At last week's hearing regarding online disinformation in front of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg proposed specific changes to the much- discussed Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Similar to the “EARN IT Act,” Zuckerberg’s ideal Section 230 liability protection would only be granted to companies if they agreed to meet best practices, established by a third party, to remove illegal content.
This proposal suffers from a few fatal flaws. In fact, it would only further politicize online speech — and create a host of other problems, too.
There are a lot of questions to ask of Zuckerberg here. After all, any proposal which relies on a third party setting up best practices needs to be clear about who exactly the third party would be.
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