Yesterday, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) unveiled legislation called “Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act,” which would shake up the legal foundation of the internet in an effort to root out online bias. Under the proposed law, companies like Facebook and Twitter would be required to obtain a government certification that they are not making politically biased decisions about content moderation, in exchange for liability protections they currently receive automatically.
Hawley’s bill would amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives companies legal protection from what users post on platforms. That provision is often seen as a fundamental part of the internet, and has been described as the law that allowed social media as we know it to flourish. The law has taken a beating lately, however, as some lawmakers, like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), call for overhauling 230. Democrats like Nancy Pelosi have also questioned the law, with the House speaker recently saying it’s “in jeopardy.”
But if Hawley hoped to tap into some of that discontent with his bill, it hasn’t happened. Lawmakers in both parties, as well as liberal and conservative groups more broadly, largely slammed the idea, calling it a dystopian plan to regulate speech online and an unworkable act of government overreach. Here’s a rundown of the responses from the past day:
The senator who wrote 230
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) was one of the original authors of Section 230, and defended the law against Hawley’s plan. In a statement, the senator said the plan “will turn the federal government into Speech Police, flagrantly violating the First Amendment,” and “would force every platform to become 4chan or 8chan rather than maintain some basic level of decency.” He went on to say that “Trump’s Republican party seems to believe that lawyers and bureaucrats should tell private companies how to make clearly private business decisions.”
Congress’ leading Libertarian
Even some sitting Republican lawmakers questioned the idea. Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) responded to Hawley’s plan on Twitter. “This legislation is a sweetheart deal for Big Government,” he wrote. “It empowers the one entity that should have no say over our speech to regulate and influence what we say online.”
A former Republican FTC commissioner
The bill would require members of the Federal Trade Commission to certify that platforms are politically neutral, but not everyone who’s worked at the commission was on board with the idea. Joshua Wright, a former Republican commissioner who left the agency in 2015, said in a series of tweets that “the bill quite literally injects a board of bureaucrats into millions of decisions about internet content.” He called the idea “central planning.”
“But the truth is that there is a ton of consumer surplus here arising from voluntary exchange in social media platforms,” Wright wrote. “I’m old enough to remember conservatives being into that kind of thing.”
The troll right
The social media platform Gab, which has styled itself as a radically laissez-fairealternative to platforms like Facebook and Twitter — and has earned a following from racists in the process — asked Hawley on Twitter whether the plan would “cement Big Tech monopoly status.” After Hawley responded that smaller companies would be exempted, Gab said it supported the idea. “These are very fair benchmarks and won’t hinder competing startups like Gab,” the company wrote. “You have our support Senator, would love to chat more about how we can help.”
Conservative media
In an op-ed posted by the right-leaning Washington Examiner, Philip Klein argued that the legislation would result in less freedom of speech, not more, and would not remedy the alleged problems it’s trying to fix. “I get that conservatives are frustrated about bias shown in decisions to ban or suspend users,” Klein writes, “but this response would only lead to a more restrictive speech code.”
Tech think tanks
The nonprofit Open Technology Institute, part of the left-leaning think tank New America, said there are reasonable concerns about tech industry moderation practices, but that Hawley’s bill wasn’t the way to handle them. The group said “the concept of a ‘politically neutral’ platform is a broad, undefined one that creates an artificial, unmeasurable standard for platforms to meet.”
Industry groups
While tech companies have largely stayed silent on the proposal, industry trade groups came out in force against the plan. The Internet Association, which represents major platform companies like Facebook and Google, said in a statement that the bill “forces platforms to make an impossible choice: either host reprehensible, but First Amendment protected speech, or lose legal protections that allow them to moderate illegal content like human trafficking and violent extremism.”
NetChoice, an e-commerce association that also includes major tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon, said the bill would turn the internet into “a hub of extremism,” and “embolden extreme political movements, such as the KKK.” The Computer & Communications Industry Association called the plan “ludicrous,” comparing it to 1984.
Conservative groups
Right-leaning groups also slammed the legislation. The libertarian group TechFreedom said “the bill would give politicians a gigantic regulatory hammer to use against Big Tech,” and giving the FTC certification power “would set up a partisan bloodmatch every other year.”
The Koch brothers-funded political advocacy group Americans for Prosperity was also critical of the plan, calling it “misguided” and saying it potentially “creates a scenario where government has the ability to police your speech and determine what you can or cannot say online.”
The Media Research Center, a conservative group set up to combat a perceived liberal bias in the media, was one of the few right-leaning organizations that threw support behind the plan, saying it was “the first major step toward holding tech giants like Facebook, Google and Twitter accountable.”