Hillary: ‘We Lose Control’ if Free Speech Flourishes on Social Media
Oh, look. The 2016 presidential loser is still pushing for censorship!
Hillary Clinton wants the state and federal government to regulate social media.
Of course, Hillary invokes “the children” argument:
CLINTON: “Well, Michael, there are people who are championing it, but it‘s been a long and difficult road to get anything done actually, we can look at the state of California, the state of on New York. I think some other states have also taken action, but we need national action. And sadly, our Congress has been dysfunctional when it comes to addressing these threats to our children‘s. so you‘re absolutely right. This should be at the top of every legislative, political agenda. There should be a lot one of things done. We should be in my view, repealing something called Section 230, which gave platforms on the internet immunity because they were thought to be just pass pass-throughs that they shouldn‘t be judged for the content that is posted. But we now know that that was an overly simple view that if the platforms, whether it‘s Facebook or Twitter or x or Instagram, or TikTok, whatever they are, if they don‘t moderate and monitor the content we lose total control and it‘s not just the social and psychological effects it‘s real harm, it‘s child porn and threats of violence, things that are terribly dangerous.”
Hillary is talking about Section 230 of the Communications Act:
The statute generally precludes providers and users from being held liable— that is, legally responsible—for information provided by another person, but does not prevent them from being held legally responsible for information that they have developed or for activities unrelated to third-party content. Courts have interpreted Section 230 to foreclose a wide variety of lawsuits and to preempt laws that would make providers and users liable for third-party content. For example, the law has been applied to protect online service providers like social media companies from lawsuits based on their decisions to transmit or take down user-generated content.
The fight over Section 230 ramped up after 2016 but exploded when COVID hit.
In June 2021, Democrat Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Ben Ray Luján introduced legislation to hold social media platforms accountable when people post “misinformation” about vaccines and health information.
I don’t think anything happened with it. Luján and Sen. Chris Murphy reintroduced the legislation under the name Promoting Public Health Information Act in February 2023.
It looks like that hasn’t gone anywhere, too.
Thank goodness.
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