Harmeet Dhillon Appears on FBN’s ‘Making Money with Charles Payne’ To Discuss Social Media Executive Order Comes After Twitter Fact Checked Trump’s Tweets On Mail-in Voting
According to Dhillon (Video Transcript):
This is a very important issue and conservatives and others, free speech activists have been waiting for a couple of years. There has been a lot of talk about this issue of doing something about the abuses and the overapplication of the Communications Decency Act Section 230 which is the law that is under discussion here which basically immunized platforms like AOL back in the day, remember dial-up internet from content that was transmitted by users but now that has turned into courts refusing to hold these companies themselves liable when they commit torts, when they commit privacy violations, when they spread defamation, and when they breach their own contract. So I’ve sued Twitter for example on breaching its own contract about what it will use to bounce people off the platform. The court said because of this immunization, you can’t sue them for even breaching their own contract. That is going too far. That is what the president wants to address. Of course, now, where they’re publishing their own commentary, which they have a right to do, but putting it on top of his and sort of interfering with his use of the platform which isn’t in their terms of service, that is where it really gets very hairy and it needs to be adjusted.
It is a great question and I’m a First Amendment activist and lawyer and so I definitely want to see a robust First Amendment space everywhere. I want to see robust free speech online, but I don’t want to see these companies act as campaign donors effectively by limiting or censoring speech in a way that benefits one candidate over another. I don’t want to see them interfering with people’s speech and they’re commercial businesses. They have to adhere by the same types of fair business practices as others. So, what the president is not strip that law or change that law. He can’t. Congress has to do that. But what he can do is where the law is not clear, which is a lot of areas of it, ask those federal agencies to craft rules and craft guidance that will help us clarify the scope and then one day hopefully Congress can actually clarify it and say “You only get these protections if you are willing to abide by certain neutral norms.” which they are not doing right now although I do think Mark Zuckerberg’s comments were certainly much better.
