Republicans & Big-Tech Regulation: Incentivize Innovation | National Review

It holds true, as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously composed, “If there be time to expose through conversation the fallacy and misconceptions, to prevent the evil by the processes of education, the treatment to be used is more speech, not imposed silence.” However not in the method some Republicans calling for regulating social-media platforms mean it. They are compromising the bedrock conservative concept of home rights– Twitter and Facebook’s platforms are privately owned– for short-term political gains and this will be to the detriment of the Web and its future users.

Last week’s questionable choice by Facebook and twitter to limit distribution of a story from the New York Post that consisted of an unconfirmed claim about Democratic governmental candidate Joe Biden included more fuel to the drive for social-media regulation. Several Senate Republicans set out on the war path against the platforms and required Twitter’s CEO to be subpoenaed. The next day Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai announced the company would “progress with a rulemaking to clarify [Section 230’s] meaning.”

As a practical matter, content moderation at scale is difficult to do completely. With half the world screaming at Facebook and twitter to take down “harmful” material instantly and the other half indignant about being “censored,” there’s little space for these platforms to make educated and constant choices in genuine time. There could never be such thing as a definitely unbiased arbiter of predisposition or precision to write and enforce the guidelines. (And even if there were, he or she sure as heck wouldn’t be a political leader.) There is no other way to prevent some quantity of bias or error if content small amounts is going to happen. If content moderation is going to be prohibited, Facebook will be “Pornbook” within 24 hr.

So what to do rather?

Back to Justice Brandeis’s point about more speech: The solution to content-moderation predisposition on platforms isn’t pretending it can be avoided, however rather to let competitors do what it does. There will come a point when bias in small amounts will drive customers to other platforms, and, for that matter, motivate entrepreneurs to establish platforms where that predisposition does not exist.