Name: It’s Not Section 230 President Trump Hates, It’s the First Amendment
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It’s Not Section 230 President Trump Hates, It’s the First Amendment

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Email updates on news, actions,and events in your area.DEEPLINKS BLOGShare ItPresident Trump’s if it doesn’t include a may represent the final attack on online free speech of his presidency, but it’s certainly not the first. The NDAA is one of the “must-pass” bills that Congress passes every year, and it’s absurd that Trump is using it as his at-the-buzzer shot to try to kill . Congress must reject Trump’s march against Section 230 once and for all.Under Section 230, the only party responsible for unlawful speech online is the person who said it, not the website where they posted it, the app they used to share it, or any other third party. It has some limitations—most notably, it does nothing to —but at its core, it’s just common-sense policy: if a new Internet startup needed to be prepared to defend against countless lawsuits on account of its users’ speech, startups would never get the investment necessary to . 230 isn't just about Internet companies, either. Any&nbsp;intermediary&nbsp;that hosts user-generated material receives this shield, including nonprofit and educational organizations like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive.Section 230 is not, as Trump and other politicians have suggested, a . It protects all of us. If you’ve ever forwarded an email, Section 230 protected you: if a court found that email defamatory, Section 230 would guarantee that ; only the author can.If you’ve ever forwarded an email, Section 230 protected you.Two myths about Section 230 have developed in recent years and clouded today’s debates about the law. One says that Section 230 somehow requires online services to be “neutral public forums”: that if they show “bias” in their decisions about what material to show or hide from users, they lose their liability shield under Section 230 (this myth drives today’s deeply misguided ). The other myth is that if Section 230 were repealed, online platforms would suddenly turn into “neutral” forums, doing nothing to remove or promote certain users’ speech. Both myths ignore that Section 230 isn’t what protects platforms’ right to reflect any editorial viewpoint in how it moderates users’ speech—the First Amendment to the Constitution is. The First Amendment protects platforms’ right to moderate and curate users’ speech to reflect their views, and Section 230 additionally protects them from certain types of liability for their users’ speech. .about proposals in Congress to force platforms to be “neutral” in their moderation decisions. Besides being unworkable, such proposals are clearly unconstitutional: under the First Amendment, the government cannot force sites to display or promote speech they don’t want to display or remove speech they don’t want to remove.It’s not hard to ascertain the motivations for Trump’s escalating war on Section 230. Even before he was elected, Trump was deeply focused on using the courts to punish companies for insults directed at him. He infamously promised in early 2016 to “” to make it easier for him to legally bully journalists.No matter your opinion of Section 230, we should all be alarmed that Trump considers a goofy nickname a security threat.Trump’s attacks on Section 230 follow a familiar pattern: they always seem to follow a perceived slight by social media companies. The White House that would draft the FCC to write regulations narrowing Section 230’s liability shield, though the FCC has no statutory authority to interpret Section 230. (Today, Congress is set to confirm Trump’s pick for a new FCC commissioner—one of the .) That executive order came when Twitter and Facebook began to add fact checks to his dubious claims about mail-in voting.But before, Trump never took the step of claiming that “national security” requires him to be able to use the courts to censor critics. , which also happened to be the day that after he snapped at a reporter. Since then, he has . The right to criticize people in power is one of the foundational rights on which our country is based. No matter your opinion of Section 230, we should all be alarmed that Trump considers a goofy nickname a security threat. Besides, repealing Section 230 would do nothing about the #DiaperDon tweets or any of the claims of . Even if platforms have a clear political bias, Congress can't enact a law that overrides those platforms’ right to moderate user speech in accordance with that bias.What would happen if Section 230 were repealed, as the president claims to want? Online platforms would become more restrictive overnight. Before allowing you to post online, a platform would need to gauge the level of legal risk that you and your speech bring on them—. It’s shocking that politicians pushing for a more exclusionary Internet are doing so under the banner of free speech; it’s even more galling that the president has dubbed it a matter of national security.Our free speech online is too important to be held as collateral in a routine authorization bill. Congress must reject President Trump’s misguided campaign against Section 230.Share ItFormer EFF intern Shashank Sirivolu contributed to this blog post. Social media users who have sued companies for deleting, demonetizing, and otherwise moderating their content have tried several arguments that this violates their constitutional rights. Courts have consistently ruled against them because social media platforms themselves have the First Amendment...In a new round of talks this week to formulate a , EFF is calling for strictly limiting the scope of the convention’s international cooperation provisions and safeguards to ensure that states respect human rights when responding to legal assistance requests.EFF is among a group of ...Since the U.S. Supreme Court overruled a half century of precedent supporting the constitutional right to abortion access, numerous states have moved towards making abortion illegal and restricting additional reproductive health services. In South Carolina, Republican state Senators Richard Cash, Rex F. Rice and Daniel B. Verdin III introduced ...Originating from the streets of Chicago, drill music is a creative output of inner-city Black youths. It is defined by real life experiences and perspectives, and whilst drill rappers often document gang-related conflict and anti-establishment narratives in their lyrics and music videos, the rap genre is a crucial mouthpiece of...Even in the face of strong public protest over a set of proposed revisions to criminal laws that infringe Indonesians’ free expression rights, the Indonesian Ministry of Law and Human Rights last month that threatens to further...The U.S. (OFAC)'s of “Tornado Cash” as an entity on the raises important questions that are being discussed around the world. OFAC explained its sanction by saying “Tornado Cash (Tornado) is a virtual currency ...Even if you think that online intermediaries should be more proactive in detecting, deprioritizing, or removing certain user speech, the requirements on intermediaries to review all content before publication—often called “general monitoring” or “upload filtering”—raises serious human rights concerns, both for freedom of expression and for privacy.General monitoring is problematic...Government involvement in content moderation raises serious human rights concerns in every context, and these concerns are further troubling when the involvement originates with law enforcement. We recently filed a with the Meta Oversight Board urging it to treat this issue seriously.When sites cooperate with government agencies, it...Students should not have to fear expulsion for expressing themselves on social media after school and off-campus, but that is just what happened to the plaintiff in C1.G v. Siegfried. Last month, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the student’s expulsion violated his First Amendment rights.The UK government has had to revise its into a proposal that wouldn’t harm users’ basic rights. It has failed to do so, and the bill should be scrapped. The current bill is a threat to free expression, and it undermines...Share It

Email updates on news, actions,and events in your area.DEEPLINKS BLOGShare ItPresident Trump’s if it doesn’t include a may represent the final attack on online free speech of his presidency, but it’s certainly not the first. The NDAA is one of the “must-pass” bills that Congress passes every year, and it’s absurd that Trump is using it as his at-the-buzzer shot to try to kill . Congress must reject Trump’s march against Section 230 once and for all.Under Section 230, the only party responsible for unlawful speech online is the person who said it, not the website where they posted it, the...

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Elliot Harmon

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It’s Not Section 230 President Trump Hates, It’s the First Amendment

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