors that let sex workers avoid holding unsafe amounts of cash:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/09/fight-overturn-fosta-unconstitutional-internet-censorship-law-continues

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SESTA/FOSTA made voluntary sex work more dangerous - and also made life harder for law enforcement efforts to target sex trafficking:

https://hackinghustling.org/erased-the-impact-of-fosta-sesta-2020/

Despite half a decade of SESTA/FOSTA, despite 15 years of filternets, despite a quarter century of notice-and-takedown, people *continue* to insist that getting rid of safe harbors will punish Big Tech and make life better for everyday internet users.

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