Pod Insights The Vergecast A conversation about Section 230 and the future of the internet About this episode Last week, The Verge held a virtual event about regulating the internet — from antitrust to privacy to the many proposals for changing Section 230, hosted by Verge senior reporter Adi Robertson.
The event kicked off with a keynote from Sen. Amy Klobuchar, followed by a panel on Section 230 reform with general counsel at Vimeo Michael Cheah, researcher, writer, and strategist Sydette Harry, and general counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation Amanda Keton.
In this bonus Vergecast, Adi Robertson and Verge policy editor Russell Brandom discuss takeaways from the event and what's next for the future of regulation on the internet.
Further reading:
What will Section 230 mean for the internet?
Everything you need to know about Section 230
Why Congress can’t stop talking about Section 230
Klobuchar calls on Congress to get serious on tech reform
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Transcript 7,761 words · 10 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:45 Nilay Patel? Hey everybody, it's Noah from The Vergecast. We've got a special episode for you today. Last week, senior reporter Addie Robertson, who you have heard on The Vergecast many times before, held an event about Section 230. That's the law that says platforms aren't liable for what their users publish. It is a critical law to the internet. It also just turned 25 years old last month. So Addie held an event with a keynote by Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat from Minnesota, who's one of the sponsors of the Safe Tech Act. That's an act that would reform Section 230, as well as a panel featuring Michael Chia, who's the General Counsel at Vimeo, Sedet Harry, who's a researcher, a writer, and a strategist thinking about tech, and Amana Keaton, General Counsel at Wikimedia, which
1:28 Nilay Patel? runs Wikipedia, talking about where Section 230 is and where it might go in the future. So we're going to run some highlights of that event for you today. Addie and Russell are going to join to talk about how it went and what they heard, what they thought. And as it happens, they're here right now. Russell, how's it going? Good. Love it. Addie, congratulations on your event. It was a good one.
1:49 Speaker 02 Hey, thank you.
1:50 Nilay Patel? So tell me how you think the event went, and then I'm going to hand over the episode to you, and we can listen to some highlights and talk it through. But Addie, how do you think it went?
1:58 Speaker 02 I thought it went well. One of the things I like about Section 230 is that it's just a really weird conversation that people kept asking, well, okay, what sides were there? There are like 50 different sides. And we had a really pretty interesting spread of perspectives, and Senator Klobuchar's speech was a really good scene setter. And I'm overall pretty happy.
2:20 Nilay Patel? Yeah, you know what I thought was really interesting, just as I watched the whole event, Senator Klobuchar has some very strong perspectives about what can be done. And those perspectives were definitely not shared by the entire panel. And in fact, the Safe Tech Act is, you know, it's always interesting to me to hear senators talk about their own legislation because they always make it seem so common sense. But it is actually quite controversial, some of the changes that she was proposing.
2:49 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah, absolutely. Well, and also, like, you know, she, in addition to talking about 230, she takes a pretty hard line on antitrust. I was actually surprised by how sort of enthusiastic she was about it. And I sort of imagine the Vimeo guy is sitting there in his chair, like, she's talking about breaking up Google. He's like, yeah, OK. I mean, I think a lot of, a lot of the sort of civil society tech people, which were, you know, this is part of what we wanted to introduce to the conversation, like, they don't have a problem with antitrust. They are mostly hoping that Section 230 doesn't get changed in a way that makes it impossible to have Wikipedia exist.
3:25 Speaker 02 And then bringing up things like misinformation also just throws its own kind of wrench into things because that's actually not largely a problem that gets addressed with Section 230. And so you end up slipping, like, weird stuff like First Amendment reform in there.
3:38 Nilay Patel? Yeah, and this was the, I think, as the panel went on, the combination of, oh, we think Facebook's too big, but if we change 230 to punish Facebook, we might end up punishing ourselves. And then Senator Klobuchar talking about antitrust just dead ahead, and even, to some extent, bringing up the idea of breakups as a potential remedy. All of that is a swirl, and we've been talking about that swirl for some time. And it was just really interesting to hear the spread of perspectives during this event. So, Addie, Russell, I'm excited for this. Why don't you start and take us through this event and what we heard?
4:12 Speaker 03 Yeah, absolutely. I think the one thing I want to start with, this sort of like, the chronological beginning, but like, you know, I always like it when these things make a little news. And I think I was very interested to hear Senator Klobuchar's line on antitrust. She's sort of coming to the fore of like, the Democrats' antitrust policy. She wrote a book called Antitrust and is the chairwoman of the Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumer Rights, which is basically the Senate
4:44 Speaker 03 Home for antitrust policy. So she's really sort of at the forefront of it. And I thought it was interesting. A lot of times she gets glossed as like this moderate voice, but she was pretty harsh on Facebook. Here, we have this clip.
4:59 Speaker 04 At the root of this problem lies the ability of a few companies to act as gatekeepers. And as we see when they dominate markets, exclude rivals and buy out their competitors, we've got a problem. In the email words of Mark Zuckerberg, these businesses are nascent, but the networks established, the brands already meaningful. And if they grow to a large scale, they could be very disruptive to us. They could be very disruptive to us. I always thought the tech industry was about disruption. It's about disrupting the status quo and bringing in new, good ideas that basically blow up the marketplace in a positive
5:41 Speaker 04 way. We can't have monopolies stopping disruption. So in a way, the work I am doing is simply a reply to that email.
5:51 Speaker 03 So I mean, the interesting thing, so this was something that we had on the site, like dual Casey and Neelai byline, when the antitrust hearing happened, he's talking about Instagram and Path. So Instagram, they bought. Path proved not to be disruptive to Facebook, I think it's fair to say. But this is not a public statement he meant to make. And I do think, I don't know, I mean, do we hear this and think like Amy Klobuchar is on Team Breakup Facebook?
6:24 Speaker 02 It feels like it. Well, I guess I should qualify that by saying, at the very least, it's Team Don't Let Facebook Acquire Anybody Else.
6:32 Speaker 03 Yeah.
6:33 Speaker 02 But Team Breakup Facebook, I don't know. It definitely seems like it's on the table.
6:37 Speaker 03 Right. Which is very interesting. So like, there have been on the left, a lot of really aggressive sort of pushes for stronger antitrust, like we need some new, like we need to reempower the Justice Department, we need some new legislation that will enable us to kind of... Go after these businesses more heavily. And it's fairly recent that Klobuchar is trying to to kind of lead that. I mean, she just she's only now sort of coming to the to the lead on this committee. And I think because she ran in the Democratic primary sort of as a moderate voice. She's been glossed as like, well, you know, she's not in the end gonna like usher in this new era of trust busting.
7:21 Speaker 03 But then elsewhere in the keynote, she's talking about, well, you know, it worked pretty well when we did this against AT&T. I mean, I don't know, I'm still kind of undecided. It's always hard to know how how committed people are going. It's gonna be a really politically difficult road to walk if they move on it, you know?
7:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think it's been for a while. It was just really easy to talk about because it seemed like it would not happen. Like, it's really easy to say, we should break up Facebook if everyone knows you're not going to. But the closer you get to actual antitrust action, the like, more this stuff is gonna matter.
7:59 Speaker 03 So the other side of that is Section 230, which, you know, Senator Klobuchar's also, as we said, she's co-sponsor of the Safe Tech Act. She's part of this broader consensus of one of the ways that we need to rein in companies like Facebook. It's not just antitrust. It's also changing the sort of statutory basis on which they operate, which is Section 230. So, again, she stopped short. Obviously, she supports the Safe Tech Act. I mean, she co-sponsored it. But she stopped short of saying like, this is specifically the stuff that needs to change. But she was pretty clear that something needs to change. So so this is the other clip. Let's let's roll it.
8:37 Speaker 04 I would argue we're not going to break the Internet with some reforms that literally follow the evolution we've seen with the Internet. Our laws shouldn't remain stagnant as they were 25 years ago. It doesn't mean we get rid of them. It means we change them. Our laws need to be as sophisticated as the techniques used by people who are messing around with us.
9:01 Speaker 02 I would just like to say that this is not remotely unique to Klobuchar, but Section 230 is one of the only times I've ever heard someone say, the law is 25 years old, that's ancient.
9:10 Speaker 03 Although you hear like this with net neutrality, they're like, oh, it's from 1932, when there weren't even, you know, when we were still having rotary telephones and stuff.
9:21 Speaker 02 Yeah, and you know how much longer 1932 is from 25 years?
9:27 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's true. Well, and there were like, there were message boards. In many ways, the internet of 1996 was, uh, was healthier.
9:34 Speaker 02 The comparison to the CF, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, but the problem there is just that it was a terrible law to begin with.
9:41 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, it's a good law. It's like a good bottle of wine. It gets better. But, okay, so I guess there's always like this split between the rhetoric and the actual policy. What is your take on the actual policy that we're seeing? Both, both from Klobuchar and sort of Congress generally?
10:00 Speaker 02 The Safe Tech Act is a thing that, as stated, it is really clearly meant to apply to a few specific scenarios that everyone agrees like were really bad. But if you actually read it, it's ridiculously broad. Like, there is an interpretation of it saying, okay, we want to not support covering liability for advertising, that also would potentially just mean that Section 230 doesn't apply to speech that makes anybody money on the internet? And that stuff like just carving out everything like related to cyber stalking or harassment also, like, that's a really broad category. That's a thing that lots of people make pretty
10:42 Speaker 02 specious claims about. It also just covers out a ton of other cases. Like, the Safe Tech Act is really pretty close to repealing Section 230.
10:51 Speaker 03 Yeah. And then this is where we like, I think we use sort of break the internet. It's like, we need some headline and like, we put that in. But I do think there's this sense of the scope of unintended consequences for just random places on the internet becomes really large. One of the things in your written piece about this, you brought up the fountain pen forum that has just been like, doing its best. It's this community of people. It is not going to like, make a billion dollars for anyone at Y Combinator, but it is sort of, this community has continued to exist. And, I mean, I think the implicit thing is it would basically be impossible to...
11:37 Speaker 03 Operate without this legal protection.
11:39 Speaker 02 The funny thing is the fountain pen network is outside the US, which is weird. So he writes and he's like, yeah, no, this would matter if I was in the US. As it stands, our servers are outside the country, so we're hoping we're protected.
11:51 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, I mean, this is, this should be Biden's priorities to bring the fountain pen forum back.
11:57 Speaker 02 It's not 300 years ago anymore. Fountain pens must modernize.
12:01 Speaker 03 Exactly.
12:02 Speaker 02 But yeah, there are a bunch of small companies. And one of the points that I really liked from the written piece was I was talking to one of the co-founders of the Archive of Our Own and the Organization for Transformative Works. And they were like, yeah, the thing this does, if you add like requirements to take down illegal content is weirdly, our legal team just becomes the moderation team that they just have to start making all our calls. So it just, it really complicates the job of being a moderator and being a moderator already sucks.
12:33 Speaker 03 Yeah. Part of what's interesting to me about the like stagnation argument is basically the like, what we're talking about is these massive platforms. There's a line in Corey Sech's novel, Very Recent History, where he says that Facebook is so big that it becomes indistinguishable from the internet itself. And like, that's kind of what we're talking about is that now the internet basically is Facebook and YouTube for anyway, a lot of people, right? And there's this sense that things have gone wrong. Facebook and YouTube are not the way we want them to be. And that that's the impetus for changing section 230, right? Like, that's, that's like the problem that we're trying to solve.
13:17 Speaker 02 If you talk to people who actually don't like section 230, the weird thing is that they will often not say that, that they will, I mean, they will say that because it's really easy to say, we hate Facebook, you should change a law. But a lot of the things they're actually worried about are sites like revenge porn sites, or there was a really compelling article in the New York Times a while. A while, I mean, a year and or three weeks ago. That was about a woman whose deal was just that she would post horrible, horrible things about people on small Consumer Reports forums. And those things would get scraped by Google, which was bad. But one of the bigger problems is that there's just a bunch of small, low-lying sites that scrape each other's content, and so it was almost impossible to get this stuff taken down.
14:00 Speaker 02 So the funny thing is that Section 230 discourse is vastly about a few big tech giants, but the people who are doing the most to try to change Section 230 on the ground are often people who are much more worried about other platforms.
14:17 Speaker 03 Do you think that they're making an accurate diagnosis that, like, 230 really is the problem there? It's not that we need some, like, more robust sense of, like, who the speaker is and when scraping is appropriate and, like, some sort of, I don't know, I mean, everyone says guardrails on the internet, but, like, do you buy the argument that changing 230 is really the way to address this directly?
14:41 Speaker 02 I kind of do buy it in the sense that I think that changing 230 probably is the clear, one of the clearest ways you could address it. It's just that also, A, it would probably have a lot of unintended blowback, and B, I think just the question of whether these things are illegal in the first place is often an issue. Like, criminalizing revenge porn, the problem has not just been, oh, well, there are these sites that allow it. It's that it's been really difficult to define in a way that lets you legalize it in the first place, which gets to the First Amendment.
15:15 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, even then, like, Backpage was successfully taken down before the FOSTO Sesta carve-out, like, that is, or, I mean, successfully prosecuted. So, so there is, like, an aspect of, there are other laws that can be brought to bear. It's just, it's difficult, and a lot of it isn't happening.
15:36 Speaker 02 Yeah.
15:37 Speaker 03 Anyway, okay, we've laid out, we've laid out the problems and the various contributions of Senator Klobuchar. When we get back, we should dig into the panelists. So I think, we were talking about the unintended consequences, they really nail sort of what that looks like in practice.
15:57 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.
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17:07 Speaker 03 And we're back. Okay, so Neil, I talked before about the panelists. We have, we have sort of a range of different kind of stakeholders. And Addy, when we were putting this together, you were talking about you wanted someone from the sort of for-profit company world, someone from the nonprofit world, and then sort of a free-floating analyst. And I think, you know, we got this. So we have Michael Chia from Vimeo. We have Amanda Keaton from With Media and Sidet Harry. I want to start with this thing Michael Chia from Vimeo said, which was about this question of Facebook's monopoly power, right? Or Google's monopoly power, or Amazon's monopoly power, or whatever. And sort of whether this...
17:51 Speaker 03 Whether addressing that will, how that affects the other problems we're looking at in this tech world. So let's listen to what he says.
18:00 Speaker 06 A lot of people are on big platforms simply because they have no choice. So I think it's certainly possible that, you know, having some additional choice would be a, and not being forced to use the same platforms over and over again would lead to hopefully more diversity of platforms where there are some, you know, better options in terms of content moderation. But then the darker side of that is that there will be some people that are going to be drawn to the platforms that don't do any moderation. And that's, you know, the parlors and the other people of this world. And so there's, there's, there's potential negative on that side as well. So I don't think, while competition is certainly
18:44 Speaker 06 a big part of this, and I think we, you know, I support, we support, you know, competition reform in the tech space. I don't think it will translate automatically into a internet where, you know, hate speech and other problematic speech and misinformation is, is, is taken down a notch.
19:05 Speaker 03 I thought this was really interesting, mostly because you do get the feeling when we approach this stuff that we're, we're dealing with like five problems at once. And they're all like related, but fixing one, a lot of the time kind of makes the others worse.
19:19 Speaker 02 Yeah, this is a thing I think about all the time because I think often talking about antitrust is kind of a dodge, that it's simultaneously really important in its own right. And it often gets treated like, well, if we didn't have Facebook, all these other problems would be solved. And I think that Michael's comment was great at pointing out that, that obviously is probably not going to be the case. That it's going to solve some really specific problems and it's probably going to change some things in ways that are interesting and possibly good, but it opens up a whole other can of worms.
19:48 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, the one, listening to this again, the other thing that like stands out to me is he sort of says, well, okay, if we just have this open competition, you'll have these bad actors like Parler or Gab or what have you that, that don't moderate at all. But in fact, I mean, the sort of deplatforming cycle has been so robust that that's not really true, right? Like Parler, you cannot download it for your iPhone, right? Same thing with Gab. Like ultimately, most of the infrastructure that's required to distribute this stuff has, for instance, and not because it's illegal, but because they say, we don't want to host violent threats.
20:33 Speaker 03 And so this is against our Terms of Service. And that turns out to be a deal breaker and it's really difficult to stay up. And I guess this like neatly sidesteps the First Amendment issues where like if the government were to pass a law saying that they needed to do this, this would be a constitutional problem.
20:50 Speaker 02 But Gab and Parler are both up. They went down for a week. Well, they went down for a period of time while they were transitioning hosts and you can sideload apps onto Android. So while I do think that the duopoly is a really serious problem on mobile, I do actually think that these services tend to stick around a lot more than people often give them credit for.
21:10 Speaker 03 Yeah, maybe it's better to say that they're technologically marginalized. But I guess part of it is the idea that without like the stifling influence of Facebook and Google, there will be nothing to sort of keep these platforms from going off like over the edge into violent and dark places. I think we sort of have seen that not really being the case, right? Like there are these other forces and if we want to like strengthen those forces, we can start to do that, whether that's by, I don't know, maybe it is by legal liability. Maybe it is by some Section 230 type thing. But it seems like that specific problem is possible to address.
21:54 Speaker 02 Yeah, although it's also worth noting that the things that he describes, like hate speech and misinformation, those things are not necessarily illegal. Like a lot of them in the US have just been found to be pretty specifically legal. So like Section 230 is not going to do anything there.
22:11 Speaker 03 Well, and this like gets into just all of our 90s free speech dreams being dead. But like it is what we're always talking about with this stuff is centralized control of information. Like it's very, I really like my heart rebels when I hear it. I'm just like, yeah, like what we need is just the companies that are that are in charge of enabling speech, we need them to get more serious about just getting that bad speech off the network.
22:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, no, I know. It really, it like cuts deep.
22:42 Speaker 03 But it's, but like we are at that point. We're through the looking glass. Like it's, it's bad.
22:48 Speaker 02 Well, the counterpoint though, is that sites like Facebook do like actively encourage or did in the past actively encourage people to join like misinformation groups that a lot of the, there is the argument that this problem wouldn't be as bad in the first place if there hadn't been this giant suggestion machine that helped create a lot of these movements. And from there, they kind of splintered off into directions that you couldn't centrally control.
23:11 Speaker 03 Well, and this is what's, so, so one of the like shorthands for antitrust is structural remedies, right? And they mean by that like structural, like Facebook no longer owns Instagram or Google no longer owns YouTube. But I do think the structural change at a technological level, like instead of just having a sort of global squad of Facebook moderators, we're going to have something more akin to like the moderation hierarchy of a subreddit or the moderation community of Wikipedia, or even like the weird distributed system of Mastodon. Like that seems more promising as a way to address this. But also I really don't know how you get there from here.
23:56 Speaker 02 Yes. And then that also, every step you take toward decentralization also amplifies every problem with like information bubbles and small echo chambers and people who can end up wandering into something really weird and bad and not having any reason to get out of it.
24:15 Speaker 03 I mean, I think I actually.
24:19 Speaker 03 I don't know. This is not a sort of belief that has weathered hugely well over the last six months. But I do think what we need at some point, if we're going to try to like, solve these problems, you need some hierarchy of like, okay, we care about the sort of algorithmic extremism problem, we care about the kind of antitrust problem and the censorship problem more than we care about these other problems. I do think I maybe care less about the echo chamber misinformation thing. Like, that's maybe towards the bottom of the list for me.
24:59 Speaker 03 But fundamentally, that's like a political choice that policymakers broadly need to make, and it doesn't seem like we're maybe capable of that.
25:08 Speaker 02 It's also just, some of these things are way easier lifts than others. Like, anything that involves antitrust, like, breaking up a company is probably easier than a politician saying, "Yeah, we're gonna rework what the First Amendment means."
25:20 Speaker 03 Yeah. Okay. Well, this sort of sets up this point. So, one of the reasons we really wanted Amanda Keaton from Wikimedia here is Wikipedia is this a great example of like, I think a good thing on the internet. I think I'm not gonna regret calling Wikipedia a good thing. I use it all the time. And like, the kind of social formation that we want to preserve and like, is legitimately at risk if the US is too reckless with changes to Section 230. So, she put it very well. We should just let her speak in the clip.
25:58 Speaker 07 I want to make sure personally that however tech laws are reformed, and in particular, Section 230, the subject of this panel, that it continues to allow a really strong system of community moderation. And I think it behooves the world to make sure that places like Wikipedia and other Wikimedia free knowledge projects can continue to flourish and thrive in partnership by lifting up all the best things that our communities of contributors and volunteers around the world represent for the internet now and moving into the future.
26:38 Speaker 03 I do think it's very easy for civil society stuff like Wikipedia to get written out of this conversation because they don't like, they can't afford lobbyists, or, you know, they can't sort of elbow their way into the conversation in the way that like, big tech companies, it's impossible to avoid, right? But I do think legitimately, I mean, I don't know, Addy, how do you see, how do you see Wikipedia fitting into like, the conversation?
27:05 Speaker 02 I think, on one hand, it's also easy to write Wikipedia out of the conversation because it doesn't quite as directly head-on deal with the things that people are specifically worried about with Section 230 now. Like, they did an interview a while back where they talked about how the majority of what they end up having to deal with is libel claims.
27:23 Speaker 03 Yeah.
27:24 Speaker 02 That people are portrayed in a way they don't like, and they claim this is defamation, and then Wikipedia's like, "Section 230." And this makes their job easier because it's really, really easy to claim that you were libeled on the internet. Much harder to prove that, but also, it costs a lot of money to defend yourself from that. But, yeah, I think that they're a thing that because they are sort of a simple, like, pretty straightforward, "we do this thing" service, and they're non-commercial, that they're kind of taken for granted. And that whenever people talk about Section 230, they end up just kind of writing them out, especially because Section 230 often just comes up in the context of things people
28:07 Speaker 02 hate, and lots of people just don't hate Wikipedia.
28:10 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, it's true. But, but I also think the point about libel claims is like, really insidious to me. Like, I think we have seen this, you know, we saw this with, with the whole Gawker fiasco, but like, there is this guy who, who I think, you know, Shiva Yadurai, who keeps claiming that he invented email, and without speaking to the truth of this claim, he is extremely litigious anytime someone identifies anyone but him as the inventor of email. And like, Wikipedia, as an organization, needs to go on record saying...
28:53 Speaker 03 You know, this was the team behind email. And like, they don't list him as on the team. Like, the case is not strong. But that's like, you know, people talk so much about like, oh, that we're in this post-truth era, and there's all of this sort of troll nonsense, and it's degrading our conversation. Like, Wikipedia legitimately is out there, sort of putting their flag in the ground of like, this is true. Like, this is the inventor of email. And, yeah, I don't know. I mean, I am inspired by that, and I want to make it easier for them.
29:27 Speaker 02 Oh, I mean, more like, so the Safe Tech Act, it carves out kind of almost everything except libel, that it seems like protecting libel claims is like, one of the less controversial parts of Section 230. That there are a lot of people saying, okay, let's exempt harassment and stalking, let's say that's not protected anymore. Let's say child sexual abuse stuff isn't protected. Let's say human rights stuff isn't protected. But people seem to be relatively okay with keeping libel as a Section 230 protection. But I also think that it's not, like, a lot of these accusations are not necessarily quite as cut and dry as that makes it seem like. A lot of people who are very powerful can claim harassment for people saying true things
30:12 Speaker 02 about them.
30:13 Speaker 03 I do think a lot of the like, internet platforms and their just contents kind of tech clash that we've seen has been about how people think about speech. And sort of, maybe our ideas about speech and promoting speech were a little bit incoherent, and like, they're being tested on this very, very broad scale. But the interesting thing about Wikipedia, it's sort of unique among platforms, and it's not really speech. Like, the point is not to like, state your opinion, it's not open. It allows very specific kinds of claims, and then this very specific moderation system for like, evaluating those claims. But it's really not speech, it's like, information. And so...
30:57 Speaker 02 Okay, I would say it's not, it is speech in the sense that... People who say we want to limit Section 230 to not cover information are often talking about stuff that's basically metadata, that's like an arms sale transaction, is primarily like information that's not speech. Wikipedia is speech, it's just not like opinion.
31:15 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, I guess my thought is that it's not like just a blank text box that you can put in anything and you really need like a good reason to not let what the person typed into the text box go on to the internet, which is basically every platform, right? Is that you just have this thing and then you put it on the internet. And like Wikipedia is sort of much more structured than that. And this is why I think other platforms like that, or things that move in that direction of kind of structuring things more, I don't know. I mean, I'm like dreaming about a less screwed up internet here, but.
31:55 Speaker 02 Reddit is, I think a lot of people want the internet to be more like Reddit now, which is ironic because that's the absolute opposite of what a lot of people said five, 10 years ago.
32:04 Speaker 03 Yeah.
32:05 Speaker 02 But where, yeah, there are a bunch of communities where they, you're stating your opinion, it's definitely speech, but it's very clearly prescribed boundaries for that speech. Like, you're here to talk about serious history and actual laws, and our moderators are going to manage that.
32:21 Speaker 03 Right. Well, and the Reddit thing, I mean, so this sort of leads us into the next thing. We're like, the knock on Reddit is that you had specific communities that were dedicated to denigrating other specific communities, and it became this really sort of ugly and fraught thing. And it was right on the surface because it was so fragmented from the beginning. It wasn't just some people on Facebook. It was like this community that is organizing using the tools that you created. But so this, this brings us to what Sidat Harry said, which is, there is this real disparate impact problem with Section 230 that has to do with kind of the makeup of the tech industry itself. So yeah, this is what she said.
33:05 Speaker 08 Every day, we are looking at the people who put things in, the structures and systems that have designed them have biases, have historical tendencies and things that need to be adjusted and have needed to be adjusted for a long time. One of the things that has been most overwhelmingly missed from the original 230, which, let's be clear, was decided with the input of a lot of very learned, expert people, but very with large amounts of access, has been the actual ability for feedback, discussion, and realization and application of those realizations to the material realities of the world.
33:40 Speaker 03 So depending on how you're listening to it, maybe she's just describing the Facebook Oversight Board. Maybe we nailed it. This is also, you were talking earlier about the revenge porn critique, which, you know, I associate very much with Carrie Goldberg, who you interviewed for the written piece. But like, I do think there is, that specifically is this claim of we've created on the internet an environment in which it's very easy to use the distribution of images to like sexually harass and victimize women, right? And I think, I take that back, basically to be her case, and like, there's a lot of evidence for that claim. And it does seem like Section 230 is part of it, is that like, you cannot, the places
34:21 Speaker 03 that are hosting these communities and enabling this stuff, they are fundamentally protected by Section 230, even more than the First Amendment, really. And, you know, I mean, there are lots of other versions of this. Obviously, there are like racial equivalence, I don't know. I mean, how much does that factor into your thinking about Section 230 at this point?
34:43 Speaker 02 It factors into it a lot because it's kind of the fundamental conflict that I have as a person, which is understanding the way that I think the law should work, which I have tendencies towards just being kind of hands-off, like we should be really careful with changing the First Amendment, we should try to like focus on freedom to do things rather than trying to limit what people can do. With the understanding that's just like not how the world works often in a lot of really practical senses, that if one person is starting with a huge structural advantage, then not putting any kind of guide rails in place is going to let those people have tremendous power over the people who were starting without those advantages. And that that's just not a system that in practice is actually equal in the way that
35:27 Speaker 02 the law is supposed to make it.
35:29 Speaker 03 I think that's right. I think the thing I struggle with is we're talking about problems that are very, very old, right? Like, these are societal divisions that predate the internet by quite a while. And I think it's definitely a noble goal and something we should think a lot about of like, how do we cultivate online spaces where there's less racial and gender harassment? Like, I think that's a really important thing to think about. But I also don't, I have a hard time really thinking of practices that have been really successful about that. I guess this is something like Anil Dash talks about a lot, where like, there are
36:08 Speaker 03 in fact, communities that have prioritized community efforts and like, people are so nice to each other on Flickr and like, but I don't know how you translate that into sort of changes to the law.
36:23 Speaker 02 Right. Especially because there are just large complexes of people whose deal is using changes to the law in extremely bad faith ways to attack the exact people that the law is supposed to be protecting, in the way that domestic terrorism laws, if they are in place, are probably going to get put in place because white supremacist terrorism is a serious problem, but they're probably eventually going to be used to claim that Antifa is a domestic terrorist organization. Like, that's kind of the standard defense and one of the fundamental problems.
36:56 Speaker 03 Yeah, and this is like, I mean, this is sort of the classic like critique of libertarianism is that there are people who are to not have power and when you remove that, like, it gets used against the people who have less power. Yeah, it's tricky. It feels like just a problem that we don't have, we haven't even really started to think about it as an industry, which is depressing, but all the more reason to to sort of push forward, I guess. Okay, so the last clip we have is, I thought it was sort of a good way to sum it up. In terms of like, a big part of what the panel is talking about is who is exposed to the risks of rolling back Section 230. You know, as we peel it back, you're exposing
37:41 Speaker 03 more and more people to liability. Who does that land on? And I thought Michael Chia had a really good perspective on that. So here's what he said.
37:49 Speaker 06 I think one thing that I keep coming back to is that, well, look, Section 230 is American exceptionalism. It's an American-only solution to an American-only problem, which is our litigious court system. But if you look at the people who actually do sue for things like defamation, it's generally the people in power. It's not the people out of power. And so by removing Section 230 protections, do you privilege those people over people who can't afford a lawyer and will never sue you anyway? I think you probably do. And so it is, I think, as Sedet says, you have to have a thesis as to what you're trying to change. What is the problem you're trying to address? And then I think you've
38:31 Speaker 06 got to act in a way that, to quote the Senator, doesn't break the internet.
38:37 Speaker 03 So this is that, instead of changing the First Amendment, we're going to change the court system. No more civil claims. But, no, I mean, I thought this is like, I really like this as like a sort of summary of the whole thing. Because it's definitely true, like, the people who are out of power are always going to sort of get the worse side of it. But also, you come back to this question of like, what is the problem that you're trying to address? And I'm still sort of wondering about that. I don't know. I mean, what do you think is the problem that we really need to be moving on of all of these different options?
39:12 Speaker 02 The fundamental problem to me is just that things that happen on the internet can happen on a gigantic scale that person-to-person legal interactions seem to not really apply to in sort of old-fashioned ways. And that those things then have massive repercussions for people's offline lives. And that's like, maybe one of the hardest problems I can think of to solve legally. And I'm not totally sure where we go with it.
39:39 Speaker 03 Yeah, there's this sense of like,
39:43 Speaker 03 We've gone the entire podcast without using the word "scale." There's this sense of, you know, we've really opened the floodgates for speech, right? It's the blank text box, you can put anything in. And the idea is that the marginal value of people who are reading it will outweigh the,
40:02 Speaker 03 because you're selling ads against the impressions, will outweigh the risks of hosting it. And that's either true or it's not. And we've sort of been living the last 25 years on an internet where it's true. But even, like, if it's even slightly negative, then it's hard to imagine, like, how Facebook responds to that. Like, it's hard to... I don't know, maybe I'm being apocalyptic. Maybe it's like, we're gonna make some tiny tweaks to Section 230, and everything will be fine.
40:33 Speaker 02 I just, like, one of the other things I keep thinking back to with the Organization for Transformative Works interview is, like, Rebecca Tishna was bringing up this case where, okay, if you receive 100 messages from somebody, and they're all really horrific stuff, you can probably claim, sue that person, like, for harassment. If you receive 100 equally horrible messages from 100 people, then the impact on you is really similar, maybe worse. And it's not a crime, because how do you... Like, it would just require massively changing our criminal laws to say, if you send one nasty email to someone, we're going to put you in jail. Like, I just, that's a problem that fundamentally, because of scale,
41:15 Speaker 02 kind of falls on platforms to solve right now, because they're the ones that can do this kind of moderation at scale. Like, the legal system just isn't really set up to handle it. And so, we're trying to create, not we personally, but like, people are trying to create laws that will make those platforms handle this, but they don't really have any basis to build those laws on.
41:35 Speaker 03 Well, and also, you know, the classic thing to say is, okay, well, the problem is that Facebook shouldn't exist. It's too big, right? And you were talking about this, of people want the internet to look more like Reddit, where we have these...
41:47 Speaker 03 Small communities that have more context and so it's harder for like something to go sort of weirdly viral and they're to have this phenomenon of context collapse. But the scenario you're describing is equally likely to happen on Reddit, if not more likely to happen. I mean, the Organization for Transformative Works is this is the sort of archive of our own fanfiction organization where there are these huge brigade battles between different fandoms. I mean, usually they have cultivated a sort of fairly healthy response to it.
42:22 Speaker 02 I mean, they're okay. They're in the interesting situation of not really having person to person chat, which is like, kind of protects them from some of it. But a lot of that bleeds onto Tumblr. And Tumblr is not the thing anybody thinks of in Section 230 debates, but it is just a massive site of like viral brigade campaigns where people feel like their words are getting horribly taken out of context and circulated for years and their lives are ruined.
42:46 Speaker 03 I want a congressional hearing where they talk about Bone Gazi. That was the this was the human bone scandal on Tumblr. Look it up, kids. Bone Gazi. I love Tumblr, but I don't think it's what anyone wants from the internet. Okay. Well, on that note, these are like really difficult problems and I don't anticipate Congress solving them in the immediate future, but I'm glad that people are thinking hard about it. And I hope that our event was a was a step towards that.
43:19 Speaker 02 Yeah. I mean, the thing I really wanted, the reason I originally told you that I wanted to do something like this was Congress keeps holding hearings about Section 230 and they always invite the same three companies and then just ask them, big tech, are you bad or good? And that I wanted to hold something that was more like what I would do if I wanted to have a congressional hearing that got across how incredibly complicated this is and how many people it would affect. And I feel like it did that to some extent.
43:47 Speaker 03 Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, let's call it a day. But thank you all for listening to the end of this podcast. I'm Russell Brandon, Policy Editor at The Verge.
43:55 Speaker 02 And I'm Addie Robertson, Senior Reporter at The Verge.
43:57 Speaker 03 And if you want to learn more, go to theverge.com/section230 where you can find a written piece that has a lot more perspectives on this issue.
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