Powerful House Democrat Crafting New Bill to Curtail Section 230

LOS ANGELES—Congressional Representative David Cicilline, one of the most powerful Democrats in the House who now heads the Judiciary Committee’s Antitrust Subcommittee, is taking aim at Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, the 25-year-old law that allows a wide range of free expression, including for adult and sexually explicit content online, according to a new report by the political news site Axios.  Cicilline’s proposal, as reported by Axios, would target internet platforms — social media companies in particular — that “amplify” objectionable content posted by users. At the heart of Section 230 is the legal shields against liability for user-posted content. Because they do not have to worry about lawsuits or prosecutions over user posts, under Section 230, online platforms are free to allow a nearly unlimited variety of controversial topics and opinions to appear online without editing or censorship.  But Cicilline says that the algorithms used by social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter promote objectionable content, and his legislation will be designed to address and perhaps penalize those corporate decisions. “That's a very complicated algorithm that is designed to maximize engagement to drive up advertising prices to produce greater profits for the company," Cicilline told Axios. "That whole set of decisions, one could argue, is different than the initial post. That's a set of business decisions for which, it might be quite easy to argue, that a company should be liable for." But Section 230 expressly protects platforms that make such decisions about removing or promoting user content, according to an Electronic Frontier Foundation analysis.  Though Cicilline did not specify the details of his proposed legislation to Axios, the site TechDirt earlier reported that the Rhode Island Democrat was drafting a bill that would “take away a broad tech liability protection for online platforms that knowingly publish ‘demonstrably false’ political ads.” Whether that earlier proposal is the same one reported by Axios and apparently aimed at curbing social media algorithms. During the presidential campaign, then-candidate Joe Biden called for the full repeal of Section 230. He has since signaled an aggressive approach to reforming or repealing the law, hiring Brice Reed, a harsh critic of Section 230 as a top technology policy adviser.    “If their algorithms promote harmful content, they should be held accountable for helping redress the harm,” Reed has written, in phrasing that appears to be echoed by Cicilline. “In the long run, the only real way to moderate content is to moderate the business.” Democrats in the Senate have also introduced a new bill, the SAFE Tech Act that would effectively gut Section 230 by removing protections from sites that engage in commercial activity — which covers all major social media platforms, and of course adult sites as well. At the same time, Republican House Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana last week introduced yet another new bill aimed at rolling back Section 230 protections. His "Stop Shielding Culpable Platforms Act" would take away liability protections from platforms that “treated as the distributor of information provided by another information content provider,” a provision that would turn the whole point of the law’s liability shield on its head. In a Twitter post last week, Banks claimed that “Section 230 lets Big Tech knowingly distribute child pornography without fear of legal repercussions,” and therefore must be curtailed. But that statement is simply false. As TechDirt writer Mike Masnick noted, Child Sexual Abuse Material is “very, very, very much illegal and any website hosting it faces serious liability issues. Section 230 does not cover federal criminal law, and CSAM violates federal criminal law.” In addition sites that discover CSAM among their content are required by federal law to immediately report the illegal material to law enforcement. Photo By Kenneth C. Zirkel / Wikimedia Commons