a priority of the new president and
congress will be reining in the giants
of social media on this democrats and
republicans agree
their target is a federal law known as
section 230. in a single sentence it set
off the big bang helping to create the
universe of google facebook twitter and
the rest
some critics of the law say that it
leaves social media free to ignore lies
hoaxes and slander that can wreck the
lives of innocent people
one of those critics is lenny posner
after a tragedy in his own life posner
has become a champion for victims of
online lies people including matya and
matt banasi who overnight became the
target of death threats
like these
the story will continue in a moment
we're going to put a bullet in there
skull um
let's load up the trucks let's go get
them let's hang them
they posted our address our full address
where we live
the hate focused on matia and matt
banasi was unleashed by a hoax that
claims she brought covid 19 into the
world it's changed and migrated over the
70-plus videos that they've had about us
but um wait
70
yeah if you actually go through all the
videos there is a total of
70 videos across
multiple youtube channels
the videos claim matia banasi carried
the virus to china on a bicycle
she was invited there as a member of a
u.s military cycling team
matya is a dutch immigrant american
citizen and soldier who served in iraq
in 2019 during an international military
olympics she crashed in wuhan where
kovid 19 was discovered two months later
her collision with the internet began
after an innocent article about the race
and somebody came across it and they had
wuhan in and they took a run with it oh
we got a person your name the name wuhan
and the rest only takes a lot of
imagination correct what were they
saying about you first they said i
brought it to china and when i crashed i
spread it and that i spread it in the
hospital which i never was in a hospital
all these lies about vials in my bicycle
hidden and
i have no idea it's going to be this
person by the name of maya mata banasi
and we're going to fall the absurdity
was spelled out literally by a hoax
peddler named george webb he has a
following among the deep state phony
conspiracy crowd
what has this meant to you i was looking
over my shoulder a lot
i was scared for my life you were taking
all that seriously yes
once my address was posted that that was
it for me that did it because they put
me in danger my family there was like 60
or 70 death threats over the span of you
know four or five weeks
they called the police and the fbi which
got them nowhere
and the reason why the fbi and the
police don't want to talk to you
is because even though we're receiving
death threats they didn't say or come to
the banassi's to kill them tonight they
need a crime to have been committed
that's correct and you're trying to
prevent a crime from being committed
absolutely
right about now you might be thinking
they should sue but that's the problem
they can't file hundreds of lawsuits
against internet trolls hiding behind
aliases and they can't sue the internet
platforms because of that law known as
section 230 of the communications
decency act of 1996.
written before facebook or google were
invented
section 230 says in just 26 words that
internet platforms are not liable for
what their users post
that means that
if i were to post something about you on
facebook that was
awful and defamatory and you actually
had a viable defamation lawsuit you
could sue me
but you can't sue facebook jeff kossith
teaches law and wrote a book called the
26 words that created the internet but
help me understand the same is not true
for
other forms of media if somebody says
something defamatory on
60 minutes or on fox or cnn or in the
new york times
those organizations can be sued so why
not google youtube facebook so the
difference between a social media site
and let's say the letters to that order
page of the new york times
is the vast amount of content that they
deliver so i mean you might have five or
ten letters to the editor on a page uh
you could have i think it's 6 000 tweets
per second and so section 230 really
recognizes how exceptional the internet
is and says
we we want to encourage this marketplace
of ideas
25 years later that marketplace has a
lot of really great stuff but it also
has a lot of really terrible products in
that marketplace and that's really
what's driving this debate right now
matya and matt banasi quickly discovered
the law was not on their side
so they turned to lenny posner who had
suffered in the same way
i was being attacked the memory of my
son
my son's
very short life was being attacked and i
just wasn't going to stand for that
the very short life of posner's son noah
ended at connecticut's sandy hook
elementary school in 2012 with 25 others
the gunshots of a madman have ricocheted
online ever since
conversations denying
the tragedy
accusing
the government of staging it what was
the most hurtful thing they said about
you
that noah did not die that i'm not
noah's father uh it all revolves around
the notion that these are staged
shootings
that they're scripted events
that i am an actor that i am paid
to fake uh the death of a child
before the covid pandemic we hired
theatrical makeup artists to disguise
posner for his safety he's pursued by
death threats
one woman left a voicemail saying
death is coming for you real soon
she landed in prison sooner
how many times have you had to move your
family around seven times
he's targeted because he's invented ways
to fight back
he copyrighted photos of his son to
control how they're used he published a
letter to facebook's ceo that read you
have deemed our lives are less important
than providing a safe haven for hate
this was meant by you and your ex-wife
to be
public shaming of facebook that has been
really the only effective way to get
change
for online platforms
after the letter a facebook manager
called posner
it began a relationship with facebook
that helped them learn about the
material that is being posted on their
platform and how it
is
abusive defamatory have you seen a
difference a practical difference in
facebook
yes it's almost all gone
posner expanded his work into a
non-profit called the honor network that
applies what he has learned to help
others
that's when i reached out to lenny
posner he had
volunteers
that were fighting
harassment and i said
lenny i want this video to come down and
he said i will help you do that
by himself
andy parker couldn't get video of his
daughter's murder
off of google's youtube
i really
expected them to do the right thing
their motto was
don't be evil
and
for a while
they did a pretty good job of it but now
they're
the personification of evil
in 2015 reporter alison parker and
cameraman adam ward were shot on camera
by a fired co-worker
the scene has been posted hundreds of
times
this one got more than 600 000 views
and to the right the automatic ad
means the person who posted this made
money
and so did youtube
we shouldn't have to be the ones
policing their platform their terms of
service say
we don't allow this we don't allow
violent content we don't allow
harassment
my biggest beef with google and youtube
and facebook for that matter is
that video is still out there it's still
out there today in essence they profit
from my daughter's murder and i can't
abide by that do you worry about threats
no
i really don't why do you feel so brave
because allison would expect nothing
less you're still her dad
i'm her dad always will be
and i will fight like hell
um for her
lenny posner flagged allison parker
videos for youtube to remove
youtube wrote us
there is no place on youtube for content
that exploits this horrendous act and we
have spent the last several years
investing in tools and policies to
quickly remove it
youtube told us it now prioritizes all
requests from posner's honor network
why do you think the online platforms
have not been effective in enforcing
their own terms of service i don't think
they were prepared
for
uh their online platforms to be used
this way i think they were more focused
on growth and expansion
and likely
had more of an idealized uh
notion of
uh the internet and and the way it would
be used for the greater good
an idealized notion of human nature yeah
well
yes
posner also has been successful pulling
down much of that kobit 19 lie that
shadows matya and matt banassi
he got hoax peddler george webb the real
identity kicked off youtube
recently some platforms took first steps
toward editing their users facebook and
twitter flagged dubious content during
the election now they're doing the same
for myths about covid19
based on what you've had to learn about
all these things what do you think the
solution could be
this is really really hard right because
section 230 when that was written it was
probably known with the intent that
social media companies would police
themselves in some manner and social
media companies haven't done that very
well
they need to police themselves quicker
or the government needs to step in and
figure out some mechanism to
to make them liable because making them
liable
would make them police themselves
but making social media liable would
also mean facebook twitter even
wikipedia and yelp couldn't exist as we
know them
president-elect biden wants to revoke
section 230. the federal government is
already suing to break up facebook and
google
no one can say what social media 2.0
will look like
or whether the innocent will ever be
protected
from a world wide web of lies
what happens when harassment goes
offline and into the real world
terrorizing someone is not free speech
at 60 minutesovertime.com