Joe Biden Has Officially Joined the Misguided Crusade Against Online Free Speech

In an effort to force Facebook to change its policy towards negative ads targeting his campaign, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is apparently willing to trash the federal law that guarantees free speech online.

Biden's campaign and Facebook have been feuding for weeks over Facebook's policy of allowing political campaigns to buy ads on the site to spread possibly false information.

Just 26 words long, Section 230 promises that online platforms will not be held liable for content provided by users or other publishers.

As Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown has written, the effort to carve away at Section 230 is backed by lawmakers on both the right and left.

In practice, stripping away Section 230 protections likely would result in platforms significantly restricting the content they would host.

Indeed, newspapers and TV stations are not held liable for false statements made in campaign adswhich seems to be the standard Biden wants to impose on digital platformsbut are free to reject ads if they choose.

It's understandable that Biden is frustrated with Facebook's policy toward ads targeting his campaign, but that's not a good reason to scrap the federal policies that have allowed the internet to grow and prosper for decades.

Hawley wants to threaten social.mefia with repealing 230 so that they will apply their policies in a more transparent and equitable way.

Holding Facebook liable for a users false statement is like holding CNN liable if candidate Biden made a false statement on their Town Hall last night,

The Eighth Amendment prohibition against excessive fines and fees applies to states as well, SCOTUS rules, opening a new way to challenge outlandish forfeitures.

Original article
Author: EricBoehm87

The latest Tweets from Eric Boehm (@EricBoehm87). Pennsylvania native living in DC after doing time in Minnesota. Writes @Reason. Chronologically ambiguous. Stay hungry, stay free and do the best that you can. Arlington VA

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