Why do so many people, including both presidents Trump and Biden, keep talking about eliminating an obscure law called Section 230?
The short answer is that Section 230, of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, is the legal underpinning for one of the largest and most consequential experiments in American history. Since the birth of Big Tech Media 15 years ago -- let's drop the friendly-sounding misnomer "social" media -- the American republic has become a test case. Can a nation's news and information infrastructure, the lifeblood of democracy, be dependent on digital media technologies that allow a global free speech zone of unlimited audience size and massive volumes of disinformation that can be spread with unprecedented ease?
This experiment has been possible because Section 230 grants Big Tech Media immunity from responsibility for the mass content published and broadcast across their platforms. A mere 26 words in the bipartisan law were originally intended to protect "interactive computer services" from being sued over what their users post, just like telephone companies can't be sued over any gossip told by Aunt Mabel to every busybody in town.
But as Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other services scaled over time to an unimaginable size, the platforms' lack of human editors has resulted in a gushing fire hose of mis- and disinformation. Facebook alone sees more than 100 billion pieces of content posted each day, a deluge that its small corps of human monitors cannot realistically contain.
As the gripping visuals of a pro-Trump mob storming the Capitol make clear, this experiment has veered frighteningly off course. The protesters earnestly believed that they were trying to stop a stolen election, having been fed this false information for over two months. Millions of people are now living inside their own "disinformation ghettos" where they do not hear contrary viewpoints. So, President Biden has called for ending Section 230 immunity to stop the Frankenstein's monster this law helped create.
Facebook is no longer simply a "social networking" website -- it is the largest media giant in the history of the world, a combination publisher and broadcaster, with approximately 2.6 billion regular users, and billions more on the Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Instagram. One study found that 104 pieces of Covid-19 misinformation on Facebook were shared 1.7 million times and had 117 million views.
Traditional news organisations are subject to certain laws and regulations, including a degree of liability over what they broadcast. While there is much to criticise about mainstream media, at least they use humans to choose what's in and out of the news-stream. That results in a degree of accountability, including legal liability.
But Facebook-Google-Twitter's robot algorithm curators are on automatic pilot, much like killer drones for which no human bears responsibility or liability.
So, it is time to hit reset in a major way, to provide the best chance to redesign these digital media technologies so that we can retain their promise and decrease their dangers. Revoking Section 230 by an act of Congress would be a good start. While imperfect, it would make Big Tech Media more responsible, deliberative, and potentially liable for the worst of its toxic content, especially when their algorithms automatically amplify such content.
But there is also a great deal of reckless online content that would likely not be impacted by 230's revocation. The revocation of Section 230 wouldn't have stopped the use of Big Tech Media for disinformation campaigns that undermined elections in more than 70 countries, even helping to elect a quasi-dictator in the Philippines; or for widely amplifying the Christchurch mass murderer of Muslims, who broadcast his carnage over Facebook (a video then seen on YouTube by millions). And losing Section 230 immunity wouldn't impact the fact that a majority of YouTube climate change videos denies the science, and 70% of what YouTube's 2 billion users watch comes from its recommendation algorithm.
So what needs to be done instead? The federal government must intervene to change the way Big Tech Media operates. Facebook-Google-Twitter's "engagement algorithms" recommend and amplify sensationalised, conspiracy-ridden user content for one reason -- to maximise profits by increasing users' screen time and exposure to more ads. In fact, the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook executives scaled back a successful effort to make the site less divisive when they found that it was decreasing their audience share.
These greedy companies have purposely weaponised their platforms, and enabled the dividing, distracting, and outraging of people to the point where society is now plagued by a fractured basis for shared truths, sense-making and common ground.
In the face of such practices, our government must impose a whole new business model on these corporations -- just as the United States did, in years past, with telephone, railroad, and power companies. The government should treat these companies more like investor-owned utilities, which would be guided by a digital licence. Just like traditional brick-and-mortar companies must apply for various licences and permits, the digital licence would define the rules and regulations of the business model (Mark Zuckerberg himself has suggested such an approach).
To begin with, such a licence would require platforms to obtain users' permission before collecting anyone's personal data -- ie, opt-in rather than opt-out. When you signed up for a Facebook account, you probably didn't imagine that 10 or 15 years on, you were unknowingly agreeing to allow the company to suck up your private data or track your physical locations, or mass collect every "like," "share," and "follow" into a psychographic profile that can be used by advertisers and political operatives to target you. Facebook and its fellow outlets started this data grab secretly, forging their destructive brand of "surveillance capitalism". Now that we know, should society continue to allow this?
The new model also should encourage more competition by limiting the mega-scale audience size of these media machines; nearly 250 million Americans, about 80% of the population, have a profile on one of these platforms. Smaller user pools could be accomplished either through an anti-trust breakup of the companies, or through incentives to shift to a revenue model based more on monthly subscribers rather than on hyper- targeted advertising, which would cause a decline in users. The utility model also should restrain the use of specific engagement techniques, such as hyper-targeting of content, automated recommendations, and addictive behavioural nudges (like autoplay and pop-up screens).
We also should update existing laws to ensure they apply to the online world. Google's YouTube/YouTube Kids have been violating the Children's Television Act -- which restricts violence and advertising -- for many years, resulting in online lawlessness that the Federal Communications Commission should examine. Similarly, the Federal Elections Commission should rein in the quasi-lawless world of online political ads and donor reporting, which has far fewer rules and less transparency than ads in TV and radio broadcasting.
Like many other people, I have benefited from the internet and its revolution in communications. These businesses are creating the new infrastructure of the digital age, including search engines; global portals for news and networking; web-based movies, music, and live streaming; GPS-based navigation apps; online commercial marketplaces; and digital labour market platforms -- services and technologies that are being interwoven into the very fabric of our societies.
I believe we can retain what is good about the internet without the toxicities. Like the promise of the internet itself, Facebook-Google-Twitter started out small, and then blew up into monopolistic giants that have established their own greedy and destructive rules that threaten our democracy. It is crucial that regulation evolves in order to shape this new digital infrastructure -- and the future of our societies -- in the right way. ©2021 Zocalo Public Square
Steven Hill is the former policy director at the Center for Humane Technology and author of seven books, including 'Raw Deal: How the Uber Economy and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers'.