Could we clean up the cesspools on social media?
If tech companies and their executives were held personally held responsible for awfulness posted there?
It flies in the face of a fundamental principle of the internet.
But the UK released the plan on Monday that would create an Internet safety regulator to do just that.
This regulator would hold tech companies legally responsible if they don't remove things like terrorists videos.
Or hate speech quickly enough.
What do you think are some of the biggest questions or concerns about this kind of plan?
Look, I think it's important for tech companies to be responsible for curbing racism, terrorism, child pornography, all these issues that are prolifilating online, I do think that this bill or this proposal in the UK is taking it maybe a little bit too far here.
I think the biggest concern from a lot of folks in tech is about free speech and essentially what kind of content can and cannot be posted on social media.
And holding them this responsible I don't think is
Really a sound plan.
Yeah, well there's gonna be a period where people get to submit like, submit their proposals, submit their feedback for this plan.
But it does like, it's counter to the very idea that these companies wouldn't be held responsible for anything that their people post.
And we've seen the bad consequences of that, as you've said.
But there are these other, you have to consider What about human rights?
Does that mean there's gonna be these false negatives where people are trying to expose human rights violations, and instead they get pulled down before people can know that actual horrible things are happening in the actual world?
Yeah, so tech companies were able to grow in the US because of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which basically prevented them From being responsible for things like this.
The exact opposite of this, yeah.
Yeah, the idea was that tech companies can't be sued for any kind of content that's posted on its website.
Because these are users posting it, this isn't Google or Facebook themselves going out and posting these horrible videos.
Right.
Or anything like that.
But I think that that bill is pretty old.
Right.
And there have been lawmakers suggesting changes to that.
But I would, again, argue that you should tread very carefully when it comes to that--
Yeah.
Because there's so many free speech issues that come with that.
Yeah, yeah