Mary Anne Franks on Section 230

The Lawfare Podcast

The Lawfare Institute

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4.7 • 6.4K Ratings

🗓️ 26 February 2021

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 immunizes platforms for the behavior of their users. It's been called by some the Magna Carta of the internet—but how foundational is it? Mary Anne Franks, a professor of law and Dean's Distinguished Scholar at the University of Miami, thinks that Section 230 is indeed a cornerstone of the modern internet, but not in a good way. As part of Lawfare's ongoing Digital Social Contract research paper series, she recently published a paper entitled, "Section 230 and the Anti-Social Contract," in which she argues that far from expanding freedom, Section 230 has simply continued a long tradition of marginalizing the most vulnerable among us. Alan Rozenshtein spoke with her about her paper, about how Section 230 fits into the broader history of American political thought and about her ideas for a better internet.

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0:00.0	The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair
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0:18.2	Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair
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1:09.0	The people who were thinking about the internet in the 1990s and the people who had the power,
1:13.4	those who were calling for it to be heavily regulated and those who were saying hands-off,
1:17.7	they had something in common and that is the fact that primarily we're talking about
1:21.2	mostly white men who were thinking about the internet either as the worst thing that
1:25.3	was going to happen to the world or maybe the best thing that was going to happen to the
1:28.5	world.
1:29.5	But there wasn't much attention being paid to, let's say for instance, the experience
1:33.2	of women or minorities online and whether or not they were having or they were likely
1:38.1	to share in the supposedly transformative, radically democratic project of the internet.
1:43.5	So I think there was just a lot of non-thinking going on in the 1990s.
	...

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