This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 31st, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Pact Act is aimed at, well, something, surely, but it's not exactly clear what it's ostensibly aimed at regulating how

platforms address speech of those platforms users even going so far as to define how

platforms may remove offending content and respond to users whose speech

was removed. But the proposal really just raises more questions than answers about how sites

big and small would be expected to comply.

Cato's Will Duffield and Mike Masnick of Tech Dirt offer their assessments.

Will, I want to start with you.

There have been many efforts to reform section 230 known as the 26 words that

created the internet what is different about the so-called packed act and I want to clarify something the first time I went

looking for the Pact Act I found a bunch of stuff about vaping products which is

not what this legislation is about?

Well, the Pact Act has been seen as a more moderate approach to Section 230 Reform.

It's a bill sponsored by Senator Brian Schatz and rather than

attacking one perceived failing or issue with contemporary social media platforms, it proposes a host of really

more procedural changes which would alter how platforms go about moderating content when they

offer appeals and how public they are in presenting statistics or other information related to their policies.

Mike, you have written about this at tree that is a lot of things that are

a lot of things that are unrelated to the core issue are just sort of crammed in here and it's sort of a

maybe a regulator's Christmas if you will. Well it's it's worse than that

and that it doesn't it doesn't really define the problem that it's trying to solve and it seems to be trying to solve a variety of different problems.

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