Hi everyone welcome to this week's special episode of 16 minutes on the news

our show where we cover the headlines from our vantage point in tech and cover

tech trends offering analysis frameworks explain, explainers, and more.

I'm Sonel, your host, and today's episode is special not just because it's three times

16 minutes long, but that this is our very first time on the show, now 32 episodes in, bringing on a special outside

guest.

Our topic is section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which makes sure that interactive websites are not liable for

their users content as their distributors not producers of content. And so we

also cover the recent news around Twitter and the President's tweets and the subsequent executive order unquote preventing online censorship all from this week which is also all

playing out against the broader more profound cultural context of George Floyd, Minnesota, and way beyond.

In this episode, we do a deeper dive on the technology and policy aspects of platforms and content moderation, including an

explainer on the evolution of Section 230 and all the key nuances of the debates

around it and content moderation to understand. My special guest is Mike Masnick, founder and

editor and chief of Tech Dirt, which is a leading tech news and analysis website and my long time

go-to source for these topics.

He also, by the way, recently launched a new section dedicated to tech and COVID coverage,

as well as a new form with different voices called the greenhouse, which focuses on tricky tech topics and lots of the

trade-offs involved like privacy and so on. You can find both of those at

Tech Dirt.com. So that's the intro and why this is a special 3X episode of 16 minutes.

Let me now kick things off by asking Mike, since the premise of the show is to tease apart what's

hype, what's real and to break down and explain what's

what's

...