Debates about moderating online speech are as old as the Internet itself. This week, Congressional hearings on Facebook, Twitter, and Google returned to familiar themes — and took the opportunity to influence the referees who currently govern our online political discussion.
Since 1996, “interactive computer services” have relied on the protection of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act from liability for their users’ statements. Known as “the 26 words that created the Internet,” Section 230 is the backbone of social media as we understand it today, with each platform defining its own content moderation policies and processes. Tori Ekstrand explained to the Dallas Morning News that “Section 230 was passed to create a robust atmosphere for speech online, and for the growth of the internet, but the other part was to encourage what we think of now as content moderation, so the platform can go in and content moderate, but they’re protected from secondary liability.”
“Revoking or modifying Section 230 is not going to get the president or conservatives what they want. It just seems to be the threat that they could come up with instead of anything more sophisticated.”
— Shannon McGregor told Forbes before Wednesday’s hearings.
Instead of revoking 230, Matt Perault, Director of Duke’s Center on Science & Technology and CITAP affiliate, released a new working paper with proposals for updating platform moderation regulations. He recommends steps like updating criminal law to prohibit specific types of speech, define content development, mandate data sharing, and more.
The arms race for attention
The urgency of the current conversation on platform moderation is due to the dominance of social media companies in our collective consciousness and the potential for bad actors to exploit their capacity for amplification. As Zeynep Tufekci observed in her newly-launched newsletter Insight:
"The actual fight here is only partly about speech... The issue here is as much about platform dominance as it is about Section 230: nobody would really want an Internet where any platform moderation meant loss of liability, but this also it wouldn’t be this big a deal if Facebook, YouTube and Twitter weren’t so dominant.”
She suggested that the hearings be flipped:
“We should stop asking questions of these men and start giving them answers. The only way to do this is to make these questions into what they actually are: political questions. That’s where we have to debate everything from the dominance of few social media companies over the public sphere to the problem of regulating attention in an age of information glut.”
Dr. Tufekci has described the successful commodification of attention in her past work as well: a small handful of firms dominate media distribution. And at present, these platforms’ sphere of influence is so large that reform conversations are complicated by their dominance.
Recent publications and appearances
Deen Freelon was quoted in Science on the second order effects of disinformation and how the general sense of paranoia it creates sows doubt in our democratic processes.
Deen Freelon and Shannon McGregor were quoted in a discussion on the link between social media and polarization. Dr. McGregor was also quoted by CNN on the same topic.
Election coverage and democracy
With only four days of voting left in the 2020 Presidential election (and over 85 million votes already cast), the Election Coverage and Democracy Network continues to share valuable resources and highlight effective election coverage, connect experts with media, and promote a “democracy-worthy” frame for any and all stories about the election.