As many folks here now recognize, the story about Backpage was grossly misleading. While the narrative pushed by politicians and the media was that the company was engaged in sex trafficking, the DOJ had actually commended the company for being a strong partner in the fight against sex trafficking. Indeed, the eventual takedown of Backpage days before FOSTA went into effect (which we were told was necessary to shut down Backpage) has been shown to make life more difficult for law enforcement trying to stop sex trafficking.
But I thought politicians told us the truth? /s
tl;Dr The court made a weird ruling that says there is no secondary liability (Backpage) but there is tertiary liability (providers they purchase or contract with).
That seems insane to me. It’s like trying to hold Microsoft liable for providing the operating systems and Outlook. Or Adobe because some of the ads no doubt use Photoshop.
5th circuit gonna 5th circuit
Mike Masnick is usually right about most things, but in this case section 230 is just the wrong defense to use. That really is meant for hosting providers, not software providers. Doesn’t mean they will be held liable, or should be, but it has nothing to do with section 230 as I understand it.
I mean, Salesforce is SaaS. They have to log in to Salesforce accounts on Salesforce servers to do the CRM angle, so if the crimes allegedly happened in the SF Cloud, then they would be the provider in that case.
Still nutty to go after them. They don’t monitor what each and every client uses SF for.
The flaw with Backpage was that they engaged in moderation of sex workers posts.
If they hadn’t done that it might be a different story but they directly specifically edited posts to increase engagement
Backpage moderated some posts, sure. But what was the role of Salesforce here besides supplying a software package?
when I ran my own business I had a support deal with my main software vendor. Maybe something like that is being held against them?
No way, that would make software providers liable for users missing their software. It’d be like MS being on the hook for terrorism if the Taliban used Windows on a laptop to manage their stuff.
expecting the government to act sensibly and logically is a real easy path to madness
Truth. But, the big problem is setting whacko precedents. Maybe a better contemporary example would be the fed going after Apple because Luigi had an iPhone. All of a sudden, software providers start monitoring their programs’ users for signs they might be subject to a lawsuit.
