Marjorie Taylor Greene Has a Half-Assed Plan to Abolish Section 230

Greene’s sudden decision to actually try and legislate comes, of course, the same week another free speech barker, Elon Musk, moved forward to acquire Twitter, which he’s referred to as the internet’s “de-facto town square.” In typical Greene fashion, the congresswoman tweeted out support for Musk’s acquisition. “Prepare for blue check mark full scale meltdown after @elonmusk seals the deal and I should get my personal Twitter account restored,” Greene wrote.

“Elon Musk buying Twitter and talking about defending free speech has ramped up the Democrats’ efforts to clamp down on speech,” Greene said according to The Verge. “That made me realize, you know, that I need to introduce this now.”

Why Greene’s Common Carrier Argument Doesn’t Hold Water

While it’s easier to dunk on Greene and leave it there, this bill and others like it would still face issues even if they weren’t spearheaded by a QAnon supporting bigot. The concept of treating social media firms like telephone companies dates back years but it received a shot of adrenaline last year from supposedly sleepy Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who invoked the argument during a court case attempting to determine whether or not then President Donald Trump was legally allowed to block social media users.

Responding to a petition, Thomas laid out a case for government regulation of social media companies without violating the First Amendment under common carrier laws. Basically, under this categorization, the government would grant platforms certain legal immunities while also forcing them not to discriminate between content.

“The similarities between some digital platforms and common carriers or places of public accommodation may give legislators strong arguments for similarly regulating digital platforms,” Thomas wrote at the time.

That categorization of tech companies as common carriers is a, “half baked idea” at best, according to Wired’s Gilad Edelman. To make a long story short, Wired notes common carriers are required to act merely as a “conduit” of a good and maintain complete neutrality. That, Wired reports, is completely at odds with the entire point of Google, Facebook and Twitter, which exist fundamentally to give users more data on things they want and less of things they don’t.

“If you mean nondiscriminatory in a much narrower sense, like does Google’s algorithm include whether the webpage has a conservative or a liberal tint, or is based on anything else—gender, race, what have you—then, yeah, Google might say that they’re nondiscriminatory in these narrower senses,” former Federal Communications Commission Chief Technologist Scott Jordan told Wired. “But this doesn’t easily map onto the question of common carriage.”

Listen, conversations around reforming Section 230 are complicated and anyone telling you otherwise is likely a liar or Marjorie Taylor Greene wearing a latex mask.

In just the past few years, former President Donald Trump, Democratic Senators Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren, and even current President Joe Biden have all voiced support for significant reform to the 1996 rules many claim are insufficient to deal with the complexities of the modern internet age. Hell, even Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg pitched his own two cents on reforming Section 230, arguing liability protections should be conditional on a platform’s ability to implement “best practices” in combating misinformation. Shocker, that criteria would disproportionately benefit Zuckerberg’s companies.

And while most everyday people understandably couldn’t tell you exactly what Section 230 even does, those who do appear more split on the issue than statements from hand waving politicians would suggest. In a poll conducted last year by Pew Research, 56% of U.S. adults surveyed said they did not think people should be able to sue social media companies for comments that others post on their platforms, which gets at the crux of 230. Republicans were just 8 percentage points more likely to agree with that statement than Democrats. 49% of respondents, meanwhile, said they believed the ability to sue platforms could reduce inaccurate or misleading content while 40% said it would lead to less freedom of expression online.