In an interview with the New York Times editorial board published Friday, presidential candidate Joe Biden went off on Facebook and said he wants to revoke section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. "Section 230 should be revoked, immediately should be revoked, number one," Biden said. "For Zuckerberg and other platforms." Section 230 shields internet platforms and publishers from liability for what users write on their platforms. For example, a social media company can't be sued for what a user posts, or a blogger isn't liable for what readers write in the comments section. A lesser-known component of the law is that it also allows internet companies to moderate their platforms as they see fit. The law dates back to 1996, and some have called for its reexamination in light of how the internet has changed in the last 25 years. However, online civil liberty experts also say it is crucial for protecting freedom of speech online.
And you may recall, the criticism I got for meeting with the leaders in
Silicon Valley, when I was trying to work out an agreement dealing with them
protecting intellectual property for artists in the United States of America.
And at one point, one of the little creeps sitting around that table, who was a
multi- — close to a billionaire — who told me he was an artist because he was
able to come up with games to teach you how to kill people, you know the ——
CW: Like video games.
Yeah, video games. And I was lectured by one of the senior leaders there that by
saying if I insisted on what Leahy’d put together and we were, I thought we were
going to fully support, that they would blow up the network, figuratively
speaking. Have everybody contact. They get out and go out and contact the
switchboard, just blow it up.
And then one of these righteous people said to me that, you know, “We are the
economic engine of America. We are the ones.” And fortunately I had done a
little homework before I went and I said, you know, I find it fascinating. As I
added up the seven outfits, everyone’s there but Microsoft. I said, you have
fewer people on your payroll than all the losses that General Motors just faced
in the last quarter, of employees. So don’t lecture me about how you’ve created
all this employment.
The point is, there’s an arrogance about it, an overwhelming arrogance that we
are, we are the ones. We can do what we want to do. I disagree.
Biden appears to have his sights set on Section 230 because of an October 2018 scuffle with Facebook. The Biden campaign wrote a letter to Facebook asking it to remove an ad, posted by an independent Political Action Committee (PAC), claiming that Biden was blackmailing a Ukrainian official to keep them from prosecuting his son, Hunter Biden. Facebook declined to remove the ad, answering that it will not monitor political ads based on whether the information they present is true or false.
Updated:04:40 PM CEST Sep,21
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