Section of 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act has served as the foundational law that makes open communication on the internet possible. As the Electronic Freedom Foundation explains, Section 230 prevents any “interactive computer service” from being treated legally as a “publisher,” essentially keeping websites and internet service providers from being held liable for content posted by third parties.
That means social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, or any newspaper or site that hosts an online comments section—as well as any other site—may not be, for example, sued for libel if a user makes a libelous comment or post.
Without Section 230, sites would be required to monitor ever piece of content posted by anyone—clearly a task so unwieldy as to be effectively impossible. But Section 230 has recently found itself under attack, with its protections chipped away by the supposed anti-sex-trafficking law FOSTA/SESTA, which creates a loophole in the law for sites that post content that promotes “sex trafficking.”
Now, however, a first-term Republican Senator from Missouri, 39-year-old Josh Hawley (pictured above), wants to do away with Section 230 once and for all, introducing a Senate bill on Wednesday which he has titled the Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act.
The bill, which would apply only to “big tech” firms—those with in excess of 30 million United States-based users, 300 million worldwide users, or $500 million in annual revenue—strips Section 230 protections from the most widely used and successful platforms on the internet, and would “blow up business models for Facebook, YouTube and other tech giants,” according to a CNBC report.
“His bill is meant to punish Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other new-media giants for their ostensible discrimination against conservatives,” wrote legal journalist Mark Joseph Stern, in a Slate.com report on Hawley’s bill. “This alleged bias, a frequent Republican complaint, is unproven and unlikely to exist.”
Under the bill, “big tech” companies could have their Section 230 protections restored only if they were able to persuade four members of the five-member Federal Trade Commission that they do not “moderate” content in a way that is “politically biased.”
Hawley’s bill, however, likely faces an uphill battle in Congress, with even the conservative Americans for Prosperity, a lobbying group sponsored by the right-wing billionaire Koch family, opposing the bill, saying that Hawley’s legislation “creates a scenario where government has the ability to police your speech and determine what you can or cannot say online.”
The bill would also take away the ability of platforms to “moderate illegal content like human trafficking and violent extremism,” according to Michael Beckerman, CEO of the Internet Association, the lobbying group that represents many of the “big tech” companies that would be in effect turned upside-down by Hawley’s bill.
Photo By Natureofthought / Wikimedia Commons
