Thank you members of the Commerce Committee for the opportunity to speak with the American people about Twitter and §230. My remarks will be brief to get to questions. §230 is the most important law protecting internet speech. Removing §230 will remove speech from the internet.
§230 gave internet services two important tools. The first provides immunity from liability for user’s content. The second provides “Good Samaritan” protections for content moderation and removal, even of constitutionally protected speech, as long as it’s done “in good faith.”
That concept of “good faith” is what’s being challenged by many of you today. Some of you don’t trust we’re acting in good faith. That’s the problem I want to focus on solving. How do services like Twitter earn your trust? How do we ensure more choice in the market if we don’t?
There are three solutions we’d like to propose to address the concerns raised, all focused on services that decide to moderate or remove content. They could be expansions to §230, new legislative frameworks, or a commitment to industry wide self-regulation best practices.
The first is requiring a service’s moderation process to be published. How are cases reported and reviewed? How are decisions made? What tools are used to enforce? Publishing answers to questions like these will make our process more robust and accountable to the people we serve.