Unfiltered new of government. Created by americas Cable Television companies on a as a public service, and brought to you today by your television provider. This week on the communicators, a discussion of tech issues that may play a role in campaign 20 20. Joining us from washington, d. C. Is berin szoka, techfreedom founder senior fellow. And from los angeles, Jessica Gonzales, free press coceo. Ms. Gonzales, i want to start with news that is breaking as we are taping this. That is a potential look at section 230, the liability portion of the Communications Act, and possible changes to it. What is your view and your groups view on section 230, and what do you think about possible changes . Jessica section 230 is an important mechanism to defend free speech on the internet. We think it should largely remain in place. Many of the attacks on 230, and especially the president s executive order he issued in response to twitter Fact Checking is very problematic censorship that runs contrary to the First Amendment. Host berin szoka, your initial thoughts on potential changes. Berin i agree with everything she said, and it is not just an important protection but the law that made the internet possible. It would not be possible for websites from the smallest blog to the Biggest Social Network to host content uses created if they could be sued for each of those pieces of content. That is what section 230 protects against, and it protects against websites when they moderate content they find harmful or objectionable. What the administration is trying to do is narrow the protection for content moderation so websites would no longer be protected if they tried to remove content that they thought was false or racist, or even calling for another holocaust. We are talking about some of the most awful content on the internet that i do not want to see and no one wants their children to see, yet the administration thinks websites should be sued for removing the most awful content. That is contrary to what the republicans who wrote 230 had in mind, and a betrayal for everything conservatives have stood for for 25 years. Host Jessica Gonzales. Jessica i have spent a lot of time working with grassroots organizations that are fighting hate and disinformation online. We have worked together on a coalition which is focused on stopping White Supremacists who are organizing violence over a social media platforms. I have worked with a stop hate for Profit Campaign which recently got 1200 advertisers to stop advertising on facebook in july to protest rampant hate and disinformation on the site. I am no fan of big tech that have abused their workers and abused the privacy rights of their users. Frankly, going after section 230 is not the right approach to the very real problems that we are seeing with online platforms, the privacy abuses we are seeing, the way they are extracting ad dollars from the field of journalism. Instead of contributing to journalism, they are spreading massive disinformation about voting, the election and health and safety during the pandemic. I am no fan of the tech platforms. I think we need to look seriously at regulation to rein them in, hold them accountable, make sure they are not abusing their dominance and taking advantage of the american people. Frankly, section 230 and dismantling section 230 is the wrong way to go. If i am the general counsel of twitter or facebook or social media platforms, and i see those protections are removed, the first thing i do is say, dont moderate content at all. That is why 230 was written in the first place. To allow companies to monitor content and moderate content as they see fit. It is their First Amendment right to moderate content on their site. They need to do a better job at that. The solution to what has been very poor content moderation and a failure to adequately remove disinformation and racism from social media platforms will not find a solution by removing 230. In fact, just the opposite. I am particularly aggrieved by what i described as an executive order temper tantrum from the Trump Administration. Freepress has sued the Trump Administration for that executive order. It went it is open for Public Comment at the fcc. The interesting thing we saw is no serious commenters in that proceeding argued that the fcc has authority to do what the Trump Administration is directing it to do, calling for them to essentially censor. We think that executive order should be revoked. If it is not, we feel we have a good chance taking it down in court. Host mr. Szoka. Berin this is about all websites. Fox news, breitbart, gateway pundit, all those websites every day in their terms of Service Reserve the right to remove content that they find objectionable, including racist content and offensive content that the administration would declare out of bounds of the protections of section 230. This is not about somehow conservatives getting what they already expect on the internet. Rather this is turning the internet into Something Like gab. Im not sure if you will thank me for this suggestion, spend an hour looking at it, and you will see what this administration wants the internet to look like. It is the most heinous content out there imaginable. It is limited to a small audience of the worst people in america. There has been an alternative developed popular among conservatives called parlor, used by ted cruz. You will notice they have censored some of that content. You will not find the nword, but plenty of antisemitic content including pro holocaust content. Even this conservative site wants to moderate some content that the administration would deny them the ability to moderate and be protected from a lawsuit, while on the other hand allowing terrible content to flourish on their site that you do not find on facebook and twitter. You hear conservatives complaining about anticonservative bias, this is what we are talking about. It is not joe, the average conservative, being censored, but people like Richard Spencer and david duke. Host we will begin with you, mr. Szoka, when it comes to content moderation, how would you develop a website or social media platform . Berin i want to underscore the First Amendment means this decision is for every operator to make on their own. It is not the role of the government or any policy organization as a regulatory matter what they should do. The Supreme Court has been clear about this. Digital media website operators are like newspaper operators, they have the same rights. With that caveat, i think it is difficult. Jessica noted this. Content moderation is inherently imperfect, it will never please everyone. It is too difficult to do with the scale of the internet. We have seen different approaches. Twitter and facebook are different between the two of them. Twitter has been more permissive. Facebook takes down things and has a difficult time distinguishing between people discussing how terrible antisemitism is, and people promoting antisemitic ideas. That is more problematic during the pandemic because it takes a lot of human beings to do the content moderation. The systems are relying on computers to do that, and they are bad at nuance. It is a difficult question to answer. If i were a Large Social Network and had the resources to hire people, i would do a better job than smaller sites who struggle to distinguish between the kinds of pro racist content or antiracist content we have been discussing. As a general matter, i am concerned misinformation about things like voting and covid is being spread on these platforms. At the same time it is important they find a way to outsource to credible organizations the decision as to who will be treated as an authoritative source. Who counts as a journalist . News guard is a tool developed by the former publisher of the wall street journal. They have done a good job of providing objective rankings of various websites. The more social Media Services rely on independent outlets that , there will be greater confidence to understand gateway pundit is being treated differently because it is not a real media outlet. Host Jessica Gonzales. Jessica i have actually been working with a Coalition Led by women and people of color forgive me for the crude expression are canaries in the coal mine and recognize how harmful and hateful and just plain wrong in terms of lying and disinformation that content is spreading. It is often impacting our communities first, because we see for instance, in my community, i am ex a can american, the latino community, large immigrant community we are seeing the impact of disinformation about immigrants, lies and hate directed at the immigrant community, and how that impacts policy and plain old relationships. How we are treated by our peers in society. I have been working with the change coalition for several years, and we are 60 human rights organizations. We came up with a framework, a series of suggestions. You can find it at changethe term. Og. We have changetheterm. Org. We call for a ban on hateful activities. We have a specific definition we worked on for over a year to make sure we were balancing free expression, and the need to keep people safe on the internet. We are calling for much more robust investment and enforcement, especially by Companies Like facebook who are making money hand over fist and have the resources to do a much better job at enforcing its own rules. Currently facebook failed to enforce the substandard rules it is setting for itself. We are calling for transparency about how content moderation is happening. We are calling for very easy to access so people whose content is taken down by mistake can easily call for it to be put back up. We are calling for Big Tech Companies to take down bots and troll campaigns that trade and hate and disinformation. We are calling for a ban on White Supremacists. In particular we followed with great concern the kenosha guard page on facebook. Two people were killed in kenosha, wisconsin by a paramilitary teenager. We are concerned about the use of facebook pages in particular, and our allies and advocates are listing this concern to facebook for over five years now. The way these pages are used to organize violent events, the way they are used to ask people to bring arms to protests outside of mosques. I am concerned about how these pages will be used to call for arms outside a polling places. I think facebook is not prepared to take action. I am getting a bit offtopic. I have a lot to say about facebook. Back to the model policies, we think these are the bare minimum, a baseline. If social Media Companies can adopt these principles and enforce them, we think that would go a long way to rooting out hate and disinformation that is having a serious impact on women and people of color, and frankly on all of us here in the united states, but also abroad. This is not a call for government regulation. This is a call for the companies themselves to step up and take responsibility for what they are hosting on their platforms. As we go on with this advocacy work, campaign work, it occurs to me that we need to look at the incentive behind the explosion of hate and disinformation on facebook and other social media platforms. We need to examine that as a society. Just to finish my thought, what i am talking about here is the fact facebook and other social Media Companies make a ton of money based off of high engagement and hate and disinformation often yield that engagement. We need to look at that incentive as we figure out what solutions we need. Host that leads into our next topic, there have been calls in washington for the breakup of some of these larger social Media Companies. Jessica gonzales, what are your thoughts . Jessica i think we need to take a deep look at how these companies are using their market power, how they are abusing their power over employees, looking at whether they are engaging in anticompetitive behavior, or have monopoly status, that is absolutely on the table. Take a deep look at that. A couple weeks ago the House Judiciary Committee began their investigation in earnest at a hearing with some of the tech ceos. Lets look at that, but also look at how they are abusing the privacy rights of people here in the u. S. And abroad. That is where i think we can work toward regulation to ensure privacy and civil rights are protected on these platforms. Honestly, i read with great interest senator warrens capitalization act that would turn large corporations to have social responsibility to the american people. I am interested in that approach as it provides for an examination into the incentives that lead these companies to monetize hate and disinformation. The final thing, i think there are a lot of different inquiries to be undertaking right now to understand the harms social Media Companies are causing to the american people, and to examine a variety of remedies beyond what we are assessing here. I think we also need to look at how the decline in journalism makes it harder to fight online disinformation. We have shuttered tons of newsrooms in the past decade. We have lost almost 50 of journalists in newsrooms. The ad dollars that used to go to newspapers that produced journalism are now being spent online. That is why at free press we are thinking a lot of a platform add tax to take a small portion of the giant revenues that the tech platforms are earning and turn that back to journalism. That in itself can help root out disinformation, root out lies, and tell the truth. We have a paper on our site at freepress. Net that sets out ideas for how to get at the disinformation problem with more information and actually investing robustly in quality independent nonprofit journalism. Host berin szoka. Berin the Trump Administration would agree with most of jessica just said, they would love to be in charge of deciding who gets funding and qualifies as journalists. I am terrified of that. I think state funding of journalism is inherently dangerous. What killed the newspaper is not facebook or twitter, it is craigs list, the ability of people to put up classifieds which previously they had done on newspapers. The Business Model for media has always been about advertising. It is not just the display ads. We cannot put the genie back in the bottle. We need to get the government out of the way mostly. I am sympathetic to this problem. I think journalism has suffered terribly. I dont think the solution is government funding. Instead, what we need to do first and foremost is maintain section 230, because without that online newspapers would not be able to engage with users. They would be like netflix, only present content and not the content posted by users. I think this idea of breaking up tech will solve the problems is also problematic. It is the case that the bigger sites are better able to do content moderation for the reasons we have been discussing. I know it is not done perfectly im sure jessica has great ideas how it can be improved, but as a practical matter it is the case those are more likely to be in limited at figure companies with better equipped teams and resources who cannot just hire people, but develop algorithms that can help websites to clean up content. This is not just about social networks. It is also about, complaints we are hearing from conservatives is that the websites are being censored because google is trying to shut them down. What they are talking about is that the federalists had a serious problem with openly racist content in its comments. Google took a position they were not going to allow ads to appear next to that content, which is reasonable and they have a First Amendment right to do. Then the question becomes, how does a website operator cleanup content in their comments section . It is not easy to do. The answer is technological innovation. Kugel and other services are building better tools to distinguish google and other services are building better tools to distinguish pro racist content so they can continue to have comments on their pages for their articles and show ads, and not get into fights where the federalist decided to shut down the comments section because it was easier than cleaning up the terrible thing their readers say. It is more complicated than just big tech, and the only way out of these problems is to innovate. Host both of our guests are attorneys. Berin szoka, give us a snapshot of tech freedom. Berin we like to say we are lawyers for the future. The First Amendment is at the heart of all of our work. In general we are concerned about the potential for abuse by whoever might be in power next. It is unfortunate a lot of people have not seen that the Trump Administration has revealed the many ways the government can weaponize law and regulation for political advantage. What i would like to see happen in the next administration is Something Like what happened in the Ford Administration when there was a concerted effort to learn from the abuses of power that took place under president nixon, then create commissions to study those problems, and implement statutory changes. I would like to see that happen now, i can work with people across the political spectrum. We ought to be talking about things like the war powers of the president and his ability to shut down Internet Services. Those things should be reformed. That is the kind of work we do at tech freedom. Consumer protection law, privacy, competition law. We try to promote a future where the government has a role to protect consumers, but to protect against the abuse of power is