Wednesday, March 31, 2021

The Fair Speech Crusade

Of course, private websites also have property rights - obviously a sports blog doesn't have to post gardening ideas - as well as First Amendment defenses.

Most important, Section 230 shields websites from the complications and costs of assorted lawsuits.

Does Section 230 go too far? From the left, we hear that websites are guilty of underfiltering - for example, allowing the posting of material that's sexist, racist, dangerous, misleading, abusive, or worse.

Some in Congress threaten more regulation unless websites censor noxious speech.

Today, government doesn't allocate social media frequencies.

Nor should we saddle websites with the unmanageable task of vetting billions of daily posts.

If Congress insists on fixing what isn't broken, here's a possible compromise: condition Section 230 immunity on a good‐​faith effort not to muzzle constitutionally sheltered speech.
 

https://www.cato.org/policy-report/march/april-2021/fair-speech-crusade 

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