https://www.wsj.com/articles/kill-section-230-you-kill-the-internet-11561924578
The internet was almost killed in its cradle. Will it happen again? In October 1994, an anonymous poster on Money Talk, a bulletin board run by the early online service Prodigy, accused Long Island brokerage firm Stratton Oakmont of fraud. Yes, that Stratton Oakmont, of Leonardo DiCaprio and “Wolf of Wall Street” movie fame. Fraud central. But in 1995 Stratton Oakmont sued Prodigy for defamation. The firm claimed the online service was liable as a publisher because Prodigy posted content guidelines that human “board leaders” enforced and deployed software that screened for offensive language. Sound familiar?
Amazingly, Prodigy lost the case. This prompted Congress to insert language into the Communications Decency Act of 1996, known as Section 230: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
That’s all it took to enable the online world as we know it today. Online companies can claim they are a bunch of disk drives and, with few exceptions, innocently passing along whatever their users post on them. Without Section 230, tort lawyers would have smothered the internet. Facebook , Twitter and Google today would be Little Tech—if they existed at all.
Section 230 also allows companies to restrict content that is “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.” With these “community standards,” online companies can remove anything and can’t be sued.
There’s a wide lane between moderating hate speech (Facebook Live of Christchurch shooting) and crippling free speech (banning conservative voices). OK, but Facebook and the like are often governed by the court of public opinion, with its varying views on fake news, identity politics and political meddling. Seems lots of folks are triggered by what they see online. But Facebook, YouTube and Twitter’s community standards are murky and vague and seem to change daily, so the dogpile to regulate or even break up tech giants grows, with the addition of new bodies across the spectrum from Elizabeth Warren to Ted Cruz.
Are online companies publishers? Should Section 230 be repealed? Heck no.
But the tech backlash grows, along with screams for Congress to do something, anything about villainous Big Tech. Justice Department’s antitrust chief Makan Delrahim even sees “valuable lessons” in the breakup of Standard Oil. OK, we get it.
So let’s think through the realities of potential remedies, for Facebook anyway. First, you could turn Facebook into a utility, a common carrier, regulated to obey some sort of “social neutrality.” But then Facebook would freeze everything in place. Say goodbye to innovation, we’d get the Bell System all over again.
Or we could use antitrust to break up Facebook, splitting off Instagram and WhatsApp, creating two weak competitors. That solves nothing and you know they’ll eventually consolidate down the road—see AT&T and, hmm, Standard Oil. Or we could make Facebook obey the First Amendment—they couldn’t be sued but couldn’t remove anything—which would make fake news and cyber bullying worse. Or here’s a weird one: end anonymity. “Know your customer” might be appropriate but brings its own logistic nightmares. Would you have to go to the post office first before you can Snapchat just so the site could get rid of Russian trolls?
Here’s my solution: Don’t shake it, break it or remake it. Instead, filet it. Open it up. Make social networks transparent. It’s our data, after all. Insist on a Trustworthy Index for every post. A combination of some two billion users voting and outside sources could rank every link from 0 (Russian trolls) to 99 (this paper). Twitter’s plan to label and hide political speech that violates its standards is an interesting start. New sources would have to earn trustworthiness. Then let Facebook’s algorithm weight the truth. Fake news would fade away.
And that fear of surveillance? Let me know who sees my data, preferences and locations, and I can opt in or out. If Delta wants to know when I’m planning a trip, they can contact me directly. Only then would advertisers begin to pay users for their attention, with Facebook taking a cut.
Heck, Facebook’s new Libra crypto payment system might be best used to pay us as users, rather than their current aim to have us use it to pay for things. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others should also post their community standards in detail publicly and explicitly and make them subject to comments. If not, the chorus to kill Section 230 or start century-old precedent breakups will get louder and, intended or not, kill the internet in adulthood. Transparency rules.
