Hillary Clinton Joins The Chorus Of Ignorant Pundits Insisting Section 230 Must Go

Apparently, the one thing that can unite Democrats and Republicans in 2023 is a shared desire to destroy the internet's legal framework. Hillary Clinton is the latest to jump on the Repeal Section 230' bandwagon.

It's truly stunning how Section 230 has switched from being a crowning achievement of US tech policy to something that is now almost universally hated, though almost always by people who don't understand it.

Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump have insisted that it needs to be repealed. Senators on both sides of the aisle, including Dick Durbin and Lindsey Graham, are supporting bills to repeal Section 230.

And now Hillary Clinton has joined the crew of ignorant political pundits spouting nonsense about 230 and saying it needs to be repealed.

They were granted this impunity for a very good reason back in the late '90s, which is [when] we didn't know what was going to happen," Clinton said, adding, Nobody knew anything because nobody had a real sense of what was happening."

Well, now we do, and shame on us that we are still sitting around talking about it," she continued. Section 230 has to go. We need a different system under which tech companies - and we're mostly talking obviously about the social media platforms - operate."

Instead, Clinton suggested the U.S. should come up with the right form of liability" for tech companies.

The thing is, removing Section 230 will not fix whatever problem any of these people think it will fix. Trump seems to think it will make sites no longer ban him. He's wrong. If there's more liability at risk, they may be less willing to have him constantly spewing potentially legally liable statements on their platforms.

Biden and Clinton seem to think that there's some magical right form of liability" for internet companies. But we already have that right form: it's Section 230, which simply says that the liability falls on whoever imbues the speech with whatever violates the law. Merely hosting content should never do that. Nor would recommending it.

Section 230 serves a particularly useful purpose: preventing frivolous lawsuits. What everyone calling for its repeal is effectively saying is that they want more frivolous lawsuits, most of which will simply be stopped eventually by the First Amendment, but after much more significant expense for websites.

If Clinton thinks we should have more liability for third-party speech, she's going to find that the First Amendment likely stands in the way of that desire.

And, really, what Biden and Clinton seem to be admitting in their desire to remove liability protections is that they want to suppress speech, namely the speech of people like Donald Trump, because they know that any threat of more frivolous litigation would lead companies to take down such accounts faster.

So, the position of Clinton is inherently censorial.

It remains a silly, ignorant claim, but I fear that we're going to keep hearing it over and over again from politicians who don't understand the underlying issues, as it seems unlikely anyone is going to learn.