Communicators, a discussion of tech issues that may play a role in campaign 20 20. Joining us from washington, d. C. Is berin szoka, techfreedom founder senior fellow. And from los angeles, jessica gonzales, free press coceo. Ms. Gonzales, i want to start with news that is breaking as we are taping this. That is a potential look at section 230, the liability portion of the Communications Act, and possible changes to it. What is your view and your groups view on section 230, and what do you think about possible changes . Is ana section 230 important mechanism to defend free speech on the internet. We think it should largely remain in place. 230, andhe attacks on especially the president s executive order he issued in response to twitter Fact Checking is very problematic censorship that runs contrary to the First Amendment. Berin szoka, your initial thoughts on potential changes. Berin i agree with everything she said, and it is not just an important protection but the law that made the internet possible. It would not be possible for websites from the smallest blog to the Biggest Social Network to host content uses created if they could be sued for each of those pieces of content. That is what section 230 protects against, and it protects against websites when they moderate content they find harmful or objectionable. What the administration is trying to do is narrow the protection for content moderation so websites would no longer be protected if they tried to remove content that they thought was false or racist, or even calling for another holocaust. We are talking about some of the most awful content on the internet that i do not want to see and no one wants their children to see, yet the administration thinks websites should be sued for removing the most awful content. That is contrary to what the republicans who wrote 230 had in mind, and a betrayal for everything conservatives have stood for for 25 years. Host jessica gonzales. Jessica i have spent a lot of time working with grassroots organizations that are fighting. Ate and disinformation online we have worked together on a which is focused on stopping White Supremacists who are organizing violence over a social media platforms. I have worked with a stop hate for Profit Campaign which toently got 1200 advertisers stop advertising on facebook in july to protest rampant hate and disinformation on the site. I am no fan of big tech that forms and how they have abused their workers and abused the privacy rights of their users. 230kly, going after section is not the right approach to the very real problems that we are ,eeing with Online Platforms the privacy abuses we are seeing, the way they are extracting ad dollars from the field of journalism. And instead of can shipping to journalism, they are spreading instead of contributing to journalism, they are spreading massive disinformation about voting, the election and health and safety during the pandemic. I am no fan of the tech platforms. I think we need to look seriously at regulation to rein them in, hold them accountable, make sure they are not abusing their dominance and taking advantage of the american people. Frankly, section 230 and dismantling section 230 is the wrong way to go. If i am the general counsel of twitter or facebook or social media platforms, and i see those protections are removed, the first thing i do is say, dont moderate content at all. That is why 230 was written in the first place. To allow companies to monitor content and moderate content as they see fit. It is their First Amendment right to moderate content on their site. They need to do a better job at that. Beenolution to what has very poor content moderation and a failure to adequately remove disinformation and racism from social media platforms will not find a solution by removing 230. In fact, just the opposite. I am particularly aggrieved by what i described as an executive order temper tantrum from the Trump Administration. Freepress has sued the Trump Administration for that executive order. Public it is open for comment at the fcc. Is interesting thing we saw no serious commenters in that argued that the fcc has authority to do what the Trump Administration is directing it to do, calling for them to essentially censor. That executive order should be revoked. If it is not, we feel we have a good chance taking it down in court. Mr. Szoka. Berin this is about all websites. Breitbart, gateway pundit, all those websites every day in their terms of Service Reserve the right to remove content that they find objectionable, including racist content and offensive content that the administration would declare out of bounds of the protections of section 230. This is not about somehow conservatives getting what they already expect on the internet. Theer this is turning internet into Something Like gab. Im not sure if you will thank me for this suggestion, spend an hour looking at it, and you will see what this administration wants the internet to look like. It is the most heinous content out there imaginable. It is limited to a small audience of the worst people in america. There has been an alternative developed popular among conservatives called parlor, used by ted cruz. You will notice they have censored some of that content. You will not find the nword, but plenty of antisemitic content including pro holocaust content. Even this conservative site wants to moderate some content that the administration would deny them the ability to moderate and be protected from a lawsuit, while on the other hand allowing terrible content to flourish on their site that you do not find on facebook and twitter. You hear conservatives complaining about anticonservative bias, this is what we are talking about. It is not joe, the average conservative, being censored, but people like Richard Spencer and david duke. Host we will begin with you, szoka, when it comes to content moderation, how would you develop a website or social media platform . Berin i want to underscore the First Amendment means this decision is for every operator to make on their own. It is not the role of the government or any policy organization as a regulatory matter what they should do. The Supreme Court has been clear about this. Digital media website operators are like newspaper operators, they have the same rights. With that caveat, i think it is difficult. Jessica noted this. Content moderation is inherently imperfect, it will never please everyone. It is too difficult to do with the scale of the internet. We have seen different approaches. Twitter and facebook are different between the two of them. Permissive been more. Facebook takes down things and has a difficult time distinguishing between people discussing how terrible antisemitism is, and people emoting antisemitic ideas. That is more problematic during the pandemic because it takes a lot of human beings to do the content moderation. On systems are relying computers to do that, and they are bad at nuance. It is a difficult question to answer. Networke a large social and had the resources to hire people, i would do a better job than smaller sites who struggle to distinguish between the kinds of pro racist content or antiracist content we have been discussing. As a general matter, i am concerned misinformation about things like voting and covid is being spread on these platforms. At the same time it is important they find a way to outsource to credible organizations the decision as to who will be treated as an authoritative source. Who counts as a journalist . News guard is a tool developed by the former publisher of the wall street journal. They have done a good job of providing objective rankings of various websites. The more social Media Services rely on independent outlets that , there will be greater confidence to understand gateway pundit is being treated differently because it is not a real media outlet. Host jessica gonzales. I have actually been working with a Coalition Led by women and people of color forgive me for the crude expression are canaries in the coal mine and recognize how harmful and hateful and just plain wrong in terms of lying and disinformation that content is spreading. It is often impacting our communities first, because we see for instance, in my community, i am ex a can american, the latino community, large immigrant community we are seeing the impact of disinformation about immigrants, lies and hate directed at the immigrant community, and how that impacts policy and plain old relationships. How we are treated by our peers in society. I have been working with the change coalition for several 60 humand we are rights organizations. We came up with a framework, a series of suggestions. You can find it at changethe term. Og. Heterm. Org. Changet we call for a ban on hateful activities. We have a specific definition we worked on for over a year to make sure we were balancing free keepssion, and the need to people safe on the internet. We are calling for much more robust investment and enforcement, especially by Companies Like facebook who are making money hand over fist and have the resources to do a much better job at enforcing its own rules. Currently facebook failed to enforce the substandard rules it is setting for itself. We are calling for transparency about how content moderation is happening. We are calling for very easy to access so people whose content is taken down by mistake can easily call for it to be put back up. We are calling for big tech andanies to take down bots troll campaigns that trade and hate and disinformation. We are calling for a ban on White Supremacists. In particular we followed with great concern the kenosha guard page on facebook. Killed in were kenosha, wisconsin by a paramilitary teenager. We are concerned about the use particular,pages in and our allies and advocates are listing this concern to facebook for over five years now. The way these pages are used to organize violent events, the way they are used to ask people to bring arms to protests outside of mosques. I am concerned about how these pages will be used to call for arms outside a polling places. I think facebook is not prepared to take action. I am getting a bit offtopic. I have a lot to say about facebook. Back to the model policies, we think these are the bare minimum, a baseline. If social Media Companies can adopt these principles and enforce them, we think that would go a long way to rooting out hate and disinformation that is having a serious impact on women and people of color, and frankly on all of us here in the United States, but also abroad. This is not a call for government regulation. This is a call for the companies themselves to step up and take responsibility for what they are hosting on their platforms. With this advocacy work, campaign work, it occurs to me that we need to look at theincentive behind explosion of hate and disinformation on facebook and other social media platforms. That as a examine society. Just to finish my thought, what i am talking about here is the fact facebook and other social Media Companies make a ton of money based off of high engagement and hate and disinformation often yield that engagement. We need to look at that incentive as we figure out what solutions we need. Host that leads into our next topic, there have been calls in washington for the breakup of some of these larger social Media Companies. Jessica gonzales, what are your thoughts . Jessica i think we need to take a deep look at how these companies are using their market power, how they are abusing their power over employees, looking at whether they are engaging in anticompetitive behavior, or have monopoly status, that is absolutely on the table. Take a deep look at that. A couple weeks ago the House Judiciary Committee began their investigation in earnest at a hearing with some of the tech ceos. Lets look at that, but also look at how they are abusing the privacy rights of people here in the u. S. And abroad. That is where i think we can ensureward regulation to privacy and civil rights are protected on these platforms. Honestly, i read with great interest senator warrens capitalization act that would turn large corporations to have social responsibility to the american people. I am interested in that approach as it provides for an examination into the incentives that lead these companies to monetize hate and disinformation. The final thing, i think there are a lot of different inquiries to be undertaking right now to understand the harms social Media Companies are causing to the american people, and to examine a variety of remedies beyond what we are assessing here. Athink we also need to look how the decline in journalism makes it harder to fight online disinformation. We have shuttered tons of newsrooms in the past decade. We have lost almost 50 of journalists in newsrooms. The ad dollars that used to go to newspapers that produced journalism are now being spent online. That is why at free press we are thinking a lot of a platform add tax to take a small portion of the giant revenues that the tech that forms are earning and turn. Hat back to journalism that in itself can help root out disinformation, root out lies, and tell the truth. We have a paper on our site at freepress. Net that sets out ideas for how to get at the disinformation problem with more information and actually investing robustly in quality independent nonprofit journalism. Host berin szoka. Berin the Trump Administration would agree with most of jessica just said, they would love to be in charge of deciding who gets funding and qualifies as journalists. I am terrified of that. I think state funding of journalism is inherently dangerous. What killed the newspaper is not facebook or twitter, it is craigs list, the ability of people to put up classifieds which previously they had done on newspapers. The Business Model for media has always been about advertising. It is not just the display ads. We cannot put the genie back in the bottle. Governmentget the out of the way mostly. I am sympathetic to this problem. I think journalism has suffered terribly. I dont think the solution is government funding. Instead, what we need to do first and foremost is maintain without230, because that online newspapers would not be able to engage with users. They would be like netflix, only present content and not the content posted by users. Uphink this idea of breaking tech will solve the problems is also problematic. It is the case that the bigger sites are better able to do content moderation for the reasons we have been discussing. I know it is not done perfectly read im sure jessica has great ideas how it can be improved, but as a practical matter it is the case those are more likely to be in limited at figure companies with better equipped teams and resources who cannot just hire people, but develop algorithms that can help websites to clean up content. This is not just about social networks. It is also about, complains we are hearing from conservatives is that the websites are being censored because google is trying to shut them down. What they are talking about is that the federalist had a serious problem with openly racist content in its comments. Google took a position they were not going to allow ads to appear next to that content, which is reasonable and they have a first amend the right to do. Then the question becomes, how does a website operator cleanup content in their comments section . It is not easy to do. The answer is technological innovation. Kugel and other services are building better tools to distinguish google and other services are building better tools to distinguish pro racist content so they can continue to have comments on their pages for their articles and show ads, and not get into fights where the federalist decided to shut down the comments section because it was easier than cleaning up the terrible thing their readers say. It is more complicated than just big tech, and the only way out of these problems is to innovate. Host both of our guests are attorneys. Berin szoka, give us a snapshot of tech freedom. Berin we like to say we are lawyers for the future. The First Amendment is at the heart of all of our work. In general we are concerned about the potential for abuse by whoever might be in power next. It is unfortunate a lot of people have not seen that the Trump Administration has revealed the many ways the government can weaponize law and regulation for political advantage. What i would like to see happen in the next administration is Something Like what happened in the Ford Administration when there was a concerted effort to learn from the abuses of power that took place under president nixon, then create commissions to study those problems, and implement statutory changes. I would like to see that happen now, i can work with people across the political spectrum. We ought to be talking about things like the war powers of the president and his ability to shut down Internet Services. Those things should be reformed. That is the kind of work we do at tech freedom. Consumer protection law, privacy, competition law. A future wherete the government has a role to protect consumers, but to protect against the abuse of power is much as possible and protect against specialpurpose regulators captured by the companies they regulate. Host how are you funded . Berin we get funding from foundations and a big tent of companies, i am glad to say include companies on both sides of the most divisive debates in the last 10 years. We were skeptical of the fccs claims of authority to regulate the authority when the Obama Administration made those claims, just as we are now. With Net Neutrality, we had companies on both sides who fund our work. People see value in taking a principled position that is skeptical about the government and in general wants to allow innovators to do their work for the future to unfold on its own without some technocrat trying Jessica Gonzalez, tell us about free press. Jessica free press is a nonprofit, Nonpartisan Organization dedicated to transforming the media toward the ultimate goal of enabling a just society. We know that media and tech have an outside influence on our lives. They help us understand the world around us, and the influence how Public Policy on a variety of issues comes out. So, we have worked very hard to make sure that, a, everybody has access to the internet. This is one of our biggest issues right now, universal and Affordable Access to the internet. People withillion inadequate access during a pandemic. That is a crisis and we need to fix it right away. We have 15 million schoolchildren who cannot go to school right now because they dont have adequate Internet Access at their homes. So free press has fought very hard over the years to ensure universal access to the internet , to fight for Net Neutrality so Internet Service providers do not discriminate or act in discriminatory ways in their provision of Internet Service to the people. At the end of the day, we are a grassroots built organization that hears from our 1. 4 million members in every state across the United States to make sure that the peoples voice is heard in the decisions that impact how our media and Technology Systems work. We really are here to give a voice to those people. We have a team of lawyers , but we also have a huge team of campaigners, of organizers, of communicators who are working in communities across the country to understand what people want, how people are being harmed or helped by media and technology, and are working to ensure we have more robust journalism, and that we have a really robust and thorough ways for people to engage in our democracy to learn the truth about what is happening in our country. And that is what we are focused on now, and that is what we have been focused on for the last 17 years. Host i apologize to both of you, but we have about one minute left and we need to discuss privacy. Berin szoka, when you look at privacy legislation, what are two key items you would like to see in that . Is aboutthink this building the capacity of the federal trade administration. It is really important that we focus on figuring out how the ftc can handle privacy. We talked at a Senate Hearing this morning. There was a proposal made to triple the agencys budget. That is a much better approach than trying to build a new special purpose regulator. Number two, the internet has flourished because of a consistent federal approach to regulating the internet. That needs to maintain the case. The states attorneys general have a role to play. It is a mistake to allow states to come up with their own approaches because that ends up creating not only a patchwork, but every state trying to regulate the entire internet. Host Jessica Gonzalez . Jessica look, we need an ftc chair who is committed to protecting the privacy of consumers. We probably need a legislative overhaul to make sure that the andrnet Service Providers the platforms themselves are protecting civil rights and privacy. But we also need to go back to an important regulation that was passed in the Obama Administration that has been repealed by the Republican Congress of the following year in ensuring that section 222 of the Communications Act protects Consumer Privacy over Internet Access and Internet Service provider abuse. Is a lot of regulatory and legislative things that we probably need to be focused on in 2021. Coceoessica gonzalez is of free press, and berin szoka is the founder and a senior fellow at tech freedom. We thank you both for being on the communicators. Jessica thanks for having me. Youru are watching cspan, unfiltered view of government. Created by americas Cable Television companies as a public service, and brought to you today by your television provider. Houses afternoon, White Press SecretaryKayleigh Mcenany released a statement on the president s condition, saying President Trump remains in good spirits, has mild symptoms, and has been working throughout the day. Out of an abundance of caution and at the recommendation of his physician and medical experts, the president will be working from the president ial offices at walter reed for the next few days. The president appreciates the outpouring of support for both he and the first lady. President trump i want to thank everyone for the tremendous support. I am going to walter reed hospital. I think i am doing very well, but we are going to make sure that things work out. The first lady is doing very well. I want to thank you very much. I appreciate it. I will never forget it. Thank you. And a look at the president departing the white house for walter reed medical center. There has been no transfer of power to the Vice President , according to the press office. A spokesperson says the president is in charge. Engines]er [helicopter engines] [helicopter blades]