Social media firms sometimes make editorial choices so there should be a government regulation, whether they’ve buried them in algorithms or not, said Barack Obama.He told this in an interview to Atlantic. The influence of social media is on top notch level and the circle is getting bigger and bigger everyday and it has almost spread everywhere around the globe. It is a good sign and bad sign too some use it for business purposes other use it for their own joy and happiness. Now it is a platform where users are living in virtual reality and they are finding themselves in this world to be on top always. Tech companies like Facebook and twitter are protected by internet law called section 230 which shields them from being liable for content that people post on their platform for others or for themselves.
If a news site falsely calls you a swindler, you can sue the publisher for libel. But if someone posts that on Facebook, you can’t sue the company – just the person who posted it. That’s thanks to Section 230, which states that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider”. That legal phrase shields companies that can host trillions of messages from being sued into oblivion by anyone who feels wronged by something someone else has posted – whether their complaint is legitimate or not. The legal interpretation of section 230 also allows social platforms to moderate their services by removing posts that, for instance, are obscene or violate the services’ own standards, so long as they are acting in good faith. The law needs to be revised because there are many blackhat hackers who can breech the firewall so it should get revised time to time and according to the users. Republicans and democrats alike have called the law to be revised and for protections to be stripped for tech companies, which would majorly impact their businesses and this is a very serious issues because people are using it for doing wrong things and so it harms the normal people.
The content which is delivered should not be violating any kind of policy. Tech companies have long argued that they shouldn’t be treated as publishers and that section 230 which is mentioned above is what protects free speech on the internet and without it, online communication would change as we know it, any person can speak freely but it should be kept in mind that it does not violate any human law and does not affect the emotions of other. Former president Barack Obama said social media companies should be regulated in some capacity as tech firms argued that they should be treated as publisher.
The functioning of news paper is very much different from social media, it publish the editorial of publishers which means its own comments and arguments or views on a specific topic. In an interview with the Atlantic the former president said tech companies are still ‘making editorial choices’ despite insisting they do not operate as newspapers and other news outlets do, whether those editorial decision are made with algorithms or otherwise. There is a lot of difference between human moderated comment and comments which are created by machines with the tools of AI. It is not required from any private companies to provide a platform for any view that is out there and which can make some changes according to the first Amendment. At the end of the day, were going to have to find a combination of government regulations and corporate practice that address this, because it’s going worse by the time. It is highly protected with section 230 that no tech giant can violate it. Introducing revisions to the law has largely been a bipartisan issue, with Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike agreeing that tech firms should no longer be shielded by section 230. But there is a bit of different perception, Democrats wish for changes to limit the spread of misinformation and hate speech, and republicans are pushing for changes to curb alleged discrimination against a communicating content.
