At the beginning of June, my colleague Luke OBrien became the target of an internet mob after he identified the New York woman behind @AmyMek , a massively popular Twitter account known for anti-Muslim, far-right-wing rantings that were endorsed by President Donald Trump . OBrien was hit by a wave of harassment from her followers, including numerous death threats.
Twitter took minimal action against the perpetrators while suspending OBrien for a joking response he made to one of his harassers. In the midst of this harassment campaign, which is ongoing, OBrien asked me whether Twitter could be held legally accountable for failing to adequately address harassment on its site. He didnt know it at the time, but I have some history with this question.
On Aug. 10, 1997, the Drudge Report published a story that my father, journalist Sidney Blumenthal, who would start work as a senior adviser in the Clinton White House the next day, had a documented history of spousal abuse that included court records in Boston. The story was entirely false concocted by a group of conservative political and media figures and fed to Matt Drudge with no sourcing. This literal bit of fake news didnt remain confined to Drudges website. Drudge had recently struck a deal with AOL to exclusively republish his content, which it immediately did for this story. My parents sued AOL. But, as they soon learned, its near to impossible to hold online platforms liable for content someone else published on their site.
So my simple answer to OBrien was no. Twitter cannot be held legally liable for anything that appears on its platform. Nor could Facebook or YouTube be held responsible for the harm done to Sandy Hook parents by conspiracy-monger Alex Jones, who was banned from those digital platforms on Monday. Thats because of a short provision in a 1996 law that gives online intermediaries immunity from liability for any third-party content posted to or hosted on their platforms. The provision, known as Section 230, has become the legal building block for much of what we cherish about the internet today, and proponents of the law believe that the internet ecosystem of Google , Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Craigslist, Tumblr and so on would not be tenable without it.
Supporters of the law claim that any tiny deviation from total legal immunity would destroy the internet and suppress free speech. They consider any changing of Section 230 akin to amending the First Amendment.
The few critics of the provision, including lawyers, advocates and victims, argue that it enables discrimination, harassment and other threatening and criminal behavior. They have brought court cases to try to change jurisprudence that granted vast immunity under the law, have argued for a legislative fix and tried to motivate platforms to change their own rules. In April, Trump signed legislation passed by a bipartisan coalition in Congress to amend Section 230 by denying legal immunity to online platforms that could aid sex trafficking.
Their efforts are part of a growing realization that the internet is no longer a babe that could be strangled in the cradle by regulation; rather, its the home of the wealthiest, most powerful corporations in the world. And those efforts contributed to the slow-moving reconsideration of the lax regulatory structure that has enabled online platforms to become unfettered corporate monopolies and make money off the harassment that takes place on their sites.
The Good Samaritan Act
This story of Section 230 begins with Jordan Belfort, the cocaine- and quaalude-fueled investor whose life of criminal fraud was depicted in the Oscar-nominated 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street.
In 1994, an anonymous user alleged on a financial forum on the Prodigy bulletin board service that Belforts firm Stratton-Oakmont manipulated the initial public offering it managed for Solomon-Page Group to Stratton-Oakmonts benefit. Belfort sued the anonymous author as well as the online platform for defamation. (Hed admit five years later that he did, in fact, manipulate the offering.)
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