Section 230, the law protecting charmingly outdated "interactive computer services" from liability for third party content, is currently being litigated. The main part of the text reads as follows:
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. (47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1)).
In other words, you can't sue platforms like Reddit for a comment left by someone on Reddit who isn't Reddit.
This is not a law blog. There are plenty of (or perhaps too many?) legal commentators out there discussing the case law, the lawsuits, and the potential ramifications of various outcomes. Instead, as always, I want to focus on the role of technology in our society, this time through the lens of Section 230 and the media conversation surrounding it.
Often, I start my posts with a quote from one of my favorite punching bags, usually the Harvard Business Review or NPR. This time, I will start with a piece of a statement about Section 230 from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization I wholeheartedly endorse.
Without Section 230’s protections, many online intermediaries would intensively filter and censor user speech, while others may simply not host user content at all. This legal and policy framework allows countless niche websites, as well as big platforms like Amazon and Yelp to host user reviews. It allows users to share photos and videos on big platforms like Facebook and on the smallest blogs. It allows users to share speech and opinions everywhere, from vast conversational forums like Twitter and Discord, to the comment sections of the smallest newspapers and blogs.
On the whole, I agree. This is wonderful. For obvious reasons, it would be stupid if Discord could be sued for their users' chats, or Yelp for users' reviews.
With that basic premise in mind, let's do a thought experiment. Suppose, every day, one of the biggest websites on earth — we'll call it YouWrite — were to conduct a contest. Anyone can enter this contest by writing an essay, which are all published on YouWrite's website. At the end of the day, according to some secret criteria, one essay is selected and put on the home page of the company's site, and the author of that essay is given fame and fortune beyond their wildest dreams.
Whereas before, enterprising writers might have started their own obscure little websites and newsletters, now they flock to the platform. As the contest goes on, people will invest more and more time studying past contest winners' essays, trying to decode what exactly the secret criteria might be. Pretty soon, like any gold rush, entire industries spring to life, catering to these enterprising content creators hoping to strike it rich. Past YouWrite winners might offer paid private tutoring. Previous YouWrite employees — or at least those alleging to be so — offer paid courses on how to write an essay to satisfy the mysterious criteria reviewers.
YouWrite's business model is exactly what Act 230 protects. YouWrite is a platform hosting user content, and as such, just like chats on Discord or users reviews on Yelp, the content of YouWrite's user submissions are third party content.
And yet, that content is obviously not really independent third party content. YouWrite's incredible wealth and power draws people to the contest, almost like supplicants. Contestants write not what they wish to express, but what they hope will satisfy some ineffable criteria, the details of which YouWrite never directly reveals. Intermediaries who claim special knowledge of YouWrite's hidden truth influence the corpus of YouWrite essays, guiding it to form some semi-coherent corpus of pseudo-scripture that future contestants study to themselves discover the esoteric truth. The reward for successfully decoding the YouWrite mysteries is the ultimate capitalist salvation — instant wealth.
At this point, I will drop the pretense. Youtube (owned by Google), Facebook (I still refuse to acknowledge their name change), Amazon, and other such platforms are not just hosting third party content; they are involved in what is perhaps the single oldest form of aquiring power known to civilization. They are hoarding resources while offering the desperate the hope of salvation.
These internet proto-empires, in their quest for domination, have created The Algorithm. The Algorithm is both a tool made to harvest the internet's most precious resource and the first god in the capitalist pantheon of internet empires. It is a vengeful god, increasingly pushing its followers towards hate and violence. And yet, it is also a generous god, rewarding influencers who serve it well with wealth, status, and power.
Perhaps this should not come as a surprise. Many of the world's oldest cities, from Mesopotamia to Mesoamerica, were ruled by priest-kings positioning themselves spiritually between their subjects and the divine. The internet, on the scale of human history, is brand new. Until very recently, much like the prehistory of our physical world, it was comprised of smaller and more dispersed communities, whose power structures and social organizations vary greatly. To those seeking to build empire, what I see as a rich tapstery of distinct and interconnected internet communities, they see as unexploited territory run by unsophisticated savages.
These corporations have become so powerful that, as discussed in my previous post, we are losing our ability to envision the web outside the frameworks they have created. Much like Tsar and Kaiser are derived from Caesar, in a remarkably short time, the hegemony of these internet empires has become so complete that we cannot discuss the web without using the language of their imperial propaganda. We discuss tech companies as simple, innocent platforms for hosting independent third party content. We call writers, filmmakers, animators, and poets "content creators." Even the EFF, a wonderful organization I support, conflates Facebook's cyber-imperial project with the comments section of a newspaper, arguing that both are essential for free speech on the web.
In fact, nothing is further from the truth. These internet leviathans seek domination, and with domination comes the power to shape the world through propaganda. We are living through the early stages of it now. The Algorithm is producing alternative realities. Instead of viewing these as simply conspiracy theories, I propose we also understand these as propaganda myths, perpetuated by the cyber-imperial cult of the Algorithm. QAnon is an occult mystery; its devotees are inducted into the sacred mysteries of the first meme president. Perhaps The Big Lie isn't simply an attempt to subvert an election, but the opening salvo in a propaganda war between empires, the first of such wars to be fought across the physical/virtual divide.
I don't pretend to have a good answer for how exactly to update Section 230. There probably are lots of newspaper comments sections and local business reviews that I would like to remain protected. Instead, I offer this — let's stop discussing these huge companies as public squares or bastions of free speech. These megaplatforms do not simply host independent third party content. No one actually wants to produce videos titled YouTube Algorithm Explained 2022 | Tips to GROW FASTER! or 5 Ways To Make Money On Amazon (Most People Don't Know This One Simple Trick). No child wants to grow up and make clickbait. These are not valuable contributions to our culture independently created by writers and filmmakers and simply hosted by YouTube. This is The Algorithm remaking the internet in its image.