Latest in Communications Decency Act
Generative AI products won’t receive the same Section 230 protections as other tech products. What will that mean for the future of the technology and the rules that govern it?
Why has it taken until now for a Supreme Court justice to pay attention to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act?
Some tentative thoughts on whether the law can be improved.
If Congress had done in almost any other setting what it’s done to online speech, the unconstitutionality would have been immediately apparent.
Editor’s note: This piece is in part a modified excerpt from the author’s book, “Nobody’s Victim: Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Pervs, and Trolls,” available from Penguin Random House on August 13, 2019.
On Feb. 25, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit heard oral argument in Force v. Facebook, a case about whether Facebook can be held liable for the use of its platform to coordinate and encourage violent attacks by users linked to Hamas.
On Thursday, Sept. 6, Twitter permanently banned the right-wing provocateur Alex Jones and his conspiracy theorist website Infowars from its platform. This was something of the final blow to Jones’s online presence: Facebook, Apple and Youtube, among others, blocked Jones from using their services in early August. Cut off from Twitter as well, he is now severely limited in his ability to spread his conspiracy theories to a mainstream audience.
The 2018 “techlash” shows no sign of slowing. The last week of July saw the release of two papers containing proposals for significant increases regulation of tech companies, particularly with an eye toward protecting the integrity of political processes and elections.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017 (FOSTA), on behalf of two human rights organizations, the Internet Archive, and two individual plaintiffs. FOSTA creates a loophole in the immunity granted to internet platforms for third-party content under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act: under FOSTA, websites can be held liable for promoting or facilitating prostitution. Plaintiffs seek to declare the law unconstitutional under the First and Fifth Amendments.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is critical to Facebook’s existence. Under Section 230, the platform is immune from liability that might otherwise be incurred from its users’ posts.