This week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing titled “Preserving Free Speech and Reining in Big Tech Censorship.” Lawmakers at the hearing trotted out the usual misunderstandings of these concepts, and placed the blame on Section 230, the law that actually promotes free speech online.
However, buried in these misunderstandings from Congress, and most of the witnesses called to testify, was a genuinely serious problem: Government officials keep asking online services to remove or edit users’ speech, raising the specter of unconstitutional interference with private platforms’ moderation decisions. And worse, the public lacks any transparency into how often this occurs.
Regardless of your ideological preference, we should always worry about government coercion that results in censoring users’ speech online, which violates the First Amendment and threatens human rights globally. The government is free to try to persuade online services to remove speech it believes is harmful, but the choice to remove users’ speech should always remain with the platform.
So Congress is right to investigate the relationship between platforms and the government, and both should be more transparent about official requests to remove users’ content.
The First Amendment And Section 230 Enable Content Moderation
One witness at the hearing, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, discovered that much of what he posted about COVID-19 mitigation strategies was being moderated by Twitter to reduce its visibility, at the request of government health officials. The decisions made about his Twitter handle were not explained to him at the time, but were later shown to him after Twitter changed ownership. This lack of transparency is problematic. That’s why, for years, groups such as EFF have pressed Big Tech companies to be more clear to users about their decision making processes, especially when those decisions
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