President Trump convened a summit of social media giants,
including Facebook and Twitter. Following the summit, President Trump
announced:
“Today, I am directing my
administration to explore all regulatory and legislative solutions to protect
free speech and the free speech rights of all Americans,” POTUS Trump
announced. “We hope to see transparency, more accountability, and more
freedom.”
In 2016, before the tech giants
began altering their search, publication, and distribution algorithms,
conservative speakers were dominant on social media, likely helping propel the
president to victory. But by the 2018 elections, based on several studies and
investigative reporting, the tech giants had begun — in concert — campaigns to
silence conservative, pro-Trump voices, led by the behemoths Facebook and
Twitter.
The companies are taking advantage
of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which “provides
immunity from liability for providers and users of an interactive computer
service who publish information published by others,” the Minc
Legal Resource Center noted.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation added that
“Section 230 says that ‘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.’”
But, argue opponents, when
Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, and other platforms begin censoring content
they find politically objectionable, that makes them publishers, and they
therefore should lose their immunity to face legal consequences for those acts
of censorship, especially if they have taken money from users they are
censoring.
The president’s summit may already
be having a positive effect on conservative and independent publishers. For
instance, The Western Journal, whose Facebook traffic had been reduced
significantly, suddenly
found its traffic returning to normal levels a day before the summit —
after months of battling with the platform to get it restored.
There is a long way to go, however,
to ensure that all conservative and indy publishers’ traffic from
their subscribers and followers returns to normal. The president has at least
gotten the ball rolling, and well ahead of the 2020 elections.
Well, good. It's a start.
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