The spread of misinformation during the pandemic led to increased moderation on many social-media platforms. This is likely to continue after the crisis is over
, legally flawed and unworkable. Experts poured scorn on the executive order Donald Trump signed on May 28th in reaction to a decision by Twitter, a microblogging service, to flag one of his tweets as unsubstantiated. The company had put warnings on a pair of tweets in which the president said: “There is NO WAY that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent”.
To many, the document seemed like a blatant attempt to bully Twitter, Facebook and other big tech firms into abandoning any efforts to fact-check the president’s online utterances ahead of the election in November. In this, if nothing else, the executive order may succeed. But it will not end the debate over how to regulate speech in the virtual realm.
Section 230 and its analogues elsewhere were crafted to solve what might be called the “moderator’s dilemma”. In the mid-1990s regulators worried that online firms would refrain from policing their services for fear this would make them liable for the content and open them up to costly lawsuits. To solve this problem, section 230 stipulated that, even if firms moderated content, they could not be held liable for it. It does not, however, eliminate all liability for online content.
Section 230 and similar regulations have already gone through one round of mini-reforms. In May 2016 the European Union agreed to a “Code of Conduct” with Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube to counter online hate speech. It includes a commitment to deal with most offensive content within 24 hours. In 2017 Germany made compliance with such rules mandatory, while giving firms some leeway in how they apply them.
Governments, particularly in Europe, where limits on free speech are more acceptable, seem to be urging online firms to police their platforms more. Tech titans are unlikely to put up much resistance, since they have already begun monitoring more content in the wake of the pandemic . Groups charged with overseeing the companies’ decisions will become more common.
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