FACEBOOK AND TWITTER TESTED ON N.Y. POST CONTROVERSY — Facebook and Twitter found themselves under siege on Wednesday over their handling of the New York Post’s polarizing Biden-Burisma story — a saga that has shed light on how tech platform’s content moderation calls could shape the final weeks of the election cycle.
Each company’s response quickly added fuel to longstanding allegations of tech firms perpetuating bias against conservatives. (President Trump suggested as much Wednesday night.) But the actions also led to claims that Facebook and Twitter are attempting to influence the results of the presidential election — after they’d spent years trying to prove they were not only ready for November 2020 but that they would not allow interference of any kind to occur the way it had in 2016.
— What happened: Both social media sites moved to limit the spread of the Post’s story on Wednesday, with Facebook referring the content to third-party fact-checkers and Twitter blocking users from sharing links to the article in question. The companies — which for months have been taking steps to thwart election-related misinformation — stressed that such actions are standard practice for disputed or potentially harmful material or content that violates existing platform policies. Twitter late Wednesday explained in a thread precisely which parts of the Post’s reporting violate Twitter’s rules, but CEO Jack Dorsey also acknowledged that the company’s communication around the event “was not great” and that blocking the sharing of the link to the Post story “with zero context” was “unacceptable.”
— Republican read: “[Twitter] has plainly decided that the American people should not be seeing or discussing this particular story, which could significantly influence voters’ views of candidate Biden,” Sen. Ted Cruz wrote Wednesday to Dorsey (a similar letter went to Facebook). “This can only be seen as an obvious and transparent attempt by Twitter to influence the upcoming presidential election.” Sen. Josh Hawley, who also fired off letters to Mark Zuckerberg and Dorsey — and plans to ask them to testify on their handling of the matter — raised with the Federal Election Commission “the possibility that egregious campaign-finance violations benefitting the Biden campaign may be playing out in real-time, just weeks before the presidential election” and urged the FEC to investigate.
In the House, Judiciary Republicans — noting that Twitter had blocked users from sharing the article — posted it on its own site and encouraged Twitter followers to “click, share, and RT!” The panel’s top Republican Jim Jordan also wrote to Zuckerberg: “Facebook’s decision to affirmatively restrict the availability of election-related information—and in a manner that helps Vice President Biden avoid scrutiny—raises questions about Facebook’s commitment to free speech and free and fair elections.”
*******
The platform, or Publisher?
If Big Tech firms want to retain valuable government protections, then they need to get out of the censorship business.
Lieu is incorrect. While the First Amendment generally does not apply to private companies, the Supreme Court has held it “does not disable the government from taking steps to ensure that private interests not restrict . . . the free flow of information and ideas.” But as Senator Ted Cruz points out, Congress actually has the power to deter political censorship by social media companies without using government coercion or taking action that would violate the First Amendment, in letter or spirit. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act immunizes online platforms for their users’ defamatory, fraudulent, or otherwise unlawful content. Congress granted this extraordinary benefit to facilitate “forum[s] for a true diversity of political discourse.” This exemption from standard libel law is extremely valuable to the companies that enjoy its protection, such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, but they only got it because it was assumed that they would operate as impartial, open channels of communication—not curators of acceptable opinion.
When questioning Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this month, and in a subsequent op-ed, Cruz reasoned that “in order to be protected by Section 230, companies like Facebook should be ‘neutral public forums.’ On the flip side, they should be considered to be a ‘publisher or speaker’ of user content if they pick and choose what gets published or spoken.” Tech-advocacy organizations and academics cried foul. University of Maryland law professor Danielle Citron argued that Cruz “flips [the] reasoning” of the law by demanding neutral forums. Elliot Harmon of the Electronic Freedom Foundation responded that “one of the reasons why Congress first passed Section 230 was to enable online platforms to engage in good-faith community moderation without fear of taking on undue liability for their users’ posts.”
As Cruz properly understands, Section 230 encourages Internet platforms to moderate “offensive” speech, but the law was not intended to facilitate political censorship. Online platforms should receive immunity only if they maintain viewpoint neutrality, consistent with traditional legal norms for distributors of information. Before the Internet, common law held that newsstands, bookstores, and libraries had no duty to ensure that each book and newspaper they distributed was not defamatory. Courts initially extended this principle to online platforms. Then, in 1995, a federal judge found Prodigy, an early online service, liable for content on its message boards because the company had advertised that it removed obscene posts. The court reasoned that “utilizing technology and the manpower to delete” objectionable content made Prodigy more like a publisher than a library.
Congress responded by enacting Section 230, establishing that platforms could not be held liable as publishers of user-generated content and clarifying that they could not be held liable for removing any content that they believed in good faith to be “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.” This provision does not allow platforms to remove whatever they wish, however. Courts have held that “otherwise objectionable” does not mean whatever a social media company objects to, but “must, at a minimum, involve or be similar” to obscenity, violence, or harassment. Political viewpoints, no matter how extreme or unpopular, do not fall under this category.
The Internet Association, which represents Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other major platforms, claims that Section 230 is necessary for these firms to “provide forums and tools for the public to engage in a wide variety of activities that the First Amendment protects.” But rather than facilitate free speech, Silicon Valley now uses Section 230 to justify censorship, leading to a legal and policy muddle. For instance, in response to a lawsuit challenging its speech policies, Google claimed that restricting its right to censor would “impose liability on YouTube as a publisher.” In the same motion, Google argues that its right to restrict political content also derives from its “First Amendment protection for a publisher’s editorial judgments,” which “encompasses the choice of how to present, or even whether to present, particular content.”
The dominant social media companies must choose: if they are neutral platforms, they should have immunity from litigation. If they are publishers making editorial choices, then they should relinquish this valuable exemption. They can’t claim that Section 230 immunity is necessary to protect free speech, while they shape, control, and censor the speech on their platforms. Either the courts or Congress should clarify the matter.
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. -- Plato (429-347 BC)
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Keep on seeking the truth, rally your friends and family and expose as much corruption as you can… every little bit helps add pressure on the powers that are no more.
"Yet, while denial might placate those who do not prefer to confront unpleasant facts, truth does not mold itself to the wishes and desires of the willfully ignorant." Unknown
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