Is it time to revisit liability immunity for Facebook, Twitter and their online platform cousins?
Some 20 years ago, when Mark Zuckerberg was a teen teaching himself code, and Facebook had yet to be imagined, a carveout in communications law granted immunity to online platforms for the content they carry. Unlike traditional publications such as The New York Times, which could be held liable for knowingly publishing false or defamatory content, the new online universes of My Space, Yelp, and TripAdvisor were given a pass.
Back then, “[t]his strange medium-specific subsidy for online content platforms made good if not perfect sense,” writes Jonathan Zittrain, a member of the Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy, in The Recorder. “The Internet was newly mainstream, and many content portals comprised the proverbial two people in a garage….What made sense for a newspaper publishing at most five or six letters a day amidst its more carefully vetted articles truly couldn’t work for a small Internet startup processing thousands or even millions of comments or other contributions in the same interval.”
Fast forward to today, when we’re grappling with damage done by the posting of mis- and dis-information on such platforms. Zittrain argues it may be time to revisit this immunity, and take an incremental approach toward holding platforms accountable. “A refined [Communications Decency Act] could take into account the fact that Facebook and others know exactly whom they’ve reached: perhaps a more reasonable and fitting remedy for defamation would be less to assess damages against the company for having abetted it, but rather to require a correction or other followup to go to others who saw — and perhaps came to believe — the defamatory content.”
Zittrain is a professor of international law at Harvard University and a member of the Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy. Read Zittrain’s full article in The Recorder, and tell us: should Facebook, Twitter and other online platforms be held accountable for content they spread? If so, how?
