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In 1995, Senator James Exon brought a blue binder to the floor of the Senate. It was
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full of, well…
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-The most hardcore, perverse types of pornography.
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The images came from the Internet. Exon wanted his fellow senators to realize
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what kids could see…
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-Come by my desk and take a look at this disgusting material.
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…with just the click of a button.
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-It's certainly not hard to find. And, I was just like, Dad, get a load of this.
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In the mid-90s, Americans debated how to handle all kinds of objectionable content on the web,
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including hate speech and defamation. Out of that debate came a law that helped
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create the modern Internet, and now both Republicans and Democrats want it changed. It's called:
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-Section 230. -Section 230 should be revoked.
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But what does that law actually do? And what would happen to the Internet if we changed it?
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The thing to remember about the 90s is…
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-On your mark, get set, we're riding on the Internet.
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...the Internet was young and few people really understood it.
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-Allison, can you explain what Internet is?
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It seemed cool.
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-It's very hip to be on the Internet right now.
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-Now that I'm on the Internet, I'd rather be on my computer than doing just about anything.
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It's really cool.
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But we hadn't agreed on what to do with all the objectionable content, or if we should
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do anything. James Exon, the senator with the porn binder, wanted the government to
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clean up the Internet by effectively making indecent material like porn illegal online.
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-And so he proposed an amendment to the Telecommunications Act called
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the Decency Act, the Communications Decency Act.
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But two members of Congress, Christopher Cox and Ron Wyden, thought that companies would
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do a better job cleaning the Internet up themselves. There was just one big legal problem.
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-There were court cases that perversely made, uh, Internet, uh, providers liable if they
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tried to exercise editorial discretion, keep, uh, smut off the Internet, and so on.
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At the time, courts held that Internet providers like Prodigy, which moderated some user content,
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were potentially liable for anything their users posted. So the companies faced a choice:
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clean up their websites and risk getting sued, or go totally hands off and face no legal consequences.
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Cox and Wyden didn't like that.
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-That is backwards. We want to encourage people like Prodigy, like Compuserve, like America
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Online, like the new Microsoft Network to do everything possible for us the customer
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to help us control what comes in and what our children see.
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So Cox and Wyden wrote a provision, Section 230, that let companies moderate content without
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being on the legal hook for it. Their hope was that Internet companies would, in good
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faith, police objectionable content on the Web.
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We came to call it the sword and the shield. And the sword is the ability to take down
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horrible stuff on the Internet. The shield is the protection from frivolous litigation.
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Section 230 was added to Senator Exon's Communications Decency Act, and the whole
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thing passed in 1996. But then Exon's porn ban ran into one big wall: the First Amendment.
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Free speech advocates are hailing a ruling: the U.S. government cannot enforce the Communications Decency Act without violating the constitutional right to free speech.
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-You, you probably guessed that because, uh, there's — Spoiler alert,
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there's porn on the Internet.”
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But the courts let Section 230 stand. And that little law created a massive industry.
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-So, you think about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, even Wikipedia. None of these business models
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could exist in their current forms if the platforms had to defend in court the veracity
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of every single thing that people post.
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The story of Section 230 is the story of the Internet: more and more people posting what
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they want online, and websites not getting sued for it because of their legal shield.
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The dark side of that story started pretty early: in 1995, when an anonymous user on
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AOL impersonated a man named Kenneth Zeran and used his name and phone number to sell
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T-shirts glorifying the Oklahoma City bombing.
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-At the time, it was a fairly novel approach of, really, ruining someone's life.
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After receiving a tsunami of threatening phone calls, Zeran begged AOL to take down the anonymous
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user's ads.
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-They, for a while, would take them down. But then they stopped listening to him. He
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was annoying. They just moved on.
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Zeran sued AOL in 1996. But the court said Section 230 allowed AOL to leave up the posts
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even after Zeran reported them. AOL got to use Section 230's shield, in other words,
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without ever having to touch its sword.
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-It becomes, effectively, the law of the land. You could keep up the content no matter how
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horrific, how defamatory it is, and you are not going to be liable for it.
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Carrie Goldberg is a lawyer who says the broad immunity Section 230's shield gives Internet
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companies has made some of them lazy and irresponsible.
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-Section 230 is not a law that protects free speech. Section 230 is a law that protects
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an industry.
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Four years ago, her client, Matthew Herrick, was impersonated by a vengeful ex-boyfriend
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on the dating app, Grindr.
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-He would create profiles using Matthew's picture and his name and then send unwitting
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people to Matthew's home and to his job to have sex with Matthew.
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-Matthew Herrick says for months he couldn't go to the restaurants where he waited tables,
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or his home, without men he didn't know approaching him for sex or drugs.
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-Matthew was receiving sometimes 23 people in person at his home. And often, Matthew's
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ex would say that Matthew was into rape fantasies. So he was setting Matthew up to be sexually
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assaulted.
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-Herrick said he filed 50 reports with Grindr and the company never did anything.
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-We were suing them ultimately for, uh, releasing a dangerous product onto the marketplace.
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But the court said that, just like in the Zeran-AOL case, Grindr didn't have to help Herrick.
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It was, in my opinion, the most expansive and extravagant interpretation of Section 230 to date.
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Goldberg thinks that Section 230 should be changed or revoked so people like Herrick
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could sue for Internet companies' negligence.
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Everybody should have the right to be able to sue somebody or a company who has harmed you
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or is continuing to harm you. And so I see this not as a speech issue, but an access
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to justice issue.
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You know, why do these harms happen? It's a combination of the perpetrator and the platform.
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Site operators should only enjoy immunity from liability if they're engaged in reasonable
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content moderation practices. Right, there here has to be an exchange, like, you get
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the legal shield, but you've got to do something.
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Today, Section 230 has helped create an Internet industry worth more than a trillion dollars.
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Section 230 is how these companies have gotten big, it's how they've gotten powerful,
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it's how they've gotten rich.
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And agreeing on what it would mean for these companies to use Section 230's sword and
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shield responsibly has gotten harder. It depends on what you think the problem is. Democrats
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want companies like Facebook to do more policing of disinformation.
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Because it is not merely an internet company. It is propagating falsehoods they know to
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be false
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But some Republicans claim there's a different problem: censorship of conservative views.
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And they want to change or scrap Section 230 to make Internet companies do less policing.
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The Big Tech oligarchs have declared war on the Republican Party and conservatives.
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I think it's time that we consider the outright repeal of Section 230.
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Tweaking Section 230 might help individual victims of abuse like Matthew Herrick, and
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it could make Internet companies more accountable for the way they moderate content. But defenders
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of the law say that changing it too much could undermine people's freedom to post what
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they want online.
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What I think we need are changes that are very carefully tailored and that address a
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particular harm and that also consider, how do we address this harm without just sort
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of, um, causing total chaos to the existing Internet that we know?