Pinterest's Way Of Dealing With Anti-Vax Nonsense And Scams Is Only Possible Because Of Section 230

A key argument by many who are advocating for getting rid of Section 230 is that various internet platforms need to "take more responsibility" or have some sort of "duty of care," to rid their platforms of malicious content (however that's defined). I even heard one staunch anti-Section 230 advocate complain vocally that internet services "aren't experimenting enough" with policing their platforms. The argument that there's not enough experimentation struck me as quite odd -- because if you look around, there's actually a ton of experimentation going on in platform moderation methods and techniques. And, even more weird, is that most of this experimentation is only possible because of Section 230.

Take the case of Pinterest. While Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Amazon have all struggled with ways to deal with the influx of utter nonsense -- much of which is actively dangerous -- Pinterest earlier this year announced that it was taking a hardline stance against anti-vax nonsense, banning it from the site, as best it could.

Pinterest has responded by building a "blacklist" of "polluted" search terms.

"We are doing our best to remove bad content, but we know that there is bad content that we haven't gotten to yet," explained Ifeoma Ozoma, a public policy and social impact manager at Pinterest. "We don't want to surface that with search terms like 'cancer cure' or 'suicide'. We're hoping that we can move from breaking the site to surfacing only good content. Until then, this is preferable."

Pinterest also includes health misinformation images in its "hash bank", preventing users from re-pinning anti-vaxx memes that have already been reported and taken down. (Hashing is a technology that applies a unique digital identifier to images and videos; it has been more widely used to prevent the spread of child abuse images and terrorist content.)

And the company has banned all pins from certain websites.

"If there's a website that is dedicated in whole to spreading health misinformation, we don't want that on our platform, so we can block on the URL level," Ozoma said.

That was at the beginning of the year. And now, Pinterest is trying to fill the nonsense void with credible information instead. Rather than just blocking all of the nonsense, it has decided to replace it with credible information:

On Wednesday, Pinterest announced a new step in its efforts to combat health misinformation on its platform: users will be able to search for 200 terms related to vaccines, but the results displayed will come from major public health organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), Centers for Disease Control, American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and Vaccine Safety Net.

The platform will also bar advertisements, recommendations and comments on those pages.

"It was really important for us to make sure that this experience doesn't allow any misinformation to seep in," said Ifeoma Ozoma, public policy and social impact manager for Pinterest. "You're not going to end up in a situation where you click on a trustworthy pin and the recommendations or comments are full of misinformation."

This is certainly not a panacea. Indeed, it's not even that hard to still find vaccine misinformation on Pinterest if you look hard enough. And, there's certainly a risk of over-blocking in this area as well. For example if someone were countering disinformation about vaccines, it's possible that they could accidentally get swept up in the mess as well. Also, not all information is so obviously bullshit. I've seen anti-vaxxers misrepresent legitimate studies as supporting their position -- so how do you handle legitimate reports that are being misrepresented? It quickly becomes difficult (as we've discussed in many previous posts).

However, the key thing here is that this is how Pinterest has decided to deal with this problem. It's the way in which this one platform has decided to approach things on a problem that it sees with the spread of, often dangerous, myths about vaccinations (and, just a heads up: don't even think of spreading more anti-vax nonsense in the comments, because you're not just wrong and ignorant, but you're actively harming people).

But the key thing here is that Pinterest is able to experiment this way because Section 230 protects its choices. Section 230 allows platforms like Pinterest to experiment and try different approaches. And that's important for a variety of reasons. More experimentation means more ideas and more tests of what actually works. It also allows for a recognition that every platform is different. The content that is on Pinterest is different than the content on YouTube or Reddit or Amazon or Twitter, and Section 230 lets them craft a unique policy and implement it how they see fit to best deal with their own platform and their own community.

Nearly all of the proposals to chip away at Section 230 would limit or block entirely this kind of experimentation -- meaning we'd all end up significantly worse off in the long run. It's one thing for people to simply demand that platforms take more responsibility -- but when the people making those demands are simultaneously trying to take away the tools that allow the companies to actually experiment with how best to take more responsibility, that's when problems come in.