Photograph: Paramount Pictures/Sportsphoto/Allstar
How did we get to a week in which the world’s richest man could label our safeguarding minister and women’s rights campaigner Jess Phillips a “rape genocide apologist”, and the boss of the world’s biggest social platforms could abandon moderating even the most despicable content in the US?
Let’s go back 30 years. It’s 1995, cargo pants were slung low, Oasis were riding high. We were all going to Live Forever. And then the New York supreme court ruled against a long-forgotten company called Prodigy, which hosted online message boards. An unknown user had posted a message that the brokerage firm Stratton Oakmont (which had inspired The Wolf of Wall Street) had committed fraud. Stratton Oakmont sued for defamation and a crucial question was asked: was the site that hosted the comment responsible for it, in the way a traditional publisher would be for a comment on its letters page? The court decided that, because Prodigy had moderators and content guidelines, it was responsible. Another company that didn’t moderate had previously gone unpunished.
