Archives For Communications Decency Act. Section 230

Conservatism and the Section 230 Debate: Applying First Principles

Ben Sperry —  30 September 2020

Over at the Federalist Society’s blog, there has been an ongoing debate about what to do about Section 230. While there has long-been variety in what we call conservatism in the United States, the most prominent strains have agreed on at least the following: Constitutionally limited government, free markets, and prudence in policy-making. You would think all of these values would be important in the Section 230 debate. It seems, however, that some are willing to throw these principles away in pursuit of a temporary political victory over perceived “Big Tech censorship.” 

Constitutionally Limited Government: Congress Shall Make No Law

The First Amendment of the United States Constitution states: “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech.” Originalists on the Supreme Court have noted that this makes clear that the Constitution protects against state action, not private action. In other words, the Constitution protects a negative conception of free speech, not a positive conception.

Despite this, some conservatives believe that Section 230 should be about promoting First Amendment values by mandating private entities are held to the same standards as the government. 

For instance, in his Big Tech and the Whole First Amendment, Craig Parshall of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) stated:

What better example of objective free speech standards could we have than those First Amendment principles decided by justices appointed by an elected president and confirmed by elected members of the Senate, applying the ideals laid down by our Founders? I will take those over the preferences of brilliant computer engineers any day.

In other words, he thinks Section 230 should be amended to only give Big Tech the “subsidy” of immunity if it commits to a First Amendment-like editorial regime. To defend the constitutionality of such “restrictions on Big Tech”, he points to the Turner intermediate scrutiny standard, in which the Supreme Court upheld must-carry provisions against cable networks. In particular, Parshall latches on to the “bottleneck monopoly” language from the case to argue that Big Tech is similarly situated to cable providers at the time of the case.

Turner, however, turned more on the “special characteristics of the cable medium” that gave it the bottleneck power than the market power itself. As stated by the Supreme Court:

When an individual subscribes to cable, the physical connection between the television set and the cable network gives the cable operator bottleneck, or gatekeeper, control over most (if not all) of the television programming that is channeled into the subscriber’s home. Hence, simply by virtue of its ownership of the essential pathway for cable speech, a cable operator can prevent its subscribers from obtaining access to programming it chooses to exclude. A cable operator, unlike speakers in other media, can thus silence the voice of competing speakers with a mere flick of the switch.

Turner v. FCC, 512 U.S. 622, 656 (1994).

None of the Big Tech companies has the comparable ability to silence competing speakers with a flick of the switch. In fact, the relationship goes the other way on the Internet. Users can (and do) use multiple Big Tech companies’ services, as well as those of competitors which are not quite as big. Users are the ones who can switch with a click or a swipe. There is no basis for treating Big Tech companies any differently than other First Amendment speakers.

Like newspapers, Big Tech companies must use their editorial discretion to determine what is displayed and where. Just like those newspapers, Big Tech has the First Amendment right to editorial discretion. This, not Section 230, is the bedrock law that gives Big Tech companies the right to remove content.

Thus, when Rachel Bovard of the Internet Accountability Project argues that the FCC should remove the ability of tech platforms to engage in viewpoint discrimination, she makes a serious error in arguing it is Section 230 that gives them the right to remove content.

Immediately upon noting that the NTIA petition seeks clarification on the relationship between (c)(1) and (c)(2), Bovard moves right to concern over the removal of content. “Unfortunately, embedded in that section [(c)(2)] is a catch-all phrase, ‘otherwise objectionable,’ that gives tech platforms discretion to censor anything that they deem ‘otherwise objectionable.’ Such broad language lends itself in practice to arbitrariness.” 

In order for CDA 230 to “give[] tech platforms discretion to censor,” they would have to not have that discretion absent CDA 230. Bovard totally misses the point of the First Amendment argument, stating:

Yet DC’s tech establishment frequently rejects this argument, choosing instead to focus on the First Amendment right of corporations to suppress whatever content they so choose, never acknowledging that these choices, when made at scale, have enormous ramifications. . . . 

But this argument intentionally sidesteps the fact that Sec. 230 is not required by the First Amendment, and that its application to tech platforms privileges their First Amendment behavior in a unique way among other kinds of media corporations. Newspapers also have a First Amendment right to publish what they choose—but they are subject to defamation and libel laws for content they write, or merely publish. Media companies also make First Amendment decisions subject to a thicket of laws and regulations that do not similarly encumber tech platforms.

There is the merest kernel of truth in the lines quoted above. Newspapers are indeed subject to defamation and libel laws for what they publish. But, as should be obvious, liability for publication entails actually publishing something. And what some conservatives are concerned about is platforms’ ability to not publish something: to take down conservative content.

It might be simpler if the First Amendment treated published speech and unpublished speech the same way. But it doesn’t. One can be liable for what one speaks, writes, or publishes on behalf of others. Indeed, even with the full protection of the First Amendment, there is no question that newspapers can be held responsible for delicts caused by content they publish. But no newspaper has ever been held responsible for anything they didn’t publish.

Free Markets: Competition as the Bulwark Against Abuses, not Regulation

Conservatives have long believed in the importance of property rights, exchange, and the power of the free market to promote economic growth. Competition is seen as the protector of the consumer, not big government regulators. In the latter half of the twentieth century into the twenty-first century, conservatives have fought for capitalism over socialism, free markets over regulation, and competition over cronyism. But in the name of combating anti-conservative bias online, they are willing to throw these principles away.

The bedrock belief in the right of property owners to decide the terms of how they want to engage with others is fundamental to American conservatism. As stated by none other than Bovard (along with co-author Jim Demint in their book Conservative: Knowing What to Keep):

Capitalism is nothing more or less than the extension of individual freedom from the political and cultural realms to the economy. Just as government isn’t supposed to tell you how to pray, or what to think, or what sports teams to follow or books to read, it’s not supposed to tell you what to do with your own money and property.

Conservatives normally believe that it is the free choices of consumers and producers in the marketplace that maximize consumer welfare, rather than the choices of politicians and bureaucrats. Competition, in other words, is what protects us from abuses in the marketplace. Again as Bovard and Demint rightly put it:

Under the free enterprise system, money is not redistributed by a central government bureau. It goes wherever people see value. Those who create value are rewarded which then signals to the rest of the economy to up their game. It’s continuous democracy.

To get around this, both Parshall and Bovard make much of the “market dominance” of tech platforms. The essays take the position that tech platforms have nearly unassailable monopoly power which makes them unaccountable. Bovard claims that “mega-corporations have as much power as the government itself—and in some ways, more power, because theirs is unchecked and unaccountable.” Parshall even connects this to antitrust law, stating:  

This brings us to another kind of innovation, one that’s hidden from the public view. It has to do with how Big Tech companies use both algorithms plus human review during content moderation. This review process has resulted in the targeting, suppression, or down-ranking of primarily conservative content. As such, this process, should it continue, should be considered a kind of suppressive “innovation” in a quasi-antitrust analysis.

How the process harms “consumer welfare” is obvious. A more competitive market could produce social media platforms designing more innovational content moderation systems that honor traditional free speech and First Amendment norms while still offering features and connectivity akin to the huge players.

Antitrust law, in theory, would be a good way to handle issues of market power and consumer harm that results from non-price effects. But it is difficult to see how antitrust could handle the issue of political bias well:

Just as with privacy and other product qualities, the analysis becomes increasingly complex first when tradeoffs between price and quality are introduced, and then even more so when tradeoffs between what different consumer groups perceive as quality is added. In fact, it is more complex than privacy. All but the most exhibitionistic would prefer more to less privacy, all other things being equal. But with political media consumption, most would prefer to have more of what they want to read available, even if it comes at the expense of what others may want. There is no easy way to understand what consumer welfare means in a situation where one group’s preferences need to come at the expense of another’s in moderation decisions.

Neither antitrust nor quasi-antitrust regimes are well-suited to dealing with the perceived harm of anti-conservative bias. However unfulfilling this is to some conservatives, competition and choice are better answers to perceived political bias than the heavy hand of government. 

Prudence: Awareness of Unintended Consequences

Another bedrock principle of conservatism is to be aware of unintended consequences when making changes to long-standing laws and policies. In regulatory matters, cost-benefit analysis is employed to evaluate whether policies are improving societal outcomes. Using economic thinking to understand the likely responses to changes in regulation is fundamental to American conservatism. Or as Bovard and Demint’s book title suggests, conservatism is about knowing what to keep. 

Bovard has argued that since conservatism is a set of principles, not a dogmatic ideology, it can be in favor of fighting against the collectivism of Big Tech companies imposing their political vision upon the world. Conservatism, in this Kirkian sense, doesn’t require particular policy solutions. But this analysis misses what has worked about Section 230 and how the very tech platforms she decries have greatly benefited society. Prudence means understanding what has worked and only changing what has worked in a way that will improve upon it.

The benefits of Section 230 immunity in promoting platforms for third-party speech are clear. It is not an overstatement to say that Section 230 contains “The Twenty-Six Words that Created the Internet.” It is important to note that Section 230 is not only available to Big Tech companies. It is available to all online platforms who host third-party speech. Any reform efforts at Section 230 must know what to keep.In a sense, Section (c)(1) of Section 230 does, indeed, provide greater protection for published content online than the First Amendment on its own would offer: it extends the First Amendment’s permissible scope of published content for which an online service cannot be held liable to include otherwise actionable third-party content.

But let’s be clear about the extent of this protection. It doesn’t protect anything a platform itself publishes, or even anything in which it has a significant hand in producing. Why don’t offline newspapers enjoy this “handout” (though the online versions clearly do for comments)? Because they don’t need it, and because — yes, it’s true — it comes at a cost. How much third-party content would newspapers publish without significant input from the paper itself if only they were freed from the risk of liability for such content? None? Not much? The New York Times didn’t build and sustain its reputation on the slapdash publication of unedited ramblings by random commentators. But what about classifieds? Sure. There would be more classified ads, presumably. More to the point, newspapers would exert far less oversight over the classified ads, saving themselves the expense of moderating this one, small corner of their output.

There is a cost to traditional newspapers from being denied the extended protections of Section 230. But the effect is less third-party content in parts of the paper that they didn’t wish to have the same level of editorial control. If Section 230 is a “subsidy” as critics put it, then what it is subsidizing is the hosting of third-party speech. 

The Internet would look vastly different if it was just the online reproduction of the offline world. If tech platforms were responsible for all third-party speech to the degree that newspapers are for op-eds, then they would likely moderate it to the same degree, making sure there is nothing which could expose them to liability before publishing. This means there would be far less third-party speech on the Internet.

In fact, it could be argued that it is smaller platforms who would be most affected by the repeal of Section 230 immunity. Without it, it is likely that only the biggest tech platforms would have the necessary resources to dedicate to content moderation in order to avoid liability.

Proposed Section 230 reforms will likely have unintended consequences in reducing third-party speech altogether, including conservative speech. For instance, a few bills have proposed only allowing moderation for reasons defined by statute if the platform has an “objectively reasonable belief” that the speech fits under such categories. This would likely open up tech platforms to lawsuits over the meaning of “objectively reasonable belief” that could deter them from wanting to host third-party speech altogether. Similarly, lawsuits for “selective enforcement” of a tech platform’s terms of service could lead them to either host less speech or change their terms of service.

This could actually exacerbate the issue of political bias. Allegedly anti-conservative tech platforms could respond to a “good faith” requirement in enforcing its terms of service by becoming explicitly biased. If the terms of service of a tech platform state grounds which would exclude conservative speech, a requirement of “good faith” enforcement of those terms of service will do nothing to prevent the bias. 

Conclusion

Conservatives would do well to return to their first principles in the Section 230 debate. The Constitution’s First Amendment, respect for free markets and property rights, and appreciation for unintended consequences in changing tech platform incentives all caution against the current proposals to condition Section 230 immunity on platforms giving up editorial discretion. Whether or not tech platforms engage in anti-conservative bias, there’s nothing conservative about abdicating these principles for the sake of political expediency.

In Amazon, Constitutional Law, Facebook, First Amendment, Platforms, Telecommunications, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , , ,
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Senator Hawley’s Unconstitutional, Unconservative Attack on the Internet

Ben Sperry —  26 June 2020

Twitter’s decision to begin fact-checking the President’s tweets caused a long-simmering distrust between conservatives and online platforms to boil over late last month. This has led some conservatives to ask whether Section 230, the ‘safe harbour’ law that protects online platforms from certain liability stemming from content posted on their websites by users, is allowing online platforms to unfairly target conservative speech. 

In response to Twitter’s decision, along with an Executive Order released by the President that attacked Section 230, Senator Josh Hawley (R – MO) offered a new bill targeting online platforms, the “Limiting Section 230 Immunity to Good Samaritans Act”. This would require online platforms to engage in “good faith” moderation according to clearly stated terms of service – in effect, restricting Section 230’s protections to online platforms deemed to have done enough to moderate content ‘fairly’.  

While seemingly a sensible standard, if enacted, this approach would violate the First Amendment as an unconstitutional condition to a government benefit, thereby  undermining long-standing conservative principles and the ability of conservatives to be treated fairly online. 

There is established legal precedent that Congress may not grant benefits on conditions that violate Constitutionally-protected rights. In Rumsfeld v. FAIR, the Supreme Court stated that a law that withheld funds from universities that did not allow military recruiters on campus would be unconstitutional if it constrained those universities’ First Amendment rights to free speech. Since the First Amendment protects the right to editorial discretion, including the right of online platforms to make their own decisions on moderation, Congress may not condition Section 230 immunity on platforms taking a certain editorial stance it has dictated. 

Aware of this precedent, the bill attempts to circumvent the obstacle by taking away Section 230 immunity for issues unrelated to anti-conservative bias in moderation. Specifically, Senator Hawley’s bill attempts to condition immunity for platforms on having terms of service for content moderation, and making them subject to lawsuits if they do not act in “good faith” in policing them. 

It’s not even clear that the bill would do what Senator Hawley wants it to. The “good faith” standard only appears to apply to the enforcement of an online platform’s terms of service. It can’t, under the First Amendment, actually dictate what those terms of service say. So an online platform could, in theory, explicitly state in their terms of service that they believe some forms of conservative speech are “hate speech” they will not allow.

Mandating terms of service on content moderation is arguably akin to disclosures like labelling requirements, because it makes clear to platforms’ customers what they’re getting. There are, however, some limitations under the commercial speech doctrine as to what government can require. Under National Institute of Family & Life Advocates v. Becerra, a requirement for terms of service outlining content moderation policies would be upheld unless “unjustified or unduly burdensome.” A disclosure mandate alone would not be unconstitutional. 

But it is clear from the statutory definition of “good faith” that Senator Hawley is trying to overwhelm online platforms with lawsuits on the grounds that they have enforced these rules selectively and therefore not in “good faith”.

These “selective enforcement” lawsuits would make it practically impossible for platforms to moderate content at all, because they would open them up to being sued for any moderation, including moderation  completely unrelated to any purported anti-conservative bias. Any time a YouTuber was aggrieved about a video being pulled down as too sexually explicit, for example, they could file suit and demand that Youtube release information on whether all other similarly situated users were treated the same way. Any time a post was flagged on Facebook, for example for engaging in online bullying or for spreading false information, it could similarly lead to the same situation. 

This would end up requiring courts to act as the arbiter of decency and truth in order to even determine whether online platforms are “selectively enforcing” their terms of service.

Threatening liability for all third-party content is designed to force online platforms to give up moderating content on a perceived political basis. The result will be far less content moderation on a whole range of other areas. It is precisely this scenario that Section 230 was designed to prevent, in order to encourage platforms to moderate things like pornography that would otherwise proliferate on their sites, without exposing themselves to endless legal challenge.

It is likely that this would be unconstitutional as well. Forcing online platforms to choose between exercising their First Amendment rights to editorial discretion and retaining the benefits of Section 230 is exactly what the “unconstitutional conditions” jurisprudence is about. 

This is why conservatives have long argued the government has no business compelling speech. They opposed the “fairness doctrine” which required that radio stations provide a “balanced discussion”, and in practice allowed courts or federal agencies to determine content  until President Reagan overturned it. Later, President Bush appointee and then-FTC Chairman Tim Muris rejected a complaint against Fox News for its “Fair and Balanced” slogan, stating:

I am not aware of any instance in which the Federal Trade Commission has investigated the slogan of a news organization. There is no way to evaluate this petition without evaluating the content of the news at issue. That is a task the First Amendment leaves to the American people, not a government agency.

And recently conservatives were arguing businesses like Masterpiece Cakeshop should not be compelled to exercise their First Amendment rights against their will. All of these cases demonstrate once the state starts to try to stipulate what views can and cannot be broadcast by private organisations, conservatives will be the ones who suffer.

Senator Hawley’s bill fails to acknowledge this. Worse, it fails to live up to the Constitution, and would trample over the rights to freedom of speech that it gives. Conservatives should reject it.

In Constitutional Law, Facebook, Federal Trade Commission, First Amendment, Platforms, Truth on the Market, Twitter , , , , , , , , ,
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The Third Circuit’s Oberdorf v. Amazon opinion offers a good approach to reining in the worst abuses of Section 230

Gus Hurwitz —  15 July 2019

[Note: A group of 50 academics and 27 organizations, including both myself and ICLE, recently released a statement of principles for lawmakers to consider in discussions of Section 230.]

In a remarkable ruling issued earlier this month, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals held in Oberdorf v. Amazon that, under Pennsylvania products liability law, Amazon could be found liable for a third party vendor’s sale of a defective product via Amazon Marketplace. This ruling comes in the context of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which is broadly understood as immunizing platforms against liability for harmful conduct posted to their platforms by third parties (Section 230 purists may object to myu use of “platform” as approximation for the statute’s term of “interactive computer services”; I address this concern by acknowledging it with this parenthetical). This immunity has long been a bedrock principle of Internet law; it has also long been controversial; and those controversies are very much at the fore of discussion today. 

The response to the opinion has been mixed, to say the least. Eric Goldman, for instance, has asked “are we at the end of online marketplaces?,” suggesting that they “might in the future look like a quaint artifact of the early 21st century.” Kate Klonick, on the other hand, calls the opinion “a brilliant way of both holding tech responsible for harms they perpetuate & making sure we preserve free speech online.”

My own inclination is that both Eric and Kate overstate their respective positions – though neither without reason. The facts of Oberdorf cabin the effects of the holding both to Pennsylvania law and to situations where the platform cannot identify the seller. This suggests that the effects will be relatively limited. 

But, and what I explore in this post, the opinion does elucidate a particular and problematic feature of section 230: that it can be used as a liability shield for harmful conduct. The judges in Oberdorf seem ill-inclined to extend Section 230’s protections to a platform that can easily be used by bad actors as a liability shield. Riffing on this concern, I argue below that Section 230 immunity be proportional to platforms’ ability to reasonably identify speakers using their platforms to engage in harmful speech or conduct.

This idea is developed in more detail in the last section of this post – including responding to the obvious (and overwrought) objections to it. But first it offers some background on Section 230, the Oberdorf and related cases, the Third Circuit’s analysis in Oberdorf, and the recent debates about Section 230. 

Section 230

“Section 230” refers to a portion of the Communications Decency Act that was added to the Communications Act by the 1996 Telecommunications Act, codified at 47 U.S.C. 230. (NB: that’s a sentence that only a communications lawyer could love!) It is widely recognized as – and discussed even by those who disagree with this view as – having been critical to the growth of the modern Internet. As Jeff Kosseff labels it in his recent book, the key provision of section 230 comprises the “26 words that created the Internet.” That section, 230(c)(1), states 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.” (For those not familiar with it, Kosseff’s book is worth a read – or for the Cliff’s Notes version see here, here, here, here, here, or here.)

Section 230 was enacted to do two things. First, section (c)(1) makes clear that platforms are not liable for user-generated content. In other words, if a user of Facebook, Amazon, the comments section of a Washington Post article, a restaurant review site, a blog that focuses on the knitting of cat-themed sweaters, or any other “interactive computer service,” posts something for which that user may face legal liability, the platform hosting that user’s speech does not face liability for that speech. 

And second, section (c)(2) makes clear that platforms are free to moderate content uploaded by their users, and that they face no liability for doing so. This section was added precisely to repudiate a case that had held that once a platform (in that case, Prodigy) decided to moderate user-generated content, it undertook an obligation to do so. That case meant that platforms faced a Hobson’s choice: either don’t moderate content and don’t risk liability, or moderate all content and face liability for failure to do so well. There was no middle ground: a platform couldn’t say, for instance, “this one post is particularly problematic, so we are going to take it down – but this doesn’t mean that we are going to pervasively moderate content.”

Together, these two provisions stand generally for the proposition that online platforms are not liable for content created by their users, but they are free to moderate that content without facing liability for doing so. It recognized, on the one hand, that it was impractical (i.e., the Internet economy could not function) to require that platforms moderate all user-generated content, so section (c)(1) says that they don’t need to; but, on the other hand, it recognizes that it is desirable for platforms to moderate problematic content to the best of their ability, so section (c)(2) says that they won’t be punished (i.e., lose the immunity granted by section (c)(1) if they voluntarily elect to moderate content). 

Section 230 is written in broad – and has been interpreted by the courts in even broader – terms. Section (c)(1) says that platforms cannot be held liable for the content generated by their users, full stop. The only exceptions are for copyrighted content and content that violates federal criminal law. There is no “unless it is really bad” exception, or a “the platform may be liable if the user-generated content causes significant tangible harm” exception, or an “unless the platform knows about it” exception, or even an “unless the platform makes money off of and actively facilitates harmful content” exception. So long as the content is generated by the user (not by the platform itself), Section 230 shields the platform from liability. 

Oberdorf v. Amazon

This background leads us to the Third Circuit’s opinion in Oberdorf v. Amazon. The opinion is remarkable because it is one of only a few cases in which a court has, despite Section 230, found a platform liable for the conduct of a third party facilitated through the use of that platform. 

Prior to the Third Circuit’s recent opinion, the best known previous case is the 9th Circuit’s Model Mayhem opinion. In that case, the court found that Model Mayhem, a website that helps match models with modeling jobs, had a duty to warn models about individuals who were known to be using the website to find women to sexually assault. 

It is worth spending another moment on the Model Mayhem opinion before returning to the Third Circuit’s Oberdorf opinion. The crux of the 9th Circuit’s opinion in the Model Mayhem case was that the state of Florida (where the assaults occurred) has a duty-to-warn law, which creates a duty between the platform and the user. This duty to warn was triggered by the case-specific fact that the platform had actual knowledge that two of its users were predatorily using the site to find women to assault. Once triggered, this duty to warn exists between the platform and the user. Because the platform faces liability directly for its failure to warn, it is not shielded by section 230 (which only shields the platform from liability for the conduct of the third parties using the platform to engage in harmful conduct). 

In its opinion, the Third Circuit offered a similar analysis – but in a much broader context. 

The Oberdorf case involves a defective dog leash sold to Ms. Oberdorf by a seller doing business as The Furry Gang on Amazon Marketplace. The leash malfunctioned, hitting Ms. Oberdorf in the face and causing permanent blindness in one eye. When she attempted to sue The Furry Gang, she discovered that they were no longer doing business on Amazon Marketplace – and that Amazon did not have sufficient information about their identity for Ms. Oberdorf to bring suit against them.

Undeterred, Ms. Oberdorf sued Amazon under Pennsylvania product liability law, arguing that Amazon was the seller of the defective leash, so was liable for her injuries. Part of Amazon’s defense was that the actual seller, The Furry Gang, was a user of their Marketplace platform – the sale resulted from the storefront generated by The Furry Gang and merely hosted by Amazon Marketplace. Under this theory, Section 230 would bar Amazon from liability for the sale that resulted from the seller’s user-generated storefront. 

The Third Circuit judges had none of that argument. All three judges agreed that under Pennsylvania law, the products liability relationship existed between Ms. Oberdorf and Amazon, so Section 230 did not apply. The two-judge majority found Amazon liable to Ms. Oberford under this law – the dissenting judge would have found Amazon’s conduct insufficient as a basis for liability.

This opinion, in other words, follows in the footsteps of the Ninth Circuit’s Model Mayhem opinion in holding that state law creates a duty directly between the harmed user and the platform, and that that duty isn’t affected by Section 230. But Oberdorf is potentially much broader in impact than Model Mayhem. States are more likely to have broader product liability laws than duty to warn laws. Even more impactful, product liability laws are generally strict liability laws, whereas duty to warn laws are generally triggered by an actual knowledge requirement.

The Third Circuit’s Focus on Agency and Liability Shields

The understanding of Oberdorf described above is that it is the latest in a developing line of cases holding that claims based on state law duties that require platforms to protect users from third party harms can survive Section 230 defenses. 

But there is another, critical, issue in the background of the case that appears to have affected the court’s thinking – and that, I argue, should be a path forward for Section 230. The judges writing for the Third Circuit majority draw attention to

the extensive record evidence that Amazon fails to vet third-party vendors for amenability to legal process. The first factor [of analysis for application of the state’s products liability law] weighs in favor of strict liability not because The Furry Gang cannot be located and/or may be insolvent, but rather because Amazon enables third-party vendors such as The Furry Gang to structure and/or conceal themselves from liability altogether.

This is important for analysis under the Pennsylvania product liability law, which has a marketing chain provision that allows injured consumers to seek redress up the marketing chain if the direct seller of a defective product is insolvent or otherwise unavailable for suit. But the court’s language focuses on Amazon’s design of Marketplace and the ease with which Marketplace can be used by merchants as a liability shield. 

This focus is unsurprising: the law generally does not allow one party to shield another from liability without assuming liability for the shielded party’s conduct. Indeed, this is pretty basic vicarious liability, agency, first-year law school kind of stuff. It is unsurprising that judges would balk at an argument that Amazon could design its platform in a way that makes it impossible for harmed parties to sue a tortfeasor without Amazon in turn assuming liability for any potentially tortious conduct. 

Section 230 is having a bad day

As most who have read this far are almost certainly aware, Section 230 is a big, controversial, political mess right now. Politicians from Josh Hawley to Nancy Pelosi have suggested curtailing Section 230. President Trump just held his “Social Media Summit.” And countries around the world are imposing near-impossible obligations on platforms to remove or otherwise moderate potentially problematic content – obligations that are anathema to Section 230 as they increasingly reflect and influence discussions in the United States. 

To be clear, almost all of the ideas floating around about how to change Section 230 are bad. That is an understatement: they are potentially devastating to the Internet – both to the economic ecosystem and the social ecosystem that have developed and thrived largely because of Section 230.

To be clear, there is also a lot of really, disgustingly, problematic content online – and social media platforms, in particular, have facilitated a great deal of legitimately problematic conduct. But deputizing them to police that conduct and to make real-time decisions about speech that is impossible to evaluate in real time is not a solution to these problems. And to the extent that some platforms may be able to do these things, the novel capabilities of a few platforms to obligations for all would only serve to create entry barriers for smaller platforms and to stifle innovation. 

This is why a group of 50 academics and 27 organizations released a statement of principles last week to inform lawmakers about key considerations to take into account when discussing how Section 230 may be changed. The purpose of these principles is to acknowledge that some change to Section 230 may be appropriate – may even be needed at this juncture – but that such changes should be careful and modest, carefully considered so as to not disrupt the vast benefits for society that Section 230 has made possible and is needed to keep vital.

The Third Circuit offers a Third Way on 230 

The Third Circuit’s opinion offers a modest way that Section 230 could be changed – and, I would say, improved – to address some of the real harms that it enables without undermining the important purposes that it serves. To wit, Section 230’s immunity could be attenuated by an obligation to facilitate the identification of users on that platform, subject to legal process, in proportion to the size and resources available to the platform, the technological feasibility of such identification, the foreseeability of the platform being used to facilitate harmful speech or conduct, and the expected importance (as defined from a First Amendment perspective) of speech on that platform.

In other words, if there are readily available ways to establish some form of identify for users – for instance, by email addresses on widely-used platforms, social media accounts, logs of IP addresses – and there is reason to expect that users of the platform could be subject to suit – for instance, because they’re engaged in commercial activities or the purpose of the platform is to provide a forum for speech that is likely to legally actionable – then the platform needs to be reasonably able to provide reasonable information about speakers subject to legal action in order to avail itself of any Section 230 defense. Stated otherwise, platforms need to be able to reasonably comply with so-called unmasking subpoenas issued in the civil context to the extent such compliance is feasible for the platform’s size, sophistication, resources, &c.

An obligation such as this would have been at best meaningless and at worst devastating at the time Section 230 was adopted. But 25 years later, the Internet is a very different place. Most users have online accounts – email addresses, social media profiles, &c – that can serve as some form of online identification.

More important, we now have evidence of a growing range of harmful conduct and speech that can occur online, and of platforms that use Section 230 as a shield to protect those engaging in such speech or conduct from litigation. Such speakers are clear bad actors who are clearly abusing Section 230 facilitate bad conduct. They should not be able to do so.

Many of the traditional proponents of Section 230 will argue that this idea is a non-starter. Two of the obvious objections are that it would place a disastrous burden on platforms especially start-ups and smaller platforms, and that it would stifle socially valuable anonymous speech. Both are valid concerns, but also accommodated by this proposal.

The concern that modest user-identification requirements would be disastrous to platforms made a great deal of sense in the early years of the Internet, both the law and technology around user identification were less developed. Today, there is a wide-range of low-cost, off-the-shelf, techniques to establish a user’s identity to some level of precision – from logging of IP addresses, to requiring a valid email address to an established provider, registration with an established social media identity, or even SMS-authentication. None of these is perfect; they present a range of cost and sophistication to implement and a range of offer a range of ease of identification.

The proposal offered here is not that platforms be able to identify their speaker – it’s better described as that they not deliberately act as a liability shield. It’s requirement is that platforms implement reasonable identity technology in proportion to their size, sophistication, and the likelihood of harmful speech on their platforms. A small platform for exchanging bread recipes would be fine to maintain a log of usernames and IP addresses. A large, well-resourced, platform hosting commercial activity (such as Amazon Marketplace) may be expected to establish a verified identity for the merchants it hosts. A forum known for hosting hate speech would be expected to have better identification records – it is entirely foreseeable that its users would be subject to legal action. A forum of support groups for marginalized and disadvantaged communities would face a lower obligation than a forum of similar size and sophistication known for hosting legally-actionable speech.

This proportionality approach also addresses the anonymous speech concern. Anonymous speech is often of great social and political value. But anonymity can also be used for, and as made amply clear in contemporary online discussion can bring out the worst of, speech that is socially and politically destructive. Tying Section 230’s immunity to the nature of speech on a platform gives platforms an incentive to moderate speech – to make sure that anonymous speech is used for its good purposes while working to prevent its use for its lesser purposes. This is in line with one of the defining goals of Section 230. 

The challenge, of course, has been how to do this without exposing platforms to potentially crippling liability if they fail to effectively moderate speech. This is why Section 230 took the approach that it did, allowing but not requiring moderation. This proposal’s user-identification requirement shifts that balance from “allowing but not requiring” to “encouraging but not requiring.” Platforms are under no legal obligation to moderate speech, but if they elect not to, they need to make reasonable efforts to ensure that their users engaging in problematic speech can be identified by parties harmed by their speech or conduct. In an era in which sites like 8chan expressly don’t maintain user logs in order to shield themselves from known harmful speech, and Amazon Marketplace allows sellers into the market who cannot be sued by injured consumers, this is a common-sense change to the law.

It would also likely have substantially the same effect as other proposals for Section 230 reform, but without the significant challenges those suggestions face. For instance, Danielle Citron & Ben Wittes have proposed that courts should give substantive meaning to Section 230’s “Good Samaritan” language in section (c)(2)’s subheading, or, in the alternative, that section (c)(1)’s immunity require that platforms “take[] reasonable steps to prevent unlawful uses of its services.” This approach is problematic on both First Amendment and process grounds, because it requires courts to evaluate the substantive content and speech decisions that platforms engage in. It effectively tasks platforms with undertaking the task of the courts in developing a (potentially platform-specific) law of content moderations – and threatens them with a loss of Section 230 immunity is they fail effectively to do so.

By contrast, this proposal would allow, and even encourage, platforms to engage in such moderation, but offers them a gentler, more binary, and procedurally-focused safety valve to maintain their Section 230 immunity. If a user engages in harmful speech or conduct and the platform can assist plaintiffs and courts in bringing legal action against the user in the courts, then the “moderation” process occurs in the courts through ordinary civil litigation. 

To be sure, there are still some uncomfortable and difficult substantive questions – has a platform implemented reasonable identification technologies, is the speech on the platform of the sort that would be viewed as requiring (or otherwise justifying protection of the speaker’s) anonymity, and the like. But these are questions of a type that courts are accustomed to, if somewhat uncomfortable with, addressing. They are, for instance, the sort of issues that courts address in the context of civil unmasking subpoenas.

This distinction is demonstrated in the comparison between Sections 230 and 512. Section 512 is an exception to 230 for copyrighted materials that was put into place by the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It takes copyrighted materials outside of the scope of Section 230 and requires platforms to put in place a “notice and takedown” regime in order to be immunized for hosting copyrighted content uploaded by users. This regime has proved controversial, among other reasons, because it effectively requires platforms to act as courts in deciding whether a given piece of content is subject to a valid copyright claim. The Citron/Wittes proposal effectively subjects platforms to a similar requirement in order to maintain Section 230 immunity; the identity-technology proposal, on the other hand, offers an intermediate requirement.

Indeed, the principal effect of this intermediate requirement is to maintain the pre-platform status quo. IRL, if one person says or does something harmful to another person, their recourse is in court. This is true in public and in private; it’s true if the harmful speech occurs on the street, in a store, in a public building, or a private home. If Donny defames Peggy in Hank’s house, Peggy sues Donny in court; she doesn’t sue Hank, and she doesn’t sue Donny in the court of Hank. To the extent that we think of platforms as the fora where people interact online – as the “place” of the Internet – this proposal is intended to ensure that those engaging in harmful speech or conduct online can be hauled into court by the aggrieved parties, and to facilitate the continued development of platforms without disrupting the functioning of this system of adjudication.

Conclusion

Section 230 is, and has long been, the most important and one of the most controversial laws of the Internet. It is increasingly under attack today from a disparate range of voices across the political and geographic spectrum — voices that would overwhelming reject Section 230’s pro-innovation treatment of platforms and in its place attempt to co-opt those platforms as government-compelled (and, therefore, controlled) content moderators. 

In light of these demands, academics and organizations that understand the importance of Section 230, but also recognize the increasing pressures to amend it, have recently released a statement of principles for legislators to consider as they think about changes to Section 230.

Into this fray, the Third Circuit’s opinion in Oberdorf offers a potential change: making Section 230’s immunity for platforms proportional to their ability to reasonably identify speakers that use the platform to engage in harmful speech or conduct. This would restore the status quo ante, under which intermediaries and agents cannot be used as litigation shields without themselves assuming responsibility for any harmful conduct. This shielding effect was not an intended goal of Section 230, and it has been the cause of Section 230’s worst abuses. It was allowed at the time Section 230 was adopted because the used-identity requirements such as proposed here would not have been technologically reasonable at the time Section 230 was adopted. But technology has changed and, today, these requirements would impose only a moderate  burden on platforms today

In Amazon, Antitrust & Competition, Constitutional Law, Copyright, Facebook, Federal Trade Commission, First Amendment, Google, Intellectual Property, Platforms, Regulation, Section 5, Telecommunications, Truth on the Market, Twitter, Tying , , , , , , , ,
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Section 230 principles for lawmakers and a note of caution as Trump convenes his “social media summit”

Geoffrey Manne —  11 July 2019

Neither side in the debate over Section 230 is blameless for the current state of affairs. Reform/repeal proponents have tended to offer ill-considered, irrelevant, or often simply incorrect justifications for amending or tossing Section 230. Meanwhile, many supporters of the law in its current form are reflexively resistant to any change and too quick to dismiss the more reasonable concerns that have been voiced.

Most of all, the urge to politicize this issue — on all sides — stands squarely in the way of any sensible discussion and thus of any sensible reform.

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In Constitutional Law, Facebook, First Amendment, Intellectual Property, Platforms, Regulation, Twitter , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Trade Agreements and Restatements as End Runs Around the Rule of Law

Kristian Stout —  15 February 2018

The Internet is a modern miracle: from providing all varieties of entertainment, to facilitating life-saving technologies, to keeping us connected with distant loved ones, the scope of the Internet’s contribution to our daily lives is hard to overstate. Moving forward there is undoubtedly much more that we can and will do with the Internet, and part of that innovation will, naturally, require a reconsideration of existing laws and how new Internet-enabled modalities fit into them.

But when undertaking such a reconsideration, the goal should not be simply to promote Internet-enabled goods above all else; rather, it should be to examine the law’s effect on the promotion of new technology within the context of other, competing social goods. In short, there are always trade-offs entailed in changing the legal order. As such, efforts to reform, clarify, or otherwise change the law that affects Internet platforms must be balanced against other desirable social goods, not automatically prioritized above them.

Unfortunately — and frequently with the best of intentions — efforts to promote one good thing (for instance, more online services) inadequately take account of the balance of the larger legal realities at stake. And one of the most important legal realities that is too often readily thrown aside in the rush to protect the Internet is that policy be established through public, (relatively) democratically accountable channels.

Trade deals and domestic policy

Recently a letter was sent by a coalition of civil society groups and law professors asking the NAFTA delegation to incorporate U.S.-style intermediary liability immunity into the trade deal. Such a request is notable for its timing in light of the ongoing policy struggles over SESTA —a bill currently working its way through Congress that seeks to curb human trafficking through online platforms — and the risk that domestic platform companies face of losing (at least in part) the immunity provided by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. But this NAFTA push is not merely about a tradeoff between less trafficking and more online services, but between promoting policies in a way that protects the rule of law and doing so in a way that undermines the rule of law.

Indeed, the NAFTA effort appears to be aimed at least as much at sidestepping the ongoing congressional fight over platform regulation as it is aimed at exporting U.S. law to our trading partners. Thus, according to EFF, for example, “[NAFTA renegotiation] comes at a time when Section 230 stands under threat in the United States, currently from the SESTA and FOSTA proposals… baking Section 230 into NAFTA may be the best opportunity we have to protect it domestically.”

It may well be that incorporating Section 230 into NAFTA is the “best opportunity” to protect the law as it currently stands from efforts to reform it to address conflicting priorities. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. In fact, whatever one thinks of the merits of SESTA, it is not obviously a good idea to use a trade agreement as a vehicle to override domestic reforms to Section 230 that Congress might implement. Trade agreements can override domestic law, but that is not the reason we engage in trade negotiations.

In fact, other parts of NAFTA remain controversial precisely for their ability to undermine domestic legal norms, in this case in favor of guaranteeing the expectations of foreign investors. EFF itself is deeply skeptical of this “investor-state” dispute process (“ISDS”), noting that “[t]he latest provisions would enable multinational corporations to undermine public interest rules.” The irony here is that ISDS provides a mechanism for overriding domestic policy that is a close analogy for what EFF advocates for in the Section 230/SESTA context.

ISDS allows foreign investors to sue NAFTA signatories in a tribunal when domestic laws of that signatory have harmed investment expectations. The end result is that the signatory could be responsible for paying large sums to litigants, which in turn would serve as a deterrent for the signatory to continue to administer its laws in a similar fashion.

Stated differently, NAFTA currently contains a mechanism that favors one party (foreign investors) in a way that prevents signatory nations from enacting and enforcing laws approved of by democratically elected representatives. EFF and others disapprove of this.

Yet, at the same time, EFF also promotes the idea that NAFTA should contain a provision that favors one party (Internet platforms) in a way that would prevent signatory nations from enacting and enforcing laws like SESTA that (might be) approved of by democratically elected representatives.

A more principled stance would be skeptical of the domestic law override in both contexts.

Restating Copyright or creating copyright policy?

Take another example: Some have suggested that the American Law Institute (“ALI”) is being used to subvert Congressional will. Since 2013, ALI has taken upon itself the project to “restate” the law of copyright. ALI is well known and respected for its common law restatements, but it may be that something more than mere restatement is going on here. As the NY Bar Association recently observed:

The Restatement as currently drafted appears inconsistent with the ALI’s long-standing goal of promoting clarity in the law: indeed, rather than simply clarifying or restating that law, the draft offers commentary and interpretations beyond the current state of the law that appear intended to shape current and future copyright policy.  

It is certainly odd that ALI (or any other group) would seek to restate a body of law that is already stated in the form of an overarching federal statute. The point of a restatement is to gather together the decisions of disparate common law courts interpreting different laws and precedent in order to synthesize a single, coherent framework approximating an overall consensus. If done correctly, a restatement of a federal statute would, theoretically, end up with the exact statute itself along with some commentary about how judicial decisions have filled in the blanks differently — a state of affairs that already exists with the copious academic literature commenting on federal copyright law.

But it seems that merely restating judicial interpretations was not the only objective behind the copyright restatement effort. In a letter to ALI, one of the scholars responsible for the restatement project noted that:

While congressional efforts to improve the Copyright Act… may be a welcome and beneficial development, it will almost certainly be a long and contentious process… Register Pallante… [has] not[ed] generally that “Congress has moved slowly in the copyright space.”

Reform of copyright law, in other words, and not merely restatement of it, was an important impetus for the project. As an attorney for the Copyright Office observed, “[a]lthough presented as a “Restatement” of copyright law, the project would appear to be more accurately characterized as a rewriting of the law.” But “rewriting” is a job for the legislature. And even if Congress moves slowly, or the process is frustrating, the democratic processes that produce the law should still be respected.

Pyrrhic Policy Victories

Attempts to change copyright or entrench liability immunity through any means possible are rational actions at an individual level, but writ large they may undermine the legal fabric of our system and should be resisted.

It’s no surprise why some may be frustrated and concerned about intermediary liability and copyright issues: On the margin, it’s definitely harder to operate an Internet platform if it faces sweeping liability for the actions of third parties (whether for human trafficking or infringing copyrights). Maybe copyright law needs to be reformed and perhaps intermediary liability must be maintained exactly as it is (or expanded). But the right way to arrive at these policy outcomes is not through backdoors — and it is not to begin with the assertion that such outcomes are required.

Congress and the courts can be frustrating vehicles through which to enact public policy, but they have the virtue of being relatively open to public deliberation, and of having procedural constraints that can circumscribe excesses and idiosyncratic follies. We might get bad policy from Congress. We might get bad cases from the courts. But the theory of our system is that, on net, having a frustratingly long, circumscribed, and public process will tend to weed out most of the bad ideas and impulses that would otherwise result from unconstrained decision making, even if well-intentioned.

We should meet efforts like these to end-run Congress and the courts with significant skepticism. Short term policy “victories” are likely not worth the long-run consequences. These are important, complicated issues. If we surreptitiously adopt idiosyncratic solutions to them, we risk undermining the rule of law itself.

In Copyright, Intellectual Property, Platforms, Truth on the Market , , , , , ,
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Eric Goldman on the role and importance of Section 230 immunity

Geoffrey Manne —  27 August 2012

For those who follow these things (and for those who don’t but should!), Eric Goldman just posted an excellent short essay on Section 230 immunity and account terminations.

Here’s the abstract:

An online provider’s termination of a user’s online account can be a major-and potentially even life-changing-event for the user. Account termination exiles the user from a virtual place the user wanted to be; termination disrupts any social network relationship ties in that venue, and prevents the user from sending or receiving messages there; and the user loses any virtual assets in the account, which could be anything from archived emails to accumulated game assets. The effects of account termination are especially acute in virtual worlds, where dedicated users may be spending a majority of their waking hours or have aggregated substantial in-game wealth. However, the problem arises in all online environments (including email, social networking and web hosting) where account termination disrupts investments made by users.

Because of the potentially significant consequences from online user account termination, user-rights advocates, especially in the virtual world context, have sought legal restrictions on online providers’ discretion to terminate users. However, these efforts are largely misdirected because of 47 U.S.C. §230(c)(2) (“Section 230(c)(2)”), a federal statutory immunity. This essay, written in conjunction with an April 2011 symposium at UC Irvine entitled “Governing the Magic Circle: Regulation of Virtual Worlds,” explains Section 230(c)(2)’s role in immunizing online providers’ decisions to terminate user accounts. It also explains why this immunity is sound policy.

But the meat of the essay (at least the normative part of the essay) is this:

Online user communities inevitably require at least some provider intervention. At times, users need “protection” from other users. The provider can give users self-help tools to reduce their reliance on the online provider’s intervention, but technological tools cannot ameliorate all community-damaging conduct by determined users. Eventually, the online provider needs to curb a rogue user’s behavior to protect the rest of the community. Alternatively, a provider may need to respond to users who are jeopardizing the site’s security or technical infrastructure. . . .  Section 230(c)(2) provides substantial legal certainty to online providers who police their premises and ensure the community’s stability when intervention is necessary.

* * *

Thus, marketplace incentives work unexpectedly well to discipline online providers from capriciously wielding their termination power. This is true even if many users face substantial nonrecoupable or switching costs, both financially and in terms of their social networks. Some users, both existing and prospective, can be swayed by the online provider’s capriciousness—and by the provider’s willingness to oust problem users who are disrupting the community. The online provider’s desire to keep these swayable users often can provide enough financial incentives for the online provider to make good choices.

Thus, broadly conceived, § 230(c)(2) removes legal regulation of an online provider’s account termination, making the marketplace the main governance mechanism over an online provider’s choices. Fortunately, the marketplace is effective enough to discipline those choices.

Eric doesn’t talk explicitly here about property rights and transaction costs, but that’s what he’s talking about.  Well-worth reading as a short, clear, informative introduction to this extremely important topic.

In Constitutional Law, Platforms, Telecommunications , , , , , , ,
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