Biden Tech Advisor Choice May Signal Tough Stance on Section 230

LOS ANGELES—President-Elect Joe Biden has stated that he favors repealing the law known as Section 230, often called “The First Amendment of the Internet.” His choice of a top technology advisor may indicate that he is serious about eliminating or making major changes to the law. Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act protects tech platforms from legal liability over content posted by users. That protection has been vital to allowing free expression online by guaranteeing that controversial content — which of course includes adult material — can be published without censorship by the platforms themselves. But according to a Reuters report this week, the top technology advisor to Biden’s presidential transition team, 60-year-old Bruce Reed, is also a harsh critic of Section 230, and authored a chapter in a recent book, Which Side of History? How Technology Is Reshaping Democracy and Our Lives, in which he denounced Section 230 as supposedly harmful to children. Reed served as Biden’s vice-presidential chief of staff from 2011 to 2013. He later became a strategist for a nonprofit group Common Sense Media, “set up by Stanford University lecturer James Steyer to advise parents and companies on healthy content for children,” according to the Reuters report. "If [tech companies] sell ads that run alongside harmful content, they should be considered complicit in the harm,” Reed and Steyer wrote in the book. “If their algorithms promote harmful content, they should be held accountable for helping redress the harm. In the long run, the only real way to moderate content is to moderate the business model.” The call to treat technology firms as legally “complicit” in alleged “harm” created by user content would directly contradict the provisions of Section 230. The Biden transition team told Reuters that Reed is now a top technology adviser, making it likely that he will also occupy a similar position in the Biden White House — though any such appointment is not yet official. Reed was a principal author of California’s 2018 Consumer Privacy Act, which restricts how tech companies may handle personal data taken from users. The law gives consumers the right to know what information a business has gathered about them, and how it is shared or sold. Earlier this month, the New York Times identified Reed as the leader of “Biden’s team of tech advisers.” Another top Biden adviser, communications specialist Bill Russo, also attacked Section 230 in public statements earlier this month, singling out the social media site Facebook in particular as “shredding the fabric of democracy.” Photo by Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons