FCC Chairman Ajit Pai released a statement which indicates that he’ll be issuing a clarification on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The idea behind this clarification would apparently be to prevent big tech companies from operating as a publisher while being legally protected as a platform.

I guess you argue that this is a step in the right direction but I don’t see how this is going to solve the censorship problem. Theoretically a clarification of Section 230 could open up these companies to lawsuits due to all of the editorial decisions they have made by censoring and blacklisting people. From there I guess the idea is that the lawsuits would collapse these companies and they would be replaced by another company that doesn’t engage in crazy censorship practices.

But this is just in the realm of the theoretical. We have no idea how this would play out in practice. It would depend upon the specifics of the FCC’s clarification and other factors.

I’m also not sure how they could clarify Section 230 in such a way that would prevent censorship. They can’t just tell platform providers across the Internet that they can’t ban anybody. And regardless of what clarification the FCC comes up with, these companies have armies of Jewish lawyers that will challenge the clarification in court. They would probably also find loopholes to continue their censorship practices.

Outside of new legislation from Congress, myself and others have argued that the best way to try and solve this problem would be for big social media sites to be regulated as public utilities which requires them to provide equal access to everyone. They’re basically the 21st century equivalent of what the telephone was in the 1960s so there’s a basic argument that they should be treated the same way.

Steve King actually suggested doing this back in 2018. Too bad he lost his primary race and won’t be returning to Congress. Republicans wouldn’t defend him because the communist left said he was part of the KKK or whatever.

I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t believe clarifying Section 230 will resolve the censorship problem.

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