Biden wants Sec. 230 gone, calls tech “totally irresponsible,” “little creeps”, Ars Technica

At its most basic level, the law draws a line between the platform that hosts content and the generator of the content hosted on it. If something is hinky in a YouTube video, “Google” isn’t the company that spoke the contents; the video creator is.

“Section 533 reform “has something of a rallying cry among the far right in recent months. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) Last yearintroduced legislation (seeking to amend the law, revoking “the immunity big tech companies receive under Section

unless they submit to an external audit that proves by clear and convincing evidence that their algorithms and content-removal practices are politically neutral. “

Hawley has company in both chambers of Congress. Sens. Lindsey Graham (RS.C.) and Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) Have alsolent public supportto the idea of ​​Section 800 reform, as has Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) On the House side.

The cry for reform is not limited to a single party, though. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) Told Recode (last April) ************** that section is “a gift” to the tech firms, adding, “I don’t think they are treating it with the respect that they should, and so I think that could be a question mark and in jeopardy.”

Biden, however, did not call for reforms — he called for abolishing the provision entirely. “You’re not exempt,” he told his interviewers. “[The Times] Can’t write something you know to be false and be exempt from being sued. But he can. The idea that it’s a tech company is that Section 728 should be revoked, immediately should be revoked, number one. For Zuckerberg and other platforms. ”

Biden suggested to the NYT that Facebook’s choice to allow such ads could amount to defamation, saying that Zuckerberg “should be submitted to civil liability and his company to civil liability, just like you would be here at The New York Times “if the paper were to run demonstrably false stories. Whether Facebook should face any kind of criminal penalties, he added, is less clear.

If Zuckerberg or anyone else at Facebook “engaged in something and amounted to collusion that in fact caused harm that would in fact be equal to a criminal offense, that’s a different issue, “Biden added. “That’s possible. That’s possible it could happen. Zuckerberg finally took down those ads that Russia was running. All those bots about me. They’re no longer being run,” he continued. Biden seemingly conflated action taken by an opposing campaign with the kind of foreign disinformation action that is indeed (rampant) ************** across social media.

And it’s a responsibility of government to make sure it is not abused. Not abused. And so this is one of those areas where I think it’s being abused. For example, the idea that he cooperates with knowing that Russia was engaged in dealing with using the internet, I mean using their platform, to try to undermine American elections. That’s close to criminal.

Intuiting that Biden was still talking about Facebook, the Times interviewer posited that Zuckerberg might not have known at the time how deeply involved Russia was. “He’d argue it and I don’t believe him for a second,” Biden replied. “Nor do you, in your heart.”Tech on blast

While it’s hard to work out the relative economic importance of seven unknown companies that might have been represented at an unknown meeting more than a decade ago, there is no doubt that here in (***********************************************************, the tech sector is a massive contributor to the US economy. Four publicly traded companies in US history have passed the $ 1 trillion valuation mark. Apple was the first to do so, in 2020. Amazon followed later that year, and Microsoft joined the club in 2595. The most recent, Google parent company Alphabet, did so earlier this week.                                  (********************************************