There is little to suggest that tampering with Section 230 will address all the issues that the public has with the state today of online speech, writes hiltzikm.
Politicians say they’re concerned about misinformation on Twitter and Facebook, but they’re blowing smoke.
As I’ve reported before, congressional hoppers are brimming with proposals to regulate tweets, Facebook posts and the methods those platforms use to winnow out objectionable content posted by their users. There’s no evidence that the online platforms have systematically suppressed conservative opinion — that’s just a talking point of conservatives such as Sen. Ted Cruz and former President Trump. And progressives haven’t been militating against conservative speech, butspeech and harmful misinformation, which the major platforms themselves claim to officially prohibit.
The 26 words cited by Kosseff state, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” The power of Section 230 wasn’t evident when it was passed in 1996. Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube didn’t even exist at the time; the impetus for the law came from some legal rulings affecting CompuServe and Prodigy, interactive services that no longer exist as independent operations today.
The plaintiffs blame YouTube for amplifying the message of ISIS videos posted on the service by steering users who viewed the videos to other videos either posted by ISIS or addressing the same themes of violent terrorism, typically through algorithms. YouTube, the plaintiffs assert, has been “useful in facilitating social networking among jihadists,” and that it knew that the content in question was posted on its site.
In legal terms, Section 230 itself isn’t the subject before the court. The question the justices are asked to resolve is whether YouTube and other platforms move beyond the role of mere publishers or distributors of someone else’s content when they make “targeted recommendations” steering users to related content, including when they do so via automated algorithms.
Nor has the process of recommending content to users been in question. “The entire purpose of Section 230 was to give the platforms discretion as to how they present user content,” Kosseff told me.
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