DON’T REPEAL 230

Hur dur its achilles heel is §230

by Utter Contempt 

Everyone knows the story by now, but let’s recap for context: sometime during the Obama administration, VP Biden’s shitbag son Hunter was appointed to a handsomely paid position on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas conglomerate, in exchange for access to his father. Biden has always denied knowledge of his son’s business dealings in Ukraine. Recently, however, the NY Post presented detailed evidence of Hunter’s influence-peddling, and Joe Biden’s complicity in the scam. Twitter then locked the Post’s account, and both Twitter and Facebook blocked users from sharing the story’s URL.

Everyone knows that in ways both surreptitious and brazen, big tech censors dissenting voices, particularly right-wing ones. But this is a watershed moment, a huge slip of the mask of liberal democratic pretenses. Here was President Trump’s response:

Justice Thomas even got in on the act, releasing a statement this week suggesting that section 230 is being applied too broadly. But Thomas and Trump could not be more wrong here: if you’re against big tech censorship, repealing or adulterating section 230 is a terrible idea.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act indemnifies content-sharing platforms against certain tort claims faced by traditional publishers. The idea is that sites like Twitter and Facebook where users upload content don’t exercise editorial discretion the way newspapers do, and so shouldn’t be held liable for defamation, incitement, and falsehood. But fighting defamation, incitement and falsehood is exactly the rationale these companies hide behind when censoring dissidents. There’s simply no violation of section 230 taking place when Twitter and Facebook engage in censorship.

In fact, Section 230 does not afford big tech any pretext whatsoever for censorship. On the contrary: it incentivizes access to platforms that facilitate speech, and its benefits transcend ideological boundaries and even political cronyism, which is why 4Chan can’t be held liable in U.S. courts for publishing content like shooter manifestos. Repealing it won’t impose legal liability for censorship on big tech. It won’t even disincentivize censorship. On the contrary, it would require greater policing of user content by these platforms, and this increased policing would be carried out by the same actors and with the same biases that are behind the censorship we’re living with today.

Like it or not, with or without section 230 there is literally no theory under the First Amendment that would prompt a court to issue an injunction against a private company censoring user content on social media. There’s no question that big tech censorship is a huge threat to free expression generally, but it isn’t a First Amendment issue. Congress and the courts just aren’t the panacea here. 

“We can’t expect God to do all the violence for us, Tim.”

The standard for proving a defamation claim (in the U.S., at least) is likewise precipitous, and if you look at the history of these claims, you’ll see that right-wingers and dissidents have a harder time defending against them than mainstream liberals do. So maybe big tech would prefer to have 230 protection, but they won’t suffer much without it. Internet users will, however, and the first casualties will be dissidents of every stripe, not the heads and commissars of companies like Twitter and Facebook. The minute 230 gets repealed, thousands of websites hosted on Blogspot and WordPress will become far more vulnerable to erasure. Anything that Silicon Valley dislikes ideologically can then be deemed a legal liability and nuked, and no one will be able to point to 230 to accuse big tech of censorship. But while Silicon Valley has a bigger litigation budget than USG, independent content sharing platforms like Minds, Bitchute, LBRY and the Chans will be in danger of folding if they don’t censor even more zealously than Facebook and Twitter, whose monopolies will only become further entrenched. That’s probably why Silicon Valley’s presidential candidate is calling for 230’s repeal just like Trump is. 

And for right-wingers, there’s a deeper issue with the repeal 230 mantra, which is its implication that spending your uncompensated time and cognition forking over huge chunks of your most intimate personal information to bajillion dollar DoD contractors led by mad scientists who are building a detailed psychological profile on you is basically fine, so long as the massive flow of online content through their gates isn’t misused politically, in order to weight the scales in favor of the Democrats. That’s really as far as e.g. Tucker Carlson’s argument against big tech’s inordinate power goes, and you’re not going to get a more trenchant critique than his in the mainstream. So if they were constrained in the slightest to care what the public thinks, the smartest move Silicon Valley could make at this point would be to allow their bought-and-paid for minions in Congress to grandstand by repealing 230. The impassioned publicity from all the litigation this generates would all but ensure that real issues like the death of privacy are never discussed again.

Also published at Utter Contempt