When the printing press was unveiled, authorities were frightened. Royalty, the church, and the nobility, to a man, were scared.
The last thing they wanted was information to be given to the common people without it being vetted through them and their lens.
They knew that the purveyor of information to the people influenced the masses, and they wanted to be that purveyor.
The invention of the printing press opened the information floodgates for the people. Yet, at the time because there was almost no democracy to speak of in the world, the powerful maintained their hold on most information by carefully regulating and then destroying printing presses when it wasn’t in their interests.
Because power resided solely with the elites, as printing and publishing expanded, so did two other things: learning and democracy.
The wider dissemination of information gave more knowledge to more people. Soon thereafter, the idea of universal education for children blossomed, succeeded by universal education for adolescents, followed by, in many Western liberal democracies, free university education.
Additionally, as democracy grew in the Age of Reason, this belief in freedom of speech became not only a rallying cry, but also one of the sacred pillars of democracy.
However, not one without limits.
In liberal Western democracies, the right to freedom of speech and freedom of the press not only became enshrined in constitutions and statutes, but also became regulated both by legislatures and courts.
Why did this happen? Because the search of humanity is not for freedom to speak one’s mind or to publish whatever one wants, but for Truth and Knowledge through a marketplace of ideas.
But, when speech infringes on someone else’s rights or is used to harm another through lies and calls for harm, people throughout the world work rigorously to regulate and punish that speech – and rightly so.
The rise of the internet is simply the next step in the information revolution of humankind. Much like the printing presses of old which allowed an exponential increase in the amount of information and knowledge transferred to folks at a fast rate, social media corporations, their platforms and applications have allowed individuals – as well as organizations – to do the same at an even greater pace.
As the internet began to increase in size and scope, regulations were frowned upon by most people in liberal democracies. The only ones who wanted to control it were authoritarian governments like China, North Korea, and middle eastern kingdoms, who knew that information and disinformation were powers they wanted to manipulate.
The remainder of the world saw the internet as a bastion of freedom of speech.
The U.S. Congress in 1996 went so far as to pass Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which states that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
This enshrined into American law the proposition that an internet company or social media platform could not be liable for simply providing the platform for another’s speech because it was not a publisher or speaker.
Clearly, this must change. The internet is a business place for markets, ideas, products, and information. They are all saleable quantities, and the platforms and companies themselves are worth trillions of dollars.
Their owners make money off of the information they gather from their users. They make money from the corporations which advertise on their platforms. They profit by selling the information they collect. In every aspect of the business, they are profiting.
Now is the time to make them liable for what is published on their platforms that is false, libelous, defamatory, injurious, and hurtful.
And Artificial Intelligence is the tool they can use to make this a seamless transition.
AI allows them to protect their sites from being used in a such a way that would subvert democracy and democratic institutions and the dissemination of falsehoods, slander, libel and hurtful speech.
The same technology that will allow companies to find malevolent deep fakes created by AI, also will allow them to reduce or eliminate their own liability in this arena without relying upon blanket governmental-granted legal immunity.
It will allow the search for truth to be the primary goal of the social media companies without sacrificing profit, and the transfer of truthful knowledge – not by banning free speech but by regulating protected speech that seeks the truth and justice – and not permitting speech whose purpose is to disinform, to cheat, and to harm people.
The same rules that permit the government to say that communicating or threatening an illegal act orally or in print to another is a crime, means one cannot allow a social media site to post that on its platform and not be liable for being a part of its dissemination. For in reality, but-for the platform itself, the threat could not be communicated. And when the platform itself can stop the threat or lies, it has a duty to do so.
When the truth is no longer the truth, but only an opinion, it is a problem for democracy and for
humanity.
Social media companies cannot be given a pass in their role under the guise of freedom of speech when their platforms are the mechanisms whereby dishonesty, lies, threats and frauds are being committed.
The rule of law will determine when they have failed in their role as a gatekeeper, just like when it determines when Fox News or the New York Times has failed in its role as a gatekeeper. Their failure will be costly.
Internet Social Media platforms must be held to that same standard. The elimination of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is the first step.
Congress needs to act now.
dum spiro, spero 