Professor Olivier Sylvain was quoted in an article published by Ars Technica discussing the new bill that would, if passed, force social media companies to be held accountable for amplifying COVID-related health misinformation.
A new bill introduced Thursday would hold Facebook, Twitter, and other social media companies responsible for amplifying conspiracies and falsehoods about vaccines, COVID cures, and other health misinformation.
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Despite the bill’s limited scope, the sort of restriction it proposes would likely encounter resistance from tech companies, Olivier Sylvain, a law professor at Fordham University, told Ars. “They’re likely to raise the argument that ranking and displaying content through some automated system is, from their vantage point, the thing that distinguishes social media, and it’s arguably the kind of thing that’s protected,” he said.
“But I’m not terribly persuaded by this,” Sylvain added, “because this is not a bill that imposes sanction or criminal liability. It is instead a bill that would remove the immunity and just return us to the baseline that every other person on the planet has to abide by.”
“The challenge is determining whether any given reform to Section 230 is unconstitutionally restrictive of speech,” he said. “It can’t be that simply removing the immunity is what triggers First Amendment scrutiny. Because then, under that theory, when Congress passed the 1996 bill, it would have basically created a protection for the intermediaries for all time.”
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If the bill passes, it could force social media companies to think more carefully about the role their algorithms play in the spread of information, Sylvain said. “It would make these companies far more alert to the ways in which they impose harms and costs by way of their automated systems,” he said. “It’s not enough to say they’re not the source of the bad information—that’s a disingenuous argument because they are the ones spreading it by way of targeted delivery.”