The media is focused on the Republican’s pre-election ploy
in the Senate Commerce Committee hearing Wednesday Oct. 28 on Section 230 of the 1996 Telecommunications
Act. I wrote up the details and provided the link of the entire livestream
here. The title was “Does Section 230’s
Sweeping Immunity Enable Big Tech Bad Behavior?” The tone of the hearing was not good.
Vox Recode has a story by Sara Morrison to the
effect.
On The Verge, which Vox owns, Casey Newton writes that
Senate Republicans want to make the Internet smaller. The article notes that the FOSTA law of 2018
was not mentioned.
But the Democrats repeatedly said that the platforms
need to censor more, because there is a lot of incitement of naïve and unstable
people (call it radicalization). The
recent plot against the governor of Michigan (and Virginia) is case in point.
All in all, the future of user-generated content in
the next term (whoever wins) does not look good. An underlying problem is that
a lot of it is gratuitous, which can really get confounded during a pandemic.
Electronic Frontier Foundation issued a piece (Oct 26)
by Corynne McSherry on content moderation yesterday without mentioning the
hearing.
Along these lines, I thought I would share a PDF paper
on voter suppression from the Center for Democracy and Technology. CDT talks about “misinformation”, “disinformation”
and “malinformation” as different things.
I miss the days when we could go to their all-day events (often in
December).
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