Will Banning Minors from Social Media Break the Internet?

 

Charles C. W. Cooke seems to think so.  Cooke, a writer for National Review whose opinions and style I have great respect for, opines in the April 2024 issue that using Federal power to keep minors off social media is a bad idea. 

 

He concedes there is a real problem:  bullying, pornography use, depression, and suicide are all results of teenagers and even younger people accessing social media.  He doesn't dispute that on balance, the harm that can happen is probably not worth the benefits that the youngsters gain.  The problem is acute enough to show up in strange places such as the comics page.  The strip "Baldo" by Hector Cantu and Carolos Castellanos portrays a nearly-nuclear Hispanic family that includes a precocious young girl named Gracie., who appears to be about 8.  Recently, the writers chose to show Gracie taking out a cigarette lighter, lighting up, taking a puff, and in the last frame she had a mobile phone in her hand instead of a cigarette.  The message, somewhat crudely but shockingly expressed, is that if you hand your eight-year-old a mobile phone, you might as well let her smoke too.

 

And the comparison between smoking and mobile-phone-mediated social media is apt in another way.  The social ostracism that many smokers now experience, at least in the U. S., came about as the U. S. government adopted severe restrictions on cigarette advertising and sales.  It's somewhat of a chicken-and-egg argument as to whether federal restrictions encouraged the change in social attitude, or the social attitude made the government's job easier.  But as the hypocrisy of the cigarette companies was exposed, revealing that they knew very well tobacco killed their customers but went right on selling it as though nothing was wrong, I think public opinion simply turned against them, especially among young people.  But the federal strictures helped the process along.

 

Cooke's main concern is that allowing the federal government to get its grubby, incompetent mitts on what is up to now almost a perfect example of the unrestricted free market of the Internet will ruin it for everybody.  He thinks that if we let the camel of government regulation of age for using the Internet get its head under the tent, the rest of the smelly animal will come too, and politicians will find some way to prevent their political opponents from accessing voters under the age of 90 ,or something.

 

Now I'll agree that the ingenuity of bureaucrats to expand their remits beyond all reasonable bounds is impressive and worth being concerned about.  But I haven't noticed any huge federal bureaucracy springing up around the subject of restricting tobacco use, unless you count the diversion of the huge pile of money extracted from the tobacco companies as part of class-action lawsuits by smokers toward uses that have nothing to do with smoking prevention.  And that was mainly the doing of states rather than the federal government, if I recall correctly.

 

Cooke says if the federal laws proposed go into action, you would have to send your private information over the Internet every time you want to access YouTube or Facebook.  Well, I do that every time I buy something online already—not only that, I send information that will allow a crook to steal from me, and now and then it even happens.  But the banks are vigilant enough to keep credit-card fraud down to a level that seems to be tolerable enough for most people, and we haven't had some giant federal bureaucracy arise because of it.

 

I agree that it may be premature to enact a federal law in this area.  But many states are currently experimenting with similar laws, and several have already gained some experience with them.  Some reports indicate that major porn outlets on the Internet are seeing their income drop substantially.  One report cited by the website of the Southern Baptist Convention says that as a result of an age restriction passed in Louisiana, traffic to the site Pornhub from that state has dropped by 80%. 

 

That may seem like a drop in the bucket, but one of the strengths of the federal system is that each state is a little political-science lab of its own.  After another year or two, federal legislators, if they are so inclined, can take a look at the many experiments in social-media regulation concerning minors that are going on right now, and take the best ideas from the successful ones. 

 

Then, it shouldn't be that hard to craft a law that would not only restrict social-media companies from preying on minors, but would also restrict the role of the federal government in the regulatory process.  Sen. Josh Hawley's proposed bill, nicknamed MATURE (for Making Age-Verification Technology Uniform, Robust, and Effective), would have as its primary regulatory feature the power granted to parents to sue Internet companies who don't comply.  In that aspect, it resembles the Texas anti-abortion law which empowers private citizens to sue abortionists.  No giant abortion-regulation bureaucracy sprang up in Texas after that law was passed.  But a lot of abortion clinics shut down immediately, which was the desired effect.

 

Cooke says that he is going to take the steps available to a responsible parent, which he is, to ensure that his own children don't get harmed by social media.  And that is fine if you are a responsible parent.  But we have plenty of irresponsible parents too, and we should have some concern for their children, who are even more vulnerable to the harms that social media can cause than the offspring of parents who are aware of the dangers and do something about them.

 

Cooke seems to be motivated by a libertarian impulse to leave the pristine unregulated nature of the Internet alone.  But as he points out, we have already seen inappropriate involvement of the government in censoring free expression on the Internet by means of the Twitter files released by Elon Musk's intervention.  And nobody passed any laws to let that happen.

 

Granted that there is currently a shortage of wisdom in Washington, we can still hope that a few public-spirited Republicans and Democrats can cooperate (!) on a bill that would take into account the successes and failures of various state laws in this area, make sure that any Federal involvement in the matter is minimized, and still accomplish the goal:  to keep children and teenagers from suffering the very real psychic harm that social media overuse and misuse can cause. 

 

Sources:  Charles C. W. Cooke's somewhat mysteriously titled "Chesterton's Internet" (he mentions the phrase twice but otherwise doesn't explain why he associates the Internet with G. K. Chesterton, who died in 1935) appeared in the April 2024 issue of National Review, pp. 34-36.  I also referred to an article on the website of the Southern Baptist Convention at https://erlc.com/resource-library/articles/the-new-state-laws-effectively-curbing-online-porn/.

What is Section 230 and Why Should We Care?

Sometimes obscure legal matters turn out to play key roles in huge areas of life.  A case in point is a law I had not given any thought to recently:  Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.  As it has been under attack lately from various quarters, it might be worth while to examine what it says and explore its ramifications for how the Internet is used, as the law also has defenders such as Charles C. W. Cooke of National Review, whose recent article about Section 230 brought my attention to it.

The law has to do with who should be sued for libel if someone gets libeled.  Not being a lawyer, I am no expert on libel, but my man-on-the-street understanding is that in the U. S., if someone knowingly and maliciously says something about you that is demonstrably false, you can sue them for libel.  If it's just a guy standing on a street corner shouting insults about you, identifying the party to sue is pretty simple.  But what if the alleged libel was carried by some sort of medium of communication?  Then it depends.

Let's take two extremes and then see how the Internet falls in between. 

Back in the glory days of newspapers, say the 1930s, the newspaper's publisher was responsible for pretty much anything that was said on the editorial pages of the paper.  That's because the editors (who worked for the publisher) actively selected and sometimes wrote the editorial material themselves.  So it's only reasonable to allow people who feel they've been libeled by a paper to sue that paper, because the paper was the effective speaker or publisher of the libel.

Now go to the other extreme:  the telephone system of the 1930s.  All that Ma Bell promised to do was to let two people talk with each other.  What they said was none of her concern.  If Mr. A called up Mr. B and said something libelous about Mr. C, no one in their right mind would think it was appropriate for the libeled Mr. C to sue Ma Bell for libel.  Mr. A was the person committing the libel, and the telephone company was a completely passive participant, simply serving as a messenger and having no part in or responsibility for the libel itself.

And then in the 1990s along came the Internet, and some clever inventors had the bright idea of "hosting" third-party content on websites, and letting users put up their own material.  But in certain lawsuits that arose around then, the courts couldn't make up their minds whether an internet service provider was more like a newspaper publisher—who could indeed be sued for libelous content in his paper—or like a telephone company, simply passively conveying messages for which the company bore no responsibility.  Congress decided, and President Bill Clinton signed, the Communications Decency Act of 1996, whose Section 230 contains these fateful words: 

"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."

So to use a germane example, when President Trump tweets something about, well, anything, it's not Twitter that is at fault if someone thinks the President is libeling him or her.  It's the President's sole responsibility, and so on all the way down to the lowliest user of the Internet, whoever that might be at the moment (yours truly excepted, I hope). 

There are exceptions, of course, for heinous stuff such as sex-trafficking and so on.  You can still go after Internet companies who harbor such things.  But as Charles C. W. Cooke points out, the immunity from libel lawsuits applies even if the service provider moderates or otherwise curates the content.  So if Twitter begins to run a spell-checker over President Trump's tweets and corrects his spelling, that still doesn't make Twitter the publisher of that content, as far as Section 230 is concerned.

Some people don't like the way that the large media companies selectively edit or suppress certain sites and types of speech, and Cooke cites Sen. Josh Hawley as wanting to repeal Section 230 altogether in something that would look a lot like revenge.  Repeal would mean that if some crank on Facebook called your mother an indecent word, for example, you could sue not only the guy who posted the insult but Facebook as well.

One thing we can be sure of:  if Section 230 was repealed, with the prospect of all that Internet-generated wealth in the offing we'd have huge flocks of lawyers descending on Google, Facebook, Twitter and company like buzzards after a dead deer.  While it might not kill the free-speech aspect of the Internet altogether, it would certainly cripple it severely.  The world needs a lot of things right now, but more lawyers filing more lawsuits is probably not one of them.

Are things just hunky-dory with regard to libelous and otherwise harmful internet content?  By no means.  Michael Cook, who edits MercatorNet.org (which carries this blog from time to time) recently drew my attention to one of the worst abuses of the sophisticated digital trickery known as deepfakes:  the practice of merging the faces of well-known people, or even unsuspecting female victims whose pictures are harvestable from the Internet, onto pornographic images that are then sold to whoever wants them.  Currently, the only recourse such victims have is to try to sue the parties responsible, but even finding them can be a difficult challenge and most people simply don't have the resources to do so.  In my opinion, pornographic deepfakery should be a criminal offense, like rape, as it is essentially a virtual digital version of that crime. 

As we mentioned, Section 230 doesn't prevent lawsuits that go after the originators of such content as pornographic deepfakes, so repealing it wouldn't help in that situation.  Overall, history seems to show that Section 230 has done more good than harm, and repealing or seriously modifying it would have effects that nearly everyone might regret later—except maybe lawyers. 

Sources:  Charles C. W. Cooke's article "Why We Need Section 230" appeared on National Review's website at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/06/22/why-we-need-section-230/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.