Immunity online

In USA law’ Section 230 of the ‘Communications Decency Act’ provides immunity for websites like Twitter and Facebook if third parties publish illegal or unpleasant things on their platforms, although it does require them to remove such material when they notice it.

It was rather obscured by the election, but there was recently a four hour hearing  in the US Senate on the future of the law featuring the bosses of Facebook, Google and Twitter.  Their different approaches are interesting.

Google and Twitter warned that removing their immunity would, in the Twitter chap’s words ‘collapse how we communicate on the internet’.  But Facebook took a different line – Mark Zuckerberg said that he felt it is time to update the law, and make the platforms more liable. 

This may sound attractive on the face of it, but the conundrum is that that only a giant like Facebook could afford to obey such a law; it already has thousands of human moderators and censors, as well as highly developed Artificial Intelligence systems looking for the problems.  Little companies can’t hope to compete, and would effectively be prevented from offering Facebook any legal competition, thus further cementing their dominance.

It’s the oldest question of all: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?