Sen. Warner’s proposed amendment to Section 230 is constitutionally sound and is needed to protect the nation from an out-of-control, lying right wing.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides in part that “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.” 1/11
Congressional Democrats are now proposing to significantly amend Section 230.
It is easy to see why Sen. Warner’s proposed amendment is an existential threat to two major destructive forces in American cultural and political life: Facebook and MAGA. tinyurl.com/y57y9b4v 2/11
Consider the lawsuit against Fox News, which led to Lou Dobbs’s termination there.
Among other things, the amendment would put Facebook and other social media companies in the same legal posture as Fox News in defamation lawsuits. They would no longer have any special protection. 3/11
The Right argues, duplicitously, that repealing Section 230 will come back to haunt liberals. But this is yet another false equivalence from America’s right wing. 4/11
The Democratic Party doesn’t have to lie to be successful politically. The MAGA right does. MAGAts viscerally understand this, and it is one reason why they love Trump: as a prodigious, pathological, non-stop liar, they see him 5/11
as their best and maybe their only hope of winning the cultural and political wars that are tearing the country apart. (The Big Lie about the stolen election, the culmination of all Trump’s lying, was the biggest and most consequential one of them all.) 6/11
Amending Section 230 is the right thing to do. It is essential to saving this country from its by-any-means-necessary, totally out of control and seditious right wing. And repealing it will be a boon to the left. 7/11
Let’s look at this, too: “Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., introduced legislation Wednesday to give Americans the ability to sue major tech companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter if they engage in selective censorship of political speech.” 8/11
Hawley knows — or should know — that political speech is fully protected by the First Amendment, and deciding what political speech to cover and what to censor is itself an exercise of free speech. 9/11
No law like the one Hawley proposed — even assuming that it passed — could survive constitutional scrutiny. (Incredibly, Hawley holds a J.D. from Yale Law School.) 10/11
Section 230 isn’t needed to protect free speech. (The First Amendment to the Constitution already does that.) As it stands, Section 230 does protect defamatory speech by social media companies, and that is why it must be amended, à la Sen. Warner. 11/11
