LOS ANGELES—As AVN reported in July, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a new bill aimed at regulating online speech, the “Eliminating Abuse and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technology Act,” or EARN IT. The bill is sponsored by Republican Commitee Chair Lindsey Graham, but, two leading Democrats — Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Dianne Feinstein of California — have also signed on.
The bill has raised alarm among digital civil liberties advocates such as The Electronic Frontier Foundation, but also among the sex-worker community.
By stripping protections for sites, such as Facebook, that allow posts which could be broadly construed as “sex trafficking,” as well as scaling back end-to-end encryption, EARN IT will likely lead to increased surveillance and monitoring of sex workers online. In addition, the definition of “sex trafficking” in the bill remains so vague that almost any adult content could fall under the terms, and face an online ban.
According to a new report by the Washington D.C think-tank The Brookings Institute, however, the United States is far from alone in the world, in the effort to crack down on internet free expression.
“We are witnessing a shift in the primary driver of regulation from protecting innovation at all costs to ostensibly protecting aggrieved citizens at all cost,” wrote authors David Morar and Bruna Martins dos Santos, in the report published Monday by Brookings. “The U.S., Europe, and Brazil are in the throes of a fundamental intermediary liability legislative fight: who deserves safeguarding, what are the major threats, and can government rewrite the rules without pulling the plug on the internet as we know it?”
In the U.S. EARN IT would further roll back liability protections afforded to online platforms under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. The Brookings report details similar legislative efforts abroad.
In 2017, Germany passed the “Network Enforcement Act,” which requires sites with more than 2 million users — such as any of the leading social media sites – to remove “obviously illegal” or “manisfestly unlawful” content with 24 hours of receiving a complaint.
Earlier this year, France followed suit, with its own law, which it titled “Fighting Hate on the Internet.” But the country’s high court struck down the law just a few months after its passage. The court “found it to be an attack on freedom of expression among many other concerns,” according to the Brookings report.
The opposite happened in Germany, however, where in June the Bundestag, or parliament passed an even more strict version of the law, requiring platforms not only to remove “unlawful” content, but to file a report with law enforcement about any deleted posts.
In June, Brazil passed its own law, modeled on the German legislation, titled “Brazilian Law of Freedom, Liability, and Transparency on the Internet.” But Brazil’s law appears weaker than the German version, requiring only “mandatory transparency reports, political content disclosure, and ensuring due process and appeals for content moderation decisions,” as described by the Brookings report.
The Brazilian law is designed to combat so-called “fake news,” but otherwise is similar in many respects to the EARN IT Act, according to the Brookings report.
Brookings counted 13 countries that have passed some version of the German law, which is known as NetzDG. The most severe in cracking down on speech, according to an EFF report, was passed in Turkey on July 29. The law is a response by Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, after several Twitter posts attacked his daughter and son-in-law.
The Turkish law requires platforms to “remove content that allegedly violates ‘personal rights’ and the ‘privacy of personal life’ within 48 hours of receiving a court order or face heavy fines,” according to the EFF summary.
The EARN IT Act has yet to come to a vote in the full Senate, however, despite Graham’s intent to push it to a vote by the end of August. Brazil’s internet speech law also remains stuck in that country’s legislature, according to the Brookings report.
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