“I’m sorry for everything you’ve been through,” Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during a recent Congressional hearing on online child safety. . These words may be disingenuous, but they are more than just an apology from a tech mogul. These represent the height of government policy failure, the rise of corporations seeking record profits, and the blatant disregard for social media users.
The “Protecting Children Online” committee hearing held by the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 31 was the latest in a series of Congressional hearings involving leaders of companies in the digital sector. Previous hearings of this type include the 2018 hearing with Mark Zuckerberg on data privacy, the 2021 hearing on internet misinformation, and the 2023 hearing with X (formerly known as Twitter). It included a public hearing on content moderation in the Like his previous three hearings mentioned above, the most recent child safety hearings have yet to yield any legislative results, and without significant bipartisan effort, they may not. expensive.
As Congress once again debates regulating content on the Internet, the need for government action will only grow. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was passed in 1996, overhauling telecommunications and Internet regulation in the United States. However, the law has only been significantly adjusted once since it was passed. The Internet deserves a policy shift. The government should restructure Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act by adding implications for website owners, especially those with widespread fraud and safety issues .
To understand why a law passed nearly 30 years ago needs to change, we first need to understand exactly what this law has enabled on the internet. The essence of Section 230 is to exempt website owners from liability for content posted on their sites. However, the impact was much larger than expected.
Section 230’s lack of liability for websites doesn’t just make the modern Internet possible. teeth modern internet. From YouTube to Instagram, TikTok and even his Pinterest, the existence of the site depends on this section. Section 230 makes each of these sites, along with millions of other bulletin boards, social media platforms, and other sites where users can create their own material, more sensitive to what content users create. You will be able to exist without doing anything.
The modern Internet and the concept of Web 2.0, an Internet centered on user-generated content, exists because of this very act. However, just because the company hosting the content they create is not responsible does not exempt all users. You are directly responsible for any violations of the First Amendment, or for defamation or defamation. Website owners, on the other hand, don’t have the same beliefs about the content on their sites.
Through the growth of the internet, coordination of content regulation on behalf of governments began, ending in 2018 with Section 230. In 2018, two of his pieces of legislation were enacted: the Stop Act, which enables sex traffickers to operate, and the Empowering States and Victims to Combat Online Sex Trafficking. , stripped Section 230 protections from websites hosting sex trafficking.
Today, social media is seeing an increase in child abuse content on its sites. This proves how a lack of regulation fosters a dangerous digital environment. While social media companies may claim that much of this content violates their terms of service, the only surefire way to ensure that your website does not feature similar content is to This is an amendment to Article 230.
It may seem like a big undertaking to reform the laws that essentially created the modern internet, but as the passage of SESTA and FOSTA in 2018 showed, it can be done. Debate about what content does and does not harm the safety of children – the details of the law – is likely ongoing, but in any case, the law requires amendments to Section 230. There is. This would allow the government to enforce this law and do it again. This process, along with other issues faced in internet-focused hearings, will put an end to the endless hearings we see today. Amendments to Section 230 would protect the safety of children online by holding the owners of these websites accountable.
This change will have a significant impact on how the Internet is regulated, as it adds another layer of government regulation and proves that Internet regulation is a dynamic process. In addition to paving the way for further regulation, social media companies in particular would be subject to more uniform enforcement of regulations, rather than each company deciding what to regulate and what not to regulate. Dew. The current system leaves major gaps in user safety because some sites are less restrictive than others.
But changes on the Internet, even if they are common, are not always appreciated, especially for owners like Mark Zuckerberg, who only take action if it benefits them. I am positive about amending Article 230. Mr. Zuckerberg’s view of Section 230 is that companies with a regulatory system will be exempt from liability. These regulatory systems are algorithms built to decide what content is allowed to be posted on a particular site, and under Zuckerberg’s proposal, these algorithms would filter out what the government deems inappropriate. need to be built for. However, this provides that if Facebook’s regulatory system fails and allows content that is deemed inappropriate, Facebook will not be responsible for that inappropriate content.
This amendment may seem reasonable at first glance, but it will allow companies with the means to have a good regulatory system to continue as they are without any consequences. Furthermore, the proposal would make it even more difficult for small and medium-sized enterprises to gain a foothold in this sector. Established industry giants can easily change their algorithms to adapt to new regulations. On the other hand, smaller businesses may need to build these systems from scratch.
Changes to Section 230 will inevitably change the Internet, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The government will require companies to oversee how they regulate their content, paving the way for an internet that doesn’t harm as many users as it hosts. Changing Section 230 piecemeal may be a tedious task, but it may be the only way to ensure the Internet is safe.
Thomas Muha is an opinion columnist who writes about legal and economic issues facing technology and the Internet. He can be reached at tmuha@umich.edu or he can be reached at @TJMooUM on X.
