During the development of the most noteworthy law in 1996 mandated to govern speeches posted on the internet, neither did Google nor Mark Zuckerberg's innovations exist. Through the Federal law, section 230 of the Communications and Decency Act, young internet organizations have grown bigger and greater ( Rogers, Kovaleva & Rumshisky, 2019 ). Such companies include YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. This section was established due to lawsuits against Internet service providers in the early 1990s. The main issue in question was to clarify the liabilities of internet service providers to their users. The making of section 230 intended to identify if the internet service providers play the role of publishers or distributors of what users post on their sites and to hold them responsible for any ‘bad’ content (Hwang, 2020 ). The primary concept of Section 230 is the separability of the liabilities for users and internet providers. The section defines the role of the internet providers in ensuring that the content they air is decent and does not violate the rights of other internet users. Moreover, the section provides a clause that protects service providers; for instance, an individual user would be called in court to respond to inappropriate content that they air. This section has, therefore allowed the internet providers to screen and block any content that they may feel is indecent and violates the rights of other people.
This paper will evaluate and discuss the positive and negative implications that section 230 has had on both internet users and service providers. The report aims at explaining the mystery and controversy on whether section 230 protects service providers and internet users or restricts freedom of expression on social networks. Some key words that will be used in further research to my topic include Social Media Bias, Censorship on Social Media, Section 230, Communications Decency Act and many more search terms.
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References
Hwang, T. (2020). Dealing with Disinformation: Evaluating the Case for Amendment of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field, Prospects for Reform , 252.
Oxford Analytica. US Section 230 moves loom over social media worldwide. Emerald Expert Briefings , (oxan-es).
Rogers, A., Kovaleva, O., & Rumshisky, A. (2019, November). Calls to Action on Social Media: Detection, Social Impact, and Censorship Potential. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Internet Freedom: Censorship, Disinformation, and Propaganda (pp. 36-44).
