Now he’s co-governing with Musk. Both billionaires own social media platforms that benefit from Section 230 protections. What’s the incentive for them to push for a repeal?
The most useful Section 230 might:
- Intimidate fact checkers
- Promote new "outsiders", conveniently approved with a polished message
- Sew a framework of attribution, especially between loyal states versus blue states.
- Obscure that some messages are paid, while others just win an algorithmic jumble.
- Sew a framework of counter-attribution, where a platform may challenge my message as untruthful. Regardless, if I seem to pass a particular loyalty test, I win the right not just to promote it harder, but also advertise "what they don't want you to know" and they must carry it as such.
Say someone posts things on Twitter calling for violence against some group, and members of that group get harassed or attacked and they sue the poster and they sue Twitter.
All they need to do is choose plaintiffs who have not agreed to Twitter's TOS.
If you don’t think that kind of thing happens on Twitter/X, you haven’t been paying attention.
Anyway, Republicans generally favor less regulation and less enforcement, not more. If there’s a new rule that requires companies to publish something, but it’s not actually enforced, then it doesn’t mean anything. Companies can just publish something vaguely plausible out of some old code snapshot (like Twitter does today).
How would that revised law look like? Would courts be tasked with determining whether a defendant in a Section 230 lawsuit had been sufficiently neutral?
The standard for libel is extremely high in America compared to many other countries. By the same logic, the standard for losing Section 230 protections should be similarly high. Otherwise courts become unwilling arbiters of what’s acceptable speech.