Why Congress can’t stop talking about Section 230

Source: The Verge added 03rd Mar 2021

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There’s finally momentum in Congress to make serious changes to Section 230 — and not everyone’s happy about it. Last year’s antitrust hearings have given way to a full-court press on regulating big companies like Facebook and Google, and many in Congress see peeling back Section 230 as an easier way forward than GDPR-style privacy regulation or a full-scale antitrust breakup.

So on Monday, we hosted an event exploring what those regulations might look like, starting with a keynote on tech regulation from Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN). After that, we had a panel of three experts — Vimeo’s Michael Cheah, Wikimedia’s Amanda Keton, and writer and strategist Sydette Harry — dig into the details of Section 230 and how the things they care about on the internet would be affected if the law was repealed.

It made for a strange combination. On one side, Sen. Klobuchar urged the tech world not to dismiss changes to Section 230 out of hand and to leave room for the idea that some kind of regulation or antitrust action might actually make the industry better. On the other side, the panel pleaded that any changes to Section 230 be tailored to specific problems. But since no one can quite agree which problems need to be addressed, it’s a tricky bet to make.

If that sounds complicated, it is. The rise of online platforms like Facebook and YouTube has created several problems at once, and this kind of tangle is the inevitable result. There’s the antitrust problem, the misinformation problem, the hate speech problem, and half a dozen other issues. They’re all related, but fixing one will sometimes make others worse. Lawmakers are increasingly aware of the problems with online platforms, but balancing them in an actual piece of legislation will be a spectacularly difficult task.

Read the full article at The Verge

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