Twitter And Social Media Are A Cancer On Our Civic Life. They Don’t Deserve Protection

1. I don’t need to be an expert in liability law to know this: social media are corrosive to our civic life, and social media companies like Twitter are largely unaccountable for their actions in that regard.
2. Even setting aside the online ugliness of the 2016 election, is there any conflict or tension in American society that isn’t made worse by social media? Sure, there are rare exceptions—sometimes people do nice things for each other, sometimes people use these platforms to reunite with long lost family members or friends.
3. It wouldn’t be the end of the world—or even of free speech—if we went back to an Internet without comment sections, without Twitter mobs, and without aggressively politicized social media companies.
4. Many people think the advent of the internet and the inventions of mass platforms like Facebook and Twitter meant we had to make concessions in federal law to enable these companies to host third-party content without the fear of defamation lawsuits over what their users might post.
5. The debate about whether social media companies should have protection from liability misses a larger question about their role in American society.
6. Go on social media right now and you’re bound to find friends, neighbors, and colleagues opining on federal statutes and citing old Supreme Court cases to bolster their arguments that we have to do this or that right now to save the internet or protect free speech.
7. There’s nothing like a row between Twitter and President Trump to turn everyone into an expert on 47 U.S. Code § 230, a heretofore obscure section of federal law that deals with liability protections for companies like Twitter.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/30/twitter-and-social-media-are-a-cancer-on-our-civic-life-they-dont-deserve-protection/