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I've seen this question come up a few times, and some of it is answered in this post from a few years ago, but let me try to answer @opinionhaver.bsky.social's question directly since he asks this every time 230 comes up. www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/h...

"Well, then, we really don't need 230 since 1A will protect." But that's wrong, as @ericgoldman.bsky.social neatly lays out in this paper. 230 provides a procedural benefit to get rid of *frivolous* cases *that would lose* but does so much earlier. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

The *practical* difference, especially for smaller entities, is MASSIVE. Basically it will get a case tossed out for ~$100k rather than over $2mil. For a massive multi-billion company (Meta, Google, etc) with buildings full of lawyers, the difference is minimal.

Yes, they will have to pay a little bit more, but rounding error levels. For a smaller entity, the difference is existential. And that means that smaller entities will have terrible options: (1) shut down (2) cave to basically any legal threats (3) stop allowing users to communicate or...

Why wouldn’t these cases increase as the number of users/posts does? The more content the greater your liability exposure. This seems to take as given that both Bluesky and meta will face the same number of these cases, but there’s an order of magnitude more content on one.