Biden’s Misguided Call for Internet Regulation

Going after Big Tech by reforming Section 230 and limiting data collection would stunt American technological innovation.

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U.S. President Joe Biden has proposed regulating social media companies by reforming Section 230 and called for limiting data collection. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images.)

Last fall, President Joe Biden earned mocking headlines for spelling out the word “D-O-T” while reading out a website address from a teleprompter. It is no surprise that a president born closer to Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration than to his own would be unfamiliar with internet terminology. Yet Very Online progressives made Biden a social media star of sorts with a bespoke meme repurposed from anti-American Chinese propaganda known as “Dark Brandon,” the laser-eyed scourge of malarkey.

Dark Brandon’s 15 minutes of memedom have not stopped the regular ol’ Joe Biden from settling on internet regulation as a major emphasis for 2023. A variety of proposed internet rules fell just short of passage last year—including a proposal to cartelize newspapers so they can extract revenue from Apple and Facebook—but the administration appears to see reining in Big Tech as fertile ground for the kind of bipartisan cooperation needed to move legislation through a sharply divided Congress. 

To that end, Biden took to the editorial pages of the conservative-leaning Wall Street Journal last month. The resulting op-ed reveals Joe Biden to be hopelessly out of touch with the nature of the internet. His proposals, if enacted, would take a laser to the foundations of 21st century American prosperity and threaten the U.S.’s position at the forefront of internet innovation. 

Biden’s call for regulation is rooted in fearmongering. He accuses social media companies of running an experiment on children, charges online forums with promoting offline violence, and implies that platforms aid and abet a wide range of online criminal conduct from cyberstalking to illicit drug sales. This is the rhetoric of moral panic. Joe Biden joins a long line of politicians who have exploited public fears about the negative social effects of novel mass media to justify government overreach, from Sen. John Pastore’s crusade against violent TV westerns in the 1970s to Sen. Joe Lieberman’s obsession with Mortal Kombat in the 1990s. 

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  1. Avatar photo
    Blake Fischer

    I work in ecommerce and over the last few years every single one of my clients have been sued for their website not being ADA compliant for vision impairments, so not completely without junk lawsuits. I realize it’s different law, but still feels like the same government “I’m helppping” situation.

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  2. Hartzlk

    If stackoverflow were to ever shutdown due to something like over regulation, us developers will either be forced to riot (meh, that sounds like too much work), or society will have to see the conclusion of The Machine Stops slowly play out everywhere. ;-)

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  3. Emma

    Love this article. One clarification though. The right wants censorship too. Hate is fine. Nudity bad. The left thinks nudity good, hate bad.

    They all want censorship.

    What Americans don't understand is that we are not the only people using the internet. Social media works globally. Policies are created globally.

    And what makes it all work is advertising/revenue.

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    Ben Connelly

    What a great article! I’m glad TD published it.

    “In other words, progressives want online platforms to moderate more while their conservative co-belligerents want them to moderate less. This makes for unusual bedfellows in what amounts to incoherent, vibe-based policymaking fixated on taking down Big Tech a notch regardless of the potential negative consequences for the wider internet. ”

    A pithy summary of the gloomy situation, and why I would fervently hope this Congress will get exactly zero passed on tech regulation - there’s no way this group of morons isn’t going to pass something that doesn’t achieve two things: 1. Fail to solve any problems 2. Make everything worse.

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    Raiderduck

    On a somewhat unrelated note, I'm assuming your favorite ice cream USED TO BE Breyer's Mint Chocolate Chip. Ever since Unilever bought out Breyer's a couple of decades ago, they've been on a long slow slide from one of the best retail ice creams in existence (they used to run TV ads actively mocking competitors' use of filler ingredients like guar gum, carrageenan, lecithin, etc) to frozen dreck that tastes like a cold block of nothing, and has so many filler ingredients that they can't even legally call most of their flavors "ice cream."

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  6. MathewA

    "Multiple conservative congresspeople have proposed laws that would define social media platforms as common carriers, treating them like telephone and utility companies that operate “dumb” pipes and must allow any and all content to flow through unimpeded. "

    This isn't really what we want though. We still want companies to be able to remove porn etc if they want. We just won't want them moderating regular political disagreement.

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    1. CB76

      But defining "regular" political disagreement is where the problems occur. Is Alex Jones claiming Sandy Hook was a false flag operation perpetrated by gun control activists "regular" political disagreement, or is it a verifiably false and offensive (and legally actionable) lie that social media companies can rightly choose not to be associated with? I think it's pretty clearly the latter, but between that and your typical anodyne "guns don't kill people, people kill people" political opinion is a line that can be crossed. Where you draw that line will necessarily be subjective, and I don't think there's any way to legislate it effectively.

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    2. Emma

      Exactly.

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      Patrick

      The problem is good luck defining “regular political disagreement.”

      I really think we all need to learn to view Facebook or Twitter the same way we view Fox News or the New York Times. They are information distributors and they choose what information to distribute based in part on their ideological beliefs and in part on their quest for revenue. We can choose to be a customer, or not.

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      Pat Riot

      Yes, and also this: a "social media platform" can operate as both a content aggregator and a content created (see my comment).

      This isn't going to be solve with a soundbite...

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  7. James Morphew

    When in doubt, leave them free.

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  8. InadvertantObfuscation

    Is it a shame that Aldrich Ames's lawyers were unaware of "the foundational principle that information middlemen should not be held civilly liable for content created by others"?
    I suggest that you have overgeneralized the bookstore example.
    I agree overall that Biden may be pushing over-regulation, but there are substantive differences between a bookstore selling books and FaceBook selling advertising directed at content perusers. Barnes and Noble is encouraged to sell books that someone will buy. Facebook is encouraged to post text that encourages someone to look.
    If someone could get advertising revenue from the rubber-necking that occurs passing any highway accident, we could certainly expect more accidents.

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  9. Avatar photo
    Pat Riot

    The spirit of these laws should include the following:

    1. Companies should be required to obtain active consent to your personal data being shared. They should be held to account--severely--for breaking contracts with users, and this needs to include so-called "accidents". We don't have laws against banks storing your money, but a bank that is careless with it can be held to account and there are regulations around the proper operation of a bank. Personal data should be treated in a similar way.

    2. Content creators, not content distributors, should be held ultimately responsible for their content, in an active way.

    3. An Internet company can itself become a defacto content provider in the act of content curation. In other words, if you use Facebook and tell it to show the posts of your friends or groups you choose, then Facebook has no direct liability. However, if you give Facebook the same input and yet other content you did not ask for is presented to you then now Facebook is in the content creation business and should be held liable for that.

    In other words, algorithms are content and should be regulated as such.

    Mr. Matzko is right that Biden--and the rest of Washington--seem to be woefully behind the times when it comes to the Internet, and this is dangerous. But it's a worse situation when the only experts available are those who are paid by companies and only represent the interests of their own company.

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  10. Joe1776

    I don't think I have ever agreed so much with an article on this topic. I love the bookstore analogy and I think it works perfectly. I also agree that Europe is going in the absolutely wrong direction.

    There is no way any sort of website or social media site can be responsible for every statement made on its platform. If they were they would just not allow any comments at all.

    People just need to understand that just because they read something on the internet that doesn't mean it is true. I think most 7 year olds understand that. Why can't our 80 year old president? If the information is important to them they should do more research. Not just say well someone on twitter or facebook said it so I made important life decisions based on that tweet. All of these laws trying to restrict speech on the internet are entirely misguided.

    Yes we have people reading kooky stuff on the internet and having kooky beliefs. But that is not new with the internet. From the time before the internet and even before the printing press lots of people had kooky ideas. The notion that central authorities can control the spread of ideas should have been dispelled with the inquisition.

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    1. Avatar photo
      Olympus Mons

      Don't be too confident in 7 year olds ability to discern fact from fiction. Your comment about 7 year olds gave me a chuckle because it reminded me of something I did when I was about that age. . I had watched a rerun of Gilligan's Island where the cast sat around a table and drank "soap" out of their coconut cups, and were then able to blow bubbles out of their mouths! I was so impressed by this I immediately went upstairs to the bathroom and took a big bite out of a bar of soap in anticipation of being able to blow bubbles just like on Gilligan's Island. You can imagine how quickly that idea evaporated w/ that bite.

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    2. Avatar photo
      Kurt

      My experience tells me vast portions of the citizenry believe what they read on the internet, regardless of age. You think 7 year olds understand and are able to discern fantasy from reality? I'm certain Biden doesn't understand much, but you think 7 year olds do....(?)

      Imagining that broad segments of users are not influenced by all the ridiculous stuff that fills up big portions of the internet is fascinating, with mountains of research showing ridiculous stuff on the internet influences all sorts of idiotic behavior.

      The rest of this piece is Cato talking points translated into something I don't think the author understands. I have no dog in the hunt on Section 230; I can navigate through the mess and I tend Libertarian. But, translating one set of beliefs into an entirely new paradigm isn't an intelligent way to think about this issue.

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      1. Joe1776

        "My experience tells me vast portions of the citizenry believe what they read on the internet, regardless of age. You think 7 year olds understand and are able to discern fantasy from reality? I'm certain Biden doesn't understand much, but you think 7 year olds do....(?)"

        They may believe what accords with their priors but not what doesn't. If you have crazy priors you will believe crazy things you read that accord with those beliefs. And yes if a 7 year old is told not to believe everything they read on the internet (or a comic book) they wont.

        I am not sure what you mean by "translating one set of beliefs into a new paradigm." Maybe you mean the bookstore analogy.

        I think it is the same paradigm the catholic church faced with the printing press. Some in the church had good intentions to try to ban books. They were trying to prevent people from losing their soul by reading incorrect information about how to be saved. So they had lists of books to be banned and wanted to suppress some ideas - such as heliocentrism. I mean everyone agrees, we shouldn't hold false beliefs. But suppressing ideas, after the printing press, no longer worked. And the policy of trying to have a central authority punish people for expressing false doctrine created more harm than good.

        The fact that ideas are now being transferred by the internet even easier and faster then they can be from the printing press makes the analogy stronger. If you can't suppress false ideas after the printing press there is no way you are going to do it now that we have the printing press *and* the internet. No central authority is going to be able to ban false information and trying is going to lead to even more of the abuses problems we saw in the past. There are very good reasons people in free countries have by and large agreed that people have a right to hold and express their beliefs. And it is not because we think everyone believes the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

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