Platform or Publisher

If you missed the Senate hearings with the titans of Tech last week, you missed a classic Washington bleep-show.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey looked like an over-dedicated Civil War re-enactor. Facebook’s CEO Mark Zukerberg at least put on a tie, but delivered wooden recitations of written talking points punctuated by deer-in-the-headlights expressions during questioning by senators.

The hearings came about after Twitter, Facebook and Google were accused of removing or “throttling” content posted on them by the New York Post about Hunter Biden, son of presidential candidate Joe Biden, and his alleged involvement in influence peddling schemes with foreign entities.

The New York Post is the nation’s oldest continuously published newspaper, found by Alexander Hamilton so it wasn’t as if big tech was silencing some violent fringe group. The content-filtering move by social media wasn’t new. It’s been going on for some time. The problem is that content from conservative voices is cut or controlled far more often than content from the political left.

This has prompted calls for legislation to amend Section 230 of Title V of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which exempted providers of certain online services from liability over the content appearing on their websites. It reads, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” In a nutshell, it means services such as Twitter and Facebook cannot be sued over content posted by users, news sites can’t be sued for posts in a comment section beneath a story and so forth. Section 230 treats these things as platforms instead of publishers.

To be legitimate platforms, such services technically shouldn’t restrict any free speech posted on their services. It became apparent this is untenable. Restrictions on posting of violent threats, child pornography and other content generally accepted as harmful are necessary. The challenge arises when a platform worker or algorithm decides certain ideas are harmful arbitrarily.

The solution is to change the designation of services that regulate content from platforms to publishers. This would make online services liable for posted content. Doing so would overhaul the services, not bankrupt them.

As publishers, Twitter, Facebook and others would have to restrict content that violates copyright laws. No more memes featuring images of celebrities, clips from TV shows or quotations from copyrighted material. News and other sites would have to eliminate or moderate comment sections, which is no big loss as they’re mostly repositories of profane idiocy serving no real purpose anyway.

Slander someone online, and both you and the site you posted the material on could be sued. I contend doing this would dramatically clean up social media feeds by discouraging constant reposting, forwarding and linking unoriginal content. This is good.

It would also mean services such as Facebook would become genuine. You could only post material YOU own. Your own family pictures, your own poetry, your own ideas and creative content. Your feed becomes about you and your life, not an endless stream of content you found elsewhere.

That, arguably, is what I think social media should, and was originally intended, to be.