Inequality, trust in government, and political stability. This week on the communicator a discussion of some of the tech issues that made play a role in campaign 2020. Joining us from washington d. C. Is a barron souk who is a founder of a group called tech freedom. And from los angeles, jessica is coceo of a group called free press. Ms. Gonzalo, i want to start with news that is breaking as we are taping this. And that is a potential look at section 230, the liability portion of the Communications Act. Impossible changes to it. First of all, what is your view and your groups view on section 230 . And what you think about possible changes . Section 230 is an important mechanism to defend free speech on the internet. We think that it should largely remain in place. In many of the attacks on 230 and especially the president executive order that he issued in response to twitter, Fact Checking amounts to very problematic censorship that runs contrary to the First Amendment. There in your initial thoughts on attentional changes . I will greet their several things that she said. Its an important protection that made todays internet possible from the smallest blogs to the biggest to host concept of the users are using if they can be sued for each and every one of those pieces of contents. That is what section 230 protects against freight also protects the websites when they moderate content that they may find harmful or objectionable. Or if the administration is trying to do here is narrowly protection for content moderation so that websites would no longer be protected if they remove content perhaps racist or perhaps even calling for another holocaust. We are talking at some the most awful content on the internet that i dont want to say for you probably dont want to see annoyed with her children to see. And yet the administration seems to think that websites should be sued for removing the most awful kinds of content out there. Thats exactly contrary to what the republicans who wrote section 230 had in mind. It is a betrayal of everything that conservatives stood for for the last 25 years. Jessica gonzalo. I have spent a lot of time, peter with working with grassroots organizations that are fighting hate and disinformation online we have worked together on a coalition called the change the term, coalition which is really focused on stopping White Supremacists who are organizing for violence over social media platforms. I looked at the stop hate Profit Campaign which recently got over 1200 advertisers to stop advertising on facebook in the month of july to protest rampant hate and disinformation on these sites. I am no fan of big tech platform and how they abuse their workers. And how they abuse the privacy rights of their users. But frankly, going after section 230 is not the right approach to the very real problem that we are seeing with Online Platforms the privacies the way they are being extracting ad dollars from the field of journalism. And instead of contributing to journalism, they are actually spreading massive amounts of disinformation about important topics like voting, the election, and even health and safety during the pandemic. So i am no fan of the tech platform. I do think we need to look seriously at regulation to rein them in, to hold them accountable, to make sure they are not abusing their dominance and taking advantage of the american people. But frankly, section 230 and dismantling section 230 is the wrong way to go. Look at finally general counsel of twitter or facebook, or smaller social media platforms and i see those protections are removed, the first thing i do is just dont moderate content at all. And that was why 230 was written 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 of that. But the solution to what has been very poor content moderation and a failure to adequately remove disinformation and racism from social media platforms that will not find a solution by removing 230. In fact, just the opposite. I am particularly aggrieved by what i have described as an executive order ten. Tantrum from a Trump Administration. Free press has sued the Trump Administration for that executive order. It is that open for Public Comments and the fcc. Interesting thing that we saw in the fcc proceedings is no serious commenters in that proceeding argued that the fcc actually has authority to do with the Trump Administration is directing it to do by calling for them to essentially censor. So we think the executive order should be revoked. But if it is not, we feel there is a very good chance taking it down in court. I would just add to that this is not about big tech. It is about all websites. Fox news, gateway pundit, all of these sites that conservatives read every day. All of them in their terms of Service Reserve the right to remove content they find objectionable. Including racist content and other offensive content that the administration would declare to be out of bounds for the protections of section 230. So this is not about conservatives getting what they arty expect today on the internet. Rather this is about turning the internet into Something Like a gab. If youve never been a gap, i am not sure youll thank me for this section. But spend an hour looking at it. You will see what this administration looks like. Its the most heinous content out there imaginable. At gap has been limited to a very small audience of frankly terrible, the worst people in america. There is but an alternative that has developed, its been conservative its called parlor used by some people like ted cruz and so on. You will notice they have censored some of that contents. You will not find the n word used as a there. It will find plenty of antisemitic content including pro holocaust content. So even the conservative site on the one hand, was to moderate some of the content that the administration would deny them the ability to moderate and still be protected from lawsuit, while on the other hand allowing some really terrible content to flourish on their site that we dont find on facebook and twitter. So, when you hear conservatives complaining about anti conservative bias, just understand this is really what we are talking about. It is not show the average conservative being censored for its people like Richard Spencer and david duke. Host so we will begin with you, when it comes to content moderation, how would you develop a website . On a social media platform . Want to underscore the First Amendment is this is for every operator to make on its own for itself aerobic government or any policy organization to insist as a regulatory matter what they should do, the Supreme Court is a very clear about this. Digital media, operators are like newspaper operators for they have this first same amendment rights. So with that caveat, i think its very difficult. Jessica noted this content moderation is inherently imperfect. It is never going to please everyone. It is too difficult to do on the scale of the internet. Now to answer your question, weve seen very different approaches. Twitter and facebook are between the two of them have been much more permissive, facebook takes down things and has a difficult time distinguishing between people for example discussing how terrible antisemitism is and people who are promoting those ideas. That is become more problematic during the pandemic because it takes a lot of human beings to that content moderation for they have to do it at the office. These systems are relying more and more and theyre very bad at nuance. It is a difficult question to answer. If i were a very Large Social Network and have the resources to hire people i would do a better job of it than the smaller sites that struggle to distinguish between the kinds of pro racist content or antiracist content that we have just been discussing. But as a general matter, i am concerned misinformation, particular about things like voting and covid is being spread on these platforms. At the same time i think it is important that they find a way to let say outsourced to credible organizations the decision as to who is going to be treated as an authoritative source . Whos a journalist . New start is a tool developed by a former publisher of the wall street journal leading conservative journalists. The dinner very good job of providing objective rankings of various websites according to the reliability. Social Media Services is greater confidence to understand gateway is being treated different because its not a real media outlet. Host Jessica Gonzales. Ive been led by a coalition of women of color who are often, forgive me for the crude expression canaries in the coal mine. Recognizing how harmful, hatefu hateful, and just plain wrong in terms of lie and disinformation, that type of content is spreading pretty soft at impacting our communities first. While we see our instance, large print community we are seeing the impact of this information about immigration immigrants, about lives and hate directed at the immigrant community. And how that impacts policy. How that impacts just plain old relationships, how we are treated by our peers and society. So ive been working with the change, the term coalition for several years now. We are over 60 human rights organizations. We actually came up with a framework. A series of suggestions. You can find it change the ter term. Org that we have for social Media Companies that are looking to do socially responsible content moderation. We call for a ban on hateful activities. We have a very specific definition theyve worked on for over a year to make sure they are balancing free expression. And the need to keep people safe on the internet. Especially Companies Like facebook to do a much better jo job. Facebook fails to enforce these substandard rules et cetera for itself, we are also calling for transparency about how content moderation is happening, we are calling for very easy to access appeals so we have content taken down right mistake can easily call for it to be put back up. We are calling for Big Tech Companies to take down bot trade and information call for a band of white supremacy, in particular we followed with great concern the osha guard event page on facebook as we all know people who were killed in kenosha by paramilitary teenager we are concerned about the use of facebook pages in particular. Been lifting it up for over five years now the way that pages are used to organize violence events the way they are used to ask people to bring armed to protest outside of mosques. I am concerned frankly, about how event pages will be used to called for arms outside of polling places. I think facebook is not prepared to take action. But im getting a bit offtopic. I have of court a lot to say about facebook. But back to the model policies themselves, we think these are the bare minimum if social Media Companies that adopt these principles and enforce them with think that would go a long way to rooting out hate and disinformation. Its 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. And you know, as we go on with this advocacy work, this campaign work, it really occurred to me that we need to look the incentives behind the explosion of hate and disinformation on other social media platforms. We need to really examine that as a society. It looks youre trying to get in there. Thats my thought for a moment. What im talking about heres the fact that facebook and other social Media Companies make a ton of money they stop high engagement, hate and disinformation often yield that level of engagement. What. Two and that leads into the topic was there have been calls in washington for the breakup for larger social Media Companies. Jessica gonzales what are your thoughts . I think we needed take a deeper look at how these companies are abusing their market power. How they are abusing their power over employees. I think looking at whether they are engaging in anticompetitive behavior or if they have monopoly status is absolutely on the table. Lets take a deep look at that. A couple weeks ago the House Speaker judiciary committee, began their investigation in earnest at a hearing with some of the ceos. So sure, lets look at that. Lets 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 really look toward regulation to ensure that privacy and civil rights are protected on these platforms. And i honestly i read with great interest, senator warrens accountable capitalism that would turn large corporations into corporations that have social responsibility to the american people. And i am interested in that approach as it provides an examination into the incentives that i think the final thing, i think theres a lot of different inquiries that we need to be undertaking right now to understand the harms that social Media Companies are causing to the american people. And also to examine a variety of remedies that go beyond what we are expecting here to those harms. But i will say, i think we also really need to look at how the decline in journalism makes it harder to fight online disinformation prayed we have shuttered tons of newsrooms in the past decade. We have lost almost 50 of journalist and newsrooms. And the ad dollars that used to go to news papers we can take a small portion of the giant revenues turn that back to journalism helps root out misinformation and rise attend lies. Jan facebook that sets out some ideas on how to get at the disinformation problem with more information. And by actually investing robustly in quality, independence, nonprofit journalism. Barron . The Trump Administration might agree with most of what jessica just said. They would love to be in chart and Estate Planning and journalism is inherently dangerous. What killed the newspaper is not waste facebook or twitter its the ability previously theyve done on newspapers, always about advertising but is not just the display ads were talking about today. You cannot put the genie back in the bottle. We needed to get that out of the way mostly unsympathetic has suffered terribly. What we need to be doing first and foremost is maintaining section 230. Online newspapers would not be able to engage with users. In their present their content not there content posted by users. I think it is just this idea breaking up big tech sites are better able i know its not done perfectly about how it could improve. But as a practical matter, i think it is probably the case its more than likely does it with Better Companies i figure companies with bigger teams and resources that cannot just hire people bit develop algorithms that can help websites clean up content part of give you an example for this is not just about social networks. Its also about a lot of the complaints we are hearing from conservatives is that websites are being censored because google is trying to shut them down. While what theyre actually talking about the federals had a really serious problem with openly racist comment. And google took a position they were not going to let their ads to appear next to that contents. Which is perfectly reasonable. They have the First Amendment right to do. The question comes how does a website operator clean up content in their Comment Section . Its not so easy to do. And the answer as of most things heres technological innovation. Google and other services are building better tools to try to distinguish between for example through racist content and antiracist content. And make that available to website operators so they can continue to have comments on their pages their articles and show ads next to that and not get into fights theyre getting into now with defendant was for example, decided just to shut down the Comment Section because it out thats easier than trying to clean up the terrible things the readers say. Again, its more complicated than big tech. The only were going to get out of these problems is to innovate. Statement both of our guests are attorneys. Gives a snapshot of tech freedom. We like to say were lawyers for the future. We are engaged in everything we do as lawyers and the First Amendment is at the heart of all of our work. And in general we are very concerned about the potential for abuse by whoever might be in power next. I think it is very unfortunate that a lot of people have not seen the Trump Administration has revealed the many ways that the government can weaponize law and regulation for political advantage. But i would like to see happen in the next administration is Something Like what happened in the ford administration. Theres a very concerted effort to learn from the abuse of power that took place under president nixon. And then to create commissions to study those problems and implement vast changes. Like to see that happen now. Im sure it just go we worked together on surveillance issues and civil the ready spread biot to be talking about things like the war powers of the president the president s ability to shut down Internet Services. Boatswain should be reformed for thats the kind of work we do at tech freedom. We apply that thinking on multiple fronts. Consumer protection law, privacy, competition law, we try to promote a future where the government has a role to protect consumers. But we try to protect abusive