Break Down or Make Up?

“Breaking news from CNN…” “Break down the war of Russia-Ukraine by Dr….” Wait, hold on a sec. Every time now I heard about these starters, I pause for a bit. Before I believe it, I will do my own fact check first. Because nowadays, it’s really hard to tell the truth from fake or twisted news. Sometimes, before you even know it, people accidentally help make up the stories instead of breaking them down.

Fake news outbreak on Twitter and many other social platform amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Can the viral spread be stopped? I don’t think so. In Western, there is no denying that we all depend on information from CNN, ABC, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, but how do we tackle with disinformation related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the fake news related to it?

“I’ve seen more fake news in 1 weeks that in all my whole life!!!”

Someone from twitter angrily post his thought after he found out that a wide spread video clip of a soldier kissing his loved ones and leaving for fight happened to be a part of the film The War of Chimeras.

Video claimed Ukraine soldier joined to fight, but the clip was from a film

It’s not alone, social media users are sharing a fabricated story about a CNN journalist that was allegedly “executed” by the Taliban in Afghanistani, is also the first American casualty in the Ukraine Crisis. But no such stories were posted by the news outlet and the screenshotted tweets come from unverified Twitter accounts posing as CNN pages. Yet, many users are too naïve to believe that they were true while others going for a fact check, some retweeted about the story and shared them along the social media.

“A man that can die twice”-fake news in the 2022 Ukraine Crisis

Who is responsible for illegal speech? Historically, the laws on intermediary liability — the extent to which a third party is legally responsible for the speech of others — have treated those who publish content differently from those who distribute it. Booksellers and newsstands, for example, are not legally responsible when a book or newspaper they distribute contains illegal content, but the publishers of that illegal content are legally responsible. The rise of online services, from early blogs and forums to search engines, social media, online marketplaces, and more, complicated the issue because they blurred the lines between distributors and publishers. In the early days of practice, an outdated legal precedent that no longer reflected the realities of an Internet-enabled world. To address this problem, Congress of the United States moved to pass legislation that would provide clarity and create an innovation-friendly environment online. This law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, has since become the central piece of legislation governing online intermediary liability in the United States.

WHAT IS SECTION 230?

Section 230 includes two main provisions: one that protects online services and users from liability when they do not remove third-party content, and one that protects them from liability when they do remove content.

· Section 230 is not a limitless legal shield. Online services are still liable for violating federal criminal or copyright law, or for violating federal or state sex-trafficking law.

· Congress enacted Section 230 to remove legal barriers that would disincentivize online services from moderating content and to encourage continued growth and development of the Internet in its early years.

· Section 230 has allowed a wide variety of business models to flourish online and is partly responsible for creating the modern Internet.

· Without Section 230’s legal protections, online services would face large legal expenses that would be detrimental to competition, innovation, and the U.S. economy.

Proponents refer to Section 230 as “a core pillar of Internet freedom” and “the most important law protecting Internet speech,”responsible for creating “the Internet as we know it.” Knowledge-sharing websites such as Wikipedia, which rely on user contributions for content, and volunteer editors for “quality control,” also are granted liability protection under Section 230. According to the Wikimedia Foundation, this “community self-governance model” would not be possible without Section 230’s liability shield.

Criticizers refer to Section 230 as an accomplice of spreading hatred and uncheck misinformation without the risk of being punished. There are dedicated employees from MSM working against misinformation and spread of hatred. For example, Meta has taken down a network for targeting people in Ukraine who posed as news editors, aviation engineers and authors to spread misinformation around the Russian invasion across social media platforms. It’s just not enough, and impossible to monitor and remove every potentially unlawful or offensive post. For instance, every sixty seconds, Facebook’s billions of users post an average of 510,000 comments, 292,000 status updates, and 136,000 photos. Facebook has 15,000 content reviewers working around the world to remove posts that violate the website’s community standards, yet still some posts manage to slip through the cracks.

My opinion is that section 230 is a regulation that needs to be considered for updated. When there are too many negative influences and misinformation on a social platform, the censorship of the platform needs to be improved.

What good actors have to gain is a clearer delineation between their services and those of bad actors. A duty of care standard will only hold accountable those who fail to meet the duty. By contrast, broader regulatory intervention could limit the discretion of, and impose costs on, all businesses, whether they act responsibly or not. The odds of imposing such broad regulation increase the longer harms from bad actors persist.

In other words, Section 230 must change.

-Charles