Politicians of every stripe have enjoyed beating up on the social media giants lately, and rightfully so. They have definitely wet their beds.
But the attack is all wrong.
The main attack is against “Section 230 protections.” Section 230 began as an obscure part of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, born in the Internet’s infancy.
It was born to solve a real problem.
Back then, if you owned a website, let’s just say AOL for nostalgia’s sake, and someone posted something libelous on a bulletin board, the question was whether AOL should be held responsible.
If someone puts something libelous in a newspaper, the paper’s owner is responsible. The editor makes the publishing decision, and so as an employee of the owner, the publication should be held responsible.
But everyone saw that online platforms were different. If someone posted to a forum, AOL wasn’t making the decision whether to publish or not, so how could they be held responsible?
Congress’s solution was to treat websites like they treated telephone companies — as common carriers. You don’t hold AT&T liable if a terrorist uses their phones to plan an attack, and websites were serving that same communication role.
So, Section 230 was born, and now nothing posted to Twitter of Facebook can expose those companies to libel.
But here’s the problem. That rule was written under the assumption that the online platforms weren’t making “publishing decisions.”
With the advent of algorithms, now the owner has delegated decisions. The newspaper owner delegated those to the editor, and Facebook delegated them to a machine.
The crux of the argument is the decision.
If Facebook and Twitter were simple flows that posted things in real time, with no decision on the company’s part dictating what you see, it would be a true common carrier. But we learned in Congressional hearings and in leaked documents this week that not only are they making decisions, they are deciding to show you things that make you angry.
Picking winners and losers based on values sounds a lot like a publishing decision to me. These companies are not using editors, but they are training machines to pick pieces that fit their values to fill the limited space of your feed.
Political arguments for and against 230 have been ridiculous. These algorithms are not silencing conservative voices.
What they are doing is silencing rational conversation and dialogue – all in the name of engagement. And what is more engaging than a train wreck full of people screaming at each other?
Section 230 itself is not the problem.
The problem is that most of what the social media giants are doing today stretches Section 230 beyond where it was ever intended.
Section 230 is a valuable tool. Truly open forums deserve protection so they can facilitate dialogue.
But when a company exercises value-based judgments to promote some content and suppress other content, that was never what 230 was meant to protect.