The tweet above is a landmark move by Jack Dorsey and Twitter. What an extremely tough decision to be public about censoring the President of the United States for the Twitter team to think through.
I’m a big believer in free speech, in fact, it’s a human right and clearly articulated in the Bill of Rights. However, Twitter is in an impossible position. There are no good answers or decisions here.
On one hand, you have people that are actively tweeting Jack and the Twitter team to do something about the president’s tweet because he’s promoting violence or manipulating voters. Twitter has been clear that they do not want to be a political platform and has decided to stop all political ads to take place on Twitter.
On the other hand, Twitter faces great criticism for restricting free speech and even claims that its censorship promotes its political bias. The President has even made threats that Twitter is a “publisher.”
What does that threat really mean?
The President is referencing the Communications Decency Act.
“(c)Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material(1)Treatment of publisher or speaker
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
(2)Civil liability
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
(A) any action voluntarily was taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers being obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
(B) any action is taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).[1]
Social media companies like Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter are given immense protection because of this very law. By Twitter censoring Donald Trump’s tweets, they’ve instituted this law and deemed this tweet to be “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.”
This is an absolutely powerful position for any social media company. If Twitter is deemed to be a “publisher”, they do not receive protection from this law and could face serious punishment.
Donald Trump and the White House published an executive order (EO) and on his thoughts about Twitter. Please note that Executive orders are not law, but merely a way for the President to formally affirm his position on this topic.
Here’s the link to the full EO
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-preventing-online-censorship/
Twitter responded backed with a concise tweet and called the EO “reactionary and politicized approach to a landmark law”
If CDA Section 230 falls or loses power, it won’t just be Twitter that suffers but all other social media companies and quite frankly future startups and companies. Twitter made its statement and practiced their power, but this won’t be the last time that we hear about this.
Today, most social media companies have massive trust and safety operations that are sole job is to monitor the content and activity on their platform. This gives these people the ability to censor conversations and discourse and ultimately wield Section 230(c) to the best of their knowledge.
In the future, there’s a great opportunity, but an extremely difficult endeavor for content to be solely reviewed by the people. I’ll leave you with this last tweet by Jack and Balaji that discuss the future of assessing content on social platforms.
(1) Source: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230