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4 highlights from Senate social media censorship hearing

Graham calls for 'Section 230' to be changed

Committee Chair Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., began the hearing by expressing concerns about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which “basically allows social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to pass off information without legal liability.”

He contends that the measure needs to be rewritten. 

Graham noted that traditional media outlets like newspapers and television stations, which are subject to legal liability, “have rules and regulations.”

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“What I want to try to find out is if you’re not a newspaper at Twitter or Facebook, then why do you have editorial control over the New York Post?” he asked.

Graham recounted how social media companies decided that “New York Post articles about Hunter Biden needed to be flagged, excluded from distribution or made hard to find.”

“That, to me, seems like you’re the ultimate editor,"  he argued. "The editorial decision at the New York Post to run the story was overridden by Twitter and Facebook in different fashions to prevent its dissemination. Now, if that’s not making an editorial decision, I don’t know what would be."

Graham pointed out a double standard about Twitter’s flagging process. He showed one tweet, where an Iranian Ayatollah asked why it was a crime to question the Holocaust and why insulting the Prophet Muhammad was allowed.

Another tweet, posted alongside the tweet from the Ayatollah for contrast was written by former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, a Republican, who raised concerns about ballot harvesting and mail-in voting.

Haley’s tweet was flagged while the Ayatollah’s tweet did not receive any scrutiny from the social media site.

“We got to find a way to make sure that when Twitter and Facebook make a decision about what’s reliable and what’s not, what to keep up and what to take down, that there’s transparency in the system,” Graham said. “I think Section 230 has to be changed because we can’t get there from here without change.”

“At what point do they have to assume responsibility that Section 230 shields them from?” Graham asked. “My hope is that we change Section 230 to incentivize social media platforms to come up with standards that are transparent and opaque, that will allow us to make judgments about their judgments, that the fact checkers be known, that the community standards, who sets them, what are their biases.”

He also highlighted a need for Congress to “give some direction to these companies because they have almost an impossible task." Graham accused them of “telling us what’s reliable and what’s not based on cable news commentary or tweets from politicians or average citizens.”

Graham stressed that “I don’t want the government to take over the job of telling America what tweets are legitimate and what are not, I don’t want the government deciding what content to take up and put down.”

“When you have companies that have the power of governments, have far more power than traditional media outlets, something has to give,” he asserted. “I’m hoping in this hearing today that we can find the baseline of agreement, that Section 230 needs to be changed, that my bias would be to allow the industry itself to develop best business practices to protect the sites against terrorism and child exploitation and other concerns.”

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