Section 230 shields social media companies from liability for user-posted content. Marsha Blackburn and Josh Hawley — both of whom have proposed legislation that would condition Section 230 protections on not discriminating against conservative content — may care little about this history. ADADWhile trying to force media to be “fair” sounds good in theory, waging political campaigns via regulatory policies can backfire. The Fairness Doctrine certainly sounded like a good idea to media reformers in the late-1940s and 1950s. In fact, conservative broadcasting would not fully recover until after the Fairness Doctrine was repealed in the 1980s and a new generation of entertainment and profit-focused conservative broadcasters emerged.

Source: Washington Post October 11, 2020 10:02 UTC