Of the six or seven front-page fights going on in Washington, D.C., these days, this one was the most predictable: Face-book and other social media companies are fending off accusations from Washington pols that they’re not doing enough to suppress bad information during the pandemic. None other than the president of the United States himself has piled on. He said the other day that social media companies were “killing people” by allowing misinformation on their sites.
The various leaders of the social media companies clutched their pearls. Why, this was nothing more than unhelpful finger-pointing! They’re doing the best they can!
This whole rancorous back-and-forth could be seen coming for miles, for years. When Facebook, Twitter and the various Big Tech companies began editing posts on their sites, they left themselves open. To accusations. To lawsuits. To all of this.
In the beginning, as it was once said in much better writing, the Congress of the United States created the Communications Decency Act and the Telecommunications Act — back in 1996. The Communications Act included something called Section 230, which generally provided immunity for website platforms from third-party content.
In English, this meant that those internet platforms acted as bulletin boards, and couldn’t be held liable for what people posted on them. Somebody could post something insane or hurtful on those platforms just as somebody could tack a note to a public bulletin board. The bulletin board couldn’t be sued. As long as the person in charge of the bulletin board didn’t edit anything — in other words, as long as the person didn’t act as a publisher.
We know something about publishing around here. We hire reporters and editors and photographers and copy editors and all kinds of people to report the news, and sometimes write something interesting in the opinion sections. And the newspaper is held responsible for those efforts. News is dug up. Perspective is given. Mistakes are corrected. And passive voice is only allowed sometimes.
But the Big Tech companies were given immunity from responsibility (and lawsuits) under Section 230 as long as they didn’t act as publishers.
Then they did.
And now they’ve waded into some deep waters.
Once these tech companies began tagging posts about what was wrong, disputed or in-between, people began expecting that of them. Over the weekend, the surgeon general of the United States told one of the Sunday shows that, “These platforms have to recognize they’ve played a major role in the increase in speed and scale with which misinformation is spreading” about covid vaccines.
Facebook, in its “defense” — it doubtlessly hopes — says it has taken steps in recent months against anti-vaccine advertisements and misstatements about the vaccines. According to the paper: “In October [Facebook] said it would no longer allow anti-vaccination ads on its platform. In February, the company went further and said it would remove posts with erroneous claims about vaccines, including assertions that vaccines cause autism or that it is safer for people to contract the coronavirus than to receive the vaccinations.”
Any such platform that wants to limit its advertising to more responsible clients has every right. But to edit every post on these sites could be to throw away Section 230 protections. Not to mention, what a chore! Is Facebook going to hire enough people to edit 2.85 billion monthly users? It better start thinking of such things if it’s going to join the publishing business.
No matter what they’re saying on the Sunday shows these days, this really isn’t a matter of Facebook vs. Anti-vaxers or how Big Tech can best help spread the (correct) news. It’s more of a legal question — about whether these social media platforms want the responsibility for the billions of things posted on them every month. Or, maybe the legal question is whether they should be, now that they’ve taken all these steps to act as publishers already, starting when they began tagging former President Donald Trump’s posts.
Big Tech seems to want it not just both ways, but all ways. It wants to be in the publishing business, but it also seems to want the freedom of being only a bulletin board. We’re pretty sure that won’t work. And a whole multi-billion-dollar industry could be at risk.
It must be said, this was all predictable. It also must be said, these companies brought all these problems on themselves.