Yeah, I have to admit it. I disagree with him on just about every single policy he has (if you can call the random brain diarrhea that spews from his mouth “policy”). But when it comes to social media companies and the mysterious Section 230 that he constantly carries on about, I do agree with him somewhat. It should be altered significantly. Before we get into why I agree with him, let’s first talk about what Section 230 is and what it does.

What is Section 230?

Part of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996, Section 230 provides liability protections to internet companies. Here is the exact text: "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" What that says is that when I post something on Twitter that’s defamatory or libelous, Twitter itself is protected from lawsuits. I can still be sued, as a dead man found out when James Woods pursued him into and beyond the grave with lawsuits. Nice guy, the Mr. Woods! (please don’t sue me) The main thrust behind an exception like this is to promote and protect freedom of speech and the unencumbered exchange of ideas, a good motivation for sure.

But just as Dr. Frankenstein intended to conquer death and expand the boundaries of medicine, he created a monster. This is the situation we are faced with now.

Why is Section 230 Good?

It’s not all bad. In fact, Section 230 has done a lot of good. I would say on balance there has been more positive than negative associated with the protections granted to internet companies. This does not mean we should be happy with the bad. If anything, we should work even harder to make it better. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a pioneer in protecting free speech on the internet. I’ll let them explain why Section 230 is good in this handy infographic they created:

OK, so getting rid of Section 230 would be bad. There is no disputing that. There have been real-life examples where its absence has hindered free speech. Some of the stuff above is a little overdramatic, I think. I’m not sure the world will be worse off without internet commentators. When one of them cures cancer, let me know. Otherwise, I think I could do without the Obama monkey jokes and rampant sexism.

The biggest issue highlighted above is that ISPs could use their monopolies to censor speech (which, psst is already happening with the death of net neutrality). Imagine if you try to write a blog post about your terrible experience with Comcast customer service (is there any other kind of experience with Comcast customer service than a bad one?) and your ISP (also Comcast) refuses to post it under the guise that it is potentially libelous or harmful to their business. This is a bad thing and Section 230 does help prevent some of this behavior.

If it’s Good, How Can it be Bad?

The CDA was an attempt to limit pornography on the internet. That’s the ‘Decency’ part. This was back when Republicans cared about such things— before they pledged fealty to a guy who curses on TV all the time and raw dogged a porn star half his age a few weeks after his wife gave birth to their son. You know, good old fashioned Christian values.

As previously noted, the CDA was written in 1996. That’s like 25 years ago. Quite a few things have changed since then. There was no way anyone could have imagined Facebook or Twitter or Instagram becoming the billion-dollar media companies they are. Section 230 was envisioned as a way to prevent powerful interests and corporations from using the legal system to silence and censor speech. But now those same protections are being used to damage our country, oftentimes by foreign entities.

It’s a proven fact that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. Part of that meddling was a coordinated effort to spread disinformation on social media, using Section 230 as a shield to prevent them from being stopped. And since Facebook and other companies were never at risk of being sued for allowing the spread of false information and propaganda, they had no incentive to stop it. In fact, because the content was highly controversial, they were actually incentivized to help it spread because it increased engagement. More engagement means more eyeballs on ads, which means more ad revenue, which means a bigger profit for Facebook shareholders. Instead of Section 230 being used to save free speech, it was being wielded by a foreign government to attack democracy and our country at large.

This is an untenable situation and if nothing is done about it, things will only get worse.

This is only one example of how Section 230 has turned against the Americans who value free speech. The practice of doxxing is dangerous and has led to actual violence against innocent people. If you don’t know, doxxing is when a user or internet figure has their personal information posted online. Their home address, their phone number, where their kids go to school. You name it. If it can be used to silence a person, they will threaten it. The worst part is that the internet sleuths who often find this information often get it wrong and accidentally dox someone completely uninvolved with the issue. This happened during the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers. There are other examples of how Section 230 has enabled dangerous, traitorous behavior but I think you get the point.

What Changed?

Part of the problem with Section 230 is that people started believing everything that saw on the internet. I’ve written about this before. Social media began to transform the internet from a virtual place where you went to see porn and send emails to an entirely new world that a person could live in 24/7. The melding of real-life and internet-life made it easy for people to be manipulated, misinformed, and confused. It has the appearance of reality since your kids and aunts and cousins and high school chums are all there. But on the internet, the social contracts we have IRL (in real life) aren’t necessarily in force. It may look like you’re getting a good picture of other people’s lives but it’s often highly curated. There are no social contracts online because a person can exist anonymously. I can create a user and say whatever I want. I could make a fake page designed to look like my mother’s account and add all her friends and then spread terrible lies. There is nothing to stop me from doing this. Seems bad.

The other part of the problem is that social media companies, in an effort to keep making money, decided to become actual media companies. How do social media companies make money? Two ways: advertising and user data, with advertising being the main one. Just like any other media company (TV networks like NBC, newspapers like NY Times, etc.) the more they know about their audience, the better they can serve them things to engage with. And then use that information to create targeted ads. If Fox News knows that its viewers are older, white people, then they’ll have lots of ads for arthritis drugs, Medicare Expansion Insurance, and catheters. Also gold, for some reason. Facebook (and others) work the same way. Except they know a HELL of a lot more about you than a TV network. They know how old you are. Where you live. How often you go online and what high school you attended. They know where you work, who your friends are, and so much more. They probably know more about you than most of the people in your life.

Don’t forget that in exchange for free messaging services and email addresses, they use all the things you write in them to keep track of you. Yeah. Have you ever noticed how after shopping for Tupperware on Amazon your Facebook page is suddenly bombarded with offers to buy Tupperware? Google combs through all your Gmail messages and looks for certain keywords. Are you and your spouse discussing buying a new car? The next time you go to search for something there will just happen to be ads targeted to you for new cars. Why do you think they give you things for free? Because they’re nice? LOL.

Advertisers LOVE that they can target you and only you. There’s no wasted money. 50 years ago an ad man had to come up with something clever and hope enough people with money and purchasing power saw it and were moved. Now, they can say “show this ad to people ages 20-25, mostly male sports fans who are followers of Joe Rogan and Barstool Sports and make more than $50k a year” and presto. They pay by the number of views so there is no wasted investment. And you give them all this information in exchange for the free services they offer.

Now imagine that you want to spread disinformation. By using the data Facebook and others have at their disposal, you can target people who are older, more inclined to believe in conspiracies, etc. You send them the disinformation and they buy it. Then they share it with their friends and families. Not everyone will swallow it down but enough will where it begins to take on the appearance of a mainstream news item. If Uncle Rick and Danny and Jenny the waitress are all talking about this, maybe there’s something to it.

And that’s basically what Russia did in the 2016 election.

What Can Be Done?

Lots! Americans have been taught to feel powerless by large corporations. They like us to think that they’ve been around forever and modern life couldn’t exist without them. Hogwash! Corporations only exist because we allow them to. They are legal constructs and their rights and responsibilities are derived and granted by American citizens. Not the other way around. We could get rid of them tomorrow if we wanted. We can change any number of laws to regulate them and make them start working for us again.

For starters, if Facebook and other social media companies want to start behaving like media companies, they need to take on the same responsibility as every other one. Facebook has curated news feeds, “fact-checkers”, and even a TV network. Sounds like a media company to me! Maybe they start being held responsible for what happens on their networks.

But how? The same way it’s always been done: hire people to monitor what information is spread and hold the company liable for damages. Facebook has a market cap of $527,000,000,000. I think they can use some of that half a trillion dollars to monitor and police their company. Again, the way things are right now, they are incentivized to allow crap to spread, so long as it increases usage. Let’s incentivize them to go the other way. You don’t think the NY Daily News would love to just publish whatever it’s readers give them for free? Ha! They can’t because they could be sued into oblivion.

This isn’t a new problem. Before we had modern libel laws America went through a period called “Yellow Journalism”. It continues in some forms to this day. But basically what would happen is rich guys would buy or start newspapers and use them to bury unflattering stories about their interests, attack other media outlets as FAKE NEWS, or manipulate their readers into war. That’s basically how we got into the Spanish-American War. It’s recurring plot point in Deadwood! Once we passed laws holding publishers accountable for what they published, they were incentivized to get their facts straight. We can do the same with social media companies.

Is it going to be hard? Sure thing! But I keep hearing about what brilliant capitalists these Silicon Valley bros are. Come up with some solutions and we can work it out through regulation and legislation. They like to pretend that there’s no way it can be done so they don’t have to invest any of their dollar-dollar bills in protecting their users from propaganda. Let’s give them the motivation to do so.

There are people much smarter and more knowledgeable than me that have solutions. Give them some power and we can begin to fix this stuff. The irony in Trump being against Section 230 is that most of what he and his supporters post would be prohibited. He doesn’t live in reality so he thinks the nonsense he’s given is real. It’s not.

In Conclusion

I don’t have all the answers. There will probably be a trial and error period until we figure it out. Freedom of Speech isn’t an absolute right. There are plenty of limits on it right now. We can find a balance between protecting free speech and ensuring the American public isn’t flooded with BS from foreign governments and domestic bad actors. We are a great country and we can do anything when we want to. But if we don’t start aligning the internet world with the real one, there is going to be a price to pay for that gap in reality. And it will be our children who pay it.

I Agree With Trump (whaaa???)