Biden Falsely Claims That Removing Section 230 And Forced Transparency Will Stop Hatred; He’s Dangerously Wrong
On Thursday, the White House hosted the United We Stand summit, to bring together people to take action against what they refer to as hate-fueled violence." This seems like a good idea for a summit, at a time when so much of politics is focused on grievances and culture wars that seem to inevitably lead to bigotry and violence. It's good to see that the White House can actually talk about some of this and take a stand, rather than cowering behind traditional platitudes.
Indeed, in addition to the summit, the White House announced a bunch of initiatives that... actually sound pretty good, in general. More funding for education, and for community organizations that combat violence and hate, and more tools for helping digital literacy. I'm perhaps less convinced that some of the other plans make sense, including funding for law enforcement (which has been a bastion of hatred itself lately) and efforts to increase school security," which seem to be about turning schools into prison-like atmospheres with security theater that makes children less safe.
As part of the summit, a bunch of the big social media platforms announced new policies to be more aggressive towards hatred, and most of those sound pretty reasonable.
YouTube is expanding its policies to combat violent extremism by removing content glorifying violent acts for the purpose of inspiring others to commit harm, fundraise, or recruit, even if the creators of such content are not related to a designated terrorist group. YouTube will also launch an educational media literacy campaign across its platform to assist younger users in particular in identifying different manipulation tactics used to spread misinformation - from using emotional language to cherry picking information. This campaign will first launch in the U.S. before expanding to other countries over time. Finally, YouTube will support the McCain Institute and EdVenture Partners' Invent2Prevent program with ongoing funding and training. The program challenges college students to develop their own dynamic products, tools, or initiatives to prevent targeted violence and terrorism.]
Twitch will accelerate its ongoing commitment to deterring hate in the livestreaming space this year by releasing a new tool that empowers its streamers and their communities to help counter hate and harassment and further individualize the safety experience of their channels. Twitch will also launch new community education initiatives on topics including identifying harmful misinformation and deterring hateful violence.
Microsoft is expanding its application of violence detection and prevention artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) tools and using gaming to build empathy in young people. The company has developed AI/ML tools with appropriate privacy protections that can help detect credible threats of violence or to public safety, and is making a basic, more affordable version of these tools accessible to schools and smaller organizations to assist in violence prevention. Microsoft is also developing a new experience on Minecraft: Education Edition to help students, families and educators learn ways to build a better and safer online and offline world through respect, empathy, trust and safety.
Meta is forging a new research partnership with the Middlebury Institute of International Studies' Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism to analyze trends in violent extremism and tools that help communities combat it. Meta will also partner with Search For Common Ground to provide trainings, workshops, and skill-building to equip community-based partners working locally to counter hate-fueled violence with tools to help amplify their work.
And... that's all good? But, it's weird, because part of what enables all of the above companies to do this sorta stuff is the fact that they know they have Section 230 which, along with the 1st Amendment, helps protect them against frivolous lawsuits over their content moderation decisions.
And even though it's Section 230 that helps enable sites to do this... in his own speech, Biden lashed out at the tech companies and Section 230.
I think most of the speech is actually pretty good, honestly. But, not for the first time, Biden gets weirdly focused on internet companies and Section 230, as if they're the problem. At minute 22:40 in the video above he says:
And hold social media platforms accountable for spreading hate and fueling violence.
{crowd gives standing ovations}
And I'm calling on Congress to get rid of special immunity for social media companies and impose much stronger transparency requirements on all of them.
This is all extremely confused and ridiculously counterproductive. We've explained this before, and have even had Biden advisors insist that they understand these issues, but it appears that no one is able to explain it to the President.
First of all, if you want social media companies to figure out the best ways to deal with hate and fueling violence, you need Section 230, because it's what allows them the freedom to experiment and put in place the other ideas mentioned above. It allows them the ability to test different ideas, and not face crippling liability for mistakes. It allows them to see what actually has an impact and what works.
Removing Section 230 goes against all of those wishes. Because of the nature of the 1st Amendment, without Section 230, many websites are more likely to take a totally hands off approach to moderation. Because they only liability they can face under the 1st Amendment standards endorsed by the courts is if they have actual knowledge of law-violating content on their site. The easiest way to avoid that is not to look and not to moderate much at all.
In other words, this call to remove Section 230 will encourage many sites to do less moderation and to allow more hatred to roam free.
Biden seems to falsely believe that removing Section 230 will magically make hate illegal, and create a cause of action with which people can sue websites. That's just fundamentally wrong. Whether we like it or not, such hate speech remains protected under the 1st Amendment, so there's no direct legal liability anyway. Removing Section 230 doesn't change that. And, again, even if the content somehow reaches a level that it does break the law, the website cannot be held liable for it under the 1st Amendment unless they had knowledge that it was illegal.
Getting rid of Section 230 makes things worse, not better.
Second, Biden is simply lying when he says it's a special immunity for social media." It is not. He's wrong. Very wrong. Section 230 protects smaller companies way more than it helps the big companies, and it protects users and their own speech way more than it protects any company (by enabling sites to host third party content in the first place). Indeed, getting rid of it would do more to harm the most marginalized than protect them.
It's bizarre that the President still gets this so wrong.
Finally, on the claims of transparency," once again, this is extreme ignorance. Forcing websites to be transparent about their content moderation practices makes it harder to stop malicious actors because you're giving them the roadmap to how to game the systems. It also makes it that much more difficult for websites to adjust and adapt to the dynamic and ever-changing methods of malicious actors (i.e. those wishing to spread hate on the platform).
So, both of these proposals would almost certainly increase the amount of hateful speech online. And I know that people in the Biden administration know this. And yet they let the President continue to spread this counterproductive nonsense.
It's all really too bad. A summit like this is a good thing. Countering hatred and violence is a good thing. Many of the programs announced at the summit sound quite helpful.
But the attacks on the 1st Amendment and tech (ironically at the same time that so many tech companies announced new programs) is not just silly, it's actively counterproductive to the overall goal.