Joint Center President: Senate Tech CEO Hearing is a Play to Discourage Removal of Election Disinformation

Slate just published this commentary on today’s Senate hearing featuring the CEOs of Facebook, Google, and Twitter co-written by Joint Center President Spencer Overton and Professor Danielle Keats Citron.

Their bottom line:

“The Senate hearing six days before Election Day is an obvious play to chill social-media companies’ efforts to remove election disinformation. The goal is to ensure that tech companies won’t remove or respond to disinformation that amplifies division, suppresses votes, or sows confusion as we wait for election results. Punishing companies by threatening to subject them to legal liability for removing disinformation is an unacceptable attack on our democracy.”

Professor Citron, a 2019 MacArthur Fellow, is one of the nation’s top experts on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Spencer’s expertise is voting rights, and earlier this year he wrote a law review article and testified before Congress on the role of Section 230 in removing disinformation that suppresses Black votes.

Read the full commentary in Slate by clicking here.