Mitch McConnell agrees to $2000 stimulus checks for a repeal of section 230 in surprise COVID19 relief bill.

Repeal of Section 230 can be a poison pill for the Democrats.

BreaknLinks

Washington
Photo Courtesy|Rod Lamkey-Pool/Getty Images

On Tuesday night, McConnell introduced a new bill tying increased stimulus payments to a full repeal of Section 230. The bill comes amid new momentum for direct $2000 stimulus payments, and increasing pressure on party leaders to appease President Trump’s escalating demands.

Section 230 says 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." In other words, online intermediaries that host or republish speech are protected against a range of laws that might otherwise be used to hold them legally responsible for what others say and do. The protected intermediaries include not only regular Internet Service Providers (ISPs), but also a range of "interactive computer service providers," including basically any online service that publishes third-party content.

Section 230 gives content providers protection from liability to remove and moderate content that they or their users consider to be “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.” It allows BIG Corps like Facebook, Twitter, etc to decide what is to be 'posted' and what isn't in their platforms. This often doesn't deal with copyright issues but it deals with other issues such as obscenity, hate speech etc.

Critics of the section 230 often claim that the section has been misused by the "big-techs" to surpress the voice and cloud the judgment. Republicans also accuse "Big Techs" of falsely censoring the news and posts in favour of democrats as an strategy to rig the election. Facebook and Twitter actively censored Trumps tweets during the elections some of which were just "presentation of facts in alternate manner", not fake information.

Trump via his twitter said ,

Section 230, which is a liability shielding gift from the U.S. to “Big Tech” (the only companies in America that have it - corporate welfare!), is a serious threat to our National Security & Election Integrity. Our Country can never be safe & secure if we allow it to stand.....

As the hard line democrats including president-elect Joe Biden highly rely on their neo-liberal policies. This act can be a poison pill for them.

Publish : 2020-12-30 11:45:00

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