While Congress was grilling some Big Tech CEOs this week, Democratic leaders in the background were making proposals to change the way Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is written. Unfortunately, there are enough people on both sides of the ideological divide who have become so angry with the actions of Twitter and Facebook, along with the other social media heavyweights, that support for these types of actions seems to be growing. But what House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone (DN.J.) and his cronies plan to do won’t stop some of Jack Dorsey’s and the company’s worst abuses. Instead, it will open the door to unofficial censorship from anyone with insufficiently vigilant opinions and could lead to endless lawsuits not only against the social media platforms, but also against all online content publishers. (Axios)
The question is not Whether technology companies should be regulated, but how, Frank Pallone (DN.J.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, told Axios’ Margaret Harding McGill.
Why it mattersDemocrats, empowered in Congress and enraged by misinformation about vaccines and the election, agree it is time to legislate on technology policy, including updating key law protecting them from liability for user-generated content. The road to passing a bill is a bit clearer, and there are signs that the biggest technology platforms are ready to embrace some changes.
Driving the news: Pallone said he wants to focus on the financial incentives of online platforms to amplify disinformation and extreme content.
Pallone cleverly frames the discussion by talking about “the more scandalous and extremist” content (his words) and how Facebook and Twitter “take advantage” of it, because that’s the kind of content that gets a lot of clicks. It’s a given that flashy, incendiary headlines are drawing attention, and when the Democrats make it sound like the only people to be punished are billionaires like Zuckerberg and Dorsey, it’s easy to get people to open the door to lawsuits and regulations.
We must keep two things in mind here. First, the Communications Decency Act doesn’t just apply to social media platforms. In fact, the original legislation was written long before those platforms were even a twinkle in the eyes of their creators. Those rules apply to any web store where news and opinions are published and, more to the point, any site that allows public comment.
The bigger problem, however, is that opening the door to lawsuits and restrictions involves a system in which someone will have to decide what qualifies as “scandalous and extremist” content. Even labeling something as ‘misinformation’ opens the door to rampant abuse. We’ve already seen far too many examples of Facebook and Twitter blocking content or suspending / banning users (almost entirely conservative votes) for posting observations considered ‘harmful’. This is often done under the guise of supposedly bad information about the pandemic, but those behavioral patterns carry over into discussions of racism, social inequality, and almost any other divisive topic you might want to mention.
People have been banned from Twitter for suggesting that the new coronavirus originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, despite the fact that the former head of the CDC recently said he believes this is also the case. Twitter suspended the New York Post’s account for weeks for linking to one of their own stories about Hunter Biden that ended up being 100% justified. (Dorsey told Congress this week that the decision was “a mistake,” but declined to say who made the decision or what process was used to evaluate the content.) Other examples abound.
The point is, there will be no clear definitions of what speech is allowed and what is “dangerous, extreme misinformation” other than the ones generated by the publishers. And with section 230 changed in the way the Democrats propose, liberals will soon be dragging comment sections off websites like the one you’re reading right now. Once they find someone who quotes the medical study from Denmark saying that fabric face masks are ineffective in protecting uninfected people from contracting the virus, they can file a lawsuit against our company for allowing ‘dangerous misinformation ‘appears on our site. . (Despite the fact that the results of that study have never been disproved.)
These lawsuits will (or at least should) eventually fail under the First Amendment, but too many of these frivolous attacks will create huge legal bills that will cause some smaller publishers to go out of business. So please don’t be too quick to support Pallone’s proposal just because you think it will punish Facebook and Twitter. There is a Trojan horse hidden in this plan and the Democrats are fully aware of it. It’s not a bug. It’s a function.