Amidst vague and uninformed questions during today’s House Judiciary hearing with Facebook, Google, and Twitter on social media filtering practices, Representative Steve King (R-Iowa) dropped a bombshell. “What about converting the large behemoth organizations we’re talking about here into public utilities?”
King’s suggestion followed his inquiries about right-wing outlet Gateway Pundit losing reach on social media and how Facebook’s algorithm worked. The insinuation was that these companies cannot properly maintain fair platforms for discourse.
The Representative also suggested that there may be need for “review” of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that protects interactive computer services from being treated as the publisher of content users post on their platforms. If that rule was changed, social media companies could be held responsible for illegal content from copyright infringement or child pornography appearing on their platform. That would potentially cripple the social media industry, requiring extensive pre-vetting of any content they display.
The share prices of the tech giants did not see significant declines upon the Representative’s comments, indicating the markets don’t necessarily fear that overbearing regulation of this nature is likely.
This story is developing
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