Remove the Section 230 exemption!

Ned Ryun writes in Fox News,

These companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google and Amazon – American based companies – who have thrived in our country because of our laws and the special exemptions that have received, have no right to violate any Americans’ civil rights, including freedom of speech no matter how distasteful we might find it. Quite frankly, who died and made those private corporations the arbiter of our Constitutional rights? Perhaps our rights died with the clinking of coins in campaign coffers as our representatives have been, legally, bought off.

On the matter of regulation, there is no new regulation by removing the Section 230 exemption for these companies: they merely get to play by the exact same rules, with the exact same oversight and regulations as every other publisher and telecommunications company. This has everything to do with fairness and leveling the playing field so that everyone plays by the exact same rules as the free market is, in theory, supposed to work.

As I’ve written about and spoken about on TV, the “rule by algorithm can be just as stringent as any rule by a dictator, perhaps even more so as it is vague, faceless, and hard to define.” Nor should we ignore the reality that very likely Google is, every day, collecting and storing more personally identifiable data than the NSA, or that in addition to Google, companies like Facebook and Amazon are collecting data to accelerate their development on machine learning and artificial intelligence, both specific and general that will lead to automation and displace American workers.

We can live with the happy fiction that somehow these companies are still simply neutral platforms, or we can demand that our elected officials take our rights seriously. The fix is simple. The question is whether enough of our representatives have the political courage to act.

Read more here.