LOS ANGELES—Joe Biden and Donald Trump did not agree on much during the 2020 presidential campaign. But one policy view they both shared was that Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act — the 26-word piece of 25-year-old legislation that is often described as the “First Amendment of the Internet” — should be repealed. The law, which experts have called vital to the growth of the internet as a forum for communication and commerce.
The law is especially important for the adult industry which relies on freedom from censorship and speech restrictions for its very existence. But Section 230 has come under attack in the past year from all sides of the political spectrum, with Republicans and Democrats in Congress combining to introduce a staggering 25 bills in just the last year to cut back on the freedoms protected by the law. Seven of those anti-Section 230 bills have been introduced in the new, 117th Congress which opened less than three full months ago.
Section 230 protects online platforms from legal liability over user-created content. That shield allows platforms that publish millions, even billions, of pieces of such content every day to avoid monitoring everything that they post. Without Section 230, critics fear, sites would be forced to simply shut down most content posting or impose strict censorship to avoid the impossible task of policing their entire sites.
On Thursday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will summon the CEOS of three online mega-corporations to testify about how they use or, in the view of many in Congress, abuse Section 230 to regulate content on their platforms. Facebook Chair Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter founder and boss Jack Dorsey, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai will all appear before the committee to give testimony.
The hearing — the third since October with all three top tech CEOS — will be streamed live via YouTube starting at noon Eastern on Thursday, March 25. The livestream will be available at this link. The title of the hearing is “Disinformation Nation: Social Media’s Role in Promoting Extremism and Misinformation.”
Some legal experts, however, question the point of the congressional hearings, saying that even without Section 230, free expression online would be protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
“Congress is really complaining about speech that is lawful...and they just don’t like it,” Santa Clara University law professor told Yahoo News. “We call that censorship.”
The inventory of 25 bills aimed at curtailing Section 230 in the past year does not include a new effort by House Democrat David Cicilline, who chairs the Judiciary Committee’s Antitrust Subcommittee. Cicilline says that he is now crafting legislation aimed at penalizing online platforms if they employ algorithms that promote objectionable content.
Also on the recent agenda is the SAFE Tech Act, a bill sponsored by three Senate Democrats that would remove Section 230 protections from platforms that have “accepted payment” for making speech available to the public, a provision that would cover most of the big social media companies.
Photo By Gerd Altmann / Pixabay
