The assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk last week has reignited the political debate over reforming a federal law that shields social media companies from liability over the content they post.
Videos of Kirk’s assassination spread rapidly across social media following the shooting on the campus of Utah Valley University that took the 31-year-old Turning Point USA founder’s life last week. That created an immense challenge for social media platforms to remove the video or implement content warnings or age gating to protect users from being exposed to it in their feeds.
The circulation of Kirk’s assassination video on social media prompted renewed calls from lawmakers to address a federal law known as Section 230 that provides liability protections for social media platforms.
“Section 230 needs to be repealed. If you’re mad at social media companies that radicalize our nation, you should be mad,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “I have a bill that will allow you to sue these people. They’re immune from lawsuits.”
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Section 230 of the Communications Act was enacted as part of the Communications Decency Act in 1996 and provides immunity for online services for content published by third-party users on their platforms.
It includes provisions that protect service providers from being liable for content posted by third-party users, as well as protection from liability for the voluntary good faith removal of third-party content the operator finds objectionable – whether it’s constitutionally protected.
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“At the end of the day, I think Section 230 does a couple of things,” Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Brendan Carr said during an appearance at the Politico AI & Tech Summit on Tuesday. “Some things it does very well. Some things there’s a lot more questions about it.”
He noted that there are two main provisions of Section 230 and explained that C-1 “says if you leave someone else’s speech up, you’re not liable for that content if it happens to be libelous or tortious in any way. I think that’s generally a good provision. It’s what I call a ‘pro-speech’ provision. It encourages people to post and express themselves.”
“On the other hand, you have this provision C-2 that’s been read by the courts as giving broad immunity to all sorts of content moderation and censorship. And I think that’s where, over the years, we saw a lot of abuses,” Carr said.
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“We saw individual Americans participating in a digital town square that were getting censored purely for protected First Amendment speech for diversity of viewpoints on religious or medical issues.”
The FCC chair said he’s waiting to see how social media companies move forward with changes to moderation policies that are already underway but signaled the debate over Section 230 is likely to continue.
“I think the debate around Section 230 is still live, but I think, given the changes that we’re seeing on social media, I think right now, for my part, I’m in more of a trust but verify posture,” Carr said.
During a hearing on Tuesday, Graham asked FBI Director Kash Patel if he supports sunsetting Section 230 to increase the liability for companies whose platforms are used to disseminate content related to the sexual exploitation of children.
“I’m all in, I have been all in, and I’m happy to work with Congress to do so,” Patel said.
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