WASHINGTON — Former Democratic presidential candidate, Secretary of State and First Lady Hillary Clinton has once again called for a total repeal of Section 230, known to digital rights activists as “the First Amendment of the internet.”
Under Section 230, internet platforms that host and moderate user-generated content — including adult content — cannot generally be sued for that content.
Clinton made her remarks Saturday during an interview with CNN, as part of her campaign push on behalf of Vice President Kamala Harris.
Speaking with CNN’s Michael Smerconish, Clinton repeated her long-held opposition to Section 230 protections, a stance she shares with numerous politicians of both parties, including both candidates in the last presidential election. As XBIZ reported, in 2020, both Donald Trump and Joe Biden repeatedly advocated for the repeal of Section 230 during that campaign. Trump ultimately attempted to push repeal through via an amendment to an unrelated bill during his chaotic lame-duck period, but was unsuccessful.
In Saturday’s interview, Clinton urged the next federal administration to regulate social media based on legislation passed in California and New York, aimed at protecting minors from online harms.
“We need national action and sadly our Congress has been dysfunctional when it comes to addressing these threats to our children,” Clinton told Smerconish. “It’s not just the social and psychological effects, it’s real harm. It’s child porn and threats of violence, things that are terribly dangerous. We need to have guardrails, we need regulation.”
Clinton then added, “We should be, in my view, repealing something called Section 230, which gave, you know, platforms on the internet immunity because they were thought to be just pass-throughs, that they shouldn’t be judged for the content that is posted.”
Clinton deemed Section 230 — which has governed internet speech since 1996 — the product of an “overly simple view” that is not up to the challenges of current social media.
“If the platforms, whether it’s Facebook or Twitter/X or Instagram or TikTok, whatever they are, if they don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control,” Clinton offered, without specifying who the “we” meant.
Reason Magazine’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown commented that Clinton made Section 230 protections “sound like some sort of aberration or anomaly,” adding that many platforms are indeed “pass-throughs” for the speech of others.
“Not holding them responsible for content they didn’t create themselves isn’t crazy at all,” Brown wrote. “If a person on private property engages in speech that is somehow criminal, we don’t hold the property owner liable. If people use the telephone to hatch criminal plans, we don’t arrest the phone company. If I use a Sharpie to write you a threatening letter and then send it in the mail, you can’t sue the makers of Sharpie or the U.S. Postal Service.”
Brown also lambasted Clinton for making “the ridiculous but all too common suggestion that social media companies aren’t actively monitoring and moderating content.”