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1 1 (June 03, 2020)

handle is hein.crs/govdazr0001 and id is 1 raw text is: Resarh Service Section 230 and the Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship June 3, 2020 On May 28, 2020, President Trump issued the Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship (EO), expressing the executive branch's views on Section 230 of the federal Communications DecencyAct. As discussed in this Legal Sidebar, Section 230, under certain circumstances, immunizes online content providers from liability for merely hosting others' content. The EO stakes out a position in existing interpretive disputes about the law's meaning and instructs federal agencies, including the Department of Commerce, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and the Department of Justice, to take certain actions to implement this understanding. This Legal Sidebar explores the legal implications of the EO. It first briefly describes how courts have interpreted Section 230 before explaining what the EO says. Next, the Sidebar discusses the FCC and FTC's authority to enforce Section 230, focusing on the EO's instructions to these agencies, before concluding with a discussion of how international trade obligations affect the United States' ability to modify Section 230. Section 230 and Litigation over Online Speech Section 230 creates federal immunity for providers and users of interactive computer services, generally preventing them from being held liable for hosting content that someone else created. For example, if someone writes and posts a defamatory statement on Twitter, the defamed person could sue the tweet's author. Section 230, however, would likely require a court to dismiss any lawsuits against Twitter or a second Twitter userwho merely retweets the original statement without comment-so long as neither Twitter nor the second Twitter user helped to develop the initial tweet. Section 230 was enacted in 1996 in response to a trial court ruling that allowed an online platform to be subject to liability for hosting defamatory speech, in part because the platform had said it would police its site for unwanted speech. Congress was concerned that this ruling created a perverse incentive for sites to refrain from monitoring content to avoid liability. Section 230 can be seen as spcech-protective: by barring lawsuits that would punish platforms for hosting speech, it may encourage platforms to err on the side of hosting more content, while still allowing sites to take down content they see as objectionable. To this end, Section 230 contains two different provisions that courts have generally viewed as two distinct liability shields. Congressional Research Service https://crsreports.congress.gov LSB10484 CRS Lega i&sebar Prepared .'r Membersand C o m m ; .. e e s o f Cen o l C o n ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------...........

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