President Trump, Congress and the DOJ have all considered changes to Section 230, a law that tech firms say is integral to their function.
President Donald Trump is the latest politician to go after a law that has long protected the tech industry.
The White House is expected to unveil a new executive order Thursday that would direct federal agencies to exercise greater oversight and regulations related to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, according to a working draft of the order obtained by CNBC.
The move would bring greater scrutiny to social media companies like Facebook and Twitter, whom conservatives have repeatedly accused of exerting political bias in their content removal processes. The companies have denied claims of censorship and constructed lengthy policies to explain the factors they consider when moderating content.
While Democrats have largely avoided claims of censorship by the tech companies, Section 230 has become a rare point of unification for political leaders from both parties who feel the industry has gotten too powerful and outgrown the need for its protections. In an interview with The New York Times editorial board published earlier this year, Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden said Section 230 “immediately should be revoked” for tech platforms including Facebook, which he said, “is propagating falsehoods they know to be false.”
Still, politicians disagree on how it should it be updated, especially since the law allows for tech companies to engage in good faith moderation of content, such as removing posts about terrorism and child exploitation.
For critics of the tech industry, Section 230 has come to symbolize the exceptional treatment from the government that has fueled the growth of a small number of players.
For tech companies, the law represents the internet’s founding values of openness and free expression, while also allowing them to remove the most insidious speech without stumbling into a legal minefield.
Here are the key things to know about this piece of legislation:
Section 230 was introduced by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and former Rep. Chris Cox, R-Calif., as a way of protecting tech companies from becoming legally liable for their users’ content if they opted to moderate it.
The law followed a court ruling against the online platform Prodigy.
An investment firm sued Prodigy after one of the platform’s anonymous users accused it of fraud. Prodigy argued it wasn’t responsible for its users’ speech, but the court found that because the platform moderated some of its users’ posts, it should be treated more like a publisher, which can be held legally liable for misleading or harmful content it publishes.
