The following statement is attributed to Evan Engstrom, Executive Director of Engine, regarding yesterday’s introduction of the Limiting Section 230 Immunity to Good Samaritans Act:
The Limiting Section 230 Immunity to Good Samaritans Act from Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) is a barely legible piece of legislation that would effectively ban all content moderation on Internet platforms. The bill would expose Internet companies to shakedown lawsuits for “selectively enforcing” their terms of service. Of course, since questions about whether content is objectionable are fundamentally subjective, there is no conceivable way for a court to determine whether or not a website’s content moderation decisions were “selective.” In short, this bill would do nothing more than allow posters of the most hateful and vile content on the Internet to extort settlements from websites that exercise their discretion to block objectionable content from their platforms.
Since Sen. Hawley said (incorrectly) in the past that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was only created to protect platforms from liability for deleting obscene content in order to make the Internet more family-friendly, it’s baffling that the senator now wants to make websites legally liable for doing just that. Anyone who posts obscene content merely has to allege that the platform’s decision to delete this content was “selective” in order to initiate a bad faith lawsuit that will cost websites potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars to defeat.
In reality, Section 230 was created to give Internet companies of all sizes the ability to moderate user-generated content as they see fit, without being held liable for what they do or do not remove from their websites. This is especially crucial for startups that lack the resources to survive meritless lawsuits over content created by their users. Without these protections, any rational platform will be disincentivized from deleting any user content, however obscene or objectionable.
The only real purpose of this badly conceived legislation is to use online platforms as a prop in a politically-driven crusade to distract from the very real problems facing the country.
