It’s called Section 230. In media terms, it was written eons ago. It’s the section of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 that exempts social media for responsibility for what they purvey. Holocaust denial? Sexual abuse? Calls to terrorism?
Calls to insurrection at the US Capitol? You name it, the social media are exempt under Section 230. Why? The social media do not originate their content. They are not “publishers,” to use the formal term in Section 230. Rather, they are “providers” or “users.”
Ergo, they are not responsible for the consequences of what others “publish” and they only “provide.”
Social media hail Section 230 as a bulwark of free speech. They fight tooth and nail at any attempt to modify it. That seems fair and logical. If Facebook, for example, never says that the Holocaust never happened, but merely reports that David Irving says the Holocaust never happened, then Facebook is not “publishing” false information. Rather, David Irving is. If you don’t like it, go after David Irving (as Prof. Deborah Lipstadt did in her book on Holocaust denial).
What I find fascinating, almost charming, about this debate is that the entities that are most active in undermining Section 230’s very broad exemption of liability are not the enemies of social media, and not the enemies of free speech, but the social media themselves.
One cannot hear loud enough or often enough that Facebook, again just to take one example, is marshalling untold resources to keep Holocaust denial off its platform. In other words, the entities most directly limiting Section 230 are the owners of the social media.
Holocaust denial is not the only target of social media. Potential “publishers” of sexual abuse, for example, are also the object of formidable search engines seeking to cancel it, say the owners of social media
How ironic, therefore, that when the US Senate this month almost unanimously decided to ban child abuse from social media (when did the Senate last unanimously decide anything?), who howls the loudest? The owners of social media. They do not want to be held financially liable under state and federal laws, and criminally liable under state laws, for merely “providing” child abuse material.
Congressional action undermines the spirit and the letter of Section 230, they say. But who undermines it more broadly than Congress ever could?
Owners of social media.
The point is clear. It is not logical — in fact it is as illogical as it gets — to “provide” uncountable billions or trillions of pieces of information and photos and then claim, “I didn’t eat it, the dog did.”
In 1996, when Section 230 was formulated, in no more than 26 words, with neither statutory requirements nor statutory exceptions, we all lived in a very different world. Internet was in its infancy. (Remember Al Gore claiming credit for the “information superhighway”?) Email was still a big deal. The phone of the day was the flip phone, now figuratively and literally in the graveyard. Nobody could predict the idea of the likes of Facebook and its reach, not even Mark Zuckerberg, who founded the company in 2004.
What is logical and fair is to revisit the long outdated Section 230.
Not that I think this would be easy, and perhaps not even possible.
The technology in the largest social media is so large that the proprietors of the social media themselves do not seem to know how to control it.
It’s easy to say: No child abuse allowed on social media. Otherwise, you can be sued, and possibly jailed. It’s quite something else to manipulate the pertinent technology to extirpate child abuse, and that’s even without the limitlessly clever (and evil) techies who would want to evade the ban, whatever the law might say.
Take Mark Zuckerberg at his word. He wanted to connect the world. He wanted to put people in touch with each other. He had an idealistic vision.
Grant all that, for the sake of argument. But what happened? He created, yes, a platform that does actualize many of his ideals, but he also created a monster. It is bigger than he is, it is bigger than Congress, it is bigger than anyone.
It is not the law that challenges the evil (real and potential) that social media “provide.” The biggest challenge is the technology of the social media itself.
Copyright © 2022 by the Intermountain Jewish News
