#section230

If you havent heard whats going on, I’d suggest watching what Legal Eagle or Phillip DeFranco posted about the Supreme court and the future of the internet. Basically they’re debating the ability to sue a content platform for the content its users post on it, basically treating youtube’s suggestion algorithm as youtube “creating” the content, making it liable for everything its algorithm recommends… this could destroy Youtube’s ability to host videos in the way that we know it, limiting search and recommendation functions, or at worst forcing Youtube to limit who can even post to its platform. Its scary to even think about what might happen to small creators without an established subscriber base… no one new would see your videos, only people who actively search it out, or who already follow you…

To my view, the best way to limit the power of a Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey to shape our political debates and influence elections is to downsize Facebook and Twitter, and possibly other sites, that can grow so large as to have an outsize influence on American politics. Restructuring the protection provided by Section 230 can be a way to accomplish this goal.

As it stands, Section 230 means that Facebook and Twitter cannot be sued for defamation for third party content, either in the form of paid advertisements or for any defamatory material that might be contained in any of the billions of posts made on these sites every month. Newspapers and broadcast outlets do not enjoy this protection for third party content.

I would propose taking away this protection for sites that either accept paid advertisements or sell personal information. This means that the only sites that would still have Section 230 protection would be sites that either had paid subscriptions or survived on donations.

I have been blogging very little, as I have been swamped with a big and exciting work project. As the peak effort on that is now past, I look forward to writing more on Continuations again, as well as taking another turn revising my book The World After Capital. In the meantime, here are some observations on the most recent iteration of the debate around regulating large tech companies generally, the role of Section 230 specifically and how these relate to speech on the Internet. Topics that I have been writing about for many years.

First, information cascades are real and have been known to be a problem for a long time. Both through low effort enduser actions (such as a retweet) and through algorithmic amplification (one user’s like winds up on others’ timelines) “news” travels fast. As has been well studied the more outrageous it is, the faster it travels.

Second, this problem has been known for a long time and one of Twitter’s and Facebook’s biggest failings has been to do nothing about it, while at the same time suppressing third party efforts. Twitter’s handling of some links last week by simply not allowing them to be posted was a ham fisted attempt to rectify this last minute before an election. A later and broader iteration aimed at slowing down retweets is more of a step in the right direction.

Third, it is clear that Facebook is back to selling out everyone else with Zuckerberg’s support for undoing Section 230. This is of course exactly what happened with the awful SESTA/FOSTA, which initially had a tech coalition aligned against it until Zuckerberg saw that it would be to Facebook’s advantage to support it. These are classic “pull-up-the-ladder” moves by powerful company aimed at suppressing competition.

Fourth, at the very same time Facebook is trying to suppress third party monitoring by sending a cease and desist to an NYU based research project in which Facebook users voluntarily contribute information. Facebook claims this represents a Terms of Service violation. If Facebook succeeds with this legal strategy, it would be a grave restriction of enduser freedom at a time when we need the exact opposite.

Fifth, it feels like all of this will come to a head following the election, no matter who wins it. What’s at stake is far larger than most people seem to believe. This isn’t about some small tweak to Section 230. This is and will be a battle about who controls information and computation on the internet. At present it looks as if we are headed in completely the wrong direction with an awful combination of too much corporate and too much state power all at once.