from the of-course,-not-in-those-words dept

As White House Says It's 'Reviewing 230', Biden Admits His Comments About Facebook Were Misinformation

In the never ending stupidity saga, kicked off by the White House picking a fight with Facebook because Facebook hasn't banned 12 individuals (who were named as disinformation dozen by the Center for Countering Digital Hate), things have kicked up a notch -- and nobody involved in the debate seems to know how any of this works. First, the White House has claimed that it is "reviewing Section 230" whatever that means.

"We're reviewing that, and certainly they should be held accountable," Bedingfield told MSNBC when asked about Section 230 and whether social media companies like Facebook should be liable and open to lawsuits for publishing false information that causes Americans harm.

The problem with this, of course, is they can "review" it all they want, but if the people spreading disinformation aren't breaking the law (and, they're not), there would be no underlying cause of action against Facebook with or without Section 230. But, of course, this should be worrisome on multiple levels, not the least of which is that Biden said multiple times during his campaign for President that he wanted to repeal Section 230 entirely, explicitly because he (falsely) thought this would magically make Facebook liable for disinformation.

(As a small aside, it's kind of rich that it's Communications Director Kate Bedingfield claiming that the White House is looking at Section 230, considering in a former life she was VP for the MPAA -- and was literally the chief spokesperson for the MPAA at a time when it was running a secretive campaign to have its own lawyers act as a shadow legal team for state Attorneys General to undermine Section 230 in order to take down tech companies Hollywood disliked. Seems kind of like a conflict, but what do I know?)

Anyway, along with all of this, President Biden walked back his statement on Friday when he said directly that he believed Facebook was "killing people," by not banning certain users. This was a stupid and misleading thing to say. And on Monday, he kind of recognized that what he originally said was not accurate:

“Facebook isn’t killing people, these 12 people are out there giving misinformation,” the president said, citing an administration report last week on online coronavirus vaccine misinformation. “That’s what I meant.”

“My hope is that Facebook, instead of taking it personally … that they would do something about the misinformation, the outrageous misinformation about the vaccine,” Biden continued.

And, again, it's perfectly fair to talk about misinformation, and how the impact of it can be very real and very dangerous. But the blame for that misinformation really ought to be on the people spreading it.

Indeed, in this case, it could easily be argued that the President himself spread misinformation in saying that Facebook was killing people. Misinformation is false or inaccurate information, especially when it's intended to deceive. Biden's statement on Friday certainly could qualify. It was inaccurate to say that Facebook is killing people. It is not. It's arguably deceptive to pin the blame on Facebook rather than on the individuals spreading the disinformation -- and Biden corrected that misinformation on Monday.

And, to be clear, I do think that Facebook should be better about dealing with such misinformation on its platform -- I'm just not so naive as to think that the company can just magically snap its fingers and make misinformation disappear. Should it be doing more to stop the spread of misinformation about vaccines? Yes. Absolutely. Does it help when the White House jumps in like this? Not at all.

And, again, it's not as if there's a clear rule on what is and what is not misinformation. As I noted, it's arguable that Biden's own comments are misinformation. There are no simple rules to distinguish what is and what is not misinformation in these contexts that can easily be applied across billions of users. And the end result of more aggressive removals also likely means the removal of perfectly reasonable content, perhaps that criticizing vaccine deniers and helping to better educate people.

Everyone thinks it's easy to make disinformation go away until you actually have to make the calls yourself.

And the White House isn't doing anyone any favors by claiming that getting rid of Section 230 would actually help. If anything, it would make things way worse, by vastly cutting back on the ability of websites (including Facebook) to experiment with better approaches to actually minimizing the impact of misinformation on their platforms.

On top of that, as some are noting, this appears to be yet another case of the government trying to cover up its own policy failings by blaming social media.

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