Twitter – Gretchen A. Peck

Yesterday, the Giants of Social Media stomped their feet down on the President of the United States, who’d abused their platforms all along, leveraging them to spread disinformation, launch attacks, paint targets, fire people, lament TV ratings, race bait, and – his most egregious offenses – to discredit the 2020 election, grift people of their hard-earned cash with promises of an overturn, inciting the most gullible among them to disrupt governance, trash and pillage the U.S. Capitol, plant bombs in the nation’s capital, murder a Capitol Police officer, and attempt to install Donald J. Trump as a second-term President via violent insurrection against their own country.

Whew.

Indeed, social media had tolerated much from the digitally prolific President, but as conversations of an armed terrorist attack on the nation’s capital began to simmer, they’d had enough.

Immediately came the decries of a “First Amendment infringement” (it’s not), and Trump’s most loyal lawmaker friends calling for a repeal of “Section 230” – a pet peeve for the outgoing Commander in Chief.

What is Section 230?

“Section 230” – more formally known as Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934 at 47 U.S.C. § 230, and colloquially as “the 26 words that created the Internet” – was born out of two 1990s lawsuits against ISPs and challenged in the Courts several times since. Each time, it was upheld.

It is fair to say that Section 230 is perhaps the single most important legislation applicable to social media. It is what enabled platforms like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and others to grow, flourish, and become a huge, integral part of the American economy and culture.

President Trump’s interest in Section 230 appears to coincide with Twitter’s first fact-checking of the President’s potentially harmful tweets, back in the spring of 2020. At the time, he was undermining his own taskforce with COVID-19 disinformation, and already sowing the seeds of election chaos.

Twitter justified the tags it placed on the President’s tweets by suggesting that virus disinformation could kill people – and it has – and that his election discrediting jeopardized democracy itself. The rest of the President’s political gamesmanship was all fair game, Twitter and Facebook concluded.

From then on, the President became hyper-focused on a Section 230 repeal. He would like to be able to sue the tech companies for denying him a platform and megaphone. He wants to criminalize fact-checking. He has been so intent on this goal, that he was willing to tank two major pieces of legislation – the NDAA and a second sweeping COVID relief Bill – if he couldn’t get his way on Section 230.

For Democrats, this repeal is a non-negotiable dealbreaker, perhaps because they have a better grasp of what’s at stake.

In Congress, some of President Trump’s most lock-step Republicans now champion the repeal in his stead.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) sponsored a 2020 bill, known as H.R. 8896 – the AOC Act, which conveniently shares the acronym with a certain Congresswoman perpetually under the skins of her Republican colleagues and its actual title, “the Abandoning Online Censorship Act.” Gohmert was able to get seven co-sponsors to sign on, all Republicans.

It was “dead in the [swamp] water.”

In 2021, and in the wake of the de-platforming of an American President who would not follow the rules, Republicans will make this case: When the platforms began to fact-check, censor, and now ban content from the President and others, they have ceased to be a platform and are instead a publisher, with an editorial due diligence and subjective control over what users see or don’t see.

The tech platforms will argue: As private companies, with clear terms of service (that users agree to when they open their accounts and create their avatars), they should be able to enforce those rules and codes of conduct, which clearly state that users are prohibited from sharing content that will harm or threaten people (other users or otherwise).

It’s worth mentioning that the federal government already has some control over platforms and their users. For example, it is criminal act to distribute certain types of content across the Internet or any platform. Section 230 does not give social media platforms blanket immunity from all forms of civil or criminal prosecutions.

If Section 230 goes away, what happens?

Without Section 230, the platforms, like publishers, would be subjected to defamation and libel laws. The distinction, however, is that publishers own their content. Publishers create, edit, verify and challenge, run it by lawyers, decide what and what not to publish, and then take whatever fallout there is from those choices; they wholly own the content they share.

Conversely, platforms are just that – a technological foundation for users to share the content they and others produce. Without Section 230 shields, platforms could then be held liable for content they do not create and merely host.

President Trump and his Congressional allies vow this repeal will force the tech companies to take an apolitical hands-off approach to users; that it will force them to enable more free expression; and force the platforms to be tolerant of a broader spectrum of ideas and alt-facts.

They feel social media has been unfair to conservative voices and ideas. A simple glance at what trends on Facebook defies this assertion. On any given day, the top 10 trending posts on Facebook are often from Right-leaning media and personalities, or topics deemed of import to conservative-minded users.

I know you’re surprised that politicians would sell you poppycock, right?

Instead, a repeal would likely have a chilling, constricting effect on users most of all.

Now, liable for content they do not create, platforms will be forced to more protective and less likely to tolerate content that could be controversial, debatable or have merit in a Court of law.

Users would have less opportunity for free expression, not more.

It’s a bottomless pit of liability for the social media platforms, which could be named as a Party in every single lawsuit in which a social media comment somehow plays a role – big-dollar cases to petty ones.

The only real winners will be lawyers.

Ultimately, it would hobble the tech companies, just as one notoriously vindictive President hopes. The tech market would be destabilized, fractured. Users would find themselves with fewer options and tighter restrictions on what they can post and share. Online communities will be more insular and more echo-chamber like.

Businesses – especially small businesses that rely heavily on the mostly free marketing perks of platforms like Twitter and Facebook – would be hobbled, too. It doesn’t seem the Republicans like Lindsay Graham and Louie Gohmert have really thought this through.

None of this is to say that social media execs don’t have plenty of atoning to do. There is no shortage of Silicon Valley sin, but repealing Section 230 will not address those in a surgical, effective way.

I lived in Pennsylvania at the dawn of the fracking boom, which ravaged the State in so many ways. I became interested in fracking because of personal experience with groundwater contamination back in my home state of Maryland – malfeasance that caused most of my family to be sick or to die of cancer. I learned about cancer clusters by being a member of one.

I anxiously watched what was happening in Pennsylvania, as gas-drilling leases were dangled before landowners and farmers as a way to sustain their properties when the local economy had fizzled. I noticed as landowners who’d leased reported obvious well contamination – hazardous materials that you could see and those that you couldn’t see. Pennsylvania’s waterways were suddenly contaminated with nasty things that were meant to stay deep in the ground and by chemicals used in the fracking process, which the industry wasn’t required to disclose to the public.

I chronicled how the gas companies made grandiose vows to communities about a commercial boom that would happen if only municipalities would welcome in their trucks and drills and legions of personnel, only to frack the town and then pack up and move along to the next dupes. I shook with rage as communities were terrorized by armed mercenaries for hire who’d shut down public roads and seal off private lands to prevent citizens from getting a closer look at drilling sites and well pads. I knowingly nodded when landowners who’d leased their properties began reporting that the gas companies were shirking them, using small-print loopholes so they didn’t have to pay landowners what they were rightfully owed.

Fracking wasn’t getting a lot of press coverage then, unless you counted some of the local small-town papers in the northern and western parts of the State, which seemingly were so enamored by the promise of commerce they missed the opportunity to protect their communities. Josh Fox’s Gasland helped ensure “fracking” became part of the public’s vernacular, in Pennsylvania and around the world.

Tom Corbett was Pennsylvania’s governor at the time, and to say he was pro-fracking would be understatement. He wasn’t just in the industry’s pockets, he banked his entire first term and a potential future term on the fracking economy.

I wasn’t on any kind of energy beat then, but I worked Corbett’s office as if I was, placing calls to the Governor’s office nearly daily, which he dodged. I attended every anti-fracking rally and protest I could – reporting on and photographing them. And I took to social media with what I found and the questions I had, including to Tom Corbett’s Facebook page, where I would plead with the Governor to address topics he clearly didn’t want to talk about.

I never name-called. I was never anything other than polite, but I did ask tough questions that I believed were critical to the public’s health and safety. I carved out at least a few minutes of my day to “touch base” with the Governor there.

I took a lot of heat from the gas-company reps who showed up there, too, and from laypeople who still believed that fracking would help Pennsylvania rise from its industrially ravaged ruins, like a fiscal phoenix. I received an onslaught of public and private threats, including on my life.

And one day, the Governor blocked me. Soon thereafter, he lost his bid for re-election. Pennsylvania installed a Democrat to the Office, who was still rather pro-fracking, but managed to straddle the middle by suggesting he’d tax the crap out of the gas companies while still allowing them to wreck the land and sicken the population.

I learned an important journalistic lesson during my time on Tom Corbett’s Facebook page: That sometimes it’s not the answer to our questions that matter; rather, that we have the tenacity to ask the questions.

Today, I often take to Twitter to question politicians and public officials, including the President of the United States, who has chosen Twitter as his bully pulpit. I model my questions there like I would if I were sitting in a Press briefing, or if I had the ear of the politician. With limited characters, I try my best to give context to the questions I ask, so they don’t come off as petty, biased or snarky, which is a common pitfall with truncated communications of this kind.

I do my best to be polite, but my questions are purposeful and pointed, and often formed because I’ve observed the politician being misleading, misinformed, or just unabashedly lying to the American people.

As you may expect, the barrage of clap-backs I get there are sometimes upsetting. Even though I haven’t attempted to be a verified “somebody” on Twitter, I – like so many other journalists, especially women journalists – get lots of attention in the form of harassment, getting doxxed, and threatened. I wish people weren’t so quick to condemn others just asking questions, but that’s the political, polarized nature of our world today. Even the most innocuous topics seem to inspire people to take to their corners and come out swinging.

Sometimes, it gets me down. I’m not going to pretend that it doesn’t take its toll on one’s psyche, but when it does, I remind myself: If someone took the time to comment, even with a visceral, nasty response, at least they’ve read the question. At least they now know there is a question, a dilemma, something to substantively debate.

At least that seed has been planted.

I’ve had fellow journalists question this approach. Some have reached out to me privately and asked, “Why do you bother? It’s not as if so-and-so is going to respond to your question on Twitter.”

I’ve explained that I have no delusions that when I tweet @ the President, for example, that he’ll respond or even notice – though if a comment trends, I suspect a lot of these politicians do take note. I explain that it was more important to put the question out there, to the benefit of the public. Twitter and other social media platforms tend to be echo chambers. Algorithms and personal settings make it far too easy for us to narrow the information that comes our way – usually, information that’s palatable to us, that supports our own established beliefs, rather than challenging them. A simple question posted to a politician’s feed breaks through that echo chamber.

Of course, tweeting at people – politicians or otherwise – doesn’t supplant traditional means of journalism. You still need to work your sources; you still need to dodge layers of blockers – press secretaries, comms pros, and PR folks – to get to them and to get them on record. None of that has changed.

Some days, Twitter feels as if it’s nothing but bots, pols, and journos swirling the drain together. But if the politicians and public officials are going to be there; if the bots and political operatives are going to be there, blasting misinformation and disinformation, we need to be there as well.

Checks and balances in the digital age. It’s our duty.

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