Platforms

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which says apps and websites aren’t legally liable for third-party content, has inspired a lot of overheated rhetoric in Congress. Republicans like Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) have successfully framed the rule as a “gift to Big Tech” that enables social media censorship. While Democrats have very different critiques, some have embraced a similar fire-and-brimstone tone with the bipartisan EARN IT Act.

After lawmakers collected hundreds of hours of interviews and obtained more than 1.3 million documents about Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, their chief executives will testify before Congress on July 29 to defend their powerful businesses from the hammer of government. The captains of the New Gilded Age — Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Tim Cook of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Sundar Pichai of Google — will appear together before Congress for the first time to justify their business pract

Reactions to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration's petition asking the Federal Communications Commission to adopt rules clarifying Section 230.

Sen Josh Hawley (R-MO) announced he will introduce the Behavioral Advertising Decisions Are Downgrading Services (BAD ADS) Act, a bill to remove Section 230 immunity from Big Tech companies that display manipulative, behavioral ads or provide data to be used for them. Sen Hawley’s bill would crack down on behavioral advertising’s negative effects, which include invasive data collection and user manipulation through design choices.

The rules NTIA has proposed are ill-advised, and the Commission should dispose of this Petition as quickly as possible. As a threshold matter, NTIA has not made the case that Congress gave the FCC any role here. Section 230 is best understood as it has long been understood: as an instruction to courts about when liability should not be imposed. The proposed rules themselves are troubling. Among other substantive problems, NTIA seems to have failed to grasp how vast and diverse the ecosystem of interactive computer services is.

Section 230 confers a unique set of benefits on social media companies and other ‘providers of interactive computer services.’ It gives them special protections that go beyond the First Amendment rights that protect everyone in this country. Congress passed this provision back in the 1990s to address the limited content moderation practices employed by Internet sites like the then-popular Prodigy and CompuServe messaging boards.

The FCC shouldn’t take this bait. While social media can be frustrating, turning this agency into the President's speech police is not the answer. If we honor the Constitution, we will reject this petition immediately.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) respectfully requests that the Federal Communications Commission initiate a rulemaking to clarify the provisions of section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934. Specifically, per President Donald Trump's Executive Order No. 13925: Preventing Online Censorship (EO 13925), NTIA requests that the FCC propose rules to clarify:

On May 28, the President of the United States signed an Executive Order. Under this order—at the direction of the President—the National Telecommunications and Information Administration is filing a petition July 27 with the Federal Communications Commission. In it, the Administration is asking the FCC to come up with rules moderating online content. We are told to do so using a law known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

Do we hold Big Tech accountable or do we sit on our hands and do nothing? In many ways, this discussion is a microcosm for a broader debate taking place within the conservative movement—one that reflects shifting views about the role of government on issues as varied as trade and the economy to national security. As to Big Tech, there are some on the Right who see no problems worth addressing or believe that any form of government-imposed accountability would do more harm than good.