Every day it’s something new. The latest is that the Justice Department has come out with its official proposal to revise Section 230. As you may recall, back in February, the DOJ held some hearings about Section 230, followed by announcing some vague and contradictory guidelines for reform in early March.
Apparently between March and now there’s been nothing more important for the Justice Department to be working on, because it’s now blasted out its full unconstitutional proposal for reforming Section 230 and it’s like a greatest hits of bad ideas. You can look at the redline version of the law itself, but the DOJ’s announcement summarizes the revisions in two giant buckets: (1) “promoting transparency and open discourse” and (2) “addressing illicit activity online.” It will not surprise you that the actual recommendations would do neither of these things. There’s a lot in here and I’m honestly just too tired of going through and debunking all the various bad ideas in these proposals, so I’ll just highlight a few egregious parts.
First off, like the recent “Online Freedom and Viewpoint Diversity Act” and the soon to be marked up “Online Content Policy Modernization Act” from Senator Lindsey Graham, the DOJ’s bill would remove the term “otherwise objectionable” (get your t-shirts while they’re still relevant!), and simply create a longer list of why a website could moderate content. It would also require an “objectively reasonable belief” that the content falls into one of those categories to qualify. The new list of acceptable reasons to moderate content to keep your immunity:
any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user has an objectively reasonable belief is obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, promoting terrorism or violent extremism, harassing, promoting self-harm, or unlawful, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.
This is pretty similar to the two bills listed above. The only real difference is that this one adds in the promotion of “violent extremism” which you already know that this DOJ will use to include trying to force social media companies to take down Antifa and BLM content…
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