230 Protects Users, Not Big Tech
from the it-protects-you dept
Once again, several Senators appear poised to gut one of the most important laws protecting internet users – Section 230 (47 U.S.C. § 230).
Don’t be fooled – many of Section 230’s detractors claim that this critical law only protects big tech. The reality is that Section 230 provides limited protection for all platforms, though the biggest beneficiaries are small platforms and users. Why else would some of the biggest platforms be willing to endorse a bill that guts the law? In fact, repealing Section 230 would only cement the status of Big Tech monopolies.
As EFF has said for years, Section 230 is essential to protecting individuals’ ability to speak, organize, and create online.
Congress knew exactly what Section 230 would do – that it would lay the groundwork for speech of all kinds across the internet, on websites both small and large. And that’s exactly what has happened.
Section 230 isn’t in conflict with American values. It upholds them in the digital world. People are able to find and create their own communities, and moderate them as they see fit. People and companies are responsible for their own speech, but (with narrow exceptions) not the speech of others.
The law is not a shield for Big Tech. Critically, the law benefits the millions of users who don’t have the resources to build and host their own blogs, email services, or social media sites, and instead rely on services to host that speech. Section 230 also benefits thousands of small online services that host speech. Those people are being shut out as the bill sponsors pursue a dangerously misguided policy.
If Big Tech is at the table in any future discussion for what rules should govern internet speech, EFF has no confidence that the result will protect and benefit internet users, as Section 230 does currently. If Congress is serious about rewriting the internet’s speech rules, it must spend time listening to the small services and everyday users who would be harmed should they repeal Section 230.
Section 230 Protects Everyday Internet Users
There’s another glaring omission in the arguments to end Section 230: how central the law is to ensuring that every person can speak online, and that Congress or the Administration does not get to define what speech is “good” and “bad”.
Let’s start with the text of Section 230. Importantly, the law protects both online services and users. It says that “no provider or user shall be treated as the publisher” of content created by another. That’s in clear agreement with most Americans’ belief that people should be held responsible for their own speech—not that of others.
Section 230 protects individual bloggers, anyone who forwards an email, and social media users who have ever reshared or retweeted another person’s content online. Section 230 also protects individual moderators who might delete or otherwise curate others’ online content, along with anyone who provides web hosting services.
As EFF has explained, online speech is frequently targeted with meritless lawsuits. Big Tech can afford to fight these lawsuits without Section 230. Everyday internet users, community forums, and small businesses cannot. Engine has estimated that without Section 230, many startups and small services would be inundated with costly litigation that could drive them offline. Even entirely meritless lawsuits cost thousands of dollars to fight, and often tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Deleting Section 230 Will Create A Field Day For The Internet’s Worst Users
Section 230’s detractors say that too many websites and apps have “refused” to go after “predators, drug dealers, sex traffickers, extortioners and cyberbullies,” and imagine that removing Section 230 will somehow force these services to better moderate user-generated content on their sites.
These arguments fundamentally misunderstand Section 230. The law lets platforms decide, largely for themselves, what kind of speech they want to host, and to remove speech that doesn’t fit their own standards without penalty.
If lawmakers are legitimately motivated to help online services root out unlawful activity and terrible content appearing online, the last thing they should do is eliminate Section 230. The current law strongly incentivizes websites and apps, both large and small, to kick off their worst-behaving users, to remove offensive content, and in cases of illegal behavior, work with law enforcement to hold those users responsible.
If Congress deletes Section 230, the pre-digital legal rules around distributing content would kick in. That law strongly discourages services from moderating or even knowing about user-generated content. This is because the more a service moderates user content, the more likely it is to be held liable for that content. Under that legal regime, online services will have a huge incentive to just not moderate and not look for bad behavior. This would result in the exact opposite of their goal of protecting children and adults from harmful content online.
Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.
Filed Under: content moderation, section 230
ICE Is Using Pure Bullshit To Turn People Into Venezuelan Gang Members To Keep Hitting Its Daily Arrest Quota
from the banal-stupidity-of-evil dept
Donald Trump has decided he can’t do immigration enforcement without doing war crimes. That’s where we’re at now as a country: under the thumb of someone exercising executive war powers to remove anyone looking faintly Mexican from the country under the extremely dubious theory that the people rounded up by ICE are all members of foreign gangs.
Of course, it’s not limited to warriors or wars. The Trump Administration is now just disappearing people for exercising their First Amendment rights. But, in this case, the outlandish claim is that everyone who was arrested and flown (in violation of a federal injunction!) to El Salvador to rot in that country’s prisons is a member of gangs like MS-13 and… um… Tren de Aragua.
Oh wait. You haven’t heard of Tren de Aragua, a.k.a. TdA? Don’t blame your service provider and/or your social media feeds. The gang Trump (sort of) declared “war” on is something new. It’s not MS-13. Apparently, it’s the new “most dangerous thing ever,” even if there’s nothing that demonstrates TdA is making the sort of inroads into America that MS-13 has.
But Trump has always been able to round up rubes to help with the duping. That’s where New York City mayor Eric Adams — a recent recipient of Trump largesse — comes into play, as Max Rivlin-Nadler reports for Hell Gate.
The Trump administration has invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport more than 200 Venezuelans to a massive prison in El Salvador without any due process. How has the president justified using a 227-year-old law that has only been wielded during actual wars to override the Constitution? He claims these men are members of the gang “Tren de Aragua.”
[…]
[T]he NYPD and Mayor Eric Adams […] spent much of 2024 pushing a narrative that New York, which is home to thousands of recently-arrived Venezuelan migrants, is somehow being inundated with members of a small, relatively new regional gang that is named for the Tocorón prison in the Venezuelan state of Aragua.
[…]
“We believe they are participating in illegal behavior, and they’re the source of some of the increases in robberies and pattern robberies, particularly on scooters. And we continue to monitor the situation, but it is alarming,” Adams said. He added that Tren de Aragua was “a very dangerous gang,” and that he had sent his NYPD deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism to Colombia to gather information.
Scooter robberies? Vague “illegal behavior?” Well, no wonder Trump deployed his war powers to rid this country of a threat incapable of being coherently defined by the NYC mayor in the president’s back pocket.
Supposedly the easiest way to identify members of a gang no one had really ever heard of before Trump started sending planeloads of non-white people to prisons in El Salvador is by their tattoos. After all, MS-13 is notorious for its inking and its members’ inability to blend into any society that isn’t currently bathing itself in bathtub meth money.
In fact, ICE has its own guide [PDF] for identifying TdA members by their tattoos. But as American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick pointed out on Bluesky, the guidelines are somewhat even worse and more lax than the bullshit regular cops use to place people in (domestic) gang databases.
This nomination system uses points. Eight points is all it takes to get you labeled as someone fast-tracked for an indefinite prison sentence in a nation you weren’t even born in. A lot of this relies on tattoos. Four points for gang tattoos. Four points for any tattoo an ICE officer believes is a gang tattoo. Six points for texting anyone ICE thinks is a TdA member and 3 points for sending funds (via Cash app or other services) to anyone whose tattoos are presumed to be TdA-related.
Even if someone fails to hit the 8-point threshold for immediate expulsion to El Salvador (and, remember, we’re dealing with alleged Venezuelan gang members here), points can be added by any ICE officer or supervisor willing to put their thumb on the scale.
Aliens scoring 6 or 7 points may be validated as members of TDA; you should consult with a supervisor and OPLA, reviewing the totality of the facts, before making that determination; if you determine an alien should not be validated at this time as a member of TDA, when available, you should initiate removal proceedings under the INA.
This ICE guidance — obtained by the ACLU — relies heavily on identifying TdA members by their tattoos. But there’s a massive logical flaw here: unlike MS-13, TdA doesn’t treat tattoos as a basis for entry or a sign of loyalty. ICE already knows this. So does the DHS.
[I]nternal U.S. Department of Homeland Security and FBI documents obtained by USA TODAY reveal federal authorities for years have questioned the effectiveness of using tattoos to identify members of Tren de Aragua, also known as TdA.
“Gang Unit collections determined that the Chicago Bulls attire, clocks, and rose tattoos are typically related to the Venezuelan culture and not a definite (indicator) of being a member or associate of the (TdA),” reads a 2023 “Situational Awareness” bulletin on the criminal gang written by the U.S. Custom and Border Protection’s El Paso Sector Intelligence Unit.
In another DHS document, titled “ICE Intel Leads,” a former Venezuelan police official interviewed by authorities said tattoos are “the easiest but least effective way” of identifying members of the criminal gang.
Everyone who hasn’t been completely corrupted by their association with Trump knows the accepted method of identifying gang members doesn’t actually work. Everyone in the inner circle doesn’t care. And ICE has never given a shit one way or the other, so long as it’s able to hit the ever-escalating expulsion benchmarks set by the administration and backed by barely-sentient FEDZ® doll Kristi Noem, who decided to issue a “tough on crime” statement in front of an overcrowded El Salvadoran prison cell while prominently displaying her $50,000 Rolex watch.
Between the bizarre invocation of the Alien Enemies Act for the first time since the abuse of Japanese US residents during World War II made it unfashionable and ICE’s enthusiasm for rounding up any foreigners officers come across, it’s no surprise areas where Latin Americans are a majority of the population are considered target-rich environments.
What is surprising, however, is that some local law enforcement agencies are viewing ICE as the enemy and the people they serve as people worth protecting from federal government overreach.
In Santa Fe County, N.M., last month, local police leaders stood before a packed auditorium and showed photos of their uniforms so residents would know what they look like — and, more pointedly, what ICE does not.
“Whatever happens around the country, whoever is president, you are our community. We are your officers,” Santa Fe Police Chief Paul Joye said with the help of a Spanish interpreter. “It is a fundamental human right that you feel safe in your home regardless of where you’re from.”
[…]
Many police chiefs have opted to risk the ire of the federal government in an attempt to preserve trust with immigrant communities – a bond that can be tenuous even in the best of times.
In Boston, when police commissioner Michael Cox pointed out last month that his agency doesn’t have the authority to enforce immigration law, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said he’d “bring hell” to the city. On March 24, ICE arrested more than 300 people in Massachusetts.
It’s nice to know that at least a few cops aren’t on board with Trump’s anti-immigrant warfare. There’s still no unified front pushing back against ICE but every little bit helps. Unfortunately, none of this will matter to the Trump administration. It’s incapable of being shamed and it’s fine with massive amounts of collateral damage as long as its intended targets are included in the body count.
Filed Under: dhs, donald trump, due process, gang databases, ice, immigration, kristi noem, tattoos, tren de aragua
Daily Deal: LabsDigest Subscription
from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept
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Filed Under: daily deal
But His Gmail: National Security Advisor Waltz’s Private Email Hypocrisy
from the the-best-hypocrites-trump-can-find dept
Remember Mike Waltz? The National Security Advisor who’s spent the last few weeks demonstrating his profound inability to handle basic security? First, there was the illegal Signal chat where he accidentally added a journalist while discussing potential war crimes. Then we learned about his completely exposed Venmo contacts and leaked passwords. And now, in a twist that would be too on-the-nose for fiction, it turns out the same official who previously demanded DOJ action over private email use… has been conducting government business through Gmail.
Ah, but her emails.
All this seems less than great for the top “security” official in the administration.
Members of President Donald Trump’s National Security Council, including White House national security adviser Michael Waltz, have conducted government business over personal Gmail accounts, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post and interviews with three U.S. officials.
The use of Gmail, a far less secure method of communication than the encrypted messaging app Signal, is the latest example of questionable data security practices by top national security officials already under fire for the mistaken inclusion of a journalist in a group chat about high-level planning for military operations in Yemen.
A senior Waltz aide used the commercial email service for highly technical conversations with colleagues at other government agencies involving sensitive military positions and powerful weapons systems relating to an ongoing conflict, according to emails reviewed by The Post. While the NSC official used his Gmail account, his interagency colleagues used government-issued accounts, headers from the email correspondence show.
This is, needless to say, pretty fucking bad. First, there’s the basic security incompetence: the National Security Advisor conducting sensitive government business through a commercial email service. Even if Gmail has robust security, it’s completely inappropriate for handling government communications — giving Google potential access to sensitive national security discussions that should never leave secured government systems.
But more concerning is what this reveals about Waltz’s (lack of) judgment. As National Security Advisor, he’s one of the highest-value targets for foreign intelligence services. Every personal account, every commercial service he uses represents another potential vulnerability for adversaries to exploit. And given his demonstrated pattern of security failures — from exposed Venmo contacts to leaked passwords — it’s clear he’s making their job easier.
The National Security Council’s response is a masterclass in missing the point (or, more accurately, misdirecting from the point). When pressed about “sensitive military matters” being discussed over Gmail, their spokesperson offered this gem:
Hughes said NSC staff have guidance about using “only secure platforms for classified information.”
This attempt at reassurance actually reveals the depth of the problem. The distinction isn’t just between classified and unclassified information — it’s about maintaining basic operational security for all sensitive government communications.
And as if to underscore how little they grasp this, we learned from a WSJ article that Waltz’s infamous Signal chat wasn’t a one-off mistake.
Two U.S. officials also said that Waltz has created and hosted multiple other sensitive national security conversations on Signal with cabinet members, including separate threads on how to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine as well as military operations
The scale of security failures here should be absolutely disqualifying for any administration official, let alone America’s top national security advisor. But what makes this situation particularly galling is Waltz’s own history of grandstanding about private email use. Here he is in a tweet that remains up from less than two years ago:
Yes, that’s the same Mike Waltz demanding DOJ action over private email use by a previous National Security Advisor. The hypocrisy would be merely annoying if the stakes weren’t so high. But this isn’t just about scoring political points — it’s about the fundamental security of our nation’s most sensitive communications.
By Waltz’s own standard, articulated in that still-visible tweet, the DOJ should be investigating his wanton use of private commercial messaging services. But more importantly, someone needs to ask: if this is how carelessly our National Security Advisor handles basic operational security, what other vulnerabilities has he created that we don’t yet know about?
Filed Under: but her emails, communications, gmail, mike waltz, national security
A Bipartisan Roster Of Former FCC Officials Say Trump FCC Boss Brendan Carr Is Taking A Giant Dump On The First Amendment
from the you-sir-are-not-popular dept
Last October, Trump sued CBS claiming (falsely) that a 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris had been “deceitfully edited” to her benefit (they simply shortened some of her answers for brevity, as news outlets often do). As Mike explored in a post at the time, the lawsuit was utterly baseless, and tramples the First Amendment, editorial discretion, and common sense.
CBS/Paramount is looking for regulatory approval for its $8 billion merger with Skydance (run by Larry Ellison’s kid David). Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr quickly zeroed on on this, and began using merger approval as leverage to bully CBS into even more feckless coverage of the administration.
It’s part of a broader effort by Carr to abuse FCC authority to harass companies that aren’t suitably deferential to Trump, aren’t racist and sexist enough for the administration’s liking, or might get the crazy idea of calling out the Trump administration’s bullshit.
Carr’s increasingly unhinged behavior continues to attract a growing roster of critics, including a bipartisan coalition of former Republican and Democrat officials who say Carr is taking a giant, heaping dump on the First Amendment with the CBS inquiry. That includes Republican Alfred Sikes, the FCC chair from 1989 to 1993, and Democrat Tom Wheeler, the FCC chair from 2013 to 2017.
In a filing submitted to the FCC last week, the former commissioners all make it clear Carr is abusing the FCC’s news distortion rules to attack journalism:
“…The Commission is signaling to broadcasters that it will indeed act at the behest of the White House by closely scrutinizing the content of news coverage and threatening the regulatory licenses of broadcasters whose news outlets produce coverage that does not pass muster in the President’s view.
We recommend the Commission reverse course, closing this proceeding without further action and reaffirming its long-held commitment to acting as an independent agency rather than the White House’s personal censor.”
How polite. The former commissioners are careful to suggest the Carr FCC “may be seeking to censor the news media in a manner antithetical to the First Amendment,” not that they’re actually and obviously censoring the news media and trampling the First Amendment, lest somebody get upset.
Carr is trying to claim that the minor edits done by CBS violate a longstanding “Broadcast News Distortion” policy that’s almost never enforced by the agency, which has largely given up on media regulations under both parties. The policy in question says violations must involve clear distortion of “a significant event and not merely a minor or incidental aspect of the news report.”
That means hard proof of something like a bribe by a company or politicians to change news coverage, and that clearly doesn’t apply here. Trumpism is just making baseless accusations against CBS, knowing that even if CBS isn’t actually found guilty of anything, it allows the vast GOP propaganda machine to generate entire news cycles suggesting that 60 Minutes did something nefarious.
That further props up the right wing victimization machine, forging greater hostility to real journalism or anybody who might be inclined to poke holes in authoritarian propaganda. All while authoritarians pretend that protecting free speech is among their top priorities.
Filed Under: authoritarian, brendan carr, fcc, first amendment, free speech, journalism, media, mergers, propaganda
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