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.
The law simultaneously empowers social media companies, which are the middlemen for millions of missives and videos every minute, to lay down and enforce general rules of conduct restricting certain types of speech. So if Facebook wants to be a place where misogynist bullying, racist invective or Russian disinformation aren’t rampant, they can do so.
That, too, makes perfect sense. To say — as off-again, on-again Twitter owner Elon Musk has suggested — that companies have no business moderating content is to constrain private companies’ ability to exercise their own First Amendment rights, and to accept that trolls of various types will control every conversation.
The Supreme Court must not undermine the statute’s basic architecture. If justices want to zero in on how it allows companies to affirmatively promote what might be harmful or libelous content, fine. But in a new world where every American with an internet connection can effectively grab a megaphone, federal law has already found the best way to balance rights and responsibilities.
