You are listening to the tech policy podcast.

I'm Corbyn Barthold.

As anyone who follows the issue knows by now,

politicians at both the state and the federal level are just itching to tell

social media services how to moderate content. It's sort of clever, really. Why tackle real-world

problems, which is hard, when you can just blame those problems on what's said or blocked from being said on the big social media sites?

There are a few problems, of course.

For one thing, the two major political parties are pulling in opposite directions.

Generally speaking, Republicans want more speech left up, while Democrats want more speech taken down.

Much more importantly, though, there is that pesky old First Amendment, which broadly ensures

that the government can't tell websites what speech they must or must not allow, repeat, spread,

speak themselves, and so on. Slowly but surely, the powers that be are coming to understand that,

whether they like it or not, it is unconstitutional for the government to employ a brute force.

You must host this, you must not host that approach to regulating online speech.

Unable to enforce their speech preferences directly,

some politicians are reaching for a more subtle approach, though it's not much more subtle.

What these politicians have hit on is the idea of using quote unquote transparency rules to burden, intimidate, browbeat, and harass social media sites into moderating content in the way the politicians want.

If you're a bit cynical about it, you might even suspect that actually they've hit on

transparency laws simply to punish sites

they don't like and to give the appearance of doing something.

At any rate, these transparency laws, too, violate the First Amendment.

And I am so, so pleased about who is here as my guest today to explain why. Eric Goldman is an associate

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