Senators on Wednesday introduced the first bipartisan bill of the new Congress aimed at holding companies such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter more accountable for their content moderation practices by overhauling their liability protections.
The PACT Act, a bipartisan bill from Sens. Brian Schatz, a Hawaii Democrat, and John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, will focus on content moderation transparency within social media platforms and allows for Big Tech companies to be sued and regulated by federal and state regulators.
It would take the first steps at the federal level under the Biden administration toward reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a provision that protects social media companies from liability for content posted by their users.
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The legislation will be reintroduced Wednesday with two new revisions: It will allow individual consumers to legally appeal tech platforms content-moderation decisions as long as the complaints are made in “good faith” and require tech companies to issue transparency reports twice a year, versus four times a year as stated in the version of the bill introduced last Congress. The transparency reports must include data on content that’s been censored, demonetized, or deprioritized. The revised bill would also give tech platforms four days, instead of 24 hours, to respond to court orders to remove content.
Both these changes are likely to be welcomed by the Big Tech giants.
The PACT Act would force tech companies to be transparent about their rules when it comes to censorship and their algorithms, which Republicans hope will force them to be more accountable than creating new exceptions to Section 230, like the other content moderation bills introduced by Democrats do.
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Both parties also favor the PACT Act’s distinction between big and small companies. Only online platforms with over a million users and $25 million in revenue would be subject to the higher transparency standards and appellate processes. This would, in theory, allow new startups to succeed without burdensome costs until they grow to a certain size.
