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“The CEOs of Twitter, Facebook and Google rebuffed accusations of anti-conservative bias at a Senate hearing Wednesday and promised to aggressively defend their platforms from being used to sow chaos in next week’s election… the Trump administration has asked Congress to strip some of the protections that have generally shielded the tech companies from legal responsibility for what people post on their platforms. The proposals would make changes to a provision of a 1996 law that has been the foundation for unfettered speech on the internet. Critics in both parties say that immunity under Section 230 of the law enables the social media companies to abdicate their responsibility to impartially moderate content.” AP News
Read our prior coverage of the issue. The Flip Side
The right accuses big tech of anti-conservative bias.
“Mr. Dorsey said that Twitter’s Beijing-like blackout of the New York Post story was the result of a ‘hacked materials policy,’ but he admitted to Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson that he had no evidence of Russian interference or fabrication. He told Texas Sen. Ted Cruz that the policy of blocking links was ‘incorrect, and we changed it within 24 hours.’…
“Yet a Twitter representative emailed a press memo on Tuesday ahead of the hearing that seemed to boast of Twitter’s blackout. It quoted tweets by two officials at the German Marshall Fund—a Washington think-tank that advocates more political suppression on social media—praising the decision to censor the story. Does Twitter’s CEO have control over the policy? Or does the company simply want to blunt the political heat for its suppression, on false pretenses, of newsworthy information about the possible future First Family?”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“Who could have guessed that Jack Dorsey wouldn’t come prepared to answer the most basic questions about why some dubious information gets banned and other dubious information remains free as a bird? It’s only the core critique of Twitter’s attempt to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, after all. And it’s *been* the core critique of the platform ever since they began their policy of appending advisories to propaganda pushed by certain world leaders (Trump) but not others (literally everyone else)…
“If Trump tweets nonsense about the fraudulence of mail-in ballots, they’re johnny on the spot. If the Chinese government tweets nonsense about Americans having seeded the coronavirus pandemic in Wuhan, they’ll *maybe* get around to flagging it. Eventually. After they’ve flagged some Trump tweet first and need to find someone else to flag in order to seem evenhanded…
“What’s the difference between a vicious anti-semitic lie about what was done to Europe’s Jews in World War II and a not-yet-discredited story about Joe and Hunter Biden trying to drum up business in China? Answer: Only one of those affects the Democrats’ chances of winning next week’s election, and so that’s the one that needs to be suppressed.”
Allahpundit, Hot Air
“DOJ's proposal revises Section 230(c)(2)(A) to narrow the range of removable content. This means that platforms would no longer have total discretion to remove merely ‘objectionable’ content… [In addition] For the platforms to be understood as acting in ‘good faith,’ DOJ's definition would require them to abide by their own terms of service, refrain from restricting access to material on pretextual or deceptive grounds, apply their terms of service evenly and provide notice to anyone whose content the platform wishes to remove…
“Reforming Section 230 along the lines that the DOJ has proposed would incentivize platforms to adopt fair terms of service, apply those terms consistently and think long and hard before banning users for lawful speech. Our political discourse, and the health of our democracy, would be better because of it.”
Will Chamberlain, Newsweek
Regarding proposals to repeal Section 230 entirely, “Section 230 enshrines free speech as a guiding principle online by protecting websites from being held liable for what its users post. As it stands right now, an individual can tweet something defamatory, and they would be sued, not Twitter. Without it, almost no social media company or even a news site with a comment section would be able to afford the costs of content moderation to let users post. That is, except for Facebook…
“With billions of users worldwide and a market cap approaching $800 billion, Facebook knows that between its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, it's the dominant social media platform, significantly more than Twitter. But that will not last forever, and Zuckerberg knows it, so now is the time for Facebook to ask the government to step in with a wildly onerous and expensive regulation to crowd out any potential competitors.”
Tiana Lowe, Washington Examiner
The left calls for big tech to take further steps to remove disinformation.
The left calls for big tech to take further steps to remove disinformation.
“‘Who the hell elected you, Mr. Dorsey?’ Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas asked the Twitter boss. Twitter, he claimed, had censored the New York Post’s article about the emails in Hunter Biden’s laptop, while ‘gleefully’ allowing the New York Times story about Trump’s taxes to be posted unimpeded. “Why do you persist in behaving like a Democratic super Pac?’ ‘You almost always censor — block content, fact check, or label content — of conservatives,’ said Mike Lee, Republican from Utah. ‘But I don’t see the suppression of high-profile liberals. How about Obama? Planned Parenthood? Emily’s list?’…
“There are reasonable answers to these questions… Liberals don’t get fact-checked as much as Trump because his tweets are often not just untrue but, when the subject is Covid-19, genuinely harmful. And while Dorsey said it was a mistake for Twitter to have blocked the New York Post story — and the decision was reversed within 24 hours — the real reason, as Zuckerberg explained, was that the FBI had warned the social media companies to be on the lookout for a ‘hack and leak’ operation close to the election.”
Joe Nocera, Bloomberg
“On the whole, data shows that conservative content thrives on social media. Conservative pundits like Dan Bongino and Ben Shapiro consistently rank among the most shared news sources on Facebook… And despite all the hoopla about Twitter’s alleged censoring of Trump, the president still uses the platform every day to reach tens of millions more followers than Joe Biden does…
“Republican senators asked why tech companies haven’t fact-checked high-profile Democratic leaders like Biden as much as they have Trump, but they ignored the very obvious answer: that Trump, unlike Biden, has more frequently promoted false and misleading statements on social media. If Biden were to attack mail-in voting or the basic science behind Covid-19, as Trump has, he would likely face the same kind of moderation.”
Shirin Ghaffary, Vox
“Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act gives social media companies the power to filter, block, and remove information that is ‘obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable’ without risk of legal liability. Congress knew that federal agencies didn’t have the resources to tackle all online dreck, so it secured a legal shield for online platforms to do the work… If the Trump proposal [to limit Section 230] were law, tech companies could risk liability for removing ads targeted at Black users that spread lies. Twitter likely would do nothing in the face of destructive falsehoods like ‘you cannot vote if someone in your household has committed a crime.’…
“The Senate hearing and the Trump proposal are obvious attempts to suppress private speech. The First Amendment stands as a check against government censorship. It doesn’t restrict private entities, which themselves have free speech rights… Governmental threats that stop tech companies from combating disinformation are far more dangerous to our constitutional values than social-media companies engaging in content moderation.”
Danielle Keats Citron and Spencer Overton, Slate
“The Federal Trade Commission should publish guidance that clarifies the blurry line between content hosting and content creation… Platforms should include reporting functionality that makes it easier to hold people accountable for their speech on online platforms. For instance, platforms could enable people to report election misinformation directly to an election monitoring organization or to a state attorney general’s office…
“[Finally], platforms should provide better data for studying online expression… [These] reforms will not solve all of the problems of online expression, but they will deter and punish some of the most harmful activity, provide more clarity on liability for users and platforms, and give us more data to inform future product design and policy development.”
Matt Perault, Slate
