Top executives from Facebook and Twitter said Wednesday they would be open to discussing changes in a 1996 law that immunizes social media against lawsuits over posts by the platforms’ users.
Known as Section 230, the measure in the Communication Decency Act has widespread support among technology companies and has been used to push back against congressional attempts to strengthen industry oversight. Several firms, for example, opposed legislation earlier this year forcing websites to take greater responsibility for content related to child sex trafficking because of how it might curb Section 230 immunity, though President Trump still signed the bill into law.
[Related: Facebook, Twitter execs amping up user safeguards before 2018 elections]
During a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, questioned Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg about how much responsibility their firms take for sales of opioids such as heroin.
“There are now laws devised to hold drug dealers responsible for the death of victims using drugs they provided,” said Manchin, who is up for re-election this year in a state won by Trump, a Republican, in 2016. “To what extent do you bear responsibility for the death of a drug user if they overdose on drugs received through your platform?”
Sandberg said the sale of pharmaceutical drugs on Facebook is “firmly against our policy,” but was cautious in committing to support revisions to current legal protections.
“The safe harbor of 230 has been very important in enabling companies like ours to do proactive enforcement, look for things proactively without increasing our liability,” she told the panel. “So we’d want to work very closely on how this would be enacted.”
Dorsey said the company is “certainly open to dialogue” around the bill.
“We benefit from a lot of the protections it gives in order for us, in the first place, to take actions on the content within our service,” he said. “The only reason we’re able to even speculate that we can increase more health in a public square is because of CDA 230, so we need to finely balance what those changes are.”
