People of a certain age will remember the 2000 presidential election as including these memorable words from then Vice President Al Gore:
“During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”
That was some seriously subpar speechwriting, because it immediately morphed into “Al Gore invented the Internet”, which made him look ridiculous. Now, in fairness, Al Gore *was* fairly ridiculous, with his lockboxes and heavy dramatic sighing and obvious disdain for GWB. I was a member of the Democratic party back then, and even I was like “dude, aren’t *any* of your expensive political consultants telling you that literally no American in history ever voted for a presidential candidate because they brought a lot of haughty condescension to the table? Hasn’t anyone told you that??”
Evidently not.
But the internet as you know it and love it (or know it and hate it), with all the social media and blogs and podcasts and so forth, actually *was* effectively created by an act of Congress, in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which is part of the larger Telecommunications Act of 1996. Here are the 26 words that led to the creation of much of what people think of when they think of the internet:
“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.”
That’s it. That one sentence made Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and all the rest possible. Those words were bipartisan in origin: they were jointly written by Republican Chris Cox and Democrat Ron Wyden. What these words do is provide companies a sweeping immunity to lawsuits over what their users upload and put online. For example, if I go on Twitter and tweet out that some particular politician loves beating baby seals to death using actual toddlers, that politician might be able to sue me personally for defamation, but they wouldn’t be able to sue Twitter. That immunity to lawsuits is what makes social media possible.
In recent years, there’s been a lot of talk of reforming Section 230, and it’s chatter you can pick up on either end of the political spectrum. On the liberal end of the spectrum, Section 230 reform is held up as a way of combating “disinformation”, and on the conservative end of the spectrum, Section 230 reform is held up as a way of combating the “silencing” of conservative voices.
Both those motivations, I would argue, constitute poor reasons to do Section 230 reform, because they would lead to lots of unintended consequences; the cure would be worse than the disease. “The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet”, by Jeff Kosseff, makes that case- that Section 230 should be largely left alone. But before we dig any deeper, let’s quickly do the grades:
Readability: A
Ideas: A
Conciseness: A-
Overall grade: A
Kosseff describes his book as “a biography of a law”, and that’s a pretty good description. With apologies to the lawyers in the audience, I would say that despite the fact that it’s a book about a law, it’s actually quite readable. If you’re interested in media or the contours of freedom of speech, or especially if you find yourself in discussions of Section 230 reform and want to be better educated on the topic, I’d recommend this book.
A couple key points from the book:
It’s no accident that most of the world’s successful media platforms originated in America. We have some of the strongest freedom of speech protections in the world. It’s one of the things that does, in fact, make America exceptional. Other countries do not provide their businesses the same kind of immunity. But imagine if someone at Twitter had to check every tweet before it went live on the site to make sure it wouldn’t get the company sued- that simply wouldn’t be workable, given that people are posting thousands of tweets per second.
There are a lot of things that exist now that did not exist when these 26 words were written, and many of these things constitute much more troubling policy challenges: revenge porn, terrorist recruiting, online sex trafficking. These things are possible in part because of the protections that Section 230 provides, but the question is: is weakening the protections afforded by Section 230 the best way to deal with them?
I have no idea if Kosseff identifies as a conservative, but in the end, I would argue that this book has a conservative bent in that Kosseff largely comes down against the idea of Section 230 reform for one primary reason: that weakening the freedom of speech protections inherent in the law would shift power away from the public and concentrate it in government or in corporations. In his view, that’s a bad idea, and I wholeheartedly agree. In the end, he is willing to compromise on a narrow exception for online sex trafficking, and he clearly feels conflicted about that. I do as well, even though I’m obviously appalled by sex trafficking in every way. But the second you allow one exception, now everyone lines up with *their* desired exception, and pretty soon free speech is shredded.
The way to combat things like sex trafficking and terrorist recruiting and revenge porn is a more robust law enforcement response, and the way to combat disinformation or the silencing of anyone’s voice, conservative or otherwise, in my view, is to pass legislation that requires that if a company has any kind of content moderation policy, that policy must be publicly disclosed. Then we as a freedom-loving people must put pressure on companies that choose to unfairly or inaccurately label something as “disinformation” or that choose to silence anyone’s voice. We the people have to police that. Government cannot be relied upon to do that for us. And it’s conservatives that should lead the way.
Our Founding Fathers were correct to enshrine freedom of speech in the constitution. It’s up to us to carry on their vision and build upon their legacy. So let’s get to it!