brendan cartwright now sec commissioner
um commission very good to have you
back with us um is it your sense or that
we are looking
at at very least revisiting uh
section 230 and and the rules around it
and and how it is
policed uh at a minimum it seemed like
some changes are afoot
maybe it depends on the election but
your thoughts yeah i think we're at a
watershed moment if you look at the
progress we've made over the last
few weeks in terms of building momentum
for reforming
section 230. we've never seen so many
republicans and conservatives standing
up for free speech
look i watched a lot of the testimony
this morning jack dorsey made
a number of claims that if they'd been
statements on his own website i think it
would have been flagged as potential
misinformation he's trying to scare off
those that want to reform 230 by
claiming that
any any efforts to change that laws can
result in more censorship not less and
he has it backwards as the reporter just
indicated
if other people's speech is on their
website they don't need to be liable for
that that's fine but there's a second
piece of the law which is when they take
down speech courts have read that
provision
as giving them carte blanche to remove
any speech they want the purpose of
reforming 230 is actually put them
through
the higher statutory tests before they
take down any speech
the upshot of that is going to be less
censorship and that is great
for our democracy so let me
that's the point i wanted to follow up
on commissioner what if their
solution to this is all right we won't
take down anything
no matter how suspicious no matter how
crazy we won't take it down and let the
reader user
beware yeah i think that's a better path
forward than where we are right now
one of the solutions that they're now
offering is these ideas around quote
unquote
transparency that's that's fine i think
we need more transparency but that's
really
sleeves off the vest they're not really
copying to the fundamental reforms we
need with
230. 230 right now to your point
lays out specific categories of speech
that if speech falls within that
category they can take it down
not just with the first amendment rights
that we all have but with their bonus
section 230 protection so i'm very
comfortable with a regime in which
we bring much more clarity to when you
take speech down and if the upshot of
that is more speech
i think we're better for that let's let
the american people make their own
decisions we don't need people
sitting in silicon valley being the
arbiters of truth and i think
look one of the reasons internet speech
is so powerful in the first place
is because people went there to get
around the traditional gatekeepers that
we had in
mainstream media and now the lack of
gatekeepers that made the internet so
attractive as a platform
is ending and now silicon valley is
stepping into the role
of those gatekeepers i think we're
moving in the wrong direction that's why
230
reform is so necessary what if you don't
know where that speech offensive or
otherwise commissioner is coming from
wasn't that part of the problem in the
2016 election that a lot of it was
coming from abroad and
you know there was this hacking effort
on the part of the russians we're told
that made it hard to discern what was
real and what wasn't i mean
what are social media companies
responsibilities with something like
that
forget about the tone or tenor or even
whether it's conservative or liberal
stories
yeah the challenge there is there's no
arbiter of truth when it comes to this
right now you've got this new york post
story
and you have some dumb democrats coming
out and labeling it
in misinformation coming straight from
the kremlin
we don't need people like this trying to
label this type of speech let's let
people make their own minds up because
increasingly what we're seeing is this
concept of misinformation this concept
of disinformation is being abused
by people with gatekeeper authority
simply to shut down
what if it really is commissioner coming
from the kremlin i believe i get your
rationale and thinking here
you can't just be you know pick and
choose your battles but
um what if the stories themselves are
are
fake that they're coming from another
venue they're coming from a foreign
entity
that's just trying to screw things up in
election year
yet your point you've got to weigh the
risk of misinformation with the risk
of capturing in your misinformation
efforts
legitimate political speech and where i
come down with that is
more speech is better if something truly
is foreign government misinformation or
disinformation
let's have people identify it themselves
but there's too much of a risk factor
particularly that we're seeing right now
i think look the bottom line here too is
facebook twitter these entities act like
a publisher
every single day when they run these
fact checks when twitter has their
trending news section these are
publisher activities that twitter is
engaging in i think as we reform 230
we should be very clear about that
because that publisher content falls
conduct falls outside the protections of
230.