Facebook CEO Zuckerberg Calls for Some Revisions to Section 230

LOS ANGELES—Ahead of a Thursday congressional hearing that featured testimony from CEOs of the top online social media platforms, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg broke from his counterparts at Google and Twitter, saying that he supports some limited revisions to Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act — the statute widely known as the “First Amendment of the Internet.” Section 230, which is especially important to the online adult industry as a shield against censorship via lawsuits over the alleged effects of sexually explicit content, has come under attack from both sides of the political spectrum over the past year, with no fewer than 25 bills proposed in Congress to limit the free speech protections guaranteed by the law.  The Thursday hearing was the third since October in which a congressional committee had called Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Twitter founder and boss Jack Dorsey to testify on topics related to Section 230 protections. While both Pichai and Dorsey defended Section 230, while conceding that online platforms should practice greater transparency in their decisions over how they moderate content, Zuckerberg proposed some revisions to the very law that has played a key role in allowing Facebook to become perhaps the world’s most dominant technology company. While Section 230 now protects platforms from almost any liability over user-posted content, Zuckerberg said that those protections should now be made “conditional.” “Instead of being granted immunity, platforms should be required to demonstrate that they have systems in place for identifying unlawful content and removing it,” Zuckerberg said in his testimony, as reported by The Verge. “Platforms should not be held liable if a particular piece of content evades its detection — that would be impractical for platforms with billions of posts per day — but they should be required to have adequate systems in place to address unlawful content.” While The Verge called the proposal the most detailed that Zuckerberg has proposed to date, the site also noted that even if his suggested revisions were put in place, they would have little effect on Facebook, which “already maintains significant systems for identifying and removing illegal or otherwise objectionable content.” Dorsey, on the other hand, did not propose any alterations to Section 230, instead focusing on the “trust” between large online platforms and their users. “Quite simply, a trust deficit has been building over the last several years, and it has created uncertainty — here in the United States and globally," Dorsey told the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. "That deficit does not just impact the companies sitting at the table today but exists across the information ecosystem and, indeed, across many of our institutions." Pichai also called for content moderation policies to be “clear and accessible, notifying people when their content is removed and giving them ways to appeal content decisions.” But he did not propose revoking liability protections for platforms that fail to meet that standard, and in fact offered a strong defense of Section 230. "Section 230 is foundational to the open web,” the Google CEO said. “It allows platforms and websites, big and small, across the entire internet, to responsibly manage content to keep users safe and promote access to information and free expression. Without Section 230, platforms would either over-filter content or not be able to filter content at all." Photo By ABC News Politics Screen Capture