These suggestions for what the Biden Admin should do about #Section230 sound good on paper but in reality (and in practice), none of them will help reach any meaningful objectives. What's more likely to result are some serious unintended consequences for free expression. https://twitter.com/ceciliakang/status/1327289929718706176

What objective do we hope to achieve w/suggestion (1)? If it's to get rid of all the bad stuff online, we'll be adding to the exceptions list regularly, as UGC evolves, to account for every issue type we discover. At that point, we'll have to stop and ask, what use is 230?

Sure, it sounds good to bake in an exception to 230 for revenge porn. But what will it do? Legitimate websites ("big tech") already go the extra mile to keep that content at bay. It's bad for their business models, bad for their users, and really bad for their ad partners.

An extra exception to 230 likely won't change any of the existing policies or practices around NCEI at least for any of the major Internet co's.

230 doesn't apply to first party authored content, so anyone who puts up their own site to personally post NCEI is already excluded.

230 also doesn't apply to Copyright law so victims might also pull that lever for self-created items.

If anything, a better alternative to 230 line-drawing is a federal criminal law for NCEI, or better yet federal privacy law. 230 already doesn't apply to federal criminal law.

I encourage regulators to draw some serious lessons learned from FOSTA before tinkering w/exceptions. FOSTA backfired, hamstringing law enforcement efforts, eliminating safe vetting options for legitimate sex workers, and costing lives.

We're worse off in every way w/FOSTA.

Suggestions 2 and 3 convert 230 from an immunity to a safe harbor. Congress and the courts would have to take up the task creating guidelines behind the words "responsible" or "reasonable" when it comes to online content moderation.

As UGC evolves, so will those standards.

What results is a lengthy list of vague pre-requisites for websites to attempt to meet to enjoy safe harbor protections.

Which is how you get ContentID, but for all issue types. If you thought abusive Copyright striking was bad, imagine strikes for everything else.

The point being, everyone wants to do something about #Section230 but very few consider the detrimental consequences these suggestions will have on free speech, information availability, and competition (amending 230 is a surefire way to make big tech bigger).

Amending Section 230 fixes the Internet in the same way hostile architecture fixes homelessness. Neither solve any of the underlying societal issues.

Suggestions to amend 230 are tired at this point. Why not instead focus on how to allocate more resources towards T&S efforts?

I encourage this new admin to think critically about how they might better equip content moderation teams with the tools and resources they need to tackle these evolving issues.

Spend less time thinking about 230 and more time thinking about why people do what they do online.