Is regulation the answer to Big Tech censorship？
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Summary
Last week, Donald Trump had a standoff with Twitter, his preferred mode of communication. This was the straw that broke the camel's back as far as Donald Trump's tolerance for big tech. So he threatened and delivered an executive order that would aim to remove some of the protections, liability protections that social media companies employ.
Transcript
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Last week, Donald Trump had a standoff with Twitter,
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in the mainstream media to get his message out.
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as far as Donald Trump's tolerance for big tech.
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So he threatened and delivered an executive order
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that would aim to remove some of the protections,
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some of the liability protections that social media companies employ.
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The basis of this is that they identify as platforms
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and should be basically subjected to a level playing field
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And the goal of this is to force them to not censor content.
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myself included, of an anti-conservative bias from big tech.
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But the problem is, I think the cure is worse than the disease
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when it comes in the form of government regulation.
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So how significant is this platform publisher divide?
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And more importantly, is the big tech oligopoly,
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if you will, a justification for government to crack down?
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I want to talk about this with Reason.com editor Robbie Suave,
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Panic Attack, Young Radicals in the Age of Trump,
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and also has another book in the pipeline on big tech itself.
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and I had shared with you something that I know you've dealt with yourself,
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which is this frustration with people on the right
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who are in every other area, anti-regulation, anti-government crackdowns.
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But on social media, they tend to not only turn a blind eye to it,
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What's your response to this executive order last week?
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Yeah, I mean, I think the best thing you can say
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about the executive order is that it won't have any practical effect
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It really just asked Ajit Pai to look into the issue,
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Again, you would actually have to have Congress look into this
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to unilaterally command investigations and compel new regulation.
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Yeah, so like you said, you would think you could fall back on principle
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to be the reason conservatives shouldn't take this series of steps against big tech.
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So of course you can find examples of mistreatment of conservative speech
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On the whole, that social media has been bad for conservative speech
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I mean, Facebook is routinely a place where conservative news websites
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like the Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro, for instance,
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The kind of gatekeeping of the traditional media,
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which is much more hostile to conservative views,
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you get around that by being able to air your views on social media.
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But I'm just, I'm really astounded at how easily and quickly
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and automatically people like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, etc.
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are reaching for government intervention as the solution here.
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Yeah, and I mean, I would take a bit more of a critical look
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because I do think there is an anti-conservative bias.
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And you look at Donald Trump and Twitter, for example.
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Donald Trump has had quite a positive relationship with Twitter.
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In fact, in many cases, Twitter can be linked to his rise to the presidency.
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are being completely stonewalled on these platforms.
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I guess what it comes down to is that a lot of people on the right
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are saying that, okay, it's not that we want government to regulate.
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We just want a level playing field, this platform publisher divide.
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And I know that there is a protection carved out there for platforms.
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But I also think people tend to overstate the importance of that distinction.
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So this is the Section 230, the law that has to do with this.
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A lot of people, right, think that it was explicitly,
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and conservatives often speak about it like it was this.
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What the law said is you have to be a platform or a publisher.
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And if you're a platform, you get all these special protections from liability,
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from being sued for having false statements or something like that,
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Whereas if you're a publisher, you're doing some kind of moderation,
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some kind of curation the way like a book publisher or a library would do,
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So conservatives are saying, well, they're acting like a publisher
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because they're taking action against some speech or in a politically non-neutral way.
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But of course, the law didn't actually compel neutrality.
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So there's a little bit of like wishing Section 230 said something other than what it does say.
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I won't go so far as to say Section 230 is perfect or something.
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There are changes I would make to it if I was the one altering it.
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I think you could have more insistence on privacy protections, for instance,
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would be something I might like to see in my ideal version of the law.
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But the issue is I would be also fearful that any attempt to rewrite the law would get rid of
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these protections in a very harmful way because, look, the result of making Facebook, Twitter,
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et cetera, become more liable for speech that takes place on their platform,
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the obvious result of that would be more censorship, would be more moderation,
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more sort of borderline kind of right wing edgy speech.
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That's the stuff that would go under a I mean, there could be Trump tweets that are up now
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that would not be up under a regime where Twitter feels like it could be sued for any by anyone who's
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I mean, Joe Scarborough and that series of tweets we had we had last week.
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So it's fine to complain about the the unequal treatment, the bias.
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You know, we can talk about how we address that.
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But again, this seems like this seems like a taking taking away Section 230 in the in the kind
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of blanket way that, again, Josh Hawley has talked about.
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I don't think the consequence of that would be better landscape for conservative speech
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on the Internet, but in fact, quite the opposite.
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All of a sudden you force risk aversion to become more of a priority than an open platform.
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However, you know, however many holes there are in that idea of a completely open platform
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But I guess where I would ask you about this is that we've had social media companies
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like Facebook, like YouTube, like Twitter that have gone after I'll use extreme examples
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I know they don't represent the mainstream right.
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And I mean, maybe not even maybe that's an example that I think establishes them all here.
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And my issue with this as a free market person is I don't think that people should be building
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their business models based on other companies and based on other companies' business models.
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Because if you have a path to success that relies on YouTube getting you views or Facebook
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getting you shares, eventually you're at the mercy of those things.
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But do you think there is some truth to this idea that these companies are effectively public
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And it's not to say that they need to be subjected to the regulations and restrictions that governments
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are, but that their role in society is public platforms.
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I mean, obviously, they are functioning to a degree as the public platform.
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And, you know, Mark Zuckerberg has said, for instance, that he to some degree views Facebook
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You know, they offer their terms of service, right?
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They outline what are the rules and procedures under which you can operate on this platform.
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I generally think they should be open, honest, and transparent about what those rules are.
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I think if they take action that is outside the bounds of what those terms are, they should
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It's still, though, it's like difficult to hold them accountable in a, like, violation of
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a contract circumstance because, again, you're not paying for these services.
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It would be a different thing if you're paying for the service and you could, you know, you could
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present some, well, this was fraudulent behavior or something.
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But, again, this is a free platform that was provided to you by a company that doesn't
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That's a tremendous, you know, that's a tremendous boon, in fact, to a lot of independent journalists,
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self-published people, conservative commentators, activists, even non-conservatives, people of
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all kinds who have an ability to transmit information, to communicate with other people.
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I think often the bias is on the part of the users, though.
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A lot of conservatives have this idea that there's some cabal, like Jack Dorsey is sitting
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in his, you know, his evil tower and deciding what speech to go after.
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That might have been true with the Trump fact check.
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But a lot of it is, it's complaint-driven, right?
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The platforms don't do anything until someone complains.
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It might be the case that very progressive-minded people are more litigious.
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They're reporting more speech they don't like, and then actions taken against it.
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You know, YouTube has, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of new hours of content, like,
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And then they'll take action once there's complaints.
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So if you made them liable or responsible, I mean, how would YouTube even operate?
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They would have to review all the footage before it goes up.
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I mean, it would, I don't think, do we want that?
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I don't think conservatives should want that to be the case.
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I mean, you know, Prager University's complaints about YouTube notwithstanding,
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There are certain areas of the Facebook and Twitter experience that are very much human curated.
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I mean, Twitter moments is one example where you've got people at Twitter that are trying
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And I don't mean that in a sinister cabal way, but just a narrative of tweets that tell
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We know there's some human intervention in what's trending or not.
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I guess the question would be, does that make them by definition publishers?
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Because they're choosing what to amplify and what to share.
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Now, whether or not that should make a difference as far as regulation, it's a different question.
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But I do think that there is, by the company's own admission,
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a level of a human curation of the user experience.
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And in truth, Section 230 was specifically designed to make it so that the platforms
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could do some amount of curation without being treated as publishers.
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That's what actually prompted Section 230, because there was a court decision where they
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told, I can't remember which platform it was, but they told them that, well, oh, so you're
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taking action against obscenity or something like that.
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So then you can be liable because you're behaving like a publisher rather than a platform.
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So then actually the law was to make it so that if they censor speech that actually everyone
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agrees would like off the platform, just kind of crazy stuff, that they're not going to be
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treated the same way like a book publisher would be treated.
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So there's some amount of good faith moderation that is not political in nature that we probably
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Like it's a good thing that this is a private company rather than a public square.
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I mean, in the public square, right, the Westboro Baptist Church can shout obscenities at the
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funerals of soldiers saying things more vile than anyone can even imagine.
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And the Supreme Court said in a not narrow decision that that's acceptable speech because it's
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the public square and it's First Amendment protected.
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So on one hand, there are benefits to the fact that Twitter is a private company.
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They don't have to let that be there if they don't want to.
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If you really dislike it, you can find another service to use, I guess.
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But there's some, you know, there's some level of like harassment and horror that is a function
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of the Internet that they are taking action against in probably a responsible way.
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Or if you were saying they are they are truly the public square and they are bound to the
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First Amendment understanding of speech, then there'd be a lot of horrible stuff that they
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would have to allow on the platform that might make it an unpleasant place for people just
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So that's that's one that's one advantage of keeping them a private entity rather than
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Yeah, that's a great point, because I know that various companies or people have tried
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to make, you know, completely 100 percent free speech friendly platforms.
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And unsurprisingly, they become magnets for the the least desirable form of speech, the
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type of people that either on principle or because they know they won't make the cut at Twitter,
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And it does, I think, very much ask the question of, you know, should you be careful what you
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wish for if you want a First Amendment platform?
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And I know that I think it was Dennis Prager or PragerU had sued very unsuccessfully YouTube
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They tried to say that, you know, the First Amendment should extend to YouTube.
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And the court, I think, very correctly shot that down.
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But it is weird that all of a sudden and I don't want to take aim at people on the right
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But but the ones who are being hypocritical on this, the same people that stand up for
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a baker to deny making a gay wedding cake, for example, are now saying, no, no, no, the
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Constitution has to apply to YouTube and Facebook.
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I certainly don't want to compel a small business owner to to engage in work that violates their
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I think that violates their freedom of religion, their their free expression rights.
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So, yeah, it's it's it's very baffling to me that so many conservatives, it's the same
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principle when when when you look at some of these companies.
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And and I just also think, you know, let's say Trump loses or or in four years or whatever.
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Eventually, a Democrat is in the White House again.
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Elizabeth Warren is is the most vocal opponent of Section 230.
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She wants to aggressively regulate these companies because she thinks Facebook in allowing a greater
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level of free speech in saying, you know what, we're not going to fact check everything, make
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We're not going to try to go through which political ads are misleading or not.
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Elizabeth Warren types hate that and they want to punish Facebook for doing that.
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So they want to give the government more power to intervene in what these companies policies
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So I think it would just be so short sighted for for conservatives, for Republican senators
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to set up some kind of commission, which was really Josh Hawley's idea at one point, at
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least like conservatives should always fear the bureaucratic answer to this where there's
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going to be like a committee of government insiders to decide these.
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Like, I don't understand how anyone remotely right of center could think that is going to
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result in an outcome that is favorable to more conservative speech online.
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And I think maybe the conservative movement broadly or conservative politicians will remember
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that when we no longer, when the right no longer has so much power and influence over
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Robbie Suave, senior editor at Reason and author of Panic Attack, Young Radicals in the
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Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
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Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.