What is the status of regulation of Social Media Companies in the US?

Question

Twitter and Facebook (and other social media sites) recently became the focus of a lot of attention for the role they did or did not play in allowing the spread of information (or disinformation) regarding alleged rigging of the election in the USA and the Capitol riots. It seems that a conversation about the censure rights of big companies was getting started. I have two questions about this.

1. It seemed both Republicans and Democrats were in agreement that the social media companies had too much power (especially when Trump was removed from Twitter). Is this true? How do their views differ?

2. Is anything being done about this, or has it simply faded from everyone's attention?

Answer 1

Honestly I think some of what you heard was posturing from people who were upset that social media was moderating their content or the content of people that they supported. Evidence of this would be the drive to remove section 230 of the communications decency act that shields social media platforms from the content that the users publish.

https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230

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

The thing that is important to know about this is currently there is no punishment of the platform based on what the users publish to that platform. However if section 230 was repealed that would mean platforms themselves could be targeted due to content that is placed on it by the users. If this was the case those platforms would have many reasons to be even more heavy handed with moderation due to fears of financial or legal complications with that said content. This would cause more content to be moderated and complaints of censorship to be even more prevalent.

As a side note it could cause even bigger problems as seen in the parlor/aws hosting situation. The question is if you can go after the social media platform for what the users post is it not also possible to go after the host of that platform? If a social media platform is not moderating content could it not be argued that the host of that social media platform could be held in the same light as the platform and its users?

This is not to say that how social media moderates content isn't something that needs to be investigated and fixed.

Answer 2

I think if there is an area in which both Democrats and Republicans can agree on this issue, it is in that there are too few user-facing platforms for content dissemination (Facebook, Twitter and just a few others have huge market domination) due to the large barrier to entry for new platforms, creating a de facto monopoly. This creates issues when the views expressed by one side or the other fall outside of the content rules laid out by these platforms; in this case that side feels that their views are being censored. In reality, the right to free speech does not imply the right to widespread publication of that speech, but it is nonetheless a valid concern that the most commonly used platforms do have content rules that tend to clip more right-wing than left-wing talking points (or maybe you see it as the reverse, but the point stands either way). Many people would agree that having few companies that define these limits is probably worse than having a larger range of platforms, each with differing moderation rules, for content that is not explicitly illegal but is offensive, harmful or otherwise unsavory.

In regards to the second point, legislation on this issue is in a developing state at present but the House-drafted SAFE TECH Act does lay out reforms to CDA Section 230.

Answer 3

I'm going to offer a more cynical perspective, and I'm assuming that when you say Democrats and Republicans in your question you are referring to the politicians and not their constituents.

I think your question has a false premise: nobody in power actually cares about false information.

People who were censored care, and care plenty. People who care about free speech care. People in power do not care. Did they go after Fox? No. It took a civil action by a private company. Have they complained about Google? You know, the company that actually owns almost all of our information? That massages results at least as much as social media companies? No. Have the people crying "monopoly!" about Facebook and Twitter given a peep about Amazon? No.

For the politicians this is all for show, smoke and mirrors. It's a way to look like they care, to look like they're doing something, without actually doing anything.

I understand the argument about censorship and how you're either a platform or a content-provider and that you don't get to switch back and forth at will based on whatever is convenient at that moment. And that's a valid argument. And I also get that if you were on the wrong end of that legal/rhetorical sleight-of-hand it burns. But the whole context of this debate is that we're picking up pennies in front of steamrollers.

Answer 4

Honestly, I think the best we can say here is summed up in the following bullet points:

• Almost everyone in the political sphere agrees that social media organizations (and media organizations more generally) have too much power over public opinion formation, concentrated in too few hands. They disagree about the specific problems involved: Trumpists object to that power being used to quell their radicalization efforts; Progressives object that this power was not used (until very lately) to stem the onslaught of vicious, dehumanizing rhetoric that has been aimed at them for decades; moderates of both parties have concerns about the 'Wild West' public attitude that media companies' laissez-faire practices have fostered, and the general degradation of civic principles that has been the result. But no one with any political chops is unaware that the situation is precarious and problematic.
• Almost everyone in the political sphere knows that Section 230 is a red herring. Making social media companies accountable for the information posted on their services might get them to 'clean up' the more obvious and indictable behavior of posters, but much of (say) the organizing chatter around the Jan 6 insurrection would not have met the requirements for legal action, and thus would still have been allowed. Repealing 230 might actually worsen the situation, giving the most ardent disinformation-mongers grounds to sue the corporations over any moderation efforts.
• No one in the political sphere understands the problem fully, or has a real sense of what an effective solution would look like. In a non-polarized context, Congresspeople would would sit down in committee, call experts, and hash out a solution that neither side liked but both sides could tolerate. IN th current political environment, discussion and compromise are ludicrously faint hopes, because too many political leaders have been abusing the power of social media for political advantage, and few of that particular crop are likely to put their political advantages on the table in service of some higher democratic ideal.

There are solutions to this problem that I can see, but I cannot see a political path to achieving any of them, short of removing the more stubborn, machiavellian, and/or radical members of Congress over the next few election cycles. SO long as we have political leaders intent on profiting off of social discord, solutions to the underlying problems of social media are going to remain out of reach.