“The Internet and other interactive computer services offer a forum for or a true diversity of political discourse, unique opportunities for cultural development, and myriad avenues for intellectual activity.”
That’s an excerpt from Section 230, the part of the federal code that regulates the internet.
Back in 1996, when it was passed by Congress as part of the Communications Decency Act, Section 230 gave internet services legal protections unavailable to mere newspapers like The Star-Ledger.
If a newspaper were to print something libelous, the publisher could be sued. But under Section 230 "No provider or user of an interactive computer services shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
The idea was that the few such services then in existence – remember Compuserve and Prodigy? – were virtual bulletin boards on which information could be exchanged between willing parties.
Then along came the giants like Facebook and Twitter. Before long they had audiences so massive that they elbowed us inkstained wretches into the shadows, where we labor to this day providing them with content for which they pay not a penny.
That’s bad enough. Worse their owners have decided to take over the role of deciding which newspaper stories are fit for the public to read and relay on their platforms.
In the case of those New York Post stories on the Hunter Biden emails released last week, the owners of Twitter and Facebook argue that the stories won’t be linked because they may have been obtained by hacking.
But journalists frequently run articles based on information acquired through actions that are illegal. Have some inside information you’d like to leak to me? No matter how you got it, please drop me a line.
The other objection is that the emails may be fake. I discussed that the other day with Eugene Volokh, the noted UCLA law professor who runs the “Volokh Conspiracy” blog on constitutional law.
Volokh drew a comparison to the 2004 controversy that cost Dan Rather his job at CBS.
Two months before the election in which President George W. Bush ran for re-election, Rather gave a report on some copies of documents obtained by the network that purported to show some inconsistencies in Bush’s story about his service in the Air National Guard.
The Bush camp raised questions about the documents' authenticity, but that didn’t stop the media outlets from covering the story.
They weren’t doing CBS any favors. When critics brought up technical flaws in the documents, Rather was forced into early retirement over his protests.
Similarly, if it turns out these emails are forgeries, then the people at the Post will have been exposed as credulous boobs.
But that sort of thing used to be sorted out in what was known as “the marketplace of ideas.”
Volokh, who’s been following online issues since the advent of the internet, said we’ve come a long way since the days of websites that functioned as mere bulletin boards.
In this case there’s a question of whether the online executives are inserting their political views into their roles.
“If it really does look like provable bias, then I think one reaction is to say ‘Who do these people think they are?’” he said. “We didn’t think we were setting them up as the newspaper of record, but they got so powerful they are now trying to tell elected officials and newspapers what they should do.”
Journalists and politicians are free to ignore such orders, of course. But there’s an irony here for conservatives, he said. Those of us on the right side of the ledger believe in private property, and both Facebook and Twitter are the property of their owners, not the public.
“If people don’t like it, they can go somewhere else,” he said.
But the problem for conservatives is that Facebook and Twitter have already locked up tens of millions of users. Efforts to start alternative sites have been fruitless.
Still, the owners of Twitter and Facebook might have been wise to not insert themselves into this controversy, Volokh said.
“Section 230 doesn’t empower them to block things,” he said. “It empowers them not to block things.”
That issue has yet to be addressed. But some Republicans in Congress have started a move to repeal Section 230. Trump has endorsed the effort, but unless he is re-elected it’s unlikely to get through Congress.
Still, the internet media moguls may have made a mistake by calling attention to a story that doesn’t add a whole lot to our knowledge of Hunter Biden’s history in Ukraine.
As far back as 2014 – before there was a President Trump – Washington Post writer Adam Taylor said of Hunter Biden’s role in Ukraine, “The appointment of the vice president’s son to a Ukrainian oil board looks nepotistic at best, nefarious at worst.”
It still does. And the ham-handed actions of the Facebook and Twitter executives are simply calling more attention to it.
ADD: The coverage in the American media of the Biden’s adventures in Ukraine has been hampered by the fact that, thanks to the domination of the Internet, the mainstream media no longer has the resources to station reporters in places like Ukraine.
That’s not true for the British. If you really want to learn the ins and outs of this scandal, read this piece by Oliver Bullogh in the Guardian. It’s very long but very much worth the read. Bullogh is covering the English angle here and reports on the Bidens only as far as they have roles in it.
That makes it even more damning when you ask yourself just why Hunter was trolling for business in a country where his vice-president father had a major role, An excerpt:
The credibility of the United States was not helped by the news that since May 2014, Biden’s son Hunter had been on the board of directors of Burisma, Zlochevsky’s company.
The White House insisted the position was a private matter for Hunter Biden, and unrelated to his father’s job, but that is not how anyone I spoke to in Ukraine interpreted it. Hunter Biden is an undistinguished corporate lawyer, with no previous Ukraine experience. Why would a Ukrainian tycoon hire him?
Hunter Biden failed to reply to questions I sent him, but he told the Wall Street Journal in December 2015 that he had joined Burisma “to strengthen corporate governance and transparency at a company working to advance energy security”. That was not an explanation that many people found reassuring.
ALSO - Over at the Sic Semper Tyrannis blog, Larry Johnson gives evidence that the laptop story is legitimate. The emails certainly seem credible. I think our liberal friends don’t want the public thinking about the influence-peddling that went on here.
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