to censor rather than to give voice to, as the Section 230 statute says, a “true diversity of views.” To borrow again from the libertarians at the Mises Institute... ... the pure free market position would be repealing 230 altogether, so that Twitter or Facebook face the same liability as the New York Post or, indeed, as you and I ... naïvely throwing up our hands and hoping some free speech startup someday survives the woke gauntlet is equivalent to quitting the field of ideas while the other side is very much on the march. Ensuring the free market can actually solve problems requires a consistently curious and vigilant oversight – and a willingness to engage to fix market distortions where and when they arise. FREEDOM FROM TYRANNICAL GOVERNMENTS AND CORPORATIONS Like many libertarians, I believe in the innovative, creative, and transformative power of what Americans can do in a free marketplace. But the power of the free market is only as strong as those dedicated to ensuring its protection. In other words, ensuring the free market can actually solve problems requires a consistently curious and vigilant oversight – and a willingness to
who use the threat of lawsuits as a justification for Section 230 protections misplace their argument, which is with the tort system that allows such lawsuits, rather than the inherent worth of Section 230 itself.) But what was once a porous liability has been judicially distorted into a bulletproof one that courts have interpreted as protecting censorship itself. As Justice Clarence Thomas noted recently, “Section 230 (c)(1) protects a company from publisher liability only when content is ‘provided by another information content provider.’ Nowhere does this provision protect a company that is itself the information content provider.” In many other contexts, libertarians intuitively understand the negative, market- distorting power of special government carve- outs for specific industries, and of the need to update or reform statutes that have become judicially contorted beyond what Congress intended, or now intends. Not in D.C., however, where an entire think-tank industry is defending Big Tech’s subsidy and characterizing any effort toward its reform – or threats of repeal to incentivize reform – as the threat of big government against free speech. But such framing distorts the issue... Though Big Tech’s libertarian advocates attempt to conflate Section 230 with the First Amendment, the two are distinct. If Section 230 is repealed, the First Amendment’s protections will still exist. Moreover, this is not a binary question of the free market versus regulation. Rather, it’s a question of an existing government subsidy being used
American Consequences
31
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs