Section 230 is a part of
the Communication Decency Act, which has shielded Big Tech from accountability and censorship. U.S. lawmakers have been debating reforms to laws that govern Big Tech to allow for more transparency and fairness.
Despite Tesla founder
Elon Musk’s attempts to buy Twitter and his pledge to honor the First Amendment, Rachel Bovard, senior tech columnist at The Federalist, said reforms still need to be made to laws, including Section 230, that govern the “massive behemoths that now control the entry points to our national discourse.”
“I think our public policy needs to respond to that. Part of that is Section 230, but I would even go further and suggest potentially common carriers should be considered, basically saying you have to admit all comers, and that’s something that’s under consideration in the Senate, as well as robust antitrust enforcement,” Bovard told the host of
NTD’s Capitol Report, Steve Lance, during a recent interview.
Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) introduced a bill called
the 21st Century Free Speech Act, which aims to curb the censorship by companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google by declaring the platforms “common carriers,” a term also used for companies that are obligated to transport goods without discrimination.
Section 230, when it was first put in place in 1996, “was designed to protect the companies from being sued for any content posted by their users,” said Bovard. “It was designed to again encourage companies to remove the things people don’t want to see. The pornography, the smut, the harassing, the lascivious content that people don’t want, while at the same time promoting, as the law says, ‘a diversity of views.’”
More specifically, Section 230 states: “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”
(
47 U.S.C. § 230).
“So, the original intent of the law, I think, was probably a good one. But it has evolved in such a way that it has made these companies almost immune to any kind of recourse by their user or anyone else.”
Over time, the courts have stretched the law to where it is a “bulletproof shield, protecting these companies when they sort of censor and curate all kinds of content in a way that a lot of
First Amendment actors are not protected,” said Bovard, adding that “newspapers, movie companies, they don’t have the same protection that these social media giants have.”
However, Bovard does think that Musk buying Twitter will shake up the Big Tech world because Twitter will stand in stark contrast to the picking and choosing that companies like Facebook and Google do on content like the Hunter Biden laptop story, she said.
“I think if Elon Musk is successful in his bid to transform Twitter into what he calls more of a free speech company, it will put into stark relief the far more sort of censorious actions that Facebook and particularly Google take when it comes to content that they don’t like.”
Since making his bid for Twitter, Musk has expressed a desire to make Twitter less extreme. “For Twitter to deserve public trust it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally,” Musk
wrote on Twitter.
Bovard said the changes Musk would implement will shed light on the corrupt practices of other
Big Tech companies.
“If Twitter acts independently and begins to allow more speech and more content, it is going to show Facebook and Google for what they are, which is already what we know, right, which are sort of these ideologically censorious platforms,” she added.
