Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey yesterday faced questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee. Unfortunately – but perhaps unsurprisingly – the discussion between the two tech CEOs and senators was yet another example of U.S. lawmakers struggling to get to grips with the urgent issues at hand. Instead of exploring issues of data privacy and antitrust in depth, what we had was more debate about censorship and the tired discussion about whether social media platforms are platforms or publishers.
Maybe we shouldn’t have expected much. The session was called, after all, in the weeks prior to the U.S. general election by Republican senators angry at how Twitter and Facebook handled the publication of a story about Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden. (This Forbes article is a good overview of the story and the problems it poses to both social media companies and news companies.) Nuanced and detailed discussion wasn’t ever likely to happen.
However, despite the rhetoric of Republicans against Jack Dorsey back in October, outlets reporting on yesterday’s proceedings note that the tone was “a lot calmer.” Makena Kelly writes for The Verge that “with the pressure valve of the election fully released, the hearing struck an unusually libertarian tone, suggesting some Republicans may be cooling on the idea of heavy-handed tech regulation.”
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Senators confused over Section 230
While Kelly makes the point that Republican attitudes to regulation may be changing – thanks, in part, to the dawning reality that Trump’s presidency is over – there were still indications that there is still confusion about what regulations like Section 230 do and don’t do. This confusion appears to stem from the continued obsession among some senators – most notably Ted Cruz – with the idea that social media platforms are censoring conservative voices.
At one point during the hearing Cruz takes Jack Dorsey to task for Twitter’s decision to add labels to a number of Donald Trump tweets that claimed the election result was fraudulent. “You’re entitled to take a policy position” he told Dorsey, “but you don’t get to pretend you’re not a publisher and get a special benefit under Section 230 as a result.”
As this piece in Wired points out, Section 230 has nothing to do with information labelling. Indeed, it doesn’t even have anything to do with the platform v. publisher debate. This is because Section 230 is designed to protect both publishers and platforms from being held accountable for content that other users post on their properties.
What next?
Senator Lindsey Graham’s closing remarks on the session were indicative of the apparent change in tone from Republicans. “My advice would be to allow the industry itself to develop best business practices to protect the sites against terrorism and child exploitation and other concerns” he said. Hostility might give way to a reawakening of libertarianism.
However, Graham still suggested that tinkering with Section 230 could be the best way to improve transparency. Rather than any wholesale changes, he argued that changes should be made to “incentivize” platforms to develop their own standards.
Speaking to The Guardian, Evan Greer of Fight for the Future said that the focus on Section 230 is misguided and dangerous. “Messing with Section 230 would only make big tech companies more powerful, and exacerbate the problems that lawmakers say they’re concerned about,” she said. Greer argued that instead of debating the limitations of Section 230, lawmakers would use their time far more effectively by “passing strong federal data privacy legislation, enforcing antitrust laws, and restoring net neutrality. We can’t afford more partisan posturing on this.”