Guest section 230 is an important mechanism to defend free speech on the internet. We think it should largely remain in place and that many of the attacks on 230, and especially the president s executive order that he issued in response to twitter Fact Checking about two very problematic censorship that runs contrary to the First Amendment. Host berin szoka, comes your initial thoughts on potential changes. Guest jessica and i dont always agree but i agree with everything she just said and i will add to that that is not just an apartment protection. Its the law that made todays internet possible. It would be possible for websites from the smallest blog to the Biggest Social Network to host content there uses greater if they could be sued for each and every one of those pieces of content. Thats what section 230 protects against. It also protects against websites when they moderate content that they may fight harmful or objectionable. What the administration is trying to do is now the protection for content moderation so that websites would no longer be protected if they tried 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 dont want to see, you probably dont want to see and no one wants to children to see and get the administration seems to think website should be sued for removing the most awful content. Thats contrary to what the republicans who wrote section 230 had in mind edits of betrayal everything conservatives have stood for for the last 25 years. Host Jessica Gonzalez. Guest listen, i spent a lot of time working with grassroots organizations that are fighting hate and disinformation online. We have worked together on a coalition called change the term coalition which is really focused on stopping White Supremacists who are organizing for violence over social media platforms. I have bored with the stop hate for Profit Campaign which recently got over 1200 advertisers to stop advertising on facebook in the month of july to protest rampant hate and disinformation on the site. I am no fan of big tech platforms and how they have abused their workers and how the abuse the privacy rights of their users. But, frankly, going after section 230 is not the right approach to the very real problems that we are seeing with online platforms, the privacy abuses we are seeing, the way they are extracting ad dollars from the field of journalism and instead of contributing to journalism they are spreading massive amounts of disinformation about important topics like voting, the election, and even health and safety during the pandemic. I am no fan of the tech platforms. I think when did look seriously at regulation to rein them in, to hold them accountable to make sure they are not abusing their dominant and not taking advantage of the american people. Frankly, section 230 and dismantling section 230 is the wrong way to go. Look, if i am the general counsel of twitter or facebook or smaller social media platforms and i see that those protections are removed, the first thing i do is i say, just dont moderate content at all. That was why to 30 was written in the first place. To allow companies to monitor content and moderate content as they see fit. Its the First Amendment right to moderate content on their site. They need to do a better job at that but the solution to what has been very poor content moderation and a failure to adequately remove disinformation and racism from social media platforms will not find a a solution by removing 230. In fact, just the opposite. Im particularly aggrieved by what i have described as an executive order temper tantrum from the Trump Administration. Free press has sued the Trump Administration for that executive order. It went to the ntia. It is to open for Public Comment at the s tc and an interesting thing that we saw in the ftc proceeding is no serious commenters in that proceeding argued that the sec had authority to do with the Trump Administration is directing it to do, calling for them to essentially sensor. We think that executive order should be revoked. But if its not we feel we have a very good chance of taking it down in court. Guest i would just add to that this is not about big tech. Thats about all websites. Fox news, breitbart, gateway pundit, all of the sites that conservatives read every day, all of them in the terms of Service Reserve the right to remove content that they find objectionable, including racist content and other offensive content that the administration would declare out of bounds for the protections of section 230. This is not about somehow conservatives getting what they already expected it on the internet. Rather, this is about turning it in that into Something Like gab. If youve never been on gap im not sure you will thank me for this suggestion but spent an hour and you will see what this administration actually wants to end it to look like. It is the most heinous content out there and imagine will. Gab has been limited to a very small audience of frankly terrible, the worst people in america. There has been an alternative that is developed, very popular among some conservatives called partner that is used by some people like ted cruz and so on and when you look at partner you will notice that they have censored some of the content. You wont find the inward used as a hashtag but youll find plenty of antisemitic content including proholocaust content. Even this conservative site once to moderate some of the content that the administration would deny them the ability to moderate and still be protected from lawsuits but one the other hand i along some really terrie content to floors under site that you dont fight on facebook and twitter. When you hear conservatives complaining about at the conservative bias, just understand this is what were talking about. Its not joe, the average conservative being censored, its people like Richard Spencer and david duke. Host we will begin with you, berin szoka. When it comes to content moderation, how would you develop a website or a social media platform . Guest i just want to underscore that First Amendment means this decision is for every operator to make on their own. Its not the role the government and a stuffed role of any policy to insist as a regulatory matter what they should do. The Supreme Court has been very clear about this. Digital media website operators are like newspaper operators and they have the same First Amendment rights. With that caveat, okay, i think its really difficult. Jessica noted this. Content moderation is inherently imperfect. It is never going to please everyone. It is too difficult to do at the scale of the internet. To answer your question, he has seen different approaches. Twitter and facebook are very different, just between the two of them. Twitter has been much more permissive. Facebook takes down things and has a difficult time distinguishing between people, for example, discussing how terrible antisemitism is, people who are promoting antisemitic ideas. Thats become more problematic during the event of it because it takes a lot of human beings to do that content moderation. You have to do that at the office and so these systems are relying more and more on computers to do that, and computers are really bad at nuance. Its a difficult question to answer. If i were a Large Social Network and and i had the resources to hire people, i would do a better job of it than the smaller sites that struggle to distinguish between the kinds of proracist content or antiracist content that weve just been discussing. But as a general matter i am concerned that disinformation particular things about voting and covid is being spread on these platforms. At the same time its important they find a way to, lets say, outsourced to credible organizations the decision as to who is going to be treated as an authoritative source, who counts as a journalist. For example, news guard is a tool that has been developed by among other people former publisher of the wall street journal. Theyve done a very good job at trying to provide objective rankings of various websites according to the reliability, and i think the more social Media Services rely on independent outlets like that, i think there will be greater confidence to understand that gateway pundit is being treated differently because its not a real media outlet. Host Jessica Gonzalez. Guest i have actually been working with a Coalition Led by women and people of color who are often, forgive me for the crude expression, the canaries in the coal mine, in recognizing how harmful, hateful and just plain wrong in terms of like applying and disinformation, that type of content is. Its often impacting our communities first because we see, for instance, in my community, i am mexican american, latino community, large immigrant community, we are seeing the impact of disinformation about immigration, about immigrants, about lies and hate directed at the immigrant community and how that impacts policy, how that impacts just plain old relationships, how we are treated by our peers in society. I had i have been working with e change the term coalition for several years now and we are over 60 civil and human rights organizations. We came up with the framework, a series of suggestions. You can find it at change of the term. Org, that we have for social Media Companies that are looking to do social responsible content moderation. We call for a ban on hateful activities. We have a very specific definition that worked on for over a year to make sure we were bouncing Free Expression and the need to keep 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 fails to enforce even the substandard rules it is setting for itself. We are also calling for transparency about how calton how content moderation is happening. Were calling for very easy to access appeals rights so people whose contents taken down by mistake and easily call for it to be put back up. We are calling for Big Tech Companies to take down box and troll campaigns that trade and hate and disinformation. And were calling for a ban of White Supremacists. In particular, we followed with great concern the kenosha guard page on facebook, that as we all know to make people were killed in kenosha, wisconsin, by paramilitary teenager. We are concerned about the juice of Facebook Event pages in particular, and our allies and Muslim Advocates have been lifting this concern up to facebook for over five years now. Way that event pages are used to organize violent events, the way they are used to ask people to bring arms to protest outside of mosques, and im concerned frankly about how event pages will be used to call for arms outside of polling places. I think facebook is not prepared to take action. But im getting a bit offtopic. I have the course a lot to say about facebook, but back to the model policies themselves. These are the bare minimum, a baseline. It social Media Companies can adopt these principles and actually enforce them, we think that that would go a long way to rooting out hate and disinformation thats having a serious impact on women and people of color and, frankly, on all of us here in the United States, but also abroad. Period this is not a call for government regulation. This this is a call for the coms themselves to step up and take responsibility for what they are hosting on their platforms. As we go on with this advocacy work, the campaign work, it really occurs to me that we need to look at the incentives behind the explosion of hate and disinformation on facebook and other social media platforms. We need to really examine that as a society. Host Jessica Gonzalez tragic if i could finish my thought for a moment. When i talk about her is the fact that facebook and other social Media Companies make a ton of money they stop high engagement and hate and disinformation often yield that level of engagement. We need to look at that incentive as we are figuring out what solutions we need. Host that leads into our next topic which is there have been calls in washington for the breakup of some of these larger social Media Companies. Just Jessica Gonzalez, what arer thoughts . Guest i think when you do look, take 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 engage in anticompetitive behavior or whether they have monopoly status is absolutely on the table. Lets take a deep look at that. I saw a couple weeks ago House Judiciary Committee began their investigation in earnest at a hearing with some of the tech ceos. So sure, yeah, lets look at that but lets also look at how they are abusing the privacy rights of people here in the u. S. And abroad. Thats were i think we can really work toward regulation to ensure that privacy and civil rights are protected on these platforms. And honestly, i read with great interest senator warrens accountable capitalization act that would turn large corporations into social responsibility to the american people. And that interested in that approach as it i think provides for an examination into the incentives that lead these companies to monetize hate and disinformation. The final thing, and i think theres a lot of different inquiries that we need to be undertaking right now to understand the harms that social Media Companies are causing to the american people, and also to examine a variety of remedies even beyond what we are saying here to those harms. But i will say i think we also really need to look at how the decline in journalism makes it harder to fight online disinformation. We have shattered tons of newsrooms in the past decade. We have lost almost 50 of journalists in newsrooms, and the ad dollars that used to go to newspapers that produced journalism are now being spent online. So thats why at free press we have been thinking a lot about the platform at tax so we can take a small portion of the giant revenues that big tech platforms are earning and turned back to journalism. That in itself can help root out disinformation, root out lies and tell the truth. So we have a paper on our site at freepress. Net that sets out some ideas for how to get at the disinformation problem with more information and by actually investing robustly in quality independent nonprofit journalism. Host berin szoka. Guest welcome the Top Administration would agree with most of what jessica just said. A would love to be in charge of deciding who gets to have funding, qualifies as journalists. I am terrified of that idea. State funding of journalism is inherently dangerous point what killed the newspaper is not facebook or twitter. It was craigslist, it was the ability of people to find a place to put at the classifieds which previously been done on newspapers. The Business Model for media has always been about advertising. Its not just the display ads were talking about today. We cant put the genie back in the bottle. We need to get the government out of the way mostly. I am sympathetic to this problem. I think journalism has suffered terribly. Dont think the solution is government funding. I think instead what we need to be doing first and foremost is maintaining section 230, because without that, online newspapers would not be able to engage with users. They would be just like netflix. They would only present the content and not the content posted by users. Its this idea breaking up big tech will solve his problems i think is also problematic. Its the case that the bigger sites are better able to do content moderation for all the reasons we have been discussing. I know its not done perfectly. Im sure jessica has great ideas of how can be improved but as a practical matter its probably the case those are more likely to be implemented by Bigger Companies with better equipped teams and resources who cannot just hire people that develop algorithms that can help websites to clean up content. Ill give you an example. This is not just about social networks. Its also about, a lot of the complaint we are hearing from conservatives are that the website to being censored because google is trying to shut them down. What they are talked about is that, for example, the federalists had a very serious problem with openly racist content in its comments. Google took a position that there were not going to allow their ads to appear next to the content, which is perfectly reasonable and have First Amendment to do. The question becomes how does a website operator clean up content in the comments section. Its not so easy to do and answer as most things your technological innovation. Google and other services are building better tools to distinguish between for example, proracist content and antiracist content and to make that available to website operators so they can continue to comments on their pages for the articles and show ads next to that and not get into fights theyre getting into network the federalists decided to just shut out its comments section because they thought that was easier than trying to clean up the terrible things the reader say. Again its more complicated than just big tech and only way we can get out of these problems is to innovate. Host both of our guests are attorneys. Berin szoka, give us a snapshot of techfreedom. Guest would like to say were lawyers for the future. We are engaged in everything we do as lawyers and the First Amendment is a part of all of our work. In general we are concerned about the potential for abuse by whoever might be in power next. Its unfortunate that a lot of people have not seen the Trump Administration has revealed the many ways that the government can weaponized 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 where there was a concerted effort to learn from the abuses of power that took place under president nixon, and then to create commissions to study the problems and to implement statutory changes. I would like to see that happen now. I can work with people across the political spectrum. Jessica im sure can work on surveillance issues and civil liberties. We ought to talk about things like the war powers of the president and his ability to shut down Internet Services. Those things should be reformed so thats the work we do in techfreedom. We apply that thinking multiple fronts, Consumer Protection law, privacy, competition law and we try to promote a future where the government has a role to protect consumers, that we try to protect against the abuse of power as much as possible and protect against specialpurpose regulators being captured by the very companies they regulate. Host and how are you funded . Guest we get funding on foundations and the big tent of companies that are glad to say include companies on both sides of the most divisive debates in the last ten years. We were very skeptical of the fccs claims of authority to regulate the internet when the Obama Administration made those claims, just as we are now. When they did that in the name of Net Neutrality we had companies on both sides of that debate will fund our work and continue to do so, so people see value in taking a principled position that is skeptical about the government and in general was to allow innovators to do their work and for the future to unfold on its own without some technocrat trying to manage it. Host Jessica Gonzalez, tell us about free press. Guest so free press is a nonprofit, Nonpartisan Organization dedicated to transforming the media toward the ultimate goal of enabling aa just society. We know that media and tech have an outside influence on allies. They help us understand the world around us, and they influence how Public Policy on a variety of issues comes out. And so we have worked very hard to make sure that everybody has access to the internet. Its one of our biggest issues right now, universal and Affordable Access to internet. We have 77 Million People with inadequate access during a pandemic. Thats a crisis and we need to fix it right away. We have 15 million schoolchildren who cant 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 Affordable Access to the internet to fight for Net Neutrality so Internet Service providers do not discriminate or act in discriminatory ways in the provision of Internet Service. At the end of the day we are a grassroots Field 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 decision to impact how are 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 huge team of campaigners, of organizers, of communicators that are working closely in communities across the country to understand what people want, how people are being harmed or help by media and technology, and are working to ensure that 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 whats happening in our country. Thats what were focused on now and thats only been focus 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 that you would like to see in that . Guest i think this is about building the capacity of the federal trade commission. That is been a cop on the beat for Consumer Protection for over a century and a think its really important that we focus on figuring out how the ftc can have privacy, we talked at a Senate Hearing this morning. There was a proposed major triple the agencies budget. Thats a much better approach in trying to build a new specialpurpose regulators and start from scratch. Number one. Number two, the internet has first because we had a consistent approach to regular intimate. That needs to remain the case. State attorneys shall have a role to play but the pool should be enforcing federal law. Its a mistake to allow states to come up with her own approaches because that ends up creating not just a patchwork but every state trying to regulate the entire internet. Host Jessica Gonzalez. Guest look, we need nftc chair who is committed to protecting the privacy of consumers. We probably need a legislative overhaul to make sure that the Internet Service providers and the platforms themselves protecting civil rights and privacy but we also need to go back to an important regulation that was passed in the Obama Administration that was then repealed by the Republican Congress the following year, in ensuring that section 222 of the Communications Act protects Consumer Privacy over Internet Access and Internet Service provider. Theres a lot of regulatory and legislative things we probably need to be focused on in 2021, Jessica Gonzalez is coceo of free press, and berin szoka is the founder and a senior fellow now at techfreedom. We thank you both for being on the communicators. Guest thanks for having me. You are watching cspan2, your unfiltered view of the government. Created by americas cabletelevision companies as a Public Service and brought you today by your television provider. This morning the Brookings Institution host a virtual of vl discussion on the 2020 president ial election and applications for the u. S. Europe relationship. Watch live at 90 and eastern onn cspan2, online at cspan. Org or listen or listen live on the free cspan radio app. U. S. Supreme court begins its new term today hearing oral arguments via conference call. Listen live or ondemand at cspan. Org Supreme Court. Watch live coverage of the Senate Confirmation hearings for judge Amy Coney Barrett starting monday october 12 with Opening Statements by Judiciary Committee members and judgment. Live coverage on cspan and cspan. Org. Listen live on the cspan radio app and be sure to visit cspan. Org to your playlist of her legal views. Vermont senator Bernie Sanders held the get out the vote rally in lebanon New Hampshire in support of democratic president ial candidate joe biden. [applause] i have participated in many rallies but this is clearly the most unusual. I want to thank everybody for being here for this limited audience event. It means a lot to me and a note means a lot to the vice president. And let
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