Free Republic

The debate about whether social media companies should have protection from liability misses a larger question about their role in American society. There’s nothing like a row between Twitter and President Trump to turn everyone into an expert on 47 U.S. Code § 230, a heretofore obscure section of federal law that deals with liability protections for companies like Twitter.Go on social media right now and you’re bound to find friends, neighbors, and colleagues opining on federal statutes and citing old Supreme Court cases to bolster their arguments that we have to do this or that right now to save the...

Sen. Ron Wyden called President Trump's executive order targeting social media platforms a "plainly illegal" attempt to push "unfiltered lies." . . . "I have warned for years that this administration was threatening 230 in order to chill speech and bully companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter into giving him favorable treatment. Today Trump proved me right. I expect those companies and every American who participates in online speech to resist this illegal act by all possible means," Wyden said in a statement.

On Tuesday Twitter added a fake fact-check to President Trump’s tweet on mail-in voting scandals. And the person behind Twitter “Site Integrity” is an avowed leftist who says there are “nazis in the White House.” On Wednesday Jenna Ellis, senior legal adviser to Team Trump and Attorney to President Trump, issued a response to Twitter’s partisan tactics: Team Trump rejects Twitter’s blatantly partisan attempt to ‘fact check’ the President on election integrity. Twitter falsely undermined the truth and opinion of his tweet, thereby misleading the American public on the valid concerns with mail-in ballots. FACTS: Mail-in balloting increases the chain...

Facebook blocked the account of ResistanceFeed.com from posting links on October 15 and said that the ban would last until October 22. The link that Resistance Feed had posted on on its page was about the footage that ABC had posted claiming that it was video from the Middle East from an attack on the Kurds. ABC retracted the story, admitting that the video footage was not from the Middle East and not of the Kurds and/or Turks but rather a video of an explosion in the United States in Kentucky from 2017. So Resistance Feed wasn't posting an unsupported...

Surprised? Not really. I know what you’re thinking. “There are people who get their daily news from social postings on Facebook?” Sadly, the answer to that is yes. At any given moment there are over 150 million users roaming Mark Zuckerberg’s monstrosity, and you can bet that some percentage of them rarely read anything outside the online utopia. So, while we may not like to admit it, the “trending” section at the upper right of the page has become frighteningly important. Facebook swears that it determines what’s “trending” by analyzing reader preference. If it’s popular on the site - meaning...