Shelter from the storm

29 Jul 2019 By Gina Chon, Jennifer Saba Follow @GinaChon

IBM is the latest to call for changes to a 23-year-old law that exempts the likes of YouTube and Facebook from lawsuits over content on their sites. The provision no longer encourages the kind of policing their platforms need. Yet scrapping it wouldn’t solve that, either.

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IBM is calling for lawmakers to revise Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects an “interactive computer service” from legal liability for third-party content on its platform.

Ryan Hagemann, IBM government and regulatory affairs executive, said in a blog on July 10 that a “reasonable care” standard should be added to the provision so that online companies can be held legally responsible when they fail to use reasonable care to moderate content, like quickly deleting child pornography.

Some members of Congress, including Republican Senator Josh Hawley, have called on eliminating the liability protection in Section 230 for a variety of reasons such as having an anti-conservative bias or for foreign election-meddling.

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