Summary
Lawmakers are once again pushing to repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields online platforms from legal liability for user-generated content.
Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) are collaborating on a bipartisan bill to sunset the law in two years.
Repealing Section 230 aims to force Congress to renegotiate platform liability standards.
The proposal reflects growing frustration over tech giants’ power and content moderation practices, but past efforts have faced political gridlock despite bipartisan support.
Yeah it would be great to change 230 so that at the very least tech companies are liable for the content their algorithms recommend to people. Seems akin to publishing something so should have the same liability.
But that’s not what’s happening here. They want to repeal it entirely, this will create problems, which will give leeway for Trump to use EOs to resolve it, regardless of whether that’s legal. This will likely end up with Trump deciding what’s allowed on social media.
The point of section 230 was to allow sites to do moderation without that resulting in liability. Without it the lemmy instances couldn’t operate in the US without being sued into oblivion. What’s lacking from the CDA is anything about sites using recommendation algorithms to push content. Because that kind of thing didn’t exist in 1995, when the law was written.