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Pastimes : Investment Chat Board Lawsuits -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sense who wrote (12268)	11/29/2019 1:14:21 AM
From: Jeffrey S. Mitchell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12465

As for Facebook, there is a saying that if the product is free to you, as Facebook is, you are the product. Facebook makes money from selling user data to allow their advertisers to reach a much more targeted audience vs the old-fashioned email spam or direct mail pieces. My personal opinion is that anytime you control who receives a message, you are indeed a publisher. By way of example, say ACME Tractor creates really retailed ads about how their tractors blow away the competition. They then buy generic ads on Facebook which Facebook then runs as is to 10,000 random users. Assuming nine of ten people in general are not farmers, maybe 1000 people even read the ads. Contrast that to Facebook instead charging much more money to ACME to reach "just" 2000 users, but with a guarantee that these 2000 are all farmers. The key difference here with my prior "ride board" example is that it is Facebook making the decision as to who receives a given message as opposed to Facebook reacting to someone else's decision. But, of course, Facebook has billions of dollars and a team of lawyers. It's hard to see anyone with deep enough pockets to take them on to reach such a verdict. Rather, my sense is that Facebook would find it way cheaper to just pay people off who challenge them on this if need be, as opposed to losing a cash cow. - Jeff

To: sense who wrote (12268)	12/3/2019 12:13:05 PM
From: SI Dave	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12465

The issue of wanting to be a "publisher" and "not a publisher" It's a distinction without a difference; that's merely a false distinction narrated by talking heads in the MSM that simply do not know what they are talking about. Federal law 47 U.S.C. 230 specifically immunized interactive computer services from liability which arises from third-party content on their websites. There are some very narrow exceptions; copyright, federal criminal law, and, more recently, sex trafficking. the law unequivocally states that they "shall not be treated as the publisher" of third party content. It doesn't matter at all what they call themselves. In 1996, Congress knowingly and deliberately (and with rare great foresight) decided to treat online publishers differently from traditional print publishers. That decision laid the foundation for the modern internet and the domination of social media and other interactive websites by the United States companies, as opposed to countries that would hold them liable for their user's content. So, Facebook isn't trying to trying to be either or both; they are an interactive computer service, as defined by 47 U.S.C. 230, and they are immunized from liability for their users' content and for their editorial decisions to publish, not publish or remove such content. All the discussion of "publisher" or "not publisher" is simply a false narrative without any distinction under the prevailing law.