The Supreme Court has chosen to review a case challenging the law that governs freedom of speech on the internet. A bad ruling would chill expression online and simultaneously prevent private social media companies from setting standards and moderating content to create civil communities — all in the Orwellian name of liberty.
The case is Gonzalez v. Google, and the law is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. It says that companies like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit — and the Daily News, to the extent that we and other newspapers allow user-generated comments — aren’t directly responsible for what contributors post on their platforms. (Newspapers, magazines and TV stations, to the contrary, are held more strictly responsible for the content they have a hand in editing, producing, publishing and promoting.)
This means that if John Doe pulls up his Twitter app, calls Joe Blow a child murderer, and shares it with his 1,500 followers (and, by extension, possibly the whole world), he’s potentially on the hook for defamation, but the company that technologically enabled his speech is not.
