This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, February 6, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren famous for having a plan for whatever ails the United States

would push criminalization of presenting certain false election related

information online. But the urge to regulate or punish activity on big tech platforms isn't just an affliction of the left.

Cato's Matthew Feeney explains.

The plan appears on Senator Warren's website and there are, unfortunately for policy professionals,

there's not too much to actually grasp here, but the essential and I think important part of

the proposal here is that she says that she would quote

push to create civil and criminal penalties for knowingly disseminating false

information about when and how to vote in US elections.

So some important things to point out here about the proposal.

One is it's relatively narrow, so it's talking about knowingly disseminating false information but about US election. So I suppose there's a way in which you could

construe that to be rather broad, but it's not importantly I think it's worth emphasizing not necessarily targeting the companies themselves, at least that's not how I'm reading it as written.

The goal here is to combat the kind of content Senator Warren and others have criticized, namely those who take two sites such as Twitter or Facebook to send false information about voting, so false information such as the day of the election or

the saying incorrectly that you can vote via text and the proposal also includes a list of actions that she wishes a lot of these platforms would engage in themselves.

But that's kind of a wish list for what she would like these private firms to do

but it's actually got no real legal or policy attachment there but when it comes to

actual laws that it seems like she

would like to pass it's this imposition of civil and criminal penalties on those

who are spreading false information about US elections. All right so you would be forgiven if you'd only were only made aware of the broad strokes of it and were forgetful of the fact that she's only talking about elections, but it seems that there

are plenty of people who agree with that in a much broader sense than her plan would indicate.

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