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US Senators Mark Warner (D-VA), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) on Friday introduced draft legislation to limit the legal protections available to social networks, websites, and anything else that provides an "interactive computer service."
The three politicians proposed a bill they're calling the SAFE TECH Act [PDF], which narrows the liability protection afforded to organizations by Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act.
[...] Section 230 of the CDA is the legal foundation of the modern internet because it provides a way for orgs to host user-generated content while, more or less, avoiding legal liability for that content. And it allows companies to maintain that qualified immunity even when they moderate user-generated content.
[...] "A platform that hosts organizing efforts for armed militia groups making direct calls for violence faces no legal consequences for its actions, even when reported by users hundreds of times in advance of the tragic events," laments Warner, pointing at the lack of consequences for online services that were used to organize the attempted insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The bill proposes to clarify where Section 230 immunity does not apply. It seeks to remove platform protection for:
- Ads and other paid content, so platforms can't profit from unlawful or harmful services.
- Civil rights law and antitrust law violation claims.
- Harassment/cyberstalking claims related to protected classes (e.g. sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, etc).
- Wrongful death claims.
- Alien Tort Claims Act claims (e.g. allowing survivors of the Rohingya genocide to sue Facebook).
Also at Reuters which adds:
There are several other pieces of legislation aimed at changing the law doing the rounds, including one from Republican Senators Roger Wicker and Lindsey Graham. There is another one from Democratic Senator Joe Manchin and a bipartisan bill from Democrat Brian Schatz and Republican John Thune.
What do other countries do?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2021, @01:33PM (4 children)
which the article links to. It isn't as bad as I would have thought. Mostly it provides some tools that judges can use to rescind 230 protections if sites are using CDA 230 to shield activities that really aren't covered by CDA230 anyway. IOW, it puts discretion in the hands of the judiciary, rather than simply repealing protections. Since the federal judiciary is corrupt, it is really same same. Big guy judge shops, and little guy gets pooned.
And by the time they end "negotiating" it won't look anything like it does now, so there really is no point in complaining. The bill that is public today, will not get passed until it is utterly perverse and opaque, without any public review or feedback. We are in the bait part of the bait-and-switch.
OK, now all you fundamentalist righties who have turned SN into 8ch chime in! I'd love to hear everything you've got to say about a two page bill you were too lazy to read before posting.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2021, @05:24PM
You are most likely misunderstanding what the bill says.
The section where it adds the various exceptions are not the normal disclaimers on legalese about not contradicting some other act. Those are exceptions that are being specifically removed from protections for 230. So for instance it removes protections against lawsuits for any act claiming "harassment" under State law. This means sites would now, themselves, be potentially liable for any post which could possibly be interpreted, under any state's set of laws, as possibly being harassing in nature.
The goal is to effectively destroy any sort of possible free speech style competitor to Twitter/Facebook/etc, while also encouraging Facebook/Twitter/etc to become even more aggressive in censorship of everything outside of establishment politics, all while trying to angle shoot around the First Amendment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2021, @12:59PM (2 children)
"And by the time they end "negotiating" it won't look anything like it does now"
Yeah, what usually happens is they throw in a bunch of horrible last minute clauses and quickly pass it before anyone can have a chance to criticize it. So the one that actually passes is likely to be a lot worse, what they're presenting now is something that will hopefully garner less criticism than what actually does pass.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2021, @01:02PM (1 child)
It's almost always the bills that are passed last minute that we need to be most worried about and it's almost always last minute changes to a relatively reasonable looking bill that we need to be most worried about.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2021, @03:01PM
(not to mention bills that are negotiated in secrecy, like the TPP was, are also bills that are the ones we need to also be very worried about. It's the bills that are presented and passed or changes that are made before anyone has had a chance to really discuss them that we need to be most worried about).