Joe Lieberman Couldn't Understand Content Moderation When He Was A Senator, But Says If We Get Rid Of 230, It'll Be Fine

Content Moderation

from the oh-shut-up dept

Former Senator Joe Lieberman was a ridiculous censorial problem when he was a Senator. Back in the early days of social media, when the first questions of content moderation were first gaining attention, Lieberman was perhaps the original moral panic Senator, demanding censorship of 1st Amendment protected content. It started back in 2008, when he sent an angry letter to YouTube, saying that they had to take down “terrorist content.” YouTube reviewed a bunch of the links he sent, and removed only the ones that violated YouTube’s policies. That made Lieberman mad and he sent a second letter demanding that the company take down “terrorist” videos. He also did the same thing to Twitter. Because of the political pressure, these companies became more aggressive, leading them to… take down a human rights watchdog that was documenting war crimes. Because sometimes “terrorist videos” are actually… “documenting war crimes.”

A smarter person might step back and realize that there’s a lot of nuance here, and what seems “easy” may be a bit more complex. But not old Joe Lieberman. Instead, he ramped up his desire to censor. He demanded Amazon stop hosting Wikileaks, and ordered Google to add a “this blog is run by a terrorist” button to all Blogger blogs. He also tried to expand the Espionage Act to cover journalists who publish leaked information.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that when CBS News asked Lieberman to come on with Major Garrett and discuss Section 230 and content moderation, Lieberman immediately jumped to “they should get rid of 230” and censor more nonsense. Major Garrett kicks the conversation off with… a total misrepresentation of Section 230.

Garrett: You referred to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and it does give essentially a carte blanche… there is no liability for… platforms for dissemination and placing essentially a foundation beneath things that are disinformation. You said it should be changed.

First of all, that awkward statement is… not accurate. Disinformation is protected by the 1st Amendment. Platforms have no liability for disinformation because of the 1st Amendment not because of Section 230. You’d think that someone on CBS News, which relies heavily on the 1st Amendment, would know that.

I mean, if providing a platform for disinformation wasn’t protected, why, we could all sue CBS News for the disinformation spewed in this interview by Major Garrett and Joe Lieberman… about Section 230. Anyway, Lieberman does his Lieberman thing:

Lieberman: So, the social media companies. The internet platforms have such impact in so many ways. Just think about it. A lot of the activity leading up to January 6th occurred on the internet.

Yeah. But it also occurred on TV. A lot of it occurred coming out of the President’s mouth. A lot of it occurred on Fox News. So why are you blaming the internet?

The terrorists communicate. The Islamic terrorists on jihadist websites.

Um. So are you saying people shouldn’t communicate? Do we take away phone service from people who might be terrorists? And, Joe, if they’re communicating on Jihadist websites that means they’re not communicating on social media. If you force them off social media, then they communicate elsewhere where it’s harder for the intelligence community to track them.

Finally, Lieberman does recognize that maybe the solution isn’t easy, but then he immediately jumps to a “nerd harder” kind of thinking:

You know, it’s not easy, for the internet companies. But, to give them total immunity from liability encourages them to be irresponsible. Not responsible at all for what’s on the internet.

Except that’s wrong. Facebook has hired 30,000 content moderators and invested heavily in technology to help as well. If they were “not responsible at all” why would they do that? All of the big social media companies have a large policy and trust & safety teams that takes all of these issues very seriously. And just because you don’t have legal liability, it doesn’t mean there aren’t tremendous other reasons and incentives for the companies to be responsible. Without good moderation practices, sites fill up with spam, abuse, and harassment and that drives away users. It also drives away advertisers. So these companies have a strong self-interest in doing the best job they can when it comes to moderation.

So, look. One simple answer, maybe not the best, but it would do it, would be to just repeal that exemption from liability, that Section 230 gives these companies. And what does that mean? It means that they could be SUUUUEED by victims of whatever is on their platform. They’ll probably look for something less than that. But that is a simple clean answer, and it ultimately leaves it to our system of law and our courts.

Yes, he drags out the “sued.” But… Joe… sued for what? Again, so far everything you’ve described is protected speech under the 1st Amendment. So what are they going to be sued for? For making you upset? That’s not how any of this works.

The reason I said it’s not easy for the companies is this: there’s obviously some things that just shouldn’t be on there, and they should just take them off. I once had a conversation with somebody at YouTube, and I was complaining about the incendiary, violent, stimulating, sermons by a particular Islamic cleric who was operating out of Yemen. Eventually we killed him with a drone. His name was Awlaki. And the woman I was speaking to at YouTube said, ‘you know what, we understand what you’re saying, but how can we tell the difference between just a regular sermon he’s giving and when he’s actually inciting violence?’ And I said, it’s not easy, but you can do it. [Laughs] I mean, I can tell the difference between whether, when a priest or a minister or a rabbi… of course, none of them that I know are incentivizing violence [Laughs]… But when they’re over the line, or they’re just talking to a religious base. And they can do it too.

This is so ignorant it’s depressing. He totally missed the point of what the person from YouTube was trying to tell him. Determining which content is okay and which is not when you’re dealing with 500 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, in a variety of languages around the world, and some of it using euphemisms or coded speech, is not the same as Lieberman himself sitting there deciding “oh this video is bad.” What the person from YouTube was trying to tell him is the same thing that we’ve been saying here for years. It’s not that it’s not easy, it’s that it’s impossible to do it well, because humanity and society is messy. And we can see that in the way that Lieberman’s earlier demands to censor “terrorism” resulted in the disappearance of war crimes documentation from human rights groups.

Lieberman may laugh that off, but it’s only because he’s a very foolish man. Repealing Section 230 fixes none of what he’s talking about.

A good reporter might have pointed that out. But this is CBS News, which just recently did an entire misleading 60 Minutes episode that got almost everything about Section 230 wrong.

You really want to believe that major media companies — who failed to embrace the internet — aren’t purposefully lying about Section 230 to help out their own corporations, but it happens so incredibly often that it really makes you wonder.

Filed Under: content moderation, joe lieberman, section 230
Companies: youtube