Former Facebook employee turned whistleblower Frances Haugen told Congress on Tuesday that she believes Facebook continuously places profit above the wellbeing and safety of its users. From misinformation to childrens' mental health, Haugen said the company routinely ignores evidence of harm.
For the company to change, she said, lawmakers will have to step in. One of her recommendations was to amend a law called Section 230.
Section 230 is a part of US law that effectively shields Big Tech companies from a lot of liability and allows them to moderate their platforms the way they see fit.
Reforming or repealing Section 230 has been a campaign point for both President Biden and former President Trump — although for very different reasons.
Here's what you need to know about the law that created the internet.
What is Section 230?
Section 230 is part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, and its advocates have called it "the most important law protecting internet speech."
It includes regulatory guidelines for "interactive computer services," which now include modern-day social media companies like Twitter and Facebook.
The section, which has been described as "the 26 words that created the internet," says: "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."
This means that Twitter and Facebook can avoid being regulated as publishers and are protected from being held liable for illegal posts (with some exceptions). Whereas a newspaper would be held liable for the content it produces and publishes, social media companies can distance themselves from the content posted by people onto their platforms.
The section also gives social media sites the ability to regulate content, such as hate speech, on their platforms:
"No provider or user of an interactive computer service... shall be held liable on account of any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected."
This specific text allows social media sites to remove or add warning labels to users' posts or even suspend people who violate their rules. It's also why tech companies don't violate the First Amendment when they regulate content as they see fit.
Twitter and Facebook have largely taken a hands-off approach to moderating content. Still, they have removed or flagged posts that explicitly violate their policies, such as policies against inciting violence. For example, Twitter's rules ban hate speech but such speech is allowed generally by the First Amendment.
Why do lawmakers care about Section 230?
President Donald Trump first started calling for Section 230 to be revoked in May 2020 after Twitter flagged two of his tweets about mail-in voting with a warning that read "Get the facts about mail-in ballots."
Trump responded with an executive order targeting social-media companies' protections under Section 230, which Biden revoked in May.
Trump's now-revoked order had no effect on Section 230, but it raised the law's public profile, and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle started discussing its possible revocation.
Republicans want to amend or revoke Section 230 to fight alleged censorship of conservative users online, while Democrats largely saw it as a way to make companies liable for harmful content, like disinformation.
Since the Georgia runoffs in January the Democrats now control both Houses, meaning they have a better shot at re-crafting Section 230 the way they want.
This poses a potential threat to Big Tech executives. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said while testifying before a Senate Judiciary hearing in October 2020 that revoking Section 230 would "collapse how we communicate on the Internet."
Haugen gave a very specific recommendation for how to reform Section 230 during her testimony to Congress, saying it should be reformed so companies are liable for the way they build their algorithms rather than individual pieces of content.
"I encourage reforming Section 230 decisions about algorithms. Modifying 230 around content — it gets very complicated because user-generated content is something companies have less control over," Haugen said.
